22 Britannia Road - Amanda Hodgkinson [23]
Most nights the dreams still come to Silvana. She cannot stop them. Being with Janusz has brought her to a kind of calmness, and yet his nearness brings back memories that she has kept from herself for years. Memories that threaten to undo her. Their son before the war; Janusz’s parents’ garden with its smooth lawns; Eve playing her violin for Aurek and his delighted, high-pitched laugh. It was there Aurek had taken his first steps, the child grinning with a smile only Janusz could have given him, father and son inseparable as a cloud’s reflection in a lake. Memories like this seem to pour out of her, and she finds herself crying for those lost days.
Her dreams are dark and terrible. Her son is swimming in unfathomable waters, and try as she might to save him, he always slips from her grasp, falling back into the inky depths. She wakes, trying to scrape the skin from her fingers, thinking of lost children, the groups of homeless street kids she saw, the orphans at the camp. Where are they now? Still searching for their dead parents? She cannot get the children out of her head. They haunt her nights. And all the women searching for their babies call to her in her dreams, begging her to help them.
She knows she disturbs Janusz with her night frights, but he says nothing. He is quiet and patient, but already she wonders whether he regrets bringing her to England. It is surely not the reunion he must have had in mind. Have they both made an awful mistake?
One morning, she knocks on the door of Doris, the neighbour who always waves hello, the only one in the street who acknowledges them at all.
‘I need to learn how to be a good British housewife,’ says Silvana, smoothing her hands over her apron front, trying to ignore the way Aurek is pulling on her sleeve. ‘Can you help me?’
‘Show you how to be a housewife?’ says Doris with a look of surprise, as if Silvana has asked her the daftest question she has ever heard. ‘Come on in, dear. Bring the little lad in too. I’ve got some toys he can play with.’
Doris is hard to follow. She bustles around, filling the coal scuttles, beating rugs, washing curtains, counting her housekeeping money. She scrubs her kitchen floor on all fours, bare-armed, sweating with exertion, tendrils of red hair sticking to her forehead. When it’s finished, she grabs a basket of wet clothes by the back door and strides into the garden, where she hangs the washing out with deft precision, shaking Gilbert’s overalls into shape, slapping the creases from wet sheets, already talking about peeling potatoes for the evening meal. Keeping up with her is like trying to run after a departing train.
According to Doris, a good housewife should keep her home clean, do her washing on Tuesdays, her ironing on Fridays, make sure there’s bread and jam on the table at weekends and bake Victoria sponges on high days and holidays. Surely Silvana can do these things.
In her own home, Silvana spends hours wandering through the rooms in a daze. She forgets to fill the coal scuttles and doesn’t find the need to sweep or dust. When she makes the beds she often lies down and falls asleep on them.
Janusz doesn’t give her housekeeping money. He says he is waiting until she understands pounds, shillings and pence. The money is strange, the notes bigger than Polish currency, the coins thicker. And she’ll never get used to ration books, no matter how often Janusz explains them to her.
Janusz is a good husband. More than she deserves. He takes her shopping and teaches her the names of household goods: corned beef, flour, Pear’s soap, Bovril. He patiently writes her shopping lists in English and stands next to her when she reads them to the man behind the counter at the greengrocer’s, correcting her when she makes mistakes.
‘I want to buy flower seeds,’ Janusz