Spring Will Be Ours (2 page)

‘But don't expect me to pay all the bills as well,' Jan had said, the Sunday morning after they arrived. He was tired after carrying all the boxes up three flights, and a night broken by the trains. Anna said nothing; she would have to find work once Jerzy started school. Her English was quite fluent now, certainly adequate for everyday use, but even so, the thought of having to use it all the time was terrifying. And she would have to start all over again, to explain all over again:

I have my
mała matura,
my Polish A-levels. I studied for them in secret, in occupied Warsaw, where if I had been discovered I would have been arrested; quite probably, if that had happened, I should not be here now. But I was not arrested, although many other things happened to me then. I took some of the exams in the transit camp in Italy, in 1945, the rest in the resettlement camp in Herefordshire in 1946. No, I have no English qualifications. When I realized that I could not return to Poland, I began to train as a nurse; I knew hardly any English then, but I managed, sitting up late with dictionaries and textbooks. And then I got married, I got pregnant, I gave it up
…

A whistle blew, and further down the track a train drew breath and prepared to leave for Victoria. Anna dropped the vegetables into the black saucepan, filled it with water and set it on the stove. Then she went to the window and watched, as if from a great distance. Already, she was able to blot out most of the noise at night, though she was still awake at once if the children called. She yawned, turned away when the train was past, and began to lay the table. Half a loaf on the breadboard criss-crossed with lines; a saucer of margarine. Three mats, three white soup plates, the Woolworth's spoons, two apples. For herself she did not mind, but the children must have one each day.

She went into their room to fetch the mending she had put aside that morning. Jerzy was in there, face pressed to the window; he did not turn round, and jumped when she touched his shoulder.

‘What are you doing?'

‘Nothing, Mama. Just watching.'

‘I thought you were with Ewa – I didn't hear you in the corridor.'

‘I was with her. But I came here by myself.'

She stroked his hair. ‘You must have tiptoed. Like a little mouse.'

He smiled.

After lunch, Anna switched on
Listen with Mother.
Ewa could understand almost everything she heard on the wireless now: Jerzy was beginning to pick out quite a lot. ‘Are you sitting comfortably? Then I'll begin …' The mellow voice of Daphne Oxenford filled the kitchen; the children sat, elbows on the table, chins in cupped hands, listening while Anna washed up.

‘Simple Simon met a pieman

Going to the fair.

Said Simple Simon to the pieman:

Let me taste your ware …'

‘Mama? What does he mean: “taste your where”?' asked Ewa.

She shook her head, rinsing the plates. ‘We'll have to look it up.' How could she possibly get a job?

‘Said, the pieman unto Simon

Show me first your penny,

Said Simple Simon to the pieman

Sir, I have not any …' The singer was called George. He had a deep voice which sounded as if it should be in a church, even on stage. Anna had a sudden vision of him all dressed up by himself in the studio – Jerzy thought he lived in the wireless – singing nursery rhymes very loudly.

‘Mama? What are you laughing at?'

‘Just a thought.'

After the story, and slow, sleepy signature tune on the piano, which they all liked, Anna sent them for a rest on their beds, then cleared the front room, putting small cars, farmyard animals and dolls neatly into cardboard boxes, all ready to come back to after their walk. It was important that they should have fresh air and exercise each day. She swept the floor and then she allowed herself, as always, fifteen minutes'rest, lying down on the double bed. For a few moments she thought, exhausted, of nothing at all. Then she turned on her side and looked at the photographs on the varnished chest of drawers.

In sepia tones, from a gilt and plastic Woolworth's frame, her mother gazed at her. She wore a soft white blouse; her hair was cut short, her brown eyes enormous. The photograph had been taken in Warsaw in 1930; Anna was four then, her brother Jerzy six. He laughed at her from another frame, from another year, much later, sitting with their father under a silver birch tree, on a sunlit river bank.

There were many memories of Jerzy and Tata; two particular ones of her mother. Occasionally she allowed herself to relive them.

Anna closed her eyes and saw a great expanse of snow.

