Yesterday we were invited to an extraordinary event in Manchester. A funeral service for a World War II General, Ludwik Kmicic- Skrzyński, who had actually died in 1972, been buried in Manchester, but was now exhumed and being sent back to his home town of Białystok, with full religious and military honours. A controversial move, […]Read Post ›
No longer with us, my father loved a Christmas hat. With embellishments. I used to find it really irritating. Now I miss it. He was the most intensely social being. When I was tiny I can remember people frequently coming round to our flat in Talgarth Road to play bridge or hearts or just for […]Read Post ›
No. Not the band but the area of London. Walthamstow. The Far Eastern end of the Victoria Line. Not difficult to get to from where I live. Ealing. The most western end of the Central Line. But a long way nevertheless. I went in order to make the typical Polish Londoner’s pilgrimage to the William […]Read Post ›
Packing away my grandmother’s spectacles I came across this piece of embroidery. My father had obviously packed away her things when she died and gave them to me many years later. But I never really looked closely until now. I remember this cushion and I always knew she had embroidered it. There were some others […]Read Post ›
for MKJK My favourite food of all time. When I was very young I did not like chicken at all. This was my father’s influence as he ate neither chicken nor fish, so I didn’t come across either until I was about 12 or thirteen, and I have to say I wasn’t exactly enthralled with […]Read Post ›
Going backwards from today. This is to help me remember. The rain it raineth everyday. I don’t particularly need to remember that, but diarists always seem to mention the weather. I’m never particularly interested in the weather. I don’t like being too cold or too hot or too wet any more than the next person, […]Read Post ›
Sunday in Kraków was cold. The hotel (Hotel 32) breakfast room was strangely laid out and we felt we had to keep on running backwards and forwards to get everything we needed, but the food itself wasn’t bad. we had lunch to go to anyway as we were going to meet a friend from my […]Read Post ›
This book was published very soon after the war. My father Jan Wysoki gave it to me to read when I was an adult because he said it gave the truest account in English of his own experiences. I am going to buy another copy now because I tore bits out of this one when […]Read Post ›
Life Through Basia's Eyes 