My father arrived back to the ward at the same time as my mother and Urcky were returning from Mass.  My mother dressed according to what, I believe, is called “classic good taste”, a smart woollen dress, with matching coat, worn with seamed stockings and high-heeled shoes, a scarf pinned with a brooch, and a locket, containing her mother’s miniature, hanging from a gold chain around her neck.  She had arrived in the UK in 1947, but still she had what Sophie had called “that foreign look”.  Today, she hung on Urcky’s arm, a pained expression on her thin, hollow face, which she had, as usual, plastered with make-up, powder, blue eye-shadow and bright red lipstick.  My sister, Urcky, who had inherited her face and figure, wore baggy corduroys and a slightly pilled polo-neck jumper and no make-up, and she was bustling about, sitting Mum on the nasty plastic NHS chair beside Dad's bed and saying, “The reason you feel hot, Mum, is was because hospitals are hot.  You’d better take off your coat.  Marya will hang it over her arm, so it doesn’t get lost or creased,"

Dad got into his bed, his face pale and drawn under a shadow of grey stubble, but he smiled at us.  The fat nurse in the blue uniform, whom I had nearly fallen over a few minutes ago, muttering about, “Too many visitors".

"Tato, Tato!  How are you?" we all demanded at once, lapsing into the family argot, a mixture of English and Polish.

"Dobrze,” he said.  "You mustn't worry about me."

"Of course we do, Tato," Lynn said.  "Have you still got pain?"

"No, not now.  It wore off, as it usually does.  Dr Grant at the surgery, he overreacts."

"What tests have they done?" demanded Urcky, who used to be a nurse.

Dad opened out his palms and shrugged, then turned to me.  "Marya, misia!  How was Cambridge?"

"Oh, all right,” I replied, clenching my fists underneath Mum’s coat.  I hadn't been thinking about the interview for the last hour or two and I didn't want to now.  "Look, there’s an awful lot of competition for places at Cambridge…  I mean, there were absolutely loads of interviewees there this morning, public schoolgirls most of them."

"I'm sure you're as good as any public schoolgirl, Marya," said Urcky.

"Look...  I doubt if I'll get in.  OK!" I replied.

Dad grabbed my hand.  "You went to the interview, and I'm sure you did your best.  What happens now will happen.  It is a bit of a lottery.  We know that."

I forced a smile.  I was bursting to unburden myself, to tell somebody what had happened, that I had made a complete fool of myself, but I couldn't put all my troubles on to Dad, not when he was ill in hospital.

"You've still got the place at Manchester, though, haven't you?"  said Lynn.  She caught Urcky’s eye.  “You and I would never’ve got to university, Urcky, never have got through the application process."

Manchester, it would have to be, I thought - "’ey up, our kid", Lowry, Mike Harding and United.

Mum wasn’t saying a word, under strict instructions, I suspected, from Urcky, who, these days, had to be everybody’s big sister, including her mothers.  Now Urcky looked at her watch and said that she really ought to be going as her children’s bath-time was approaching.  She turned to me and asked how I had got to the hospital, so I told her.  "You've no right to take Dad's car without asking, Marya!" she exclaimed.  She turned to Dad for corroboration.

"No, Marya, you shouldn’t, "he said, in a weary tone, “but it's been a… funny day."

"And where have you parked it, Marya?"  Urcky demanded.

"Er...  it's all right,” I replied.

Just as Mum and Urcky were getting up to go, Steve arrived, and I could almost see Lynn slip back into Steve mode.  "Come on, love," he said. "You mustn’t be staying out, in your condition.  You need to get back home and have something to eat." 

At any other time, Urcky and I would roll our eyes at each other, but she was still cross with me about Dad's car.  What he meant was, "Come home and cook my dinner."

The family all left, apart from me, and, for a few minutes, Dad and I sat together in silence, listening to the murmur of other patients’ voices and the approaching meal trolley.  "Hospital food," I said.

"It'll be good to eat something I have not cooked myself," said Dad.  He picked up the library books which I had brought for him.  "'The Snow Goose'.  You have read it, Marya?  "

"Me?  Of course.  I read just about everything this last term, didn't I?  All I've done since September is read and have occasional Oxbridge tutorials.  I can't wait to leave at the end of this week."

