Snapshot: My dad in Poland, long before I came along
Growing up with a Polish dad in the 1960s and 70s, I felt very much the odd-one-out at school. With the new influx of Poles now in the UK, I imagine their children don’t feel in a minority like I did then.
Instead of having shepherd’s pie for our tea (this was the Midlands, after all), we would have bigos (hunter’s stew) or my favourite, pierogi (cheese dumplings with cream and onions) or, horror of horrors, galaretka (pig’s trotters in jelly).
Despite wanting to be the same as my classmates and not stand out, I loved my dad’s collection of old photos from his past and ours, housed not in an album but in a battered old brown suitcase. My siblings and I spent many happy hours leafing through them, even when we had seen them a hundred times before. After growing up and moving away, on visits home we would always ask Dad to get the suitcase out, and he would haul it out from under the bed and the photos – black and white and tiny – would keep us entertained for half the weekend.
How we laughed at the ones of us in the early 70s: the flares! The mullets! The tank-tops! Then we would go further back, to the 50s, my little brother and sister (me not yet a twinkle in my dad’s eye), my mum glamorous in clothes she made herself and Dad always in a smart suit or his gabardine raincoat (which I later requisitioned, five times too big for me, during my grungy student days), despite the fact that they had no money.
And then back further, to the early 40s, when my dad was a refugee in east Africa, tanned and posing with his bicycle. Until, finally, I came to this one of him, in his native Poland in the mid-1930s, before it was torn apart by war; the little, blond, green-eyed boy at the front, surrounded by his older siblings – there were 11 children altogether – and his mother and father, a gamekeeper who was later to die of tuberculosis after spending the war in a Russian labour camp at Arkhangelsk, along with the rest of his family.
They were different times. I can see my dad already in that little boy, one who was to know great hardship and sorrow, and who finally put that behind him by building a new life and family in England.
When Dad was dying last year, I raided the suitcase to make an album for him, a kind of This is Your Life for him to ponder on when it was coming to an end.
At his funeral, my brother described him as a family man, and that summed him up perfectly. He felt the loss of his first family keenly; he threw everything into making another, happy one.
I now have the album I made, and the suitcase. I haven’t been brave enough to open it since, but one of these days, a wintry Sunday perhaps, I’ll click open the catch again and dip back into my childhood.
Julia Kaminski
Playlist: The midnight fizz of a new age being born
Rock Around the Clock by Bill Haley and His Comets
“We’ll have some fun when the clock strikes one”
This part of the lyric always made me feel a bit aggrieved. Much as I loved my mum she had this rule that could not be broken for any reason or excuse. I had to be in the house before the street lights went off and that was at exactly 12.15am. “The dance finishes just before 12am, so you have plenty of time to get home,” Mum would remind me as I left. She knew that dances couldn’t extend into Sundays and so finished promptly. And I couldn’t say I didn’t know the time, which I probably would have done if it wasn’t for those darned street lights.
Still, life was so exciting. With the birth of rock’n’roll everything changed. Until then, our days had been dark and solemn. Most of our parents had experienced such hardship through the wars and forgotten that life was for living. But Bill Haley had swept all that misery away. We jived to Rock Around the Clock as though there were no tomorrow. It was exhilarating, breathtaking and fun all the way. My friend Jacky and I had such a great time dancing at the Grosvenor or sometimes at the town hall.
Now, decades later, I appreciate how lucky we were to have been born in this period of history. So exciting, so full of hope. The whole world was changing and we were there from the very beginning. We had seen the end of rationing but still remembered taking the ration book even when all we could afford was a few fruit gums. Suddenly, Mum could start making cakes again. When sugar was rationed there hadn’t been enough to go round for such luxuries. These were innocent times, happy carefree days.
So yes, life has changed. But remember the miraculous advances in medicine, how we can all live longer, have healthier lifestyles. We can travel the world if we want, almost unheard of in those early days. And the music, well although that has evolved, perhaps it doesn’t have the excitement of when we first sang, “We’re gonna rock around the clock tonight …”
Pat Randall
We love to eat: My grandmother’s millionaire pasta
Ingredients
Pasta
An onion
Fresh coriander
Caviar
Black pepper
My Russian grandmother introduced me to little black pearls of the sea – I used to call them black pops – on blinis with creme fraiche. As only half the jar was used, my mother would boil pasta, fry an onion, chop a bunch of coriander and mix with the remaining caviar and some black pepper to make her millionaire’s pasta. (We use canned lumpfish caviar.)
Babushka used to sit me on her fat knees, draw me into her copious bosom and tell me wonderful stories of her life in a tiny Russian village on the Finnish border. She had escaped with her parents before the Russian revolution, being taken by horse and carriage across snowy paths in the forests until they reached the sea and walked over the ice to Finland. Some of her memories were sketchy, and I’m sure she embellished some details from having watched Dr Zhivago many times.
She lived in a large house full of kitsch, but as she got older, she reduced the number of rooms she lived in and would slowly waddle between the parlour and the kitchen where she would prepare the blinis (she always had blini dough in the fridge ready to cook like mini pancakes on the griddle), and then ask me to add the creme fraiche and caviar. We would sit together on her armchair, complete with fake gold armrests, and giggle as we stuffed as many into our mouths as possible. The texture of hot, slightly crunchy pancake coupled with unctuous creme fraiche and salty black pops was as near to heaven as a 10-year-old could be. She would then recite poems in Russian, none of which I could understand, but I adored the heavy guttural noises she made in a sing-song way. I can still see her sitting in that glitzy chair, surrounded by heavy mahogany furniture on which there was a samovar, numerous Russian icons and a picture of Omar Sharif.
My mother would despair at the half-eaten jars of caviar and hence made up her millionaire’s pasta recipe. I still make both dishes and regale my daughter about her prababushka’s life and legacy.
Tania Davis
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