Spring Will Be Ours

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• Sue Gee
  
• PART ONE
  
• Preface
  
• 1. London, 1958
  
• 2. Warsaw, 1939
  
• 3. Warsaw, 1939–1941
  
• 4. Warsaw, 1942–1944
  
• 5. Uprising: Warsaw, 1944
  
• PART TWO
  
• 6. London, 1960
  
• 7. England, 1968
  
• 8. London, 1970s
  
• 9. Poland, 1979
  
• PART THREE
  
• 10. Warsaw and London, 1980–1981
  
• 11. London, 1981
  
• 12. London, December 1981
  
• 13. Warsaw, January 1982
  

Sue Gee is an acclaimed and established novelist.
Reading in Bed
(2007) was a
Daily Mail
Book Club selection;
The Mysteries of Glass
(2005) was long listed for the Orange Prize for Fiction. She ran the MBA Creative Writing Programme at Middlesex University from 2000–2008 and currently teaches at the Faber Academy. Sue Gee has also published many short stories, some of which have been broadcast on BBC Radio 4 and her most recent publication is a collection of stories,
Last Fling
(Salt 2011). She lives in London and Herefordshire.

For the family – the living and the dead

In December 1981 I went on a demonstration. The weather was cold: snow fell as we marched from a rally in Hyde Park down Oxford Street, towards the Polish Embassy – tens of thousands of us, flanked by police and carrying banners, those up at the front preparing to deliver a petition, demanding the release of thousands of internees. Poland, after the heady, astonishing days of Solidarity, was under martial law.

I was on this demonstration in the company of my Polish partner, Marek, and his family: parents and grandparents who in 1946 had come to this country as exiles after the war. They had made their home here, but their spiritual home was still in Poland. They had brought up their children as Polish children, who, as they grew up, experienced a deep sense of displacement, of belonging neither here nor there. When the world's spotlight turned, between 1979 and 1981, on a Polish pope returning to his homeland, on the shipyard gates of Gdansk strung with Solidarity banners, on Lech Walesa, carried shoulder high, there had been, for the first time, a sense of identity and belonging. Now, as the telephone lines from Poland to the rest of the world were cut, and General Jaruzelski delivered implacable statements from behind dark glasses, it felt for these children of exiles as though an umbilical cord had been cut, too, and that a country whose history was so deeply entwined with their own childhood had been robbed of hope.

In the summer of 1983 I went for a walk down a Sussex country lane. I was pregnant; my father had just died. The weather was sunny and mild after rain, the grass was lush. I could hear cows cropping it, behind tall hedges. I thought of how utterly English all this was, and how deep lay my own roots in a country childhood. My father had brought us up on a farm: his clergyman father, whom I never knew, had died at the vicarage breakfast table. Marek also had a grandfather he never knew: a doctor and a Reserve Officer in the Polish Army who, with thousands of the Polish
intelligentsia
, was taken prisoner by the Russians in 1939. Many of those men died infamously at Katyn. This man was taken to the prison camp at Starobielsk, whose inmates, in April 1940, were transported in small groups to a KGB prison in the Ukraine. There they were executed, and buried in mass graves in the forest.

I walked down the lane thinking of these two men, whose ends had been so different, and one so terrible. I thought of how Marek and I, their grandchildren, had met, decades later, and begun a life together. I recalled Marek's childhood, spent in a London flat overlooking a railway line, and of the excitement he had told me he felt on first moving there, watching the trains. I saw, in an image which would not go away, this little boy, whose parents had lost everything, and who were struggling to rebuild their lives in a foreign country, standing at a dusty window, looking down on to the railway track, at the trains, arriving and departing.

I did not write a word of this novel until some eighteen months later, but it was then that it began. From the research I did while writing, and from the many letters people were kind enough to write to me when it was first published, I know that although it focuses on a single family, there are echoes and reverberations in the lives of hundreds of thousands of Polish families who came here after the war. They had lost beloved relatives and friends, their home, their country. Many of them chose not to take up British citizenship, and thus acquire a British passport, but to wait in the hope that one day they would be able to return, freely, to a free Poland.

Now that day has come. I don't think that fourteen years ago there was anyone, public figure or private individual, marching on that demonstration, or attending the candlelit one outside the Polish Embassy a few nights later, who would have dreamed that before the end of the decade the Berlin Wall would come down, and the countries of Eastern Europe discover liberation.

