THE SECOND WORLD WAR – the worst thing that ever happened. It started in September 1939, with Hitler's Wehrmacht invading Poland from the west and Stalin's Red Army storming in from the east. Among their victims was a five-year-old named Basia Deszberg. The Russians shot her father and her brother in the Katyn Forest massacres, then loaded Basia, her sister, and their mother into a cattle car for a horrific three-week journey to the steppes of Kazakhstan, there to survive as best they could. Over the next eight years, they escaped through Persia, Lebanon, and Egypt to find safe haven in England.
By contrast, I grew up in a United States mired by the Great Depression. Europe's agony was America's windfall! I went from hardscrabble poverty to a college degree and a fellowship that took me to the English university where Basia too was a student. This is the story of our meeting, our travels, and our parting.
The book is told in alternating chapters, those set in 1955 and those in the past, with a concluding chapter taking us down to the present. Poland’s Daughter is available in paperback and digital editions. What follows is Chapter One:
1 – We Meet in Caf
1955
TO BE HONEST, I’m not sure whether my love for Poland led me to Basia, or it happened the other way around. They came into my life a very long time ago. By now, I’m afraid, the unlucky nation and its fortunate daughter have more or less merged in my mind. When I think of Poland, it’s Basia’s dark blue eyes that I see – her impossibly blue eyes, like cornflowers in the summer fields. And when I think of her, I hear the tanks clanking toward the ancient city in which she was born, and where she was a five-year-old in September 1939. From the west comes the gray Panzer IV, squat and gray, with a short-barreled 75-mm howitzer in its turret. And from the east, the green BT-7 Betuska, smaller and faster and more lightly armed.
In sour salute to the despots who unleashed those machines upon Basia’s birthplace, I think of the German tanker as Corporal Adolf, with a square mustache and a twitchy white face, while pockmarked Comrade Josef drives the smaller, faster cavalry tank from Soviet Russia. Bad cess to both of them, as my Irish mother would have said. They were the first killers of the Second World War, the worst thing that ever happened.
But then ... but then! If Germany and Russia hadn’t invaded Poland – if those tanks had turned back before they crossed the frontier – I would never have met Basia. It’s a terrible thought, I know, but if 60 million people hadn’t died in the Second World War, and if thrice that number hadn’t been bereaved, wounded, raped, and exiled ... I would never have kissed that pretty girl on the road to Italy. And not only did the War bring us together, but all the rest of her personal tragedy was likewise necessary to our meeting. What for Basia was a loss beyond imagining – her father, her brother, the very cobblestones of Potocki Street – even the language she’d learned as a child – were stages on the journey that brought her to the University of Manchester in the dreary northwest of England, where I came to know her in the winter of 1955.
I think we met in Caf, the vast room where undergraduates gathered at ten o’clock for cigarettes and coffee. That would have been early in the Lenten term, the months between Christmas and Easter. I was one of two Fulbright Fellows at what the English called a redbrick university, though in truth the buildings weren’t brick but stone, and not red but black from the coal fires of Manchester. This was a considerable disappointment. I had expected smooth lawns, spacious Georgian halls, and white shutters against the brick, much like the University of New Hampshire from which I’d come.
I was also distressed to find that, as the English understood the matter, my field of study – Modern European History – had come to an end with the Victorian era, which to me seemed ancient history. And it wasn’t just the history department: the entire city seemed dedicated to the Widow at Windsor. When I arrived at Victoria Station and carried my suitcase to a red double-decker bus, I found myself under the protection of a grand gray statue of the seated Queen, holding the world in her palm like an anarchist’s bomb. Nearby were Victoria Square, Victoria Street, and the Victoria and Albert Hotel. Indeed, I now find that the formal name of my institution of higher learning was the Victoria University of Manchester, though I didn’t know that at the time. I doubt that any of us did.
And the classrooms weren’t heated. I was always cold in Manchester, but never colder than in class. In my 1848 seminar, the more rebellious students (an Irishman named Callahan, a lesbian Marxist named Joan, and me) abandoned the table and perched on the ribbed iron radiator. Up against that tall, drafty window, streaked on the outside with sooty raindrops – like coal-miners’ tears! – we might catch a bit of the warmth that gurgled through it from time to time. As for the lecture rooms, I don’t believe they had any radiators at all.
