It took a week for Mum to fully recover from the flu and regain her usual energetic drive.
“I was wondering,” she said to Joan one evening over the washing up, “about that Polish girl at your school – the one you told me about. Ania, wasn’t it? It must be very dull for her, living with that old lady. Why don’t you ask her over here for tea one day?”
Joan’s heart sank. She felt sorry for Ania, but she didn’t really want to make friends with her. Ania had settled down in the class, up to a point, and had even managed to keep her head down enough to keep clear of Angela Travis and her gang most of the time, but it was still almost impossible to get a word out of her outside the classroom. All Joan wanted to do was to let well alone.
“I could make a cake,” said Mum. “I’ve got some icing sugar and margarine saved up and some dried egg powder. Do ask her. It would be a kind thing to do, surely, to offer her a bit of hospitality?”
There was no arguing with this. So after school the following Friday afternoon, Joan and Ania walked back to Joan’s house together. Joan had tried to get Doreen to come too, but she had cried off.
Mum had done her very best with the tea. She had even got hold of some chocolate biscuits, an almost unheard-of luxury these days. Ania ate ravenously and thanked Joan’s mum politely many times between mouthfuls. After tea, conversation stalled somewhat.
“Would you like to go for a walk while I clear up?” Mum suggested. “Or would you rather listen to a comedy show on the radio?”
Ania preferred the first suggestion. “Radio I do not like,” she explained. “They talk so fast and I do not understand well the jokes.”
So she and Joan set out. For some time they walked in silence, heading towards the promenade for lack of anywhere better to go. It was chilly, and there were very few people about. The tide was out, and the big bank of clouds that had built up over the faraway Welsh coastline was the same colour as the estuary mud.
“You must get awfully sick of walking around here,” Joan said at last. “I mean, there’s not much to do, is there?”
“I am – what is the word? – accustomed. Yes, accustomed,” answered Ania, simply. “I have stayed in so many places – more that I can count. Miss Mellor, the lady I live with now, does not wish me to be at home with her in the daytime. And…” She paused and then went on, “Neither do I wish to be with her.”
Ania plodded on, looking carefully at her feet. There was a long silence before she began to speak again. This time it was in a very low voice, and it was as though a floodgate had suddenly burst open inside her, and her words poured out very rapidly. “My home I remember very well. Our house, our village.”
“Your village in Poland?”
“Yes. Where we live − my mother, my father and me, and my grandmother too until she die. We work very hard, we grow our food, we have a cow, we have plenty to eat. We live well until the soldiers come.”
“Nazi soldiers?”
“Yes. They come in trucks. They take all the Jewish people, all families living there. Many Jewish people live in our village. The soldiers pull them out of their houses, and line them up in the street. We are Christian Polish people, not Jewish. But my father try to help our Jewish neighbours, the Wartskis. He hide them and their children in our barn at back of house. The soldiers search the barn and they find them.” She hesitated, then said, “So they take them, and my father also. Put him in truck with the others. Then they shoot our dog. Shoot him in the street because he bark and try to follow my father. Then my mother and I run away. We run out of house at back, across the field, into forest. The soldiers come after us, but we hide. Soon they stop looking and go away.”
Joan took a deep breath. She couldn’t think how to respond to this sudden, devastating revelation.
“Did you go back?” she asked finally.
“Yes,” said Ania. “We are too frightened at first. So we wait until dark, then we go back. We find the truck quite gone. The truck taking my father. Gone. We do not know where. We find our village – what is the word? – all spoiled, all broken, many houses burned. Our house still there, but all our things smashed. My mother and I know we cannot stay there. We fear too much that the soldiers will come back. So Mother look and find the box that my father hide under the floor, next to fireplace. Still there. The box with the money he save, and my grandmother’s gold chain and her ring. My mother, she put them in a little bag around her neck. Then we put on warm clothes and take what we can carry and leave our home. And we start to walk.”
Joan and Ania had come to a standstill, leaning on the railings and looking out towards a final burst of blood-red sun dropping down below the Welsh coastline.
“Where did you go?” asked Joan.
Ania said, “We walk for many days. I do not know how far we walk. My mother say we must get to her brother’s house. There we will be safe. There are many other people on the road like us. Some have carts. Sometimes they let us ride, but not often, because they too have all their things, and children also. So we walk until we reach the railway station. Many, many people there. When the train come, we must push and fight to get on. We journey on the train many hours. We have little food and no water. If the train stop, we get off and run to fill our water bottles at the tap by side of track. One girl in our truck, she get out to … to…” She blushed.
“To relieve herself?”
Ania nodded. “But the train move on and we must leave her there. Her father and mother scream, try to stop the train. But they cannot. The girl is lost, left there by the railway.”
“Did you reach your uncle?”
“Yes, yes. In the end, we reach him. We come to a big station, crowded with many people. One time I am pushed so I am … separate from my mother, and I shout. Then she is there again, and at last we reach my uncle’s house. There we rest. We try to make plan what to do. But my mother … my mother she is so tired. She start to be ill with fever.”
Ania was silent then, staring out at the sky. There was another long pause before she spoke again. When she did, her voice had dropped to a whisper. “We could not get the medicine she need. We try to nurse her, to bring down the fever, but she get more and more ill. Not – how do you say? – not talking sense. And all the while people in my uncle’s village are leaving, taking their things…
“After my mother die, and we bury her. My uncle say it is not safe for me to stay longer with him. He fear the same soon happen in his village as happen to us. So he find people who take me, with many other children, on another train. This one called Kindertransport. We cross frontiers. A long, long journey. And I come here, at last, to Liverpool. I stay in many places. And now I am here. With Miss Mellor.”
Ania stopped talking and turned her face abruptly towards Joan. There were no tears in her eyes.
“I tell you all this,” she said. “You are the first person here in this place I tell. Because you are kind to me. You and your friend and your mother also. You are not like Angela Travis. Or Miss Mellor.”
Joan hesitated. Then, awkwardly, she put an arm around Ania’s shoulders. But Ania did not respond. She simply stood there, looking back at the watery horizon, which was now very dark.