Wodka, or Tea with Milk

By Rosemary Johnson

Wodka, or Tea with Milk’ takes the reader on an immersive, rollercoaster ride into the Solidarnosc years in 1980s Poland. Marya Weiclawski is second-generation British, the daughter of Polish refugees who fled during World War Two. When her Cambridge University interview goes wrong – her fault actually – she resolves to seek out her Polish family whom no one speaks of, and her father’s RAF comrade, Pyotr Murkowski, whom her beloved dad, Jerzy, has suddenly stopped talking about. Marya becomes involved in the shipyard strikes in Gdansk in 1980 and falls in love with Jan, a shipyard worker. Jan is well liked by colleagues, unflappable and down-to-earth - a bit too much so for volatile Marya – but he appears to have no family and in Poland family is everything.

• Language: English
• Publisher: The Conrad Press
• Release date: Aug 23, 2023
• ISBN: 9781839786372

Book preview

1

I

’ve just messed up my whole life. My own stupid fault.

Everybody tells me I have ‘too much to say’ and I used to answer, ‘So what? I have to stand up for myself. I’m the youngest of four sisters.’ But that was then and this is now.

My train moves forward in the sneaky way of modern locomotives, slipping away from the empty platform, the lights from the buffet glowing yellow against the gloom of what counts for daylight in December. The guard in his shabby uniform, his flag flaccid by his side, wanders back to his office. He’s in Cambridge. I never will be.

I long for steam, to feel the engine strain, puff and shriek, to throw me around in my seat, filling my lungs with acrid smoke. I squint to see the hands of my watch, which has slid around my wrist. Almost two o’clock. Not yet halfway through the day.

With a crunched-up tissue, I dab at the soft woollen fabric of my coat, actually, my sister Ursula’s favourite coat, which she has lent me for the day. She warned me not to let it get wet but it was raining on my way back to the station, and I can’t stop the weather.

I cross my legs and re-cross them. I attempt to pull my dress over my knees. My sister Sophie, whose garment this is, doesn’t know I’ve borrowed it although she wouldn’t have minded. She must’ve taken one of my tops with her when she went because I can’t find it anywhere. I have to talk to her. More than anything else in the world I want to speak to Sophie, even though Father O’Grady says to wish her back home is a sin. She’s the only one who’ll understand.

I have let my family down, in the worst possible way.

I could get off this train at Ipswich and find one destined for York. She would be allowed to see me, wouldn’t she?

Hang on. I can’t. Because of Dad.

Three hours ago everything was hunky-dory.

Using the map on the back of my letter, I found my way on foot from Cambridge Station, through the dreaming spires, to St Theresa’s College. The porter in the lodge was sitting with her back to me, reading The Daily Mail, all about Mrs Thatcher and trade unions, and from time to time lifting a flowery-patterned mug to her lips. I waited but she carried on. When I tapped my knuckle against her glass panel, the sound ricocheted off stone pillars like gunfire. She swung around in her chair and cranked open the sliding door separating her from the rest of the world.

‘Yes?’ I smelled the Nescafe on her breath.

‘I’m Marya Weiclawski. I’ve got an interview.’

She studied her clipboard. ‘What name?’

‘Marya Weiclawski.’

Her pen hovered over her list. ‘Mary?’

‘No.’ I showed her my letter.

‘Oh.’

She directed me across the entrance hall to what she called the ‘JCR’. I pushed open the heavy door and stood on the threshold. Did real students go in here? Would I? Sash windows extended along two sides, flanked by red velvet curtains, faded along fold lines. On the ceiling above my head hung a massive tear-drop chandelier. Not trusting something so huge and heavy to stay in its place a second longer, I didn’t go in but, instead, paced up and down the corridor, pretending to be interested in the portraits of popes and saints. St Theresa’s is a Catholic college.

‘Who are you?’ asked St Thomas Moore peering down his long and supercilious nose. Looking holy but pissed off, Edmund Campion listened in. ‘Are you an intellectual like me?’

‘Oh yes,’ I said. Nicholas Breakspear, the only English pontiff, had the biggest portrait but, with his Norman helmet turned sideways, he was blatantly ignoring me. Pope Pius XII, in round-framed glasses, clasped his hands together but Pope Paul VI held his fingers up as if he were telling me off. Yes, me personally. I wasn’t nervous – really, I wasn’t – just bored. Wish I hadn’t arrived so early. Pope John Paul I smiled from a new photograph frame even though he’d lasted only thirty-three days. Pity they hadn’t yet got around to putting up a photo of the current Holy Father.

