22 Britannia Road - Amanda Hodgkinson [54]
‘A tree house?’ Tony claps his hands together. ‘What a wonderful idea. Can I help?’
‘Of course,’ says Janusz, delighted by Tony’s enthusiasm. Tony reminds him of Bruno: the kind of man who always knows a way out of a scrape. He is a loner, as far as Janusz can see, a man too taken with his business to worry about a home and a settled life. Not like Janusz, who needs a wife and a family to make sense of his days. Janusz wants the polished key to his front door in his pocket, a hook on the wall for that key when he comes home, his newspaper and dictionary beside his chair in the front parlour, his family gathered around him at mealtimes. But still, he looks at Tony and likes him for being different.
At the bottom of the garden, Janusz saws planks and Tony pulls out old nails from the wood with a claw hammer.
‘I’m going to show you how to make a dovetail joint,’ Janusz says to Aurek and Peter. He holds his hands up, makes a fist with one. ‘This is the mortice. The tenon is like this.’ He holds his other hand like an arrow, fingers straight. ‘They fit together like this.’ He pushes his straight fingers into the hole in the middle of his fist.
Peter does the same. So does Aurek. Janusz smiles at Aurek. He’s pleased his son has a friend at last. The two of them may get into quite a bit of trouble at school, but it is just schoolboy pranks. A bit of tomfoolery. Normal at their age. And Aurek speaks good English now, without a hint of a foreign accent. That makes Janusz proud. Children learn so quickly. The boy has even stopped making bird noises. Janusz knows he’s a bit hard on him about that, but the boy has to learn. When he goes back to school in September, he will fit right in.
They pull the wood up into the tree, Janusz and Tony doing the heavy lifting while the boys are allowed to hammer in nails. The tree house has four sides, its roof made from corrugated iron. A perfect den for a boy at the bottom of a perfect English garden.
The garden is the key to everything. A place for them all. Janusz has planted herb beds and roses for Silvana. Sage and hyssop, marjoram, sprawling mint and low-lying clumps of thyme sit under pink rose blossoms. The lawn is flat, rolled and velvety green. Borders are filled with dahlias, hollyhocks, yellow and white irises, lilac and love-in-a-mist. Beyond these is the vegetable patch. Here potatoes grow in leafy rows. Onions are pushing up pale globes out of the soil. Marigolds have seeded freely through them all. They keep the vegetables happy and ward off insects. And now, in the oak, Aurek’s tree house will look down on them all. He’d like his father to see this garden, his grandson playing in his den.
‘You’re a clever man, Janusz,’ says Tony, breaking his thoughts. ‘I can’t put up a stack of shelves on my own.’
‘I had a tree house when I was a boy,’ says Janusz. ‘I hid up there with my slingshot and I could hit a bird’s nest right across my parents’ garden.’ He pauses, and then, seeing the way Aurek is listening, his gaze concentrated upon him, he continues.
‘I had a tin whistle my father gave me. I sat in my tree house and played it for hours. I made a terrible noise with it. I’m not musical. Not like my sister Eve. She plays the violin like an angel. And I collected snails for racing. I loved that. My friends brought their snails along and we raced them down the trunk of the tree. The first to reach the bottom was the champion.’
‘Well, that’s not so far away from my own boyhood,’ says Tony. ‘I had a whole stable of champion racing snails. My father loved them. I bred the snails and he cooked them in garlic butter.’
Peter pulls a face.
‘Don’t look like that, Peter. Give the boy a choice and he’d eat roast beef and Yorkshire puddings every day of the week. One day I will take you to Italy, young man, and you’ll learn about real food.’
Janusz is intrigued. ‘I was in southern Italy. Only for a month or so, back in ’44. We flew over the countryside dropping propaganda leaflets. It looked beautiful. What part of the country do you come from?’
‘My parents came