Dark clumps of fir trees broke up the glittering whiteness; distantly, far up the mountains, were tiny figures on skis. Anna did not know why she was not with them, how she came to be standing alone under a tree, staring at the empty slopes. She began to cry, and the sound of her own sobbing on the cold silent air frightened her still more. Then, with a great, wonderful swooping movement, her mother was beside her, snow on the tips of her skis, on her dark hair and gloves.

‘Mama! Mama!'

‘Maleńka
– little one – here I am.'

She was clasped in a warm, delicious hug of heavy tweed, fur brushing her cheek, the smell of snow breathed in deep.

On a Sunday afternoon in the spring of the following year, Anna stood outside her father's study door, listening to the murmur of voices.

‘I am sorry, Tomasz,' her mother was saying. ‘I don't like to worry you …'

‘But of course you must tell me. Anyway, I can see how unlike yourself you are these days. So tired …'

There was a long sigh. ‘Always so tired. Sometimes I can hardly get out of bed – and when I go for even a short walk with the children, I'm almost crawling by the time we get home.'

‘Poor Ewa. Perhaps you're anaemic – we must send you for a blood test.'

‘Yes.' A pause. ‘It's not just the tiredness. I – I keep having these silly nosebleeds. Quite often I forget to tell you about them, but I suppose I must have one almost every day. And I don't know why, but I seem to bruise more easily, or something. I keep finding bruises in places I can't remember hurting myself at all …'

‘Do you?' Anna heard her father's chair pushed back as he got up from behind his desk, piled high with medical textbooks. She loved looking at them when he was out on his calls, carefully tracing the diagrams with her fingers, smelling the leather bindings.

‘Let's have a look at you, my darling. Where are these bruises?'

Silence. Anna pressed her ear to the crack of the door, imagining her mother undressing, her father's gentle touch.

His intake of breath was just audible. She waited, suddenly frightened: what was wrong with Mama? Then a door opened at the end of the passage: Aunt Wiktoria was coming. She fled.

Two clear memories only: of the day she was lost and found, and the day when she knew, somehow, that her mother was lost to her for ever. Anna had half-understood a number of facts from her father's textbooks. It was not until she was much older, ten or eleven, that he told her he had been studying the symptoms of leukaemia during the weeks that her mother grew so unwell. Anna listened gravely as he told her of the Sunday afternoon when he examined her, and understood why. She never let him know that she had heard the terrifying silence of his discovery.

‘Mama! Mama!'

Ewa and Jerzy were awake. Anna swung herself quickly off the bed and went to their room on stockinged feet.

‘Such a noise!'

‘Can we go out now? Can we go to the common?'

‘Yes, in a little while.' She sat on the edge of Ewa's bed and shivered. Streatham had been cramped, but the heating had been included in the rent. It would be difficult to heat this flat, with the draughty corridor.

‘Did you sleep well?' she asked.

Ewa stretched. ‘I had a funny dream – about Tata … I can't remember.' She reached for her book, the cartoon antics of the goat Matolek. ‘Can I read until we go out?'

‘Yes.' Anna forced herself to stop shivering. Jerzy was getting out of bed, his feet bare. ‘Your socks,
Maleńki
…'

Half an hour later they were walking down the grey streets, the children's coats buttoned up to the neck. The weather was changing. Litter blew along the pavement and the trees shook chestnuts over the path across the common. Dogs barked as their leads were unclipped, and Ewa and Jerzy ran ahead, kicking up piles of yellow leaves.

Every Sunday they went to mass, and afterwards they had lunch with the grandparents. Jerzy thought that before the move they had all gone to mass together, always. Now, quite often he and Ewa went with Dziadek and Babcia by themselves. Sometimes Tata met them afterwards, on the common, and they went with him to watch the toy boats sail on the pond. He never came with them to church. Mama used to, but not any more; when he thought about it Jerzy was a little puzzled; he had thought she liked it.

He liked it. In his grey coat and shorts, shoes stiff with polish, he walked beside his grandfather, holding his hand. Dziadek wore his dark coat now it was getting cold, and his black leather gloves. Babcia had a nice grey coat for Sundays, and wore a hat.