To pass the time, I telephoned my sister Lynn from the call-box in the corner. Lynn, pregnant with her first child, is always in these days and ready for a chat. As I waited for her to pick up, I read the messages etched on the hardboard hood: Gillian loves Dave, Hilary loves Paul, Theresa’s girls rule OK.

My sister’s voice cut in. ‘Marya? Aren’t you at Cambridge?’

‘Yes.’

Pause. ‘I thought you were the hospital.’

‘Hospital? What?’ We didn’t have these sorts of conversations anymore. Over the years we had become acquainted with the inside of every health-care facility within a fifty-mile radius of our home, but that was all over now.

‘Marya, it’s Dad.’

‘Dad’s in hospital?’ He and I went to hospitals as visitors, not patients.

‘His stomach.’

‘He was all right when he drove me to the station this morning.’

‘He didn’t want to worry you.’

‘He was going to work. And his stomach’s been much better since—’

‘Ursula called in at home at nine o’clock. She found him lying doubled up on the settee. She drove him to A and E. He didn’t want to go, mind, kept saying he’d be better in a minute. Oh Marya. I shouldn’t have told you all this. I’ve made you worried and you’ve got your interview.’

‘Don’t be stupid, Lynn. I’ll be all right. Poor Dad. Look, I’d better go now.’ It’s indigestion, nothing serious, I willed myself to believe as I trudged back to the JCR. He’s had it for years. Doctors, nurses, give him Bisodol.

I felt my shoulders sag under the pads of Ursula’s jacket as I opened the door again. The easy chairs were now inhabited by glossy young ladies, bright and shining like well-groomed horses, calling out to each other in plummy tones. Their heavy perfume tickled my nose and I realised I’d forgotten to use the bottle of Charlie which Lynn had lent me for the day. Smile, Marya, smile. However, as nobody seemed to notice me, I let the muscles of my mouth relax.

We fell silent when a woman entered holding a clipboard. For what seemed like for ever she stood there saying and doing nothing, her neck bundled up in scarves, as if she had a cold, and her hair tied back in a loose ponytail. I guessed she was in her late twenties. By 1989 I’ll be you, an academic, a lecturer. Dr Weiclawski .

At last Scarves bade us good morning, welcomed us to the college and explained that she would be leading each one of us in turn to the library for our interviews. She drew in her breath, her eyes moving around our expectant faces. ‘Miss Cholmondley.  You’re first,’ she said. A pale blue pashmina stood up. The rest of us re-started breathing.

I wasn’t nervous. Honestly. I carried on staring out the window, waiting, waiting, and waiting. Each time Scarves returned I willed her to say ‘Miss Weiclawski’ but it was ‘Miss Walmington-Smythe’… ‘Miss Forbes-Browne’… ‘Miss Montague-Jones’. Am I the only one here not to have a posh name? Am I the only state school pupil? Bet they’re not Catholic. I am.

By this time there were only two of us left in the JCR. When Scarves came back again, the tap-tap of her heels on the wooden floor in the corridor now so very familiar, my body clenched, also my knees, my shoulders, my stomach, my calves. The other girl looked straight ahead yet I did notice the tightening of her fists in her lap. ‘Er… er… Mary-a?’

This was it. A thunder bolt of adrenalin zapped through my spine, touching each of my vertebrae as if checking in. I’m disappointed at not being addressed as Miss though.

I followed her into the library. It was happening. Yes, it was happening. Scarves was pointing to a chair in front of a long desk and taking her own place behind it, alongside a second woman and a man. The interviewers did introduce themselves but I forgot their names as soon as they said them. Again I forced the muscles of my face into a smile. Don’t think about Dad, Marya.

The woman not wearing scarves said, ‘So… you’re Marya. From Colchester. And you’ve applied to read English literature. Let me get this right. Is it Mar-ee-a, as in the Sound of Music, or Mar-eye-a?’

‘Mar-ee-a.’ ‘Miss Weiclawski’ would’ve sounded so much better.