Then too, I felt adrift in the English system of self-tutoring. In our first meeting of “1848: Year of Revolution,” Professor Lewis handed out mimeographed packets of books we might like to read, about the Second Republic, the Frankfurt Assembly, and so on. I scarcely knew what to do with these bibliographies, accustomed as I was to reading chapters from a common textbook, a chapter per class. However, I gritted my teeth and decided to concentrate on Giuseppe Mazzini and Young Italy, because they seemed so similar to my father’s service in the Irish Republican Army. But when I went to the University library, I found that its catalog consisted of bound books with many handwritten additions, utterly baffling to one accustomed to card catalogs in alphabetical order.
What with one thing and another, by the time the Lenten term began, I’d stopped going to class. Instead I wrote and rewrote a novel whose central character was Stephen Faust, in joint tribute to Joyce’s young hero and to Goethe’s elderly alchemist, who had pledged his soul to the devil in return for unbridled experience. I sat fully clothed at my typewriter, with a bathrobe over all, and a pair of fingerless wool gloves from Burtons, the chain haberdasher on Oxford Road near the University.
I read Faust and Portrait of the Artist that winter, and much else besides: The Magic Mountain, Nineteen Eighty-Four, Brideshead Revisted, Tender is the Night, and Hemingway’s Fiesta, which turned out to be The Sun Also Rises in disguise. These were orange Penguin paperbacks at two shillings sixpence the volume. I also bought and read a six-volume set of Winston Churchill’s The Second World War. It wasn’t Senator Fulbright’s intention, I’m sure, but my year at Manchester enabled me to catch up on the books I’d been too busy to read as an undergraduate. (To my shame, I also read a quantity of post-apocalypse Pan paperbacks with garish covers, nuclear war being an English preoccupation of the time.)
And I wrote for the Mancunian, the student newspaper, where Frank the editor assured me that it would be quite all right, indeed rather amusing, if I retained American spelling and usage in my reporting. The English were much intrigued by the way I handled their language. I was asked: “Do all Yanks talk like you?” And: “When one stages Shakespeare in your country, do the characters speak with American accents?” I hadn’t, up to my arrival in England, realized that I actually had an accent. Southerners did, and even Midwesterners had an accent, as I’d discovered coming over on the SS United States. But New Englanders spoke the language just as it was meant to be spoken, or so I believed before I became part of the Victoria University of Manchester.
The newspaper staff became my particular friends. We drank great quantities of room-temperature beer, called bitter though it really wasn’t. We saw foreign-language movies at the Piccadilly Cinema uptown – Wages of Fear, Sawdust and Tinsel – another way of keeping warm. We joined the Union debates on one side or another; it didn’t matter which side; the debate was the thing. I loved the debates, for which we donned academic gowns, and where I was addressed as the Gentleman from the Colonies.
And we went to Caf every morning. Coffee was twopence for a tall white cup, straight-sided, with a saucer, identical to those served at Victoria Station or at the Lyons Teashop on Oxford Road. The coffee was dreary, like most things in 1950s England, slippery stuff, probably adulterated with chicory.
I keep saying “England.” That’s correct for the era. My friends thought of themselves as English, or Welsh or Irish. (I didn’t know any Scots.) “Britain” was a geographical notion, referring to the island that contained the glorious English nation and its subsidiaries. As for today’s favored term, “United Kingdom,” that was a theoretical construct, so that London could continue to rule the six Irish counties that made up its last colony, as my father reminded me in his letters.
Poor Dad! As a boy he’d gone to war against the “bloody damned English,” using one of their own rifles for the purpose. He must have been puzzled that his younger son wanted to study in their company. I’d applied for every fellowship on offer, variously named for Cecil Rhodes, George Marshall, and William Fulbright. The last of these came through for me, and in September 1954 I took the train to Grand Central Station and walked across town to Pier 86 on the Hudson river, just the third time in my life I’d ventured more than a hundred miles from home.
SOMEWHERE IN CAF – a cavernous room, with tables covered with oilcloth – was a table of students who fancied themselves literary, mostly drawn from the Mancunian staff. The group invariably included my best friend in Manchester, a tall Liverpudlian named Malcolm Hopson, with a mop of black hair and a quiet, bespectacled girlfriend named Sheila. She was generally the only girl at our table, whether in Caf or in the pub to which we adjourned in the afternoon, and she seldom spoke. She loved Malcolm and tolerated the rest of us because we were his friends. He’d done his National Service in the Royal Air Force, which he called the “Raff.” That brought his age close to mine although he was a fresher, a first-year student.