It would be foolish to pretend that in Poland, as in the other countries which used to make up the Eastern Bloc, this fast-changing state of affairs has not been without its own problems. A free market economy has brought unemployment, as well as thriving shops and cafés. It has brought resentment of those who have raced ahead. A friend recently in Warsaw says: ‘It's all there, and so many people can't afford it.' On the whole, however, life is undeniably better. There is freedom of exchange – of goods and ideas. There is freedom to come and go.

For some, this has come too late. For some of the older generation, living here, it is simply too painful to go back. People deeply traumatised in youth bear the scars for ever. But, even so, there is hope. A wall has fallen, an iron curtain is gone. There has been much more than a thaw in the long cold war which divided east from west. In this new, more optimistic climate, it is more important than ever to keep alive the memories of those who, in dark days, lost everything, and to pay tribute to their courage.

London, 1995

When he was almost five, they moved to a long dark street in Clapham. Three-storey mansion blocks, with dark green paintwork, lined either side; indoors, the paintwork was brown, and the stairs were covered with linoleum. Every time the tenants went up and down, the banisters trembled. There was a notice pinned to the front door of their block: No Banging.

It took the whole afternoon to move them all into the two flats on the top floor. His grandparents were to be on one side of the stairwell; he and Mama and Tata and Ewa on the other. Linoleum covered not just the stairs, but the narrow corridors and the floor of each room; all day, it was discovered, and for much of the night, you could hear footsteps, chairs scraping, the clack of brush against skirting board, heavy saucepans bang on to heavy stoves. And voices, but to these he did not pay much attention.

There was another noise. A mighty rhythm of hissing and puffing, lit by an orange glow and sparks. He stood on tiptoe in the empty room at the back and gazed through dusty glass at the network of tracks, at the huge, black, beautiful engine and the men inside; at the gleaming green coaches, the cloud of steam. The tree-lined streets of Streatham disappeared: a half-remembered sunny afternoon, the walk from Ewa's school, and they were gone.

He would live here always.

‘Jerzy?'

Leave me alone.

‘Jerzy!'

‘Yes, Mama?'

Rapid footsteps echoing along the corridor; the half-closed door flung wide.

‘All alone? There is tea in the kitchen. Come and sit down.'

‘Yes. Look, Mama.'

Her thin skirt against the side of his head, her hand on his shoulder. A sigh.

‘Yes. It will be very noisy. Come along now.'

Hand in hand; more echoes; everyone round the varnished table; lifted on to his chair. The same chair.

‘Mama?'

‘Yes?'

‘Where shall I sleep?'

‘With Ewa.'

‘I should like to sleep at the back. Please.'

‘Perhaps.'

That night he lay in his bed in the room at the back, filled with unpacked cardboard boxes; a blanket was pinned over the window. Movement in the bedclothes on the other side of the room.

‘Ewa?'

‘Yes?'

‘Do you like it here?'

‘I don't know. I don't think so.'

‘I like it.'

‘Good. Go to sleep now.'

‘Goodnight.'

‘Goodnight.'

He waited, listening until he was sure she was asleep. Then, when a new clanking and hissing came from the track below, he crept on bare feet to the window and pulled aside a corner of blanket. For as long as they were there, he watched the dark shapes of the driver and of the firemen, bending and stoking, feeding the red belly of the engine. Chilled, he tiptoed back to bed when it had gone; beneath the linoleum a floorboard creaked. He must watch out for that. Under the blankets he rubbed, one cold foot against another.

From somewhere in the flat came the low voices of his parents and grandparents; doors closed; downstairs, a baby cried, then stopped abruptly. He slept.

Brown paint; pale light. In the days since the move, Anna had washed every door, every window frame, and skirting board. Dust and grime was lifted, but the colour must stay; there was not a penny to spare for decoration. To relieve her eyes she paused every now and then to gaze through the freshly washed windows at the autumn sky. September's departing sunlight was unable to break through continuous thin cloud, but there was no rain, just the great pale flatness, over the railway line and the rooftops of unknown houses.

The wireless played
Music While You Work.
She sat in the kitchen, slicing potatoes and carrots. The children were in the front room, playing – Ewa had a cold, and was off school today; there was more space for them here, and Dziadek and Babcia could feel secure, living two steps across the landing. There were other Polish people living in the street – the housing association evidently found them reliable tenants, and though the rent was higher than Streatham it was just affordable.