They started asking Oxbridge interview questions, the ones I’d been rehearsing all year. This tinny little voice, with an Estuarian accent which I hadn’t realised I had until now, rattled on by itself. Individual words and phrases wafted around the library, speech bubbles floating up the book-stacks, pausing on each stair of the wheeled stepladder. The male interviewer who had an American accent invited me to discuss authors of my choice. I did my best. Actor Leonard Rossiter’s white bottom, as he undressed on the beach in the title sequence of ‘The Rise and Fall of Reginald Perrin’, kept flitting into my mind as I waffled on about Evelyn Waugh and Grahame Greene. When I mentioned Antonia White, whose novel Frost in May I was reading on the train, his eyes glazed over.

‘So… what makes a piece of writing literature?’ He looked down at the name-sheet in front of him. ‘Miss… Miss… er… Weewee?’

Ignore it, Marya, ignore it. I was trotting out my prepared answer when out the corner of my eye I saw him snigger.

‘Mar-ee-a,’ said Scarves but I saw her suppressed giggle. Too late she tried to turn it into a cough.

I leapt to my feet, my chair scraping against the much-polished floor. ‘My name is Vee-clav-ski. Okay? It’s Polish.’ I swung around to the American man. ‘Surely there are enough of us Poles your side of the pond for you to know that in Polish we pronounce W as V. As in v…v..wodka. It’s the name my father gave me, my father who... like Joseph Conrad before him... I wonder if you know Conrad better than you know Antonia White... has Polish as his first language. My father knows English literature better than any of you here. He came to England in 1940, joined the RAF and flew over Nazi Germany while you lot...’ I glared at the Yank. ‘You lot were flirting with America First. And my mother was in Auschwitz.’

Silence. More silence.

‘Er …maybe you ought to pop outside a minute,’ said Scarves.

‘I’m not going anywhere.’ I thumped my backside on to my seat then sprung up like a coiled spring released. ‘Actually, I will go outside. I’m not staying here another minute.’

I bolted to the door in three long strides. ‘And get a photo of Pope John Paul II and stick it up with all the others, will you?’

2

I

arrive back in Colchester in the middle of the afternoon, when the feeble winter daylight is fading to grey. Colchester’s all right, built by the Romans and Britain’s oldest recorded market town or something. We have a Roman wall which I walk alongside on my way to school, a castle and ugly Victorian water towers which you can’t help becoming attached to. Dad says that this bloody station platform, which I’m trudging along now, is the longest in England. I believe you, Dad.

The train I’ve just alighted clacketty-clacks off to Liverpool Street. I’ve been to London twice – once to watch England play hockey at Wembley and more recently to see Hamlet in the West End – each time travelling in my school uniform on a hired bus, alongside giggly girls more concerned about eyeing up good-looking boys than experiencing one of the greatest cities in the world.

Colchester’s all right. I’ve lived here for seventeen years. It belongs to me. Cambridge doesn’t anymore. I entered my five universities on the UCCA form and I’ve had offers from Manchester, Newcastle and Leeds, but I haven’t bothered to visit any of them.

At the barrier I hand in my ticket, purchased last night by my father in a state of intense excitement. In the street outside cabs hover on the taxi rank, their drivers leaning against their doorframes as they chat. I scan their faces for Dad then remember he’s in hospital. Another blow to my gut. I imagine the bruise, black in the middle with blue rings on the outside. I linger in the muggy warmth of the booking hall. I’ve heard kids say they want to travel to ‘broaden their minds’, but they must spend so much time in this transit cocoon. Maybe I’ll travel myself one day.

I set off from the station on foot, a fine drizzle seeping into my hair and settling on my cheeks. I can’t be bothered to wait for buses. Banging my heels down on the damp pavement, I wonder what I’m going to do with the rest of my life. Kicking away the soggy brown leaves under my feet, I suppose I’ll have to accept one of my other university offers. I’ll tell everyone that Cambridge is rubbish and the redbrick universities are where it’s all at. Maybe.

Already three girls in my year at school have Oxbridge places.

The lock in the front door of our house refuses to yield as usual. I swear. I curse. Come on, come on, house. My dad bought you last year at my mother’s insistence, with a mortgage he can scarcely afford. You’re ours, a Council house no longer. On the fifth attempt, the door judders open, pitching me into our living room. I tread on a wafer-thin blue airletter lying on the doormat. I recognise my Aunt Grazyna’s spidery writing and feel the usual frisson on seeing the Polish stamp, but I put it down unopened on the window-ledge by the front door. We didn’t used to receive letters from Grazyna. Mum refused to admit she had a sister and shook her head whenever her name was mentioned. Finding Grazyna’s address, in order to tell her Mum had died, had been a challenge.