Less often, Frank the editor would be there, stroking his beard. I was much in awe of Frank, who’d served with the British Army in Korea while I was enjoying myself as an undergraduate. Oh, and Antony Bolcover, a portly, heavy-faced lad with smooth, shining cheeks, well dressed and well spoken. I have a photo of our gang in Caf, taken before Basia entered my life: serious Antony, bushy-haired Malcolm, placid Sheila, and a bright lad named Ian Fellowes who lived in the same digs as I, on Mauldeth Road in the suburb of Withington.
Did my wandering eye spot Basia even then? She tells me that she and her best friend, an English girl named Margaret, weren’t far away, at a table made up mostly of medical students. Evidently they regarded us as deep thinkers, rather than the brilliant writers we fancied ourselves to be. In an email, Basia recalls those long-ago mornings in Caf:
One day someone mentioned a table of intellectuals. I did look across at your table occasionally but didn’t find it of great interest. Maybe because at the time I had more interest in Paul, an Irish medical student. We were getting on fine but it finished badly. He was meeting his parents in London and invited me for dinner with them at the Ritz. I then spoilt it all by writing to Margaret and to Paul and putting the letters in the wrong envelopes. Those were not the days of easy telephone access, so I only learned about the mistake when I met him back in Manchester and he said “Thank you for letting me know what you think of me.” I can't imagine what I could have written. I liked him and his parents, and the dinner was enjoyable, especially when the waiter suddenly materialized in front of me and produced a lighter for my cigarette.
For a while I moped, was too embarrassed to go on meeting him at the medics’ table, and didn’t go to Caf very often. Finally Margaret and her boyfriend established their own table so I would join them. I think that was the time I started to notice your group. You seemed quieter than the others and had a good smile.
All these years later, I am pleased to learn that in 1955 I had a good smile!
WITHINGTON WAS A TWO-PENNY ride on the upper deck of the Number 42 bus. There was a pole by the entryway, to hold onto, and a broad step, as if designed for the express purpose of letting students swing on and off. It was a point of honor for us to do this, while the Indian conductor watched us impassively. The entry was at the back of the bus, and there was no door to hinder us.
Number 42 ran past the Gothic university buildings on Oxford Road – a scaled-down Houses of Parliament, as they seemed to me, though without the gold leaf, and with towers that were oddly flat-topped – and down Wilmslow Road to Withington, where I lived, and where I dined too often on fish and chips served in a cone of yesterday’s Manchester Evening News. “Fish and four!” we would say.
“Food for the body and food for the mind!” the vendor agreed, handing me sixpence worth of codfish – white, flaky, and steaming inside the brown crust – and a fourpenny portion of potato. The chips, as the English called them, were heavily salted and flavored with vinegar that the vendor dispensed from a round-bellied bottle, like a barber shaking hair tonic on a newly shorn head. Thus an evening at leisure in Withington cost tenpence for dinner, plus sixpence for a seat in the front stalls of the Scala Cinema, a total of nineteen U.S. cents at the exchange rate then prevailing. Cheaper, indeed, to go out for dinner and a movie than to stay home and feed coins into the gas meter.
The Scala was said to be one of England’s oldest cinemas. It was situated on a corner, its second story half-timbered behind the marquee. The film was generally from Janus, Rank, or Ealing Studios, and it generally starred Dirk Bogarde or Jack Hawkins as a war hero, or perhaps Alec Guinness dressed as a woman, transvestism being a traditional vein of English humor. Ah, the glow of the projector’s beam through the shifting veil of cigarette smoke! At the Scala, or indeed any English cinema, each seat was equipped with a tiny ashtray, on the armrest or attached to the back of the next seat forward.
Cigarette smoke was the least of our pollutants. Most Mancunians relied on coal-fueled fireplaces for their heat, and their electricity likewise came from coal-burning plants. The soot was everywhere – begriming the university buildings, streaking the windows, and mixing with winter fog to produce what were known as “pea soupers.” On one occasion, walking from Mauldeth Road to Withington, the fog was so thick that I couldn’t see the sidewalk beneath me: I missed the curb and fell into the street. Probably on the same evening, Basia’s bus was led on its route by a man on a bicycle, with a lantern slung behind him.
Each morning I bought the Manchester Guardian and wrote the previous day’s statistics in my diary. Temperature: 55 high, 40 low. Rain: trace. Sunshine: nil. In my recollection, the sun never shone in Manchester that year.
