Who do you think you are? Misha Herwin

 On the day when we remember the fallen of two World Wars my thoughts inevitably turn to my own family history and the reflection that without those two events I would not be sitting here writing this post.

My family comes from Poland; a country that for a part of its history did not even exist. My grandmother was born in Lemburg, part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, my mother in the same city, which at the time was Lvov and was in the newly independent Poland of the inter war years. Now it is Lviv and is in war torn Ukraine.

My father was from Warsaw and he and my mother met in Iraq when both were in the Bristish Army, he a Captain, she a nurse and they married in Italy during the Italian campaign.

After the war, returning to a country under the rule of the Russians was impossible. There was discussion about moving to Argentina, where scientists like my dad were being welcomed by Peron, but fortunately for us, my parents decided to stay in the UK.

Growing up in Bristol in the sixties, I was always conscious of being different. First of all there was my name. Malgorzata Anna Maria Chmielinksa, Polish and unprounceable once I went to school it was decided that I was to be Margaret, the closest equivalent in English.

I never felt like a Margaret and what was worse the nuns refused to even attempt my surname, so to distinguish me from the other Margarets in the class, I become known as Margaret Anne.

Stripped of my name, I soon realized that unlike the other girls, I had not extended family in the city, or even in the country. There were Mum and Dad, my sister, Anuk, and much younger brother, Peter and me. My grandmother died when I was twelve and apart from one uncle and aunt, the rest of my relatives lived in Poland; a country that was behind the Iron Curtain, part of the Soviet Bloc and could not be visited.  

To add to the mix, the language we spoke at home was Polish as were the customs and expectations in the family. There was a great respect for education. It was taken for granted that we three children would all go to university, which we duly did.

If asked about their experiences during the war Mum would tell us the curated version, though as we grew up we learned more. Dad never talked and to this day I still don’t know how he escaped from Warsaw when the Nazis invaded in 1939. The only story he ever told us, was that when he was in the 8^th Army, he met his brother in the street in Edinburgh. Neither of them had known that the other had left Poland.

What this background gave me was the sense of being an outsider, someone who stands apart, watching, listening and analysing, all useful habits for a writer. It also provided useful material for my novel “Shadows on the Grass.” The novel is not my family history. There are things in it that happened to family members, but the details have been changed and the characters and how they react are my own invention. I am not related in any way, shape, or form to a Russian princess and much as I would like to say I did, my teenage years were far from rebellious.

It does show how we shape our own history as we try to make sense of what happened to us and to the families we come from and how even though we might not take them into account world events make us who and what we are.