22 Britannia Road - Amanda Hodgkinson [2]
It is the last house in a terrace, and although it stands next to a bomb site, somehow it has escaped any real damage itself. The only sign is a crack in the coloured glass pane, a line running through the bluebird that makes it look as if it might have problems if it tried to fly. Apart from that, it is possible to believe the war has never touched this building. It’s a fanciful idea, he knows, but one he likes. Maybe the house will share some of its luck with him and his wife and son.
‘Don’t you worry about that eyesore,’ says the estate agent beside him, waving his hand at the wasteland where dirty-faced children are playing. ‘That’ll be cleared in no time. We’ll have this town back on her feet quick enough.’ He straightens the cuffs of his tweed jacket and hands Janusz a bunch of keys. ‘There you are. All yours. I hope you like living here. Can I ask you where you’re from?’
Janusz has been waiting for this question. The first thing people want to know is where you come from.
‘Poland,’ he says. ‘I’m Polish.’
The estate agent pulls out a cigarette case from the inside pocket of his jacket. ‘You speak damned good English. In the army, were you?’
And that is the second thing they ask: What are you doing here? But Janusz is at ease in this country. He knows the manners and ways of things. Keep everything simple and to the point. Let them know you are on their side, and they’re happy.
The first time someone had asked him where he came from, back when he had been anxious about his foreignness, seeing it like a birthmark, a facial port-wine stain visible to all, he had mistakenly tried to answer them. He’d not been in England very long – a year, if that – and the loud, bloody enthusiasm for war he found among his new comrades had lit a kind of fire in his heart. A rich blazing ran through his veins and flared in him an outgoing recklessness he’d never experienced before. He was in a smoky hall with a noisy crowd of RAF men, drinking beer the colour of engine oil, and launched into his own story, the whole journey from Poland at the very start of the war, to France and then England.
Too late, he realized he’d made it too complicated and in any case nobody was listening. Nobody wanted to know about the women he’d left behind. He carried on, stumbling over vocabulary, finishing up lost in his own regrets, mumbling into his beer in Polish, talking of painful things like love and honour. When he left the hall and stood in the sobering night air, looking up at a sky littered with stars, he regretted every foolish word he had uttered.
He squares his shoulders and closes his mind to those memories. ‘I served with the Royal Air Force,’ he says, his voice clear and steady. ‘The Polish Corps. I came over in 1940. I’ve been here ever since.’
‘Ah. Right you are.’ The man smiles and offers him a cigarette. ‘I was in the army, myself. I met quite a few of your lads. Great drinkers, the Poles.’
He lights his cigarette, flicks the match onto the ground and hands the box to Janusz.
‘Stationed around here, were you?’
‘No,’ says Janusz, taking the matchbox, giving a brief nod of thanks. ‘We moved about a lot. I was demobbed in Devon and offered work here or up in the North.’
‘Well, you’ll find this is a decent enough area. Ipswich is a nice little market town. And you got this house just in time. I’ve a list as long as my arm of people wanting this property. If you hadn’t been there, banging on my door before I’d even opened up, it would’ve been some other fellow who’d have got it. It’s a nice family house. Have you, er … any …?’
‘Family? I have a wife and a son. They are coming to Britain next month.’
‘Reunited, heh? That’s good to hear.’
Janusz takes a drag on his cigarette,