EXCUSE ME; I meant to introduce you to Number Two, Mauldeth Road West. I lived at the back of the house, on the third story, and Ian Fellowes had a room on the second story front. Like Malcolm Hopson, he was a fresher, but he hadn’t done his National Service so was only eighteen. He was “reading” – that is, majoring in – biochemistry, and he was my boon companion on those evenings on the prowl in Withington. We got on remarkably well together, considering our differences in age and aspiration.
Ian came from Hull, and he was the first to alert me to the fact that the War I had enjoyed as a youngster was regarded somewhat differently by Europeans. It seems that he lived near the docks, and that the docks were often bombed. “That must have been exciting,” I said.
“No, it was terrifying,” Ian said.
He also spiced my vocabulary with Yorkshire sayings such as “Ne’er shed a clout till May is out” and “If once naught’s naught, twice naught must be sommat.” We’d met at the Mayfield Hotel nearby, where we’d lodged during Michaelmas term – three pounds sixpence a week for bed, breakfast, and dinner, which generally consisted of brussels sprouts, mashed potatoes, and pot roast, followed by pie or cake smothered in a sweet white sauce called custard. The clientele was entirely male. Like Ian, all the lads were younger than I, and all were virgins except for me. I felt quite the international playboy at the Mayfield Hotel. This wasn’t just vanity: not long after my sojourn there, the sociologist Ferdynand Zweig (born in Poland, as it happens) interviewed Manchester students on a variety of topics, including their sex lives. Scarcely a third of the lads claimed to be sexually experienced. Considering that this is a subject upon which young men are notorious fabulists, I am tempted to put an exclamation mark after that sentence. And get this: Mr. Zweig didn’t interview the girls. The 1950s were indeed a different age, closer to Queen Victoria than to Lady Gaga.
But back to Caf! Unlike most spaces in Manchester, it was warm, thanks to the body heat of a hundred or so undergraduates. Sometimes, indeed, we actually felt overheated in our jackets, ties, and long university scarves, which were our primary protection against fog, rain, and even snow. I did own a plaid winter coat from Sears, Roebuck that was much envied by Ian Fellowes, who had no overcoat.
One morning at Caf, Ian joked that he was so warm that he might take off his jacket. This met with no protest. So, glancing uneasily around the table, Ian actually did shed the jacket, and sat there rather proud of himself with his shirtsleeves tucked up. (English shirts were sold by neck size only, with sleeves long enough for any contingency; if there was sleeve left over, and there usually was, you took it up with a garter worn above the elbow.) One or two others followed this daring example, but not Antony Bolcover, in whom gentility ran strong. Antony was also, I think, one of the few students at Manchester not receiving a government grant, which for most of them was forty pounds a month. My own stipend was fifty quid, so for the first time in my life I was just about the wealthiest person in my immediate circle. Fifty pounds, about $140, bought more beer than a twenty-two-year old could drink, if he knew what was good for him ... but who does know what’s good for him, at twenty-two?
At some point in the Lenten term, Basia joined the journalists’ table. Basia, I learned, is the Polish diminutive for Barbara, and I now know that one of the reasons she liked me was that I pronounced it more or less correctly. The English made three crisp syllables of her nickname: bass-ee-ah. My lazy American tongue rendered it as two: bash-ah. That is almost correct, it seems.
She’d turned twenty-one during the Christmas holidays, so like Frank and Malcolm was closer to my age than most of the students. There was just the slightest difference in her speech – not what could be called a Polish accent, which is quite impressive given that she didn’t really learn English until she entered secondary school. The Poles, it seems, have very agile tongues. And Basia had been exposed to so many languages. Almost every week, it seemed, I discovered yet another language she’d had to cope with on the way to her final linguistic home: Polish, of course, then Russian, Farsi, Italian, and French. All this before the age of fourteen, when she had to master English along with high school Latin.