If it rained, they took the bus. Otherwise, they walked all the way down the main road to the church. It was an English church, Babcia explained, but permission had been given for Polish mass to be held there at one o'clock. She and Dziadek smiled and nodded to the families they knew, walking down the path, but never spoke as they took their grandchildren through the half-open door. It was time for silence.

Jerzy drew a deep breath of wax and incense, flowers and dampness, as they entered the church and crossed themselves before the Virgin, the Queen of Poland. Candles burned at her feet, and when the coughing and shuffling and rustling of prayerbooks had settled, and the priest began to speak, Jerzy somehow felt that the man's voice was not exactly a human voice at all, but something quite mysterious, coming out of and belonging to the flames flickering in the darkness. He hardly knew that he had this feeling, but it was there, always. After a while, he would start to think of other things: of his Sunday talks with Dziadek, of lunch, of the trains – he knew several of the regular journeys now.

Occasionally there were prayers for Poland in the service, and Jerzy knew they were important, and tried to pray too. Through half-closed eyes he watched Dziadek and Babcia go to the altar rail for Communion, and wondered what it was like up there, so close to the murmuring priest, taking the host on their tongues in the candlelight. Was it really Jesus they were eating? Ewa would have her First Communion soon; perhaps she could tell him then.

After mass, people stood talking in dark knots outside the church, and the priest moved among them, smoothing down his brilliantined hair. The chidren were allowed to scamper, but not too much. Then came the walk home, and inside the green door they pounded up the echoing stairs in their loud Sunday shoes.

‘Mama! Mama!'

She stood at the door to the flat, smiling at the grandparents as they went through their own front door. Inside, the children put on their slippers, and she took them into the kitchen and gave them a hot drink.

‘Did you see Tata on the common?'

Sometimes they said yes, and that he'd taken them to the pond, and she looked pleased, and asked them about the boats. Or they said no, they'd looked for him, but must have missed him, and then she said nothing. They all went into the front room, to draw with their crayons, and wait for him to come home.

Soon afterwards, every Sunday, Jerzy got up and said: ‘I'm going to Dziadek now,' and his mother nodded. ‘Be good.'

There was very little light on the landing between the two flats, only what filtered up through the thick starred glass of the window in the hall, far below. He stood on the shadowy square of linoleum, and knocked on his grandparents'door. When it opened, it was filled with Dziadek, smiling in welcome, and behind him it was even darker, and always felt quiet, though Babcia was preparing lunch. His grandfather led him into the front room.

After the darkness of the landing and corridor, it seemed to be filled with light. Later, when all the family was there, clatter and conversation would obscure what Jerzy somehow thought of as the real room; this time, always, it felt as still and light and silent as if it were under glass. Crimson and blue tapestries hung on the walls; Babcia made those, in the evenings. Lacy net curtains were at the windows, and when the sun shone their patterns fell on to the carpet. There were a lot of stiff green plants, and photographs of him and Ewa. Before the gas fire stood an unyielding brown sofa; on the mantelpiece a large clock ticked into the quietness.

He wandered over to the window, lifted the lacy curtain over his head, and stood looking out, across to the window opposite, and down at the street, far below. The woman in the window waved to him: she was English, and had a lot of visitors, mostly men. There were children playing in the street, kicking a football up and down, along the pavement, against the dustbins, shouting to each other. They couldn't see him, right up here.

‘Come and sit down,
maleńki.'

On the table was spread the newspaper from yesterday,
Dziennik Polski
, the
Polish Daily
, which Dziadek didn't have time to read on Saturday mornings, because that was when he taught at Polish school. When Jerzy was a litte older, he would go there, like Ewa. Until then, this was his private school. Next to the paper was the shiny red exercise book, neatly open at this week's page, with the sharpened blue pencil beside it. He and Dziadek sat side by side on the high-backed chairs, and slowly he copied the words for today:
rzeka
, river;
rząd
, government; z
^·
ołnierz
, soldier;
bitwa
, battle.

‘Tell me a story, Dziadek.'