Snapshot: My mother, a true survivor

September 1961, in a town in northern England – a joint birthday celebration: my mother’s 37th and my brother’s second. In the picture, my Polish grandmother holds my brother, Zbyszek, while my Polish mother, days away from giving birth to me, enjoys a cigarette, one of 20 a day and sometimes more. Small wonder that even as a full-term baby I weigh scarcely 5lb.

It’s a miracle that any of us is here at all. Like the proverbial cat, my feline mother has thwarted death on multiple occasions – in the Warsaw uprising of 1944, she was a Home Army messenger: she lost her younger brother, her sister and her fiancé (my brother, although he does not know it, is named after this boy). She escaped through the Warsaw sewers, collapsed with dysentery, then later contracted tuberculosis in 1953 in communist Poland).

She had a TB relapse in 1957, though “relapse” is somewhat inaccurate, human error being to blame. In 1953, in a sanatorium, high up in the Tatra mountains, the surgeon who carried out the first operation on my mother’s infected lung was badly hungover on the morning following his name-day celebrations. He was a nice man, so the story goes, but negligent: he left a spool of surgical thread inside my mother’s body, which caused a secondary infection to appear four years later, leading to the removal of one of her lungs.

In 1961, when this picture was taken, our family doctor is near hysterical at the prospect of delivering the baby of a one-lunged, 30-something, 20-a-day smoker. But my mother, the survivor, gives birth at full term without oxygen or pain relief.

She has a high pain threshold – a good thing, too, as two years later, my father is dead. It’s his hand that we can see in the bottom right-hand corner of the photograph – yet another Pole. How he and my mother (in their own separate ways) came to be in England in 1961 – now that’s another story.

Halina Boniszewska

Playlist: The song that brings my parents to life

Begin the Beguine by Pete Townshend

When they begin the beguine/It brings back the sound of music so tender

In the mid-1970s, I came across a cassette for sale of a devotional album that Pete Townshend had recorded for Meher Baba, his spiritual master. Called Happy Birthday, this song was included on it. I was struggling to memorise the song, when my mother appeared from the kitchen and thrust a piece of paper into my hand. “This is what you’re looking for” she said, chuckling to herself.

She had written out Cole Porter’s lyrics for me, as she was probably tired of hearing it repeatedly, as any sane human being would be. It turned out that she was a big-band jazz fan before the second world war, and even saw the great Fats Waller in concert at the Gaumont State cinema in Kilburn, north-west London. She danced to the sounds of Artie Shaw (who had a hit with this song in the late 1930s), Duke Ellington and all the big bands that were in their heyday back then.

All through that summer, we talked at length about her life and her upbringing as one of seven children in pre-war Holloway, north London, which was very tough. Like so many women of her generation, she never had the career she wished; instead of working in an office, which is what she would have liked, Mum left school at 14 to work in a machine shop just off the Seven Sisters Road. She joined the ATS (Auxiliary Territorial Service, the women’s branch of the army) in 1942, using her quick mathematical mind to become a plotter in the operations room at Middle Wallop RAF airfield in Hampshire, where she met my dad, who was serving in the Royal Artillery.

She eventually lost her hearing in one ear due to excessive headphone use, which in later life led to isolation and loneliness, a situation in which many deaf people unfortunately find themselves.

After being invalided out of the ATS in 1944, she took a job as a postwoman in north London, and when Harlow was built in the mid-1950s, my parents moved there.

Though her health was failing, she still worked. It must have been awful for her, as she didn’t always show her discomfort to the outside world; being a proud woman, she kept all that to herself, and carried on. She died at the age of 81 in 2003, five years after my Dad. I think about her a lot as I get older and time moves on.

I no longer have the piece of paper on which she wrote the words out for me 40 years ago, but whenever I play this song, I think of her and her life of missed opportunities. As the line in the song says, “When I hear people curse the chance that was wasted,/ I know but too well what they mean.”

Bless you Mum, wherever you are.

Steve Ingless

We love to eat: Mum’s baked potatoes

Ingredients

Potatoes, one per person

Butter

Salt and pepper to taste

Wash the potatoes, then dry them, before placing them on an oven shelf for about 90 minutes at 200C. Cut in half, scoop out the flesh, mash with butter, season with salt and pepper, return to the potato skins and the oven briefly for a final crisping.

In the 1950s I used to love to eat my mum’s baked potatoes as a treat for Saturday dinner, along with Yorkshire puddings, nut roast and various vegetables. As we lived in the West Riding of Yorkshire, dinner was at mid-day and the Yorkshire pudding was eaten first as a separate course.

My dad was a painter and decorator and worked on a Saturday morning; my brother and I played outside, the “rag and bone” man announced his presence and fresh cut daffs were a shilling a bunch (spring time only); meanwhile my mum baked the potatoes in the oven. My dad got back from work, took off his overalls, used a pumice stone to get any paint off his hands and the feast began.

Now that we live in West Yorkshire, we eat our main meal at night; sometimes the Yorkshire puddings are smaller and eaten as part of the main course, but we still all love to eat my mum’s version of baked potatoes on any day of the week.

John Petrie

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