Even now I anticipate the creak of springs in my mother’s chair. She always peered around to see who’d come in. But I’m relieved to hear just the hum of the fridge in the kitchen. Things are bad enough without me having to explain everything to her. The spines of the tomes in the bookcase behind Dad’s chair are all ears. ‘Well?’ they say. ‘Did you do us justice?’

No, books. I didn’t.

My darling father has read every one on every shelf but goes to the library each week for more. This week’s pile, in plastic covers with corners stubbed and split, lies on what Mum used to call the ‘coffee table’.

I make myself a cup of tea. ‘Tea cures everything’, says Ursula, but today it tastes all wrong. I need music. I run upstairs to my room, shove Roxy Music’s Greatest Hits into my cassette player and sing along to Bryan Ferry’s sneering voice, but in the middle of ‘Love is a Drug’ I yank the cassette out the carousel and toss it on to Sophie’s vacant bunk. So much of my stuff on there, four months’ worth.

Quiet again.

My sisters call me a cry baby, but I can’t cry now. Tears usually well up under my eyelids at the smallest thing, even something good like watching the Holy Father saying mass in Krakow on television last June. That was in the before time, one of our better days. Mum was in her usual armchair and Sophie, Dad and I squashed up on the settee, watching those thousands of wonderful Polish people cheering on our own Polski pope. We ought to be there, I thought. No Hitler, no World War Two and we would’ve been. Every building and landmark I saw on the screen would have been as familiar as the veins on my hand. That day I wept for a life lost, but this afternoon my eyes are as dry as dust. I didn’t cry when Mum died either.

I rush downstairs to the kitchen, as if there were a reason for me to be there. I stare at the contents of my mug, at the nasty tannic scum which has formed on top. I watch the brown sludge spiral down the sink. I get my coat. I slip my feet back into my shoes. I need more than tea. I don’t go to Ahmed’s convenience store, because I work there and they won’t believe my fibs. ‘It’s for my mum,’ I say to the checkout assistant at the offy further along the road.

The minute I walk out the shop, I twist open the screw top, put the bottle to my lips and swig. Oh bliss. I take a second gulp. Bliss again. And more. By the time I reach home again, I’m starting to feel as if I’m watching this horrible world from a distant cloud.

The airletter’s dropped down on to the doormat again. Stupid thing. I try to put it back on the window-ledge but it wafts down, three times more. I suppose I’ll have to open it. I shove my finger under the fold and rip the flimsy paper. More bloody gardening, I suppose. I mean, the woman’s living in Poland, in Krakow, the Holy Father’s former see, and all she writes about is her boring vegetables.

It’s cabbages and leeks this time. Oh, and she’s had a cold, so has someone called Jacinta, and she’s looking forward to her son, Dominik, returning from university in Gdańsk for Wigilia. What’s Wigilia? I have a dim recollection from childhood of Mum serving herring. ‘I do hope you can come and visit us soon.’ She issues invitations in every epistle. ‘Not at this time of year. Too much snow. In the summer perhaps.’

I’d go. I really would go and immerse myself in cabbages and leeks in Poland. You don’t need a degree to do gardening. Never mind the snow.

The telephone rings. ‘Hello Marya,’ says Ursula. ‘How did you get on?’

‘Okay.’ I burp. ‘It’s very competitive, you know. Lots of public schoolgirls.’

‘I’m sure you did fine. You’ll want to know about Dad. I do hope you weren’t fretting about him during the interview. I wish you hadn’t spoken to Lynn beforehand. He’s okay, Marysia. The pain in his stomach has eased off but they’re keeping him in for observation and carrying out tests.’

‘His pain always eases off after a few hours. He’s had this for years. Which hospital is he in?’

‘Dobrze. He’s in Essex County. Visiting starts again at six. I’ll call for you in the car at twenty to. Are you okay at home by yourself?’

‘Ursula, I’m nearly eighteen.’ After replacing the receiver I take a further swig of wine. And another one.

I shouldn’t do this.

I really shouldn’t do this. I think of my mother who died just this last September.

Dad’d be so upset.

