Hope you enjoy this too.
We arrived in London, where we were met by some people from the firm whom Father was to work with. They took us to a hotel.
Maria, Danshell and I were put into one room. The nights were quite hectic for we carried on all night. Danshell made us laugh so much I couldn’t stop giggling and couldn’t get off to sleep.
We kept doing the beds. They were quite different to what we had been used to. On the Continent we had huge pillows and a feather bed to cover us.
The feather bed was a huge pillow to cover the whole body, filled with down. It was very light and beautifully warm. The covering was changed everywhere, the tick was red and the covering would have inserts of lace showing the red tick through.
The English bed was a hard small pillow, a cold sheet and hard heavy blankets which were in a muddle all the time. So we had to keep getting out of the bed to put all the blankets and sheets in order.
During the day the parents left us in the Hotel while they went out to see to things to do with staying in England. They were all on contract for three years.
In time we arrived at Brimsdown Station. We sat on a bench on a long platform and waited. I don’t know what for. It was very countrified. We saw the distant hills of a forest (Chingford), all around the station were fields and a road not far away with houses.
The houses were a little like the pamphlet we had received in Austria only they seemed wider and lower.
We were taken to the houses, Mrs Rudolph in the first, then a few houses further Mrs Mendrys, next door but one we were shown ours.
Mrs Szymatowice was to live in the road behind.
Our furniture had arrived and the unpacking soon done.
It seemed a huge house, there were two rooms and a kitchen downstairs, a bathroom, toilet and three bedrooms upstairs.
I was given the little box room. There was a gas stove in the kitchen and a sink. In Austria water was brought into the flats with large jugs from a tap in the hall.
We, the children, were taken to school. Some children would come for us and we walked a very long way and home for lunch and again in the afternoon.
In Austria, school was only in the morning and we had to do homework at home in the afternoon although we started at 8 a.m. and finished at 2 p.m.
Maria, Danshell and I were put into different classroomsbecause of our ages. We met only at playtime and on the way to and from school. We could not understand a word. Soon we were whipped off to another school. A different direction but even further.
Nuns had descended on us. There were Polish nuns among them, so of course we had to go to their school. I was put into Sister Stansislow’s class. She was a chubby sister always fussing. She called me Dzieckcko which means child in Polish.
She had been to Poland although I think she was Irish. She could not forget Poland. She could not speak Polish very well but she spoke to me all the time.
Proze, Dzieckcko! All day long, Proze being "please".
She was like a flapping old hen around me. Her excitement at practising her Polish was unbounded.
Maria and Danshell she tolerated as my friends but showed no interest in them, only being able to speak German.
I think it was mainly through her I learnt English very quickly.
I have met Maria this year - 36 years later and she still speaks with an accent, although I find people will not believe I'm a foreigner at all.
Sister Stanlisaw had a very funny way of teaching - she had no shame.
She took me into the playground for games.
The classes were mixed of course. I had become used to that in my first English school, ignoring the boys!
But not with Sister Stanislaw, she made me play games like ‘The farmer had a wife’, where you had to get into the ring with a boy to be his wife and worst of all some game where you stood in a ring and somehow you had to kiss the boy in the ring!
I would not do it. I’d run off in tears with everyone laughing. I hated the games.
Then she would have this horrible Alfie Cook, who looked like a monkey, thin puckered lips, hair standing up all over his head and round thick glasses making up stories.
The stories had to be acted. He would, with Sister’s encouragement, choose me to be his leading lady. The story was always about a prince and princess who would have to end the scene kissing!
By that time I realised it was better to suffer the kissing than to cause a rumpus by refusing.
He would approach me for the kiss leering at me. I would screw my eyes shut and pretend I was somewhere else, but as soon as I sensed him near I would quickly turn my head aside and he would miss my face and do ‘the kiss’ somewhere in my shaking hair.
I hated Alfie Cook! I have a photograph of agroup with him in it and even now I’m not surprised, he looks awful!
I did manage by that time to live with boys. There was a little boy David next door with whom I used to play with. He was always saying ‘Ay-Ay-Ay’ when asked a question. I tried to find out what ‘Ay’ meant - no-one seemed to be able to tell me.
I would have to take Father some food to his factory and all the men were very friendly.
They taught me to say words in English and when I told them to Sister Stanlislaw she would go as red as a beetroot.
When she had got over the shock enough to speak, she would tell me they were something dreadful. So when I went to the factory and got talking to the men I would repeat the words, knowing they meant something nasty, all innocently, going round the men in the factory and saying them. Some would roar with laughter, others would look shocked. I’d look at them to see their reaction. On the whole it was quite good fun. But I did not repeat them to Sister Stanlislaw.
Mother would send me to the shops with the unfamiliar money. Some of it was very big. Pennies they were called, although you could not buy as much as with the silver money.
In a sweet shop there were two sisters, elderly ladies, they called everyone ‘Duck’,
In the shop next door was a dark haired woman. She had a load of black frizzy hair and lots of make up on. Her husband was old. At least 40. She must have married him for his money. Years later she was old too - but he did not seem any older than when I first saw him, so perhaps she did not marry him for his money at all.
On the corner was a fish and chip shop. It smelt awful. When I walked past it I would turn faint. My stomach would get the wobbles and I would have to run to get away from the tainted air.
If the woman next door asked me to get her chips I’d find another girl to go in for me and give her my reward money, a penny.
In time of course, I learnt to love chips and other English delicacies.
In the road behind where we lived a woman kept a shop in a house. She would fill a glass for you of mustard pickles for a penny. They tasted wonderful. They don’t make tasty pickles like that now.
There was a factory opposite our house. At he back of the factory were sand pits and cement works. In the pits it was fairyland for the children. Bushes crew and ponds galore. Shallow pools where the sand had been taken out.
There were frogs and toads, frogspawn and then they would grow into newts, then they got larger and larger until they were fully grown frogs.
We would play in the water, taking out frogspawn and put them into old rusty tins we would find.
Dragonflies would fly over the water. They were very beautiful, their wings shining and shimmering with a thousand colours and lights as the sun flashed on them as they flew. But we were all frightened of them. They were too big.
In the water grew reeds and we would tear them up and plait them and make pipes and mats.
Around the cement factory lay big cement stoves. We would make houses out of the block. We would play mothers and fathers. We would get sand from the pit, mix it with water and make pies with the assortment of tins we found laying around.
Father would go to work. He would have to search for anything he could find for the house.
Mother would stay at house cooking the pies.
Sometimes we would be film stars, Ginger Rogers and Joan Crawford. Mostly I was Joan Crawford. I would walk around tossing my hair. I would discuss my leading man, Clark Gable.
Sometimes lots of children came to play. We would all play together, hiding seek, statues, where the girl who was ‘he’ if she turned around and caught someone moving would count her ‘out’. The idea was that while ‘he’ turned around you had to move to the front. As soon as he turned to face the players, they had to pose as statues and of course the one who managed to creep to the front without being noticed, played ‘he’ next time.
We played ‘film stars’. ‘He’ would call out initials of famous film stars and of couse the one who guessed the initials became ‘he’.
My favourite was ‘truth and dare’. You would be asked ‘truth or dare’, if you said ‘truth’ you would be asked to tell the truth, mainly if you kissed boys and things like that. If you said ‘dare’, it was much more exciting. You would be dared the most terrible things. Like going in the middle of the road and screaming or trying to stop cars and get lifts, or shouting something nasty at men or going up to someone to ask them something like ‘can you tell me where Mrs So and So lives? We would then hover around while the ‘darer’ would approach someone to ask for Mrs So and So. We would all die laughing.
