Magda's Daughter (12 page)

The entire village had feasted and danced for three days and nights to celebrate their wedding. She had also seen the light fade from her mother's eyes when she had told her how the lives of everyone in the village, indeed the whole of Poland, had been blighted when the Germans and Russians had invaded the country less than a year later in September 1939.

The Russians were bad, but when the Germans declared war on the Soviet Union in the summer of 1941, the Poles discovered that the Germans were even worse. Secondary schools were closed, and the only education open to Poles was rudimentary primary, which ended at the age of twelve. According to Magda, even that was designed to make the Polish people nothing more than good servants for Germans. German soldiers had constantly raided her father's farm for produce and the village for healthy young men and women they could deport to Germany as slave labourers. Jews, communists and old people were rounded up and never heard of again. The food rations allocated to Poles were set at below subsistence level, and everyone starved.

‘Starved in a land of plenty!' Magda had railed, still emotional about the injustice after more than twenty years. ‘Our food, the food we had worked so hard to produce, was stolen from us by those monsters.'

Magda had told her of the German raids on all the farms in the village. How breeding animals, stores and even seed corn and potatoes, which were needed to see people and livestock through the winter, were stolen by the Nazis.

Decree after decree and raid after raid made daily life gradually worse until the fateful morning in June 1943 when a unit of German soldiers rolled into the village with a tank and armoured cars. The soldiers rounded up all the villagers, selected the young  healthy men and women, and ordered them to march out.

As the major landowner in the district, Adam Janek had been elected spokesperson for the Poles in the area. He had been nursing Helena, a three-week-old sleeping baby, when the Germans arrived, but that hadn't stopped him from approaching the senior officer. He had dared to ask where his neighbours were being taken. The officer had listened, then pulled out his gun and shot him.

The shot was a signal for the rest of the Germans to open fire. Adam Janek had been standing next to other men, women and children, including her grandfather and her mother's eldest brother. Both had died in the hail of bullets, along with several of their friends and neighbours. Magda hadn't even been allowed to bury her husband, but her grandmother and surviving aunt and uncle had done it for her. Helena knew because Magda had read her extracts from a letter that enclosed a bill and a description of the memorial that had been erected on Adam Janek's grave with money her mother had sent for the purpose.

If only she had been able to find those letters, she thought. There might have been an address, which would have been helpful now, when she was on her way to her mother's home village.

She knew what her father had looked like, what a kind, generous, and loving husband he had been, and how he had died. But she had no idea of his education or how he'd earned a living, only that he had been ‘a rich landowner'. Had he owned more than one farm? Had he and her mother lived on a farm after the fairytale wedding that was her mother's happiest and most treasured memory? Had her paternal grandparents been farmers, too? Had many people in the village survived the massacre? Was her mother the only woman from the village to be sent to labour in Germany? What kind of work had her mother done? Factory work? Munitions? And who had looked after her while her mother had worked?

So many unanswered questions. If only she had thought to ask her mother more about the past when she'd had the chance. Now it was too late.

When Helena woke for the second time, the noise of the engines had softened to a dull hum, and the coat on the back of the door was hanging straight and still. She picked up her duffle bag and climbed down from her bunk, closeted herself in the tiny bathroom, changed out of her pyjamas, washed and dressed in the same jeans she had worn the day before, but changed her navy-blue T-shirt for a grey one. Slipping on her cardigan, she opened the door and stepped back into the cabin.

‘About time, too!' a woman with dyed blonde hair complained. She threw back the bedclothes on the bunk beneath Helena's, and dived into the bathroom before either of the other occupants of the cabin could move.

Helena muttered, ‘Good morning,' as she squeezed past her and the tousled heads of their companions, checked her bunk to make sure that she hadn't forgotten anything, and left the cabin. Ned was outside, talking to the stewardess.

‘Good morning. Did you sleep well?' he asked her.

‘Fine.'