"You are at the end now, misia."  He opened 'The Snow Goose’ and flicked through the pages. "This was the first book that I read in English.  I got it from the library yesterday, and I shall read it again.  It was very popular during the war.  One of the officers lent it to me, Pyotr Murkowski."

"How did you learn English, Dad?" I asked.

"Very fast.  "

"Did they teach it to you in the RAF?  "

"Flying words, yes."

"You never talk about the war, Dad."

"You girls don't want to hear about the war...  tales of derring-do.  War was very boring… no, a mixture of very frightening and very boring.  We read books during the boring bits."

"Don't you think about your time in the war?"

"Yes, of course."

I got up and looked out the window, at the city of Chenham, which had been my home for eighteen years, the twinkling lights of cars taking people home during the rush hour and the lights of the office buildings they had just left cutting through the darkness.  I wondered what it would have been like to search the night sky for the Nazi warplanes and I tried even harder to imagine my gentle father as a navigator in a Lancaster bomber.  Once, when I had been looking for something at home, I had come across his old blue grey RAF uniform, with the Polish Eagle on the epaulettes, dusty and smelling musty in the wardrobe.

"What comes into your mind when you think about the war?"

He shrugged.  "The other men, I suppose."

"The Polish men?"

"Yes."

"Did you have much contact with the British airmen?"

"A little.  We were a separate unit and, Marya, there was a language barrier.  They could not say our names."

"The staff on reception here couldn't pronounce your name, and that nurse, the one who made the comment about too many visitors, she called you 'Mr W'.  "

Dad smiled.  "The boys at school call me 'Mr W'.  I'm used to being called ‘Mr W’.  The British airmen, now, they called us names which, I am sure, were very rude, because they thought they were very funny.  But we didn't know enough English to know what they said."

"Didn't you mind?"

"No.  I was happy to be safe and to have food to eat."

Dad didn’t have much male company now, I thought.  "Why don't you make contact with the other Polish airmen?  "

"They have gone their separate ways."  He gesticulated, waving his hands to the left and to the right.

"Back to Poland?"

"No.  Very few of us returned.  They’re around somewhere."  He raised his eyebrows.  "No, no, Marya, it's OK.  I work.  I teach at the school.  We have a good staffroom, and it is a pleasant place to be."

"Surely, dad, there is an old boys' association or something?"

He laughed.  "The RAF Association is what I think you mean. But it is a long time.  I do not know that I would like them now."

"What about this Pyotr Murkowski?  He lent you books.  You two must’ve got on if you both liked reading."

            "Pyotr?  Yes.  He had been in England, at Cambridge, at the start of the war.  His family were supposed to be counts, but then, you know how Polish émigrés are about such things.  He was the pilot in our crew.  You didn't become too friendly with the officers.  It was different when we were on a mission, when our lives depended on him and his life depended on me and my protractor.  He saved my life many times.  Then we talked and talked, and laughed.  We laughed a lot.  He knew a great deal, about books in English, and other languages, and I suppose it was because of Pyotr that I started reading."

"You talked about 'The Snow Goose' when Pyotr was driving the plane?"

"Marya, misia, you have no idea about flying.  You do not have to stop for traffic lights and pedestrian crossings.  There were hours when you did nothing."

The meal trolley clattered into the bay and the patients were being served watery-looking shepherds pie on bright orange plastic plates.

My father gave a rueful smile.  "This is like RAF food, I think.  Pyotr Murkowski, he did return to Poland.  He had a girlfriend out there and he went back to marry her.  For several years, he wrote to me from somewhere near Gdansk.  But I think he must have moved because, after a while, he did not reply to my letters."

"You should track him down and write again."

My father shook his head.  "I don't think I can do that now."

“When did you last hear from him?”

“1956.”

"Do you still have his address?"

"No, Marya, no.  This will not do.  He will be a different man.  A lot of things have happened in Poland, Communism, for instance."

            We had to stop talking because the signature tune for ‘Crossroads’ had started blaring out in the next bay, then, abruptly, it was turned down to almost nothing.  "You know, Marya," he said, "I don't know the Polish word for 'television'.  It was not something I needed to know in 1939."