As a rule, students in English universities didn’t stray far from their chosen subject. Ian Fellowes, for example, was taking his sole elective in German, because most scientific research at the time was written in that language. Basia was much more adventurous: in addition to “honours” Italian, which required her to study English and French as well, she was studying philosophy:
I did logic that year, and I will never forget the lecturer. He would talk for the whole hour, and every fortnight or so he would set us some exercises. When he came into the lecture room with a batch of papers in his hand, we knew we had it coming. He would start by waving the whole packet, making derogatory remarks. Then, taking each paper separately, he would wave it even more forcefully, read out a name, and say what he thought of the – usually “poor, very poor” – effort. When he came to mine, it was always the same. He would say quietly, with pity in his voice, “Miss Deszberg,” then shout “Miss Deszberg!” Then he’d go through an exercise or two, picking out all the faults and finishing off with “You may have the right conclusion.” A pause. “Sometimes.” Another pause. “But no premises.” Another pause. “Where are your premises?” I would give a sigh of relief. It was over. But I liked him, and I did enjoy his lectures.
SHE WAS A SMALL GIRL, standing five foot four and weighing eight stone on the English scale – 112 pounds. Her hair was light brown and worn fairly short, curling over her forehead and under her ears. She had high, arched eyebrows, high cheekbones, an elegant nose, and lips that begged to be kissed.
What I saw first, though, were her eyes. They were not merely blue. Everyone in my family had blue eyes, of a shade that one might find in a box of marbles from Woolworth’s: a medium blue, an inexpensive blue. Basia’s eyes were very dark, as if purple had been added. When I asked her about this, she only said: “Oh, it’s my sister who has the exceptional eyes! They’re dark brown. In Poland, brown is the color that turns men’s heads. Lalka – my sister – Lalka was always the pretty one, and I was the ugly duckling.”
Duckling?
Ugly?
Sheila and most of the girls in Caf had no jewelry, but Basia wore four gold bangles on her right wrist. She told me that her mother had given them to her when they lived in Tehran, “for luck,” when she was ten years old.
But really, what does any of this matter? I found her enchanting, and no doubt I fell in love at my first sight of her. One does that sort of thing at twenty-two. All the sadder, then, that I really don’t remember meeting her, though I’m sure it was at Caf.
FOR HER PART, BASIA thinks we met at Rag Ball, the culminating event of Rag Week, an English university carouse to raise money for charity. I find that it still exists: Manchester has a Rag organization and a Rag Week, though no longer a Ball. Oxford does, but it entails black tie for men and party dress for women. God help us! I never saw a tuxedo at the University of Manchester. Antony Bolcover might have inherited one, but if so he never wore it. I don’t even know if one could rent a tux in Manchester. We wore the same invariable jacket to Rag Ball as to Caf, the pub, or the cinema, and the same striped tie and university scarf, wound once around the neck and hanging down rakishly in back and front. It was the same with the girls: Sheila in her pleated dress, with a brown cardigan over it; Basia in her gray suit and demure white blouse. She only had the one costume; all of us only had the one costume. As she emails now:
I am glad we didn’t meet in my first year at Manchester. I was still wearing my school blazer with the coat of arms on the pocket, my school shoes and blouse, and a skirt I borrowed from my sister. (At convent school we wore a tunic or long wide shorts that looked like a skirt, and a blouse and tie. I didn’t take the shorts to Manchester, and I cut off my plaits.) Later Uncle Jan gave me the two-piece suit, and much later I bought a beautiful pair of high-heeled bright green shoes.
Basia underestimates the effect she had on me. Never mind the blazer, the borrowed skirt, and the clunky brown shoes! If she’d worn a burqa, I would have concluded that full-body concealment was the very height of female fashion.
Rag Ball was held in the Men’s Union, an ancient building that contained a club-like lounge, offices for student organizations – including the Mancunian – and an upper-story auditorium where we otherwise gathered for those Thursday afternoon debates. I remember wandering with Malcolm and Sheila from floor to floor and from room to room, some with dance bands and some with open bars. By midnight I was rather drunk, and I kept getting into scrapes that almost but not quite ended in fistfights. At some point I linked up with Basia, who’d come to the ball with her friend Margaret. Perhaps it was Margaret and the boyfriend who pushed her into my orbit, or perhaps Basia made it happen.
In any event, I stayed close to her for the rest of the evening. In one of those many rooms with many bars, I realized that another lad had draped his arm across her shoulders. I was hugely offended, so I grabbed his thumb and peeled it back, neatly removing his arm from the shoulders that I regarded as my own acquisition. With some justification, he set out to punch me. He was a sturdy lad, and big across the shoulders, so he probably would have made a good job of thrashing me, if Malcolm hadn’t stepped in. He drew the outraged young man away and smothered him with eloquence. I heard him speak of “hands across the sea and all that,” no doubt arguing that he would be leaving a blot on England’s honor if he punched out a guest from the colonies.
