There Shall Be No More Fences In My Life

      When I was a child we lived in southwest London. Our home was a small terraced house where the back gardens lined up like teeth and were divided by wooden fences. Our neighbours were an elderly couple who grew beetroots instead of roses in their flowerbeds. He had made a hole in their fence so I could crawl through and play with them in their back garden amongst the beetroot.

(As a child I loved the smell of my best friend’s father’s pipe.
The smoke was exotic and filled the house with a blue fug.)

     They had survived the Second World War and Josef Stalin’s Gulags. The husband had escaped from Poland to join the Free Polish Army, leaving his wife behind, and had flown Spitfires from the southeast Coast of England over northern France against the Luftwaffe. He had committed his life to once again seeing a free Poland.

(I once spent two hours alphabetising all the books on my shelf whilst avoiding other more important jobs. Now the books are ordered by letter, the spines creating random patterns of colours and shapes that I could never have created with my own hands. Sometimes chaos can create an accidental beauty.)
As the Soviet armies freed formally occupied countries from the retreating Nazis the people of eastern Europe, imagining freedom, discovered they were still occupied.
The new Soviet regime in Poland also made people disappear.
Even though the husband had fought against the Germans the Russians sent his wife to a gulag. Stalin did not want any Poles connected with the Free Polish Army. He did not want any Poles who called themselves ‘free’ to have any freedom too spread their ideas, and would make the relatives of the sentenced pay the penalty if the accused could not be found. And worst still, she was Catholic, something very bad to be in Soviet Russia.

(I made Air fix models of Me 109’s and hung them from my ceiling with white thread so you couldn’t see what held them and through squinted eyes they flew. Spinning in circles as they strafed lines of soldiers on the carpet and attacked heavy bombers hung by the light switch. )

     And so they spent the war apart never thinking they would see each other again. She was pregnant with his child when they sent her to the gulag. The war had created a huge need for trains and trucks and so there were none available for any prisoners being sent to the camps.
So they walked.
And then they walked some more.
The long march and the cold caused her to lose the baby and three toes. She lost the baby somewhere by the roadside on the journey northwards near a church that was burning - They could see the smoke for miles after they had passed.

(Once on scout camp I fell down a hill in some woods and fractured my arm. Skip thought it wasn’t broken, only sprained, and he ripped a hole in my shirt and stuck my arm in and I spent three days like that. It fixed wrong - so they had to rebreak it.)

     In the gulag people worked on digging canals or cutting down trees, there was no food and they had to work constantly in the cold. People went mad and cut lumps out of their bellies, then cooked and ate the flesh. Men bled themselves into bowls and crumbled bread in as if it were soup. Each day people died, babies were born, and life slowly ground itself down into dust under the wheels of industry. So many people were fed into the machine that the cogs nearly stopped and the reason why was forgotten

(In Brighton, when I was twenty four years old I watched the old pier burn down and fall into the sea below it. There was a large crowd and I got 15 minutes off work)

After the war had finished, he thought that he had better get on with his life as best he could. He thought that he would never see his wife again but at least he was alive and maybe she was alive somewhere too. He didn’t know that their baby had died. Then one day he met with an old friend from Poland who told him that she was alive and was working in a hospital in a country which had a lot of Poles and Jews now; Israel. So he went to Israel and he found her. After all that time and all those intrusions on their life they were together again. They settled in Ealing, England, had two children, and lived in a terraced house next door to where I would eventually be born, enjoy the comfort of the smell of pipe smoke, build model aeroplanes, and eventually leave to join my life elsewhere.

They settled there and made a hole in the fence between the two gardens.


 

Reviews

[Yaooooooo]

Very well writen.
Keep up the good work and feel free to send me a request.
One!