Screwing the bottle tight shut I rush back upstairs, but I can’t resist one more mouthful as I tuck it away behind the school files under Sophie’s lower bunk. It hurts when I bang my head on the bedframe as I stand up but the wine’s glowing in my throat like summer sunshine. I blow on my palm and sniff. Ten past five.

I contemplate making coffee. In no time at all my breath could smell like a teacher emerging from the staff room after break. At twenty past five, as I’m waiting for the kettle to boil, my eyes rest on Dad’s amazing bookcase, rising from floor to ceiling. I remember when he bought it from a jumble sale years ago. I crouch down to the bottom shelf. At the gentle tug of my fingers, Dad’s world atlas glides out because it knows what to do, like a dog going along its usual walk. When I balance it on the headrest of Dad’s chair it falls open at the map of Poland. I’m there in seconds, inside the pages of the atlas and walking all over the map. I’m in Warsaw in the middle, Krakow at the bottom, Lodz above Krakow, then up to Gdańsk on the Baltic Coast where my cousin’s at university. Yet every city looks like Colchester in my mind.

‘Could we go to Poland?’ I asked Dad a few weeks ago.

The hand Dad had been lifting to reach a plate from the cupboard froze, set in stone like a Greek statue. ‘Nie.’ He turned his back to me as he continued laying the table for supper.

‘But Dad—’

‘Nie, Marysia, nie.’ He spoke in that chilling tone in which he tells me not to get into strangers’ cars. ‘We will not speak of it again.’

Five thirty and I’m still poring over the atlas. I haven’t made any coffee.

3

T

here are four of us Weiclawski sisters. Our parents, Jerzy and Agnieszka, gave us Polish names – Urszula, Alina, Zofia and Marya – but mine is the only one to remain in its Polish form. Ursula, who lost her z aeons ago, is the sensible one, a qualified nurse although currently a stay-at-home mum. Lynn, a typist until a few weeks ago but currently on maternity leave with no intention of returning to work ever, is the pretty one. Sophie, also a typist, is the difficult one and me, Marya, the clever one. This is what our mother used to say about us. Mum herself possessed all these character traits bar one – sensible.

Ursula’s car pulls up outside at five thirty-five. Did I mention also that she’s always early? Right now, she’ll be sitting bolt upright in the driving seat, staring straight ahead, drumming her fingers on the dashboard, and expecting to find me waiting on the doorstep.

I rummage through the kitchen cupboards. Mints… mints. We must have mints somewhere. No, we don’t. Aah… Mint toothpaste… in the bathroom. I hear the rattle of my sister’s key in the door as I leap up the stairs two and three at a time.

‘Marya. Come on. I’ve left the children in the car.’

‘I’m cleaning my teeth.’

Split seconds later – but not fast enough for her – I’m sitting beside her in the passenger seat and avoiding her brown eyes, wide and alert, the distinctive Weiclawski brown eyes which all we four sisters possess. I turn around and greet my nephews strapped into their child-seats in the back.

‘He’o, Maweea.’

‘Hello Daniel.’

‘Maweea, Maweea.’

‘Yes, Daniel.’

‘Weewee in potty, Maweea.’

I flinch at the word even from a toddler.

‘You did very well, darling,’ says Ursula. ‘So, Marya, how was Cambridge?’

‘All right.’

‘Only all right?’

I’m speaking through the hand I’ve placed in front of my mouth as I’m not sure how effective toothpaste is in camouflaging other smells. ‘I want to go to Poland.’

She doesn’t reply.

The familiar streets and houses of Colchester flit past me like a film I’m watching, or even acting in. ‘Grazyna’s suggested we go in the summer.’

‘She issues invitations every time she writes, but, of course, we can’t do it. Marya, tell me about Cambridge.’

‘Like I said, it was all right.’ I turn my head towards the window. Six hours have elapsed since the interview, but I haven’t yet put together a form of words to head off the inevitable questions from family. ‘I want to go to Poland.’

No response – again.

‘I really do want to go to Poland. I mean, I can speak Polish—’

‘Mm.’ Peering through the glare of yellow streetlights, she’s willing a vacant place to appear beside one of the narrow roads by the hospital. We’re used to difficult parking at hospitals, at this one and all the others in northern Essex. ‘Yes. You can speak Polish. And Essex. I haven’t heard you use one consonant since I picked you up.’

‘Wha’e’errrr.’

