CHAPTER 1

December 1979

Gobby, gobby, gobby.  That was me! 

My train slid forward, in that smooth, almost sneaky way, as modern trains do.  Cambridge station ebbed away, the platform now empty of people, the lights from the station buffet glowing yellow in what, at midday in December, counted for daylight.  The guard in his shabby uniform, his flag flaccid by his side, was walking back to his office.  He was in Cambridge.  I would never be.

In my present state of mind, I longed for a steam train, to feel the engine straining, to hear it puffing and shrieking, and to be thrown around in my seat.  I was holding my breath, I realised.  I let it out with a noisy sigh and refolded the jacket on the seat beside me, something I had already done several times over.  It belonged to my sister, Urcky, her favourite.  I crossed my legs, then crossed them over the other way.  I tried to pull my skirt down over knees but it wouldn’t oblige.  I had found it in my sister, Sophie’s, wardrobe and she was shorter than me.  I hated wearing skirts.  No!  I hated having nylon tights on my legs more.  It was so long since we had seen Sophie and the house was so empty without her.

I ran my hands through my hair, combing it with my fingers, allowing the tie drawing back my pony tail to fall out, and then spending several minutes searching for it on the carriage floor.  When I picked it up, there was a grey, dirty mark on it – something else I had spoiled.

I was gobby, “had too much to say”, so my mother said, and she “didn’t know where I got it from.”  Maybe, it came about through being the youngest of four sisters.  Maybe.  When Sophie and I used to go out in the evening and we were late home, she always got me to ring up home and explain that, “The bus must’ve gone early.  Honestly, Dad!”  I bit my lip when I thought about my Dad.  He had been all right when he had driven me to Chenham station first thing this morning, full of hope and expectation, still thinking things to say at the interview.  Now, he was in hospital, with stomach pains, or so my mother had said in the telephone message she had left at the college office, and, when I tried to ring home, from a beaten-up callbox on the boards of which the girls at St Theresa’s College had written their scruffy telephone messages for several decades, she hadn’t picked up.  I tried ringing my sister, Urcky, and then my sister, Lynn, but they didn’t answer either.

My mother never made phone calls, except to my married sisters and Father Flanagan, whom she would pester, day and night, when she was more than usually ill - not that he knew what to say to her, poor man!  None of us did.  The thought that my Dad’s condition must so serious that my mother had used a telephone dogged me.  How had she found the number?  She surprised us sometimes.  But, as I sat down with the other interviewees, in a room which seemed to have just engraved brass plates for wall coverings, I was thinking about… appendicitis.  That came on suddenly, didn’t it?  It wasn’t serious.  You had an operation and then you were OK.  Gallstones, stomach ulcers, hiatus hernia, whatever that was.  Maybe he just had food poisoning, but Dad cooked all our meals and, when he got indigestion, he just took Bisodol.  Dad did suffer in that way.  He was always reaching for the yellow Bisodol tub in the kitchen cabinet, shaking the powder into a glass and adding water.

The interviewees were being called in, one by one… Miss Holmes, Miss Walmington-Smythe, Miss Forbes-Browne... Public schoolgirls with double-barrelled names, the daughters of what our Prime Minister, Mrs Thatcher, called “grandees”.  Maggie was a grammar school girl and she had got into Oxford, I thought to myself.  I liked the idea of being called “Miss”, though.  At the age of eighteen, that had never happened to me.  However, when it was my turn, the secretary who had been calling the girls’ names, looked at her list, frowned, then looked at it again.  “Er… Marya?”

Disappointed, I got up from my chair.

“I'm sorry, Marya,” she said, with a complacent smile, as she ushered me through the door into the library, “but I really don’t know how to pronounce your surname.”

“It’s not that difficult,” I muttered under my breath.

There were three interviewers, two tweedy-looking middle-aged women, one draped in scarves as if she had a cold, and a younger man, bald, wearing thick black-rimmed glasses and a checked jacket.  “Sit down, my dear,” said the woman without scarves.  “Now… you’re from Queens Grammar School for Girls, Chenham… you’ve taken your A levels.  And you’ve taken a Third Year Sixth term to do Oxbridge exams.”

“Yes.”  I hated it.  In September, it had been awful putting on my school uniform and going back to school with eleven year olds, when all my contemporaries had been about to swan off to university.  It would soon be over.  I would leave at Christmas.

“And you’re applying for English Honours?”

“Yes.”

“I see that you applied last year,” said the woman with the scarves, looking at the sheaf of papers on the desk in front of her, “but you withdrew your application.”

“Yes.  My mother was er…ill the night before the first exam.”  And now my father was in hospital.  Dad was never ill.  He couldn’t be.

“I hope your mother’s feeling better now,” said the woman without scarves.

Mum wasn’t better.  In fact, she had attempted suicide the night before I should have started my Oxbridge exams last year, and she had made two more attempts this autumn.

They asked me questions about English literature and I made a reasonable stab at answering them.  As St Theresa’s was a Catholic college, I steered my answer towards Catholic authors, G K Chesterton, Graham Green, Evelyn Waugh, Antonia White…

“Antonia White?” blurted out the man interviewer.  “I’m sorry, but you just can’t call that feminist Virago garbage literature!”  He spoke in an American accent.

I knew of Virago, of course, but it hadn’t clicked with me that Virago published Antonia White.  I was drawing in breath to talk about “Frost in May” when he continued, “I mean… Maria… or Mariah…”  He held out his palms.  “Do we call you Mareea as in Julie Andrews in “The Sound of Music” or Mar-eye-a?”

“As in “The Sound of Music”,” I replied, meaning to talk about Antonia White again.

“It gets kinda confusing because you spell it with a Y, honey,” he said.  “And I'm afraid I just can’t cope with your second name.  Where are you from… Mareea?”

“Chenham, England,” I retorted in a tight voice.  “I was born there and I’m British.” 

“OK, OK.”  The woman interviewer without scarves glared at him, but he went on, “But you don’t have a… typically English name and I thought…”

At that point, something inside me snapped.  “My name is Wieclawski.  My father’s name is Jerzy Wieclawski and my mother’s name is Agniesca Wieclawski.  Is that a problem?” 

I could hear my voice raising in volume, my words tumbling over each other.  I had so much to say.  “You want to know about my family?  I'll tell you.  My mother was in Auschwitz.  She isn’t Jewish.  She was there because, as a girl of sixteen, she invited her teacher, who was Jewish, to hide at the family home in Krakow.  My grandparents died of the typhus and the teacher went to the gas chamber, but my mother and my aunt survived.  Being a Catholic, not Jewish, probably saved her from the gas chamber, but, in her mind, she has never left Auschwitz.  She’s been married for over thirty years to a good man.  She has four daughters, and three grandsons, but the terrible things she saw there haunt her every day and most of every night, as real now as then.  Hitler took her life, all right.  He condemned her to a living death...”

The woman without scarves reached over the desk and tried to touch my arm, but I drew it away.

“You’ll want to know about my father?  My father arrived from Poland in 1939.  He was fighting in the RAF Polish Squadron, flying as a navigator over Germany… at a time when America wasn’t even in the war, and was flirting with “America First”. “

“Marya, Marya…” the woman without scarves said.  “Please calm down.”

“Would you like to go outside for a minute?” suggested the woman with scarves.

“No, no.  I won’t.  This has never been a problem before, not in Chenham, not at the Queen’s Grammar School.  Never.  I'm British.”

Then I flounced out, down the corridor, flung open the main door, through the college grounds and the gate and into the street… before I had even put on my coat.