‘Liar.' He dropped two shillings into the saucer the stewardess had placed on a narrow shelf at the top of the corridor, and picked up Helena's suitcase from the rack. ‘We've berthed. Want to come up on deck and see what Holland looks like?'

‘My first foreign country.'

‘It looks better on deck than through a porthole.' Ned led the way up the stairs.

‘We didn't have one to look out of. Where's your case and the carrier bags from yesterday?' she asked.

‘Safe, on deck. I bought a holdall in the shop for the carrier bags and duty-free goods I stocked up on last night. I left them with a steward; he's arranging for a porter to take our luggage to the train.'

They walked to the ship's rail and looked down on the dock below. Helena wasn't sure what she'd been expecting from her first glimpse of foreign soil, but it certainly hadn't been a grey concrete platform filled with goods sheds. Yet logic told her that any port would look the same. She shivered, and Ned slipped off his jacket.

‘Here.' He draped it over her shoulders.

‘You'll freeze.' She tried to hand it back to him.

‘You know me, I'm always warm. Besides, the temperature will rise when the sun comes up.' A loud bang echoed along the quayside. ‘That's the gangplank going down. Time to find our porter and follow him to customs.'

‘You're expecting problems, aren't you?'

‘Not in Holland,' he reassured her. ‘But I've never liked going through customs. All those grim-faced, staring, uniformed men are enough to make you feel guilty, even when you're innocent. And before you ask, I bought well within our spirits, tobacco and perfume allowance on the boat. Only an idiot would do otherwise.'

‘You think the duty-free shop would tip off the customs officers if you'd bought more?'

‘I'm sure they would,' he answered flatly.

Helena and Ned followed the porter the steward had engaged for them off the boat and into the customs shed. Helena's heart sank when she saw the contents of a middle-aged woman's case strewn across a trestle table, and cringed in embarrassment when she saw an officer thumb through the woman's underclothes. But the official their porter led them to looked at their passports, checked their visas, asked them a few perfunctory questions about cigarettes and spirits, and waved them through.

‘That wasn't so bad,' she said to Ned when they approached the train.

‘I've a feeling that it won't be quite so simple when we reach the East German border.' He reached into his pocket for the Dutch guilders he'd acquired on the boat. ‘But look on the bright side: we won't have to make any changes for the next eighteen hours.' He stepped on to the train ahead of her and held out his hand to help her up. ‘Do you want to play snap or read after breakfast?'

‘The last thing I want is breakfast.' Her stomach heaved at the thought.

‘You felt the boat rocking last night?'

‘I thought it would never stop.'

‘Were you sick?'

‘No, but I thought I was going to be.'

‘Then I prescribe a real Continental breakfast. Plenty of warm, fresh, stodgy bread rolls with lashings of butter, jam, cheese, cold meat, orange juice and coffee.'

She entered the carriage, smelled the coffee and realised Ned was right. She was hungry.

‘You go ahead to the dining-car and get a table. I'll see our luggage into the carriage. Order two of everything and cheer up. Tonight, if we don't get held up at the borders, we'll sleep in Poland.'

‘Poland,' she repeated, instinctively clutching the duffle bag that contained her mother's ashes. She walked down the train, breathing in the scents of food and freshly ground coffee. Most of the tables were already full, but she found an empty one and took a window seat. She set her bag carefully on the bench beside her. ‘Not long before you're home, Mama,' she whispered. ‘Not long now.'

Helena pushed the remains of her cheese roll to the side of her plate, leaned back in her seat and gazed out of the window.

‘What do you think of your first glimpse of Holland?' Ned asked, as the manicured Dutch fields and neat, doll-like houses rolled past.

‘I've never seen so many flowers. And the countryside is beautiful, so clean and tidy. It looks as though everything has just been polished.'

‘Unlike poor old dusty, coal-smudged Pontypridd.'

‘You have to admit that, by comparison, this country positively sparkles.'