‘Mm.’ She’s spotted a driver edging out into the traffic and is hovering behind him. ‘I’m not staying long, Marya. The boys need to go home to bed. Brian’s shift finishes at eight and he’ll give you a lift home.’ Ursula’s husband, Brian, is also a nurse.

The cold damp night air hits my fragile wine-soaked frame as we clamber out the car. Although I’m having to concentrate on not tripping over uneven pavement slabs, I don’t get properly drunk. Mum was the same. I’ll have a headache soon; that’s the usual pattern. As we enter the hospital building a familiar odour seeps up my nostrils, cooked mince overlain with astringent TCP. When I comment that the droopy Christmas decorations in the corridors are probably the same ones as last year, Ursula shushes me. ‘Keep your voice down, Marya.’

On reaching Dad’s ward, my eyes scan up and down the rows of men’s faces. Unknown faces. Dad’s not in hospital. It’s all a terrible mistake. Then Daniel calls out, ‘Gwandpa,’ and breaks into a run.

It’s the shape of Dad’s head I see first, round and solid, everything that sums up Dad-ness, his silver-grey hair slicked back over his bald patch, even in hospital. Beside him sits Lynn, the pretty one of we sisters, with soft wavy hair and a heart-shaped face, her voluminous maternity dress dripping in flowery folds over the wobbly orange plastic NHS bucket seat. ‘Marya, how was Cambridge?’

I pretend I don’t hear her. ‘Dad, how are you?’

‘He’s a bit better.’ Lynn’s brown eyes sparkle as she says this. I sense she’s enjoying being the one with the news. ‘He’s sitting up and he’s drunk a cup of tea.’

Dad’s propped up against a stack of pillows in a bog-standard hospital bed, its metal frame once painted cream but ancient chips revealing the cold grey steel underneath. His lower body is pinned down by bleached white sheets, crisp with starch and rigorous ironing, overlain by the inevitable pale green counterpane edged with laundry tags and holes. He lays his hand over Lynn’s. ‘Kochanie Alina, you worry, worry, worry. Not good for you. Not good for baby.’

I seize his other hand, noticing for the first time the pattern of prominent blue veins like furrows on a ploughed field.

Daniel squeezes between us. ‘Weewee in potty, Gwandpa. Gwandpa, weewee in potty.’

I flinch again.

Dad pats the top of his head. ‘Hello, Daniel.’

‘Hello, Gwandpa.’

‘Cześć, Daniel.’

‘Hello, Gwandpa.’

I squeeze his little hand. ‘Say Cześć Grandpa.’

He hangs back, pressing himself against Ursula’s leg.

‘Oh never mind. Dad, tell me how you are.’

‘I’m okay. Cambridge, Marya? How was Cambridge?’

His gentle grey eyes anticipate good news. I can’t disappoint him, not yet. ‘I want to know about you first, Dad.’

He heaves an enormous shrug, the corners of his shoulders ascending towards his ears then sinking back into the pillows. ‘I’m okay. Not ill. No hospital. Pain all gone.’ He turns to Ursula. ‘I want to go home.’

‘Glad you’re feeling better but you were very poorly this morning.’ My eldest sister perches on the edge of the bed, her baby on her knee. ‘You’ve complained of this stomach pain for months. You need to have it checked out.’

‘I have tests. Lots of tests. They say I must wait for results. I wait at home. I am well.’

‘Dr Robinson wants to keep you in under observation,’ says SRN Ursula Brooks.

‘No. No.’ He leans forward. ‘I have work. No work. No money. Christmas soon—’

‘Don’t worry about money.’ Ursula places her hand on his shoulder. ‘The important thing is for you to get better.’

‘Don’t worry about money, Dad.’ Lynn echoes Ursula’s words, as she often does. Her husband, Steve, is an estate agent with an upward career trajectory. These days, she wears posh clothes, eats in restaurants and takes foreign holidays. ‘We’ll chip in if necessary.’

Dad shakes his head. ‘No, no. I don’t want you to.’

‘Has he got appendicitis?’ This suddenly occurred to me.

Ursula rolls her eyes. ‘Marya, if Dad had appendicitis, he’d have been in and out of theatre hours ago. We don’t know what the problem is. That’s why he has to stay in.’

‘I am okay.’ Pulling his hand away from mine, Dad pats his stomach. ‘I think I eat something bad. As English say, it disagrees with me, but okay now.’ He draws himself up on his pillows. ‘The RAF dinner in