A Special Duty (20 page)

His next job was as a food inspector, which suited him better because he could keep on the move, but his mind always returned to Poland, and the friends he had left behind. Any news of Poland in the national newspapers caught his eye, and he read that Stanislaw Mikolajczyk, who had returned to Poland in 1945 as a Deputy Prime Minister, had fled back to England, having been unable to protect his country from Communist domination. He had met Mikolajczyk in 1944, and his plight prompted Tom to write him a letter, sympathising with his situation and saying: “I am happy that you have sought refuge in this country, as I did with your people”. Mikolajczyk very quickly moved on to America, where he settled, but he remembered Tom, and took the time to reply and wish him well before leaving. And then, in April 1947, just a few months before I was born, the body of Peter Crosland was found on a wooded hillside in the Cabar district of Yugoslavia, where it had lain since November, 1943. The woodsmen who found him buried his remains on the hillside, retaining the identity tags, which enabled one of the RAF search parties (MRES
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) to locate his body during a sweep of Yugoslavia, and re-inter his body in the Belgrade War Cemetery. Tom read about it in a national newspaper and wrote to the RAF to confirm that the story was true, later travelling to London to identify some of Peter’s personal effects.

The family continued to grow with the birth of my younger sister Susan in 1949, and by this time we were living in an ‘Airey House’
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on the outskirts of Ludlow, which was a good place for a young family, and we loved it. The football pitch was at the bottom of our road, Clee View, and every Saturday we walked down to watch from the touchline as Dad, always taller than anyone around him, streaked down the pitch flicking the ball between his feet, and weaving through the opposition. At around this time we acquired an old Austin car, in which we would travel to Carlisle to visit our Cumbrian family. Wrapped in blankets, we would be loaded into the car at bedtime so that we could sleep, but somehow we always managed to be awake for the thrill of Shap Fell. It was a long haul to the top of this barren section of the A6, and in the dark it seemed to us bleakest and most frightening place we could imagine. My memory always had us driving through fog, sleet, or lashing rain. The lights of oncoming cars would be blinding, and yet Dad never flinched or appeared worried; these were the conditions that were familiar for him and he seemed completely at ease. I remember once on a particularly bad night asking him how he could see where he was going. He said: “I keep my eyes lowered on the left edge of the road, and I never look at the lights”. We loved his reassuring presence because he made the frightening feel normal, and we would arrive in Carlisle, having overcome the perils of Shap, feeling like adventurers ourselves.

It was the move to Lancaster in the north west of England that really changed everything, and yet it was a very positive move to a beautiful part of the country. Dad had got a job as a travelling salesman for Jewsbury and Brown, soft drinks merchant, and not only did the job come with a house and a car, but the move, close to the sea at Morecambe, was hopefully going to help Susan, who suffered from chronic asthma and had spent long months in a sanatorium before the move. This was an ideal job for Dad, who loved being behind the wheel of a car, and had an easy-going, genial manner that enabled him to develop a rapport with the managers of the busy theatres and piers in the seaside town of Morecambe, which formed his ‘patch’. For him, it was a bit like being back in the RAF mess, propping up the bar at the Winter Gardens, the Alhambra, the Gaumont, and the Central Pier, and for us there was the thrill of him arriving home with our autograph books signed by the stars of the day; Jerry Colunna, Alma Cogan, and most thrilling of all, Tommy Steele. On one occasion, when Susan was confined to bed with a severe asthma attack, Dad brought Harold Graham, the organist from the Central Pier and well-known local celebrity to visit and cheer her up, and on another occasion he got us complimentary tickets for ‘Dancing Waters’ at the Gaumont. Coloured jets of water, dancing to the 1812 overture, would be a laughable entertainment now, but we were thrilled by the spectacle, especially when the manager treated us to a box of chocolates in the interval. The fifties were great years for the seaside towns, and although they began well for us, it wasn’t long before clouds began to gather. Coming home from school, more often than not, Dad would be sitting by the fire and not at work. I say he was there, but actually he had begun to retreat to his ‘other place’, and we became quite used to it. The anniversary of the ill-fated flight in April was always a difficult time for him and seemed to intensify his emotional turmoil. Then, in September 1957, he was unsettled by an advertisement that had been placed in The Times:

“Greetings to pilot and crew of RAF bomber who, on a mission from Brindisi over Poland 1942, were forced down River San. Stayed with partisans at Ulanow until taken over to Allies by Russians in July 1944. From partisan commander.”

Who had placed this strange advert, and why? About this time, their old partisan friend George got in touch and, in an exchange of correspondence with Patrick Stradling, warned that they should not respond to The Times notice, saying: “The Soviet partisan who sent you to Russia [Kunicki] is now living in Poland, not wanting to stay in Russia. He was in prison too. He was not the author of the greetings!” George explained that he had been unable to get in touch any sooner because he had been seriously wounded while fighting with the Polish Second Army in Czechoslovakia towards the end of the war, and had spent months in a military hospital. He had returned to the army after discharge from hospital, reaching the rank of Major and then, in 1951, he was arrested on political charges. There followed three years of investigation, after which he was given a prison sentence of twelve years.
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At the time of making contact with the British men, he was working with a foreign trade organisation, and had begun to write an account of his years with the partisans.
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He asked for details of the crash and information about the crew to assist with this memoir, but Tom took the cautious approach, and did not respond to the letter. It had arrived with a covering note from the Air Attaché in Warsaw, saying: “You would be best advised at this stage to write in terms of happiness at having contact again and not reveal any names of other crew or information which might not be permitted to be passed by Air Ministry.”

