22 Britannia Road - Amanda Hodgkinson [3]
‘I hope so. It’s been six years since I last saw them.’
The estate agent cocks his head on one side, a concerned look on his face.
‘That’s tough. Mind you, look at it this way, you’ve got this house, a job and your family’s coming over here. Add it up and you’ve got yourself a happy ending.’
Janusz laughs. That’s exactly what he is hoping for.
‘That’s right,’ he says. ‘A happy ending.’
When the Red Cross officer told him Silvana and Aurek had been found in a British refugee camp, he had not been able to smile. ‘They are in a bad state,’ the officer said. The man’s voice had dropped almost to a whisper. ‘They’d been living in a forest. I gather they’d been there for a long time. Good luck. I hope it works out for you all.’
Janusz jangles his new house keys on his finger, watching the tweed-jacketed back of the estate agent as he walks briskly down the hill. So this is it. Peacetime. And he’s got a house. A home for Silvana and Aurek when they arrive. His father would have been proud of him, bringing his family back together. Doing the right thing. Looking to the future. He can’t return to Poland. Not now that his country has communist rule imposed upon it. He must face facts. Dreams of a free and independent Poland are just that – dreams. His home is here. Churchill himself said Polish troops should have the citizenship and freedom of the British Empire, and that’s what he’s accepted. Britain is his home now.
If he ever speaks to his parents or his sisters again, if one day they answer his letters and find him here, he hopes they will understand that this is where he has chosen to be.
He pockets his keys and wonders what life here will bring him. When he was offered two jobs, one in a factory making bicycles in Nottingham and one in an engineering works in a town in East Anglia, he sat in a library with a map of Britain and put his thumb on Ipswich. It was a small town with a harbour squatting on a straggling line of blue estuary leading to the sea. With his little finger he could reach across the blue and touch France. That’s what decided it for him. He would live in Ipswich because he could be nearer to Hélène. It was a stupid reason, especially when he was trying so hard to forget, but it eased the pain a little.
He yawns and sighs deeply. It feels good here. The air is clean enough and it’s a quiet place. Terraced brick houses stretch away down the hill. In the distance, a church spire reaches for the sky, the top of it boxed in by scaffolding. Whether the scaffolding is there so that long-awaited repair work can be carried out or because of recent war damage, he doesn’t know. And he doesn’t care. He has stopped believing in God. Now he hopes for specific things. A job to go to. A family to care for and perhaps, one day, a small degree of happiness.
Beyond the church, rows of housing are hemmed by the river and the tall chimneys of the factories. Beyond them are fields and woodland. Above him, the sky is chewing-gum grey but some blue is breaking through. Hélène would have said there was just enough blue to make a pair of trousers for a gendarme.
He lights another cigarette and allows himself to think of France. It’s a weakness that he savours briefly, sweet and good as an extra spoonful of sugar in bitter barracks tea. He thinks of the farmhouse with its red tiled roof and blue wooden shutters. Hélène standing at the kitchen door. Her tanned skin and her warm southern accent, the life in her beautiful eyes.
He finishes his cigarette and wanders through the house again, planning, making lists of things that need mending or replacing. Flinging open the back door, he strides out into the garden. It is a long rectangular piece of land. The grass hasn’t seen a mower in years and there are nettles and brambles everywhere. At the end of the garden is an old oak tree. It looks just right for a treehouse for his son. And when the lawn is cut and the weeds are dug up, he’ll have flower beds and a vegetable plot too. A real English garden for his family.
With his