22 Britannia Road - Amanda Hodgkinson [0]
Amanda Hodgkinson was born in Burnham-on-Sea in Somerset and grew up in Essex and Suffolk. She currently lives in south-west France with her husband and two daughters. This is her first novel.
22 Britannia Road
AMANDA HODGKINSON
FIG TREE
an imprint of
PENGUIN BOOKS
FIG TREE
Published by the Penguin Group
Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA
Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4P 2Y3 (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.)
Penguin Ireland, 25 St Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd)
Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd)
Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi – 110 017, India
Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, Aukland 0632, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd)
Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa
Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
www.penguin.com
First published 2011
Copyright © Amanda Hodgkinson, 2011
The moral right of the author has been asserted
All rights reserved
Without limiting the rights under copyright
reserved above, no part of this publication may be
reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system,
or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical,
photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior
written permission of both the copyright owner and
the above publisher of this book
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN: 978-0-141-96498-0
To my mother and father. With love.
The dead have need of fairytales too.
Zbigniew Herbert
Table of Contents
Spring 1946. To England.
22 Britannia Road, Ipswich
Poland, 1937
Poland, 1939
Poland
Poland
Poland
Poland
Poland
Poland
Poland
Poland
Poland
Poland
Poland
Poland
Poland
Poland
Poland
Poland
Poland
22 Britannia Road
Spring 1946. To England.
The boy was everything to her. Small and unruly, he had a nervy way about him like a wild creature caught in the open. All the dark hearts of the lost, the found and the never forgotten lived in his child’s body, in his quick eyes. She loved him with the same unforgiving force that pushes forests from the deep ground, but still she feared it was not enough to keep him. So she was taking him to England, determined Janusz would love him and keep him safe.
On the ship’s sailing list she was named as Silvana Nowak. Twenty-seven years old. Married. Mother of a son, Aurek Josef, aged seven years.
‘What is your profession?’ the British soldier asked her, checking the identity papers she put before him.
She looked at the documents on his desk and saw pages of women’s names. All were listed as housewives or housekeepers.
Behind her, hundreds more women, dressed as she was in donated clothes, stood silently with their children. Above the soldier’s head, a sign in several languages, including Polish, detailed the ship’s rules. All blankets and sheets remain the property of the ship. All stolen items will be confiscated.
Silvana tightened her grasp on her son. The soldier glanced at her quickly and then looked back to his papers. She knew why. It embarrassed him to see a woman so unkempt and a child with such restless ways. She touched her headscarf, checking it was in place, and pressed her other hand into Aurek’s back, trying to make him stand up straight.
‘Profession?’
‘Survivor,’ she whispered, the first word that came to her.
The soldier didn’t look up. He lifted his pen. ‘Housekeeper or housewife?’
‘I don’t know,’ she said, and then, aware of the queue shifting impatiently behind her, ‘Housewife.’
So that was it. She was recorded, written neatly into a book in indelible black ink. She was given a transport number,