Tom was unsettled during this period, feeling threatened and nervous if a stranger came to the door, telling Rita: “Don’t answer, just in case”. However irrational his fear seemed, he really thought that the Russians were trying to find him. Group Captain Ridgway, Air Attaché in Warsaw, wrote to all four men with regard to The Times item, advising them not to reveal any information about their aircraft, the crash, or their experiences, until he contacted them again, and suggested that if they needed to get in touch with him, they should only do so via the Foreign Office because: “Letters through the open post will definitely be censored”. These were the Cold War years, and the “atmosphere of unbounded suspicion” that Burrows had spoken of was no longer confined to Moscow. Rita kept the household running during Tom’s crisis, but then one day the company car disappeared and a stack of cardboard boxes appeared for us to pack our belongings in. “Where are we going, Mum?” She smiled, and said: “I’m not sure yet”. Now she was the calm, reassuring voice that made everything seem alright.

Tom Storey with his daughters 1957

We moved to a boarding house in Morecambe and, although we had not planned to take in visitors, when a family of holidaymakers knocked on the door and asked if we had any rooms, Mum thought: “Well, why not?” We were clearly not business people because we ended up accommodating one or two long-term boarders who had fallen on hard times, and were unable to pay for their lodging. One was a musician from the Joe Loss Orchestra, who was sacked while playing with the band on the Central Pier. His one-week stay turned into weeks as he worked on his legal case for wrongful dismissal, promising to pay for his lodging when he won the case. Pat spent many hours writing and rewriting pages of evidence for him, but it came to nothing and he eventually moved on. Dad managed to get his job back briefly, and it seemed that things were looking up, but it didn’t last, and he seemed quite broken by the weight of responsibility and his inability to get well. Mum got an extra job as manageress of a new café attached to Twell’s corner shop, and because of that, when we suddenly had to move from the boarding house following the death of the landlord, we were offered the flat above the shop and café. I could see the forecourt of the Central Pier from my bedroom window, and we were all quietly pleased to have escaped the boarding house business, which none of us had enjoyed. Free time was spent leading donkey rides along the sands and searching for the pennies that used to fall from the slot machines on the pier, dropping through the planking and onto the wet sand beneath. I joined the Sea Cadets during this period, and loved to march along the promenade playing a bugle in the band, but we also took summer jobs, which was an easy thing to do in a seaside town. One blissful summer of 1959, Pat and I were sent to Ireland to stay with Mum’s sister and our Irish cousins in Killybegs, Donegal. What a joyful, free-spirited summer that was.

Then life over the shop came to a sudden end when Mr Twell, the owner, closed up one night, put the contents of the till in his pocket, and walked out. He simply disappeared, and it was many years before we learned that he had caught the Heysham ferry to Belfast and begun a new life in Ireland. At the time we had no idea what had happened to him. The shop and café closed and we were on the move again. This final move was to a house at Hest Bank, a ‘passing through’ sort of place on the A6 between Morecambe and Carnforth. We managed to get the house at an affordable rent because the owners had suffered a terrible tragedy when their only child was killed on the busy A6, which ran along the bottom of the road. They moved out as soon as we agreed to move in and, although the house seemed to harbour grief, Dad seemed happier as he dug and tended a vegetable plot in the private back garden, which shielded him from the outside world and, most of all, from anyone who called at the house. He spent hours digging, raking, planting, and weeding, and the absorption seemed to lift his spirits. He got us an old canvas canoe to mess about in on the canal and talked a local farmer into giving us a Border collie, which in the absence of any sheep, took to rounding up the two pet rabbits that ran free in the garden and played havoc with the vegetable plot.

We caught the school bus into Lancaster every day and life was a whirlwind of friends, homework, and the nightly ritual of jiggling the TV aerial so that we could get a good enough picture to watch Top of the Pops, or Ready Steady Go. Every Sunday, Mum would cook a roast, which Dad would carve. He always had fresh vegetables from his garden plot, and from time to time they sang together as the food was prepared. There were flashes of life as it used to be, when Dad would play the mouth-organ for us as a treat at bedtime, “D’ye ken John Peel with his coat so gay…”, or dance around the room singing a silly song. We clung on to these happy moments because they were increasingly rare, and what we knew, but couldn’t express, was that Dad was by now only partly with us. It was the fire now that absorbed him almost totally. He would sit hunched over it and stare into the flames for hours, sometimes until it died and went cold, and still we would chatter and sing and argue as though nothing was wrong. He had aged far beyond his years, and his physical health was also beginning to fail, with a collapsed lung and long bouts of illness. Once a week he would put on a suit and catch the bus into Lancaster to queue at the Labour Exchange in the hope of finding work, but he would not work again.

When the end came, it was unexpected. Even with such intimate knowledge of his mental and physical health, we were not prepared. Pat had just started work as a lab assistant at the technical college, which is where she was on the Thursday that it happened. Dad’s brother, John Storey, had called in the early afternoon and he had done his best to find words of encouragement and motivation as he sat at the bedside. Mum took a cup of tea up shortly after the visit and placed it gently on the floor by the bed – Tom appeared to be asleep. She was in the kitchen as Susan and I arrived home on the school bus. It must have been around half past four, and we dropped our bags on the floor and went running upstairs to see Dad, where we found him dead. Pat got a call at work to tell her to go home straight away, and as she walked through the front door, Dad’s body was being brought down the stairs. From that moment on we were bonded to each other by the tragedy and the profound sense of loss, which was almost never talked about from that day on. We didn’t talk about it outside the house, and we didn’t talk about it amongst ourselves. We wrapped a protective cloak of silence around it; a silence that lasted for years.