Late at night, we wound up in an actual ballroom, almost empty as I recall. We sat along one wall in folding chairs – Malcolm, Sheila, Basia, and I – while a dance band played forlornly on the stage. Perhaps, come to think of it, this was the same auditorium in which the Union debates took place, with the chairs removed to supply a dance floor. Nobody was dancing, however. Instead we sat with our heads hanging, with the exception of Basia, whose dark blue eyes lighted upon the artwork decorating the stage behind the band. This depicted a square-rigged ship, all sails set, and above it in fancy letters the legend, Frigging in the Rigging.
“What does ‘frigging’ mean?” she asked.
If this seems impossibly naive, take note that I was the product of a rather coarse background, yet at the age of twenty-two I’d only once heard the ultimate obscenity spoken in what was known as “mixed company.” On that memorable occasion, I’m sorry to say, I was the speaker. I was driving a 1934 Chevrolet sedan over a hump-backed bridge, en route to Boston, and on the downslope the accelerator stuck wide open. The Chevy kept increasing speed, causing me to shout: “What the fuck?” The slip was met with strangled laughter, was never again mentioned, and I’m sure was never forgotten. So I was not about to interpret for the language student from Poland. But again Malcolm came to the rescue. He raised his fine head and its great burden of black hair, shook it once, and said: “Why, it means fucking, my dear.”
All these years later, I find that I remember some parts of our friendship very clearly, while Basia remembers different moments altogether, and sometimes to opposite effect. This conversation is among the events she challenges, though it is word-for-word graven upon my memory. I couldn’t be mistaken, as I tell her in an email. She answers:
Okay, if you are sure. But Malcolm’s explanation would not have enlightened me as I didn’t know that word either.
WHAT A THING IS MEMORY! That late-night ballroom, with the forlorn dance band playing for the four of us, is as vivid to me as if Rag Week were yesterday. Yet I don’t remember if I took Basia home, whether I kissed her in parting, if I even arranged to meet her again.
Indeed, I don’t really know how much of an item we were that winter. We lived on opposite sides of the city, I in Withington to the south, Basia in a northern suburb with her Uncle Jan, Aunt Jadzia, and two baby cousins. Nor could I have courted her by telephone, because phones were still a rarity in England. (I remember a Manchester Guardian advertisement for a tailor who boasted, “Telephone,” without troubling to include the number.) Still, we had some sort of relationship, because Basia tells me:
I went to great length to save for my green shoes, and you gave me a perfectly matching pair of gloves. Real colour sense! You managed to get the same colour without me, and without looking at the shoes.
I did? It seems very unlike me, but even more unlikely that Basia would be mistaken, given that she had so little money that generally she ran through her stipend before the end of the month. For the final week or so Uncle Jan would send her off to school with two shillings to buy a ham sandwich for lunch. As feckless as us lads, she often spent the florin on a ten-pack of Player’s. Her grant was twenty pounds a month, half of what Malcolm, Ian, and the others were getting, whether because “boys were privileged over girls,” in the words of a scholar of the times, or because the money came from Polish funds rather than English.
And always there were our mornings in Caf. Every morning at ten o’clock, Basia joined us at the Mancunian table, and the early arrivals shifted places so that she and I could sit together. A courtship based on coffee and cigarettes!
We devoted hours to this pursuit. (Never again, after Ian’s daring breakout, did any of the lads remove his jacket at table.) If I brought out my packet of Player’s Navy Cut, it was mandatory to send it around the table, often enough returning empty. At three shillings sixpence the pack of twenty, this was a considerable offering. Never mind! Next time, Malcolm would hand his pack around, or Ian would, or Frank or Antony. The girls were not expected to participate in this ritual.
Basia also went to the pub with us from time to time, and to the Piccadilly Cinema uptown. I particularly remember La Strada. Malcolm and Sheila were there, and we picked up Ian Fellowes en route. I spotted him, Malcolm called to him, and he swung about the bus in the best student fashion as it swayed along Oxford Street.
I sat next to Basia, casting covetous glances at her profile in the reflected light from the screen – the soft lips, the elegant nose, the tousled hair still damp from rain. I considered the merits of leaning across and kissing those lips, which were pouting disapproval of Anthony Quinn’s cruelty to Giulietta Masina, the circus strongman and his simple-minded protégé. (A year earlier, in the Franklin Theater at home, I’d have canoodled with my girlfriend without a second thought. What a mystery! Faced with a different woman, how does one get from here to there?) I did venture a whisper: “Do you read the subtitles?” Basia shook her head and lightly spanked my knuckles on the armrest. Well, she knew where my hand was, at any rate!
