Writing about your parents, by Elizabeth Kay

 

My dad, Feliks Krzewinski, at work as a display artist in London in 1960

Most people seem to prefer to do this after those concerned have died. Not so easy if your mother lives to 104, like someone I know. However, if you had a good relationship it’s not such a problem – it’s the things you’d like to get off your chest that’s the issue. My parents were elderly, 42 and 49 when I was born, and I was an only child. They both died over 40 years ago. Having a clear-out, I recently discovered a note I wrote after my first trip to Poland to visit my father’s relatives on my own. My mother was English, and after my father died the Polish side cut off all contact. Unbeknownst to me my mother, on her one and only trip abroad, she told my father’s relatives I considered myself to be entirely English, and didn’t want anything whatsoever to do with my Polish heritage. Many years later, out of the blue, I had a call from my cousin who was in the UK for a visit. I cried my eyes out with relief after I put down the phone, and we’ve been in touch ever since.

2024: From right to left: husband Bob, Agnieszka my cousin,
Martyna, her daughter and Jacek, Agnieszka's husband.
Note the traditional English fish and chips.

The note I wrote to myself went as follows: “My father wrote many letters to the family, saying how wonderful I was. He was as proud of me as my mother was ashamed. This has meant rather a lot. (Sniff, wipes away tear.)” Some explanation is needed here.

My father was wonderful. He’d been a headmaster in Poland, and understood children extremely well. In 1939 he was arrested by the Russians at midnight, as was everyone with an education in what is now Lviv, and marched to Siberia. After Stalin released those prisoners out onto the Steppe with nothing (cheaper than feeding them), he walked through Russia, Persia, and the Middle East, joined the Polish free army, and ended up at Monte Cassino. An artist, he painted on anything he could get hold of, and some of his paintings are now in the Imperial War Museum.

I miss his world view more and more these days. When he said, “Watch China” in the 1960s everyone laughed at him. China was a land of peasants. When he warned against Russia’s imperial ambitions everyone laughed again, as the Berlin wall had come down and Russia was going to be OK. All my schoolfriends loved my dad. He was the complete opposite of a misogynist – both he and all his 8 siblings went to university, his eldest sister was a Latin professor, and his youngest sister a doctor. He told me I could become whatever I wanted, being female was no barrier to anything. I wrote this poem about him, which I think probably gives a better flavour than anything.

PHOENIX

 A thousand miles and two world wars

Separate our births.  A rime

Of white hairs and nightmares his legacy;

Pigtails and nightingales mine.

 

I can hear something fluttering -

Fluttering like a child’s heartbeat

In the sealed-off chimney

That once served a range.

“Do something, Tatuś.  Please.”

He nods.  Fetches a hammer.

Wages war with a cold chisel,

Trapping debris in a curtain.

Iron hits the wall, each blow

A polished detonation of sound.

Bricks and mortar flake away

Like shell fragments, against

A telling background of silence.

“Feliks...”  My mother, shocked;

Appalled at such destruction.

Whoosh.  A cascade of soot -

Feathers, stones, tiny bones;

Echoes.  A black hole opens up.

We listen.  And then... a coup.

A scratching, a scrabbling,

A shower of ashes.  “What now?”

“Ve vait,” he says.

 

A dove emerges, blinking,

Thin, bedraggled refugee.

My father opens the door -

And, smiling, sets it free.

 

 Tatuś - Polish for daddy.

Commended, Wilkins International Memorial Poetry Prize; was published in both the Birmingham & Midland Institute Magazine, and Enitharmon’s Parents Anthology.

My mother was a totally different story. Her own mother died when she was 10 months old, and she was shunted around from relative to relative as she was too young to go to the workhouse with her three older brothers. (We’re talking 1908 here.) Her father turned to the bottle when his wife died, and his own mother – my great grandmother, known to all as Gra, went to visit the boys. She found them all covered in lice, and took them home with her. She was by that time a widow herself, with the last 5 of her 11 children still at home, and she then took on my mother as well. Quite a woman, a true Victorian. My grandfather was a very clever man - had a scholarship to Harrow - but he liked a drink far too much. My mother was offered a scholarship to Hornsey Art School. Her father said, could he have the money instead and when the answer was no he took her out of education altogether. During a brief period of sobriety he got a job managing The Wrestlers pub in Highgate, established in 1547. It’s still there with its original fireplace, wooden furniture and stained glass windows. It came with accommodation, so the whole family moved in. and my mother became a barmaid. The sobriety didn’t last, though; my grandfather drank the profits and they were all thrown out on the street in the middle of the Great Depression. My mother’s youngest aunt, Dorothy, was quite a character and a bit of a stunner and one of her acquaintances, “the major”, offered them all a home. My mother looked after Gra until she died, and then  the war started and the family went their separate ways. Dorothy married, and my mother, with nowhere else to go, stayed with them. Then she met my dad, and said she couldn't believe her luck.

My great-aunt Dorothy, and her mother "Gra"

I only remember one occasion when he lost his temper with her, and that was when she called me stupid. She told me he’d once stopped her shaking me when, as a small baby, I wouldn’t stop crying. She had absolutely no idea how to be mother, never having had one herself. But because I understood the reasons for my mother’s ineptitude it made it easier, as I blamed her background for her behaviour rather than myself. I never told my dad all the things she said, because I knew how angry he would have been and the fallout was inconceivable. "You're not pretty enough to be an actress, no one will ever marry you, your stomach sticks out too far”. When I told her I’d learned to swim she refused to believe me. (She couldn’t swim herself - presumably never had the opportunity). She gave away nearly all my possessions within three weeks when I went to art school, and redecorated my room so it looked as though I’d never lived there. I think she couldn’t bear the fact that I had the opportunities she didn’t. Long after her death I was sent some letters she’d written to a relative, saying how awful I was. One thing I remember very clearly. The three of us were out for a walk, and I’d run on ahead a bit. She called out to me, demanding to know which one of my parents I loved the most. I think I was about seven, and I knew it was a trap. Thinking quickly I said, “I love both of you exactly the same.” I saw a fleeting expression of sheer pride at my diplomacy on my father’s face. I think he understood what her childhood had done to her only too well, he felt sorry for her, and they did love one another. After he died she came to stay with me, my first husband and our two daughters. My mother-in-law asked her when she was going back to her home in East Anglia. “Oh, I’m not,” she said. And she didn’t. Eventually we had to sell both houses and buy somewhere together – and even then, she tried to tie up her will so that her share of the property went to my daughters rather than me…

          I would never have written all this whilst she still alive, because despite everything I didn’t want to hurt her. And, I suspect, thereby hangs many a tale.

 

Dorothy, mum, Gra, and not sure! Mum's grandfather?