‘Especially in early-morning sunshine. But, as I don't speak Dutch, I won't be moving here this week.' Ned reached for his orange juice. ‘I'd miss Pontypridd too much, even the slag heaps and coal tips.'

‘So would I.'

Ned looked into her eyes. ‘Would you?'

‘What a strange question. It's home.'

‘You were born in Poland.'

‘But I don't remember it.'

‘I've always thought that Magda brought you up as a Pole.'

‘She was proud of her upbringing and her country, but she was grateful to Britain for taking us in and allowing us to live there after the war. I think she tried to give me the best of both worlds: a British education with extra lessons in Polish culture.'

‘I remember seeing you when you were small. You were always dressed differently from the other girls. Your clothes were more colourful and heavily embroidered. And they were clearly not bought in any shop in town. They were too well made.'

‘You noticed me when I was a child?' she asked in surprise.

‘Even when I was in short trousers, I knew a pretty face when I saw one,' he joked.

‘When you asked me to dance at the freshers' ball in university, you said you'd never seen me around Ponty.'

‘I lied.' He took an apple from the bowl of fruit on the table and cut it into wedges.

‘Why?'

‘Because I couldn't think of any plausible explanation as to why I'd ignored you all the times I'd seen you in the Regent Ballroom and the New Inn dances. Not that you were there often. The other boys used to say your mother kept you locked up.'

‘That's rubbish.'

‘You hardly ever went out with the girls.'

‘Only because I liked to spend time with my mother. We both loved going to the theatre, opera and ballet. And after they turned the Town Hall in Pontypridd into a bingo parlour, we had to travel to Cardiff or Bristol to see plays and shows. So when did you start noticing me?' she demanded.

‘When did I not?' He turned the question back on her. ‘But something certainly clicked that night I saw you at the freshers' pyjama dance.'

She raised her eyebrows. ‘My pink baby-doll pyjamas?'

‘It wasn't the first time I'd seen your legs. I'd seen you diving into the pool in the park.'

‘So you noticed me there, too?'

‘Guilty as charged.'

‘But you never said a word to me.'

‘It was Ponty. Speak to a girl and three-quarters of the town has you walking up the aisle with her.'

‘And the other quarter has you getting her pregnant.'

‘You know the place so well.' He became serious. ‘I used to call in at the shop almost every day when I was in the Boys' Grammar School. Town was out of bounds in the lunch hour so naturally we all descended on it, and our first shop was always Charlie's cooked meat and pie shop. Your mother used to talk about you all the time –'

‘I know. It was embarrassing,' she interrupted.

‘I thought you were lucky to have a mother who thought so much of you.'

‘As if you don't.'

‘My father could have been more understanding when I was younger.'

‘He might have been if you'd given him half a chance.'

Ned thought about this for a moment. ‘Let's just say that we didn't see eye to eye for a long time.'

‘What's important is that you do now.'

He gave her a wry smile. ‘Sometimes I think you're fonder of my family than me.'

‘Mama adored your mother and father. They made us – both of us – feel like family from the very first time we visited.'

‘That's my mother. She's the nice one.'

‘Your whole family is.'

‘You're the nice one if you think that of my sisters.'

‘If they're horrible to you, it's only because you tease them unmercifully.'

‘You're talking like Rachel already. But to get back to the freshers' ball, I wasn't entirely lying about seeing you for the first time. Because that's just what it felt like. I might have known who you were but it was just like seeing you for the very first time. And it wasn't just your legs – although they are rather wonderful. It was your eyes, your deep blue come-to-bed eyes. I looked into them and saw my future – and I hoped yours, too. I'll wait as long as it takes you to do whatever you have to in Poland, sunshine, and I'll help you in any way I can. But you'll have to forgive me for being impatient to get back to Pontypridd so we can marry and start our life together.'

‘Our life together,' Helena repeated slowly. She rested her chin on her hand and looked out of the window in the hope he wouldn't see her tears. ‘I love being part of your family. I just never thought I wouldn't have anyone left of my own.'