Apart from that tap on the hand, I got little of value from Signor Fellini’s fable, though I did enjoy the Fool’s wonderment at the heroine’s appearance: “What a funny face! Are you a woman, really? Or an artichoke?”
The pubs were opening when we emerged from the movie at half-past six, in the rainy night, but Basia pleaded that she was overdue at home. She fled in the direction of Piccadilly Gardens.
I didn’t see her home? No, I watched her duffle coat – white, it seemed in the night – vanish amongst the double-decker buses, bound for all points of the compass. The wet asphalt reflected their headlamps and the red of brake lights, along with the gleam of the cinema marquee and the pub window toward which the rest of us were bound.
It wasn’t much of a date, to be sure, but I could console myself that my love at least was no artichoke.
THEN EVERYTHING CHANGED. The Fulbright office sent out a list of ships sailing for North America in the summer of 1955: which one did I prefer? I settled on RMS Ivernia, her maiden voyage scheduled for June 30 from Liverpool to Montreal. Flush with the prospect of this new adventure, I met Basia for our morning excursion to Caf ... which, come to think of it, means that by this time we had a regular rendezvous. Probably I’d developed the habit of lurking in the corridor of her classroom building at ten o’clock, or on the steps outside, so as to share a private moment while we walked to the Union. It’s a pity, really, that I don’t remember more about our friendship in Manchester – when and where I bought those green gloves, for example.
It was Sheila who reacted to my news. “You’ll be going home?” she said, and reached across the table to pat my hand. “We will miss you!” I have always admired women for their ability to say things like that, which men keep to themselves. I would miss this gang when Ivernia steamed out of Liverpool, but I would never have said so.
Then Basia delivered her own news: she had been accepted at Perugia’s Università per Stranieri, School for Foreigners, to spend the Easter term perfecting her spoken Italian.
“How wonderful!” Sheila said, while my heart slid into my shoes. No more coffee and cigarettes at Caf? No more movies at the Piccadilly Cinema uptown?
The University of Manchester still followed the pleasant tradition of dividing the year into three terms – Michaelmas, Lent, and Easter – with a four-week break between them. We were expected to use the time for independent study or to write a “long essay” or research paper, but for most of us it was an excuse to travel. In Basia’s case, because the school calendars weren’t the same, she’d have two weeks between her last class at Manchester and her first at Perugia. “I will visit Paris on the way,” she said, “and Florence of course. I would love to have company! Won’t one of you go with me?”
“Yes,” I said, before anyone else could speak. “I will.”
How I Met Basia, Hitchhiked to Italy, and Learned About Love, War, and Exile
WE DID GO TO PARIS, and in April at that. After three days in the City of Light, we set out on the Route d’Italie, my palm upraised in the European fashion, catching rides in long-distance lorries, a Chevrolet Bel Air, a Citroën 2CV, and a magnificent Traction Avant with clamshell fenders and suicide doors, of the sort that usually carried French diplomats and policemen. Crossing the Alps was an adventure for us, as it had been for Hannibal, but we came down into Italy only one day behind schedule, and I fell in love all over again, this time with the Italian language.
Along the way, and in a castle at Lerici on the Mediterranean coast, Basia told me about Poland, Kazakhstan, Persia, Lebanon, Egypt, and England, so that I came to understand our lives as two great arcs, starting in very different places and coming together in these enchanted places – and then, sadly, veering away, as she returned to Manchester and I to Fort Dix, New Jersey, to start my two years of obligatory military service. I had to wait more than half a century to finish the story, but finish it I finally did.
“Dan Ford is a conjurer of literary magic,” wrote Irene Tomaszewski in Cosmopolitan Review. “In just over 200 pages, he tells a tale that is sad and funny, innocent and wise; he weaves together tragedies great and small, the many facets of love and loss, commentary on peace, war and cultural differences. And he does all that with an artist’s touch, creating not just images but atmosphere, personalities, and dramatic tension.... It’s an extraordinary book, highly original, gripping, at once full of joy and of sorrow.”
Read more at DanFordBooks.com.
Thank you – Daniel Ford, Durham, New Hampshire, September 2014.