Authors Electric

No, not the traditional turkey, goose, chicken, beef or pork. A pot full of golabki is one of the dishes we will be eating this Christmas Eve. Because of my Polish family, my children were brought up celebrating both Christmas Eve and Christmas Day.  Which meant cooking two different meals. On the night before Christmas we laid the table, putting wisps of hay, or straw under the cloth to remind us of Jesus in the manger. Then the youngest was set to look out for the first star, or that at least was the theory and it did give the kids something to do. Once the star was sighted then Christmas could begin. First the baby Jesus was put in our homemade crib, then came the distribution of the oplatek. The thin wafer, like communion bread, that in those days was sent to us by our family in Poland. Each person took a piece and shared it with all the others, kissing them and wishing them a happy Christmas. After that it was presents under the Christmas tree and fi...

Cover by Claire MacLean Because this novel is going to be part of the Authors Electric grand Christmas Sale, I've been looking back over various things I've written about it over the years, and wondering why it's still so dear to my heart. It wasn't me who called it a Polish 'Gone With The Wind' though. I wouldn't dare. That was my agent at the time. She loved it. She couldn't sell it. The first draft was written more years ago than I care to remember. I'd had a novel bought by the Bodley Head and published by Random House. This was back in the days of the big takeovers and I fell victim to one of them, but really, I was a Bodley Head kind of a writer. For my next novel, I had been crafting this big Polish historical saga, or a version of it. I had cut my teeth with a couple of radio plays and some poems and stories. I had done a lot of research. These characters were in my head, itching to tell their tale. We had high hopes. A string of acq...

My dad. My late father came to Yorkshire from Poland, at the end of the war, with one of the Polish regiments attached to the British army. He came via Italy and Monte Cassino, so he was lucky to survive. In Yorkshire, still a young man, he worked in a textile mill for a while - it was compulsory for 'refugee aliens' -  met and married my English-Irish mother, Kathleen, and went to night school, cycling home through smoky Leeds on wintry nights while I was a baby. By the time he retired, he was a distinguished scientist, working as a visiting expert for UNIDO, with a double doctorate: a DSc as well as a PhD in biochemistry. He died in 1995 and I still miss him, but I think I miss him and my mother most at Christmas, especially on Christmas Eve, because we always managed to have a Polish celebration meal, reserving the turkey and plum pudding for Christmas Day. My dad, my grandfather and grandmother, in Galicia, Eastern Poland It can't have been quite the same a...