The Death of the Fronsac: A Novel

1

One day, Jackie came home early from school and blew the world up.

That story should belong to her. So why am I telling it, so many years after it happened? For a strange reason: because nobody can pronounce my name.

I am called Maurycy Szczucki. Yes, Polish, although I have held a British passport for half a century now. When I renewed it in Glasgow last year, the young woman in the passport office was only the latest in the queue of well-meaning meddlers who have suggested that I change that name. ‘See, Mister, ehm, Sushi: you could make life easier being, like, Stuart or mebbe Shoesmith.’

I refuse. It’s not patriotism. It’s not even that, frankly, they could easily pronounce it if they bothered to try. ‘Sh-choot–ski’: not so hard. No, it’s because my name is one of the only two things I have left to stand by, to keep me sure about who I am. The other, less reliable, is memory.

After war and exile, I could have reconstructed what the British call a ‘normal’ life. But what happened on that day, the midday when Jackie came home early from school, led me off into fogs and mires. In the fog, other people came close to me but then were lost again. Whenever I set out on a paved road, the hard stone under my feet dissolved into marsh.

So many things happened to me – happened senselessly, I used to reckon. But when that girl in Glasgow challenged me, I suddenly thought: my name is a flag. I am still grasping it, even as an old man. If I hold it up and march back through my life, I might make sense of those memories. Not only the tale of a disordered man but a life as a geological core – mud, gravel, then sandstone full of grimacing fossils, then dead granite drilled from earliest times.

That is why I began to write this. For whom? Not for myself – I am finished with myself. Not for a namesake (I have no children) but for the sake of my name. So let us arrive in Scotland, in the year 1940, and start this story again.

*

One day, Jackie came home early from school and blew the world up.

I remember the day. In some ways, I remember it more sharply than what happened on the day.

It was late April, with May becoming imaginable. Pretty cold still, but handsome. From Greenock, you could see right across the big estuary. The warships and convoy ships anchored off the Tail of the Bank lay in sunlight; the Argyll mountains behind them were black in rain-mist. A northerly breeze kept jumping up and then falling away. It sent dark catspaws racing across the water from Gourock Pier to Princes Pier. The barrage balloon tethered to the Esplanade swayed and glinted.

All this I could watch from my window in the French naval headquarters. This day began as a wartime day: plenty of confident, pointless activity. Two British destroyers were making a mess of coming alongside at Gourock, thrashing up cataracts of foam as they went astern, whooping their sirens. Then a procession of blue naval lorries became stuck in the road outside the torpedo factory at Fort Matilda. Shouting broke out, though I couldn’t hear the words. Gulls lined the roof-ridges, jostling and shrieking. A white flying boat passed low overhead, landed almost out of sight by the other shore of the Firth and then, restlessly, took off again.

Everyone else was busy winning the war, but I was not. After all, I had just lost one. As a Polish officer freshly attached to the French navy, that experience gave me authority but also a certain unpopularity. I soon realised that I was losing a friend each time I said to some eager young enseigne de vaisseau from Brest or Toulon: ‘Your turn will come! Then you will see what they can do when they really mean it!’ So these days I sat at my table by the window, smoking Gold Flake and exchanging small talk with French colleagues about the eccentricity of the Scots. I had a telephone, the only one in the office, which was used by everyone else to make assignations with girls. I also took care to have papers spread out on the table, weighed down by the ashtray. These papers were my diary and some draft pages for a novel, but as nobody else could read Polish they gave a diligent impression. I read a lot, library fiction in brown-paper wrappers, to improve my English.

That day, when I came in, Commandant le Gallois told me that I was to wait indoors for the arrival of some personage from Paris. A figure from the Ministry of War wished to inspect the base and meet the foreign liaison officers. Due to the uncertainty of the trains, he might turn up at any hour of the day or night. I was to remain in the building until further orders.

This annoyed me, because there were other things I wanted to do. So, in spite of le Gallois, I did venture out twice. Why not? Who did he think he was? I should explain that all this was happening in the spring of 1940, when the French were free but not yet ‘Free French’, and nobody had heard of Charles de Gaulle.

This phoney war had, in fact, only ten days to run before Hitler’s panzers sprang out of the woods and gave France heart failure. I did not realise that it would be so soon. But of course I knew that it would happen. I had watched it happen to me and to my brave artillerymen and to my country, only seven months before. Where had France been then, with all her promises of a counter-offensive on the Western Front? Where would France be tomorrow, when the Nazi-Soviet dragon had finished digesting my country and came looking for its next meal?

I raised all this with Commandant le Gallois one evening, soon after my arrival in Scotland. He said that I was a pessimist; I said that I was a realist. A defeatist sort of realist, then? I reminded him that one of our great leaders had said that ‘to be defeated and not to give in is to be victorious’. We both sensed that it was better not to continue this conversation. Le Gallois smiled at me (he wasn’t a bad fellow), and, getting up, remarked: ‘After all, many of my colleagues think that we are fighting this war for Poland, for Danzig, but not really for France.’ I thought of saying: ‘Just wait and see!’ But then I decided to say nothing. I decided that I would continue to like le Gallois, who so calmly tolerated my waste of his time and space, but that I would no longer be in awe of him.

So I went out twice. The first time was to walk down to the noisy lorry convoy jammed on the main road at Fort Matilda, and see what it was carrying. Probably the trucks were carrying torpedoes. If they were French ones, strange contraptions with a bad safety reputation, I could accept that they were none of my business. But if they were British torpedoes, then they might be destined for one of our Polish destroyers or submarines based here, and I could make their delay very much my business. I could justify my existence.

While the drivers stared at my exotic uniform, I peered over the tailboards. No torpedoes. The lorries were carrying naval rations in crates. I went back to the office.

The second time I went out was around midday. No, a few minutes after. I meant to cross the main road at the foot of the hill and make for the gate of the torpedo factory. A British naval friend there, a lieutenant commander, had asked me to drop into the officers’ mess for lunch and a game of billiards, and I was going to leave a note explaining why I couldn’t come.

I do recall going down the headquarters steps and then stopping on the lowest one. Too much smoke in there, too many voices, and I needed to breathe for a moment. The Scottish air was cold, spiced with distant heather and bog-myrtle. Everything seemed to have gone quiet. The lorries had concluded their dispute and gone. The ships were silent; the argumentative gulls had slipped off the roofs and spun away across the water. The soldiers and children of the town behind me had stopped drilling and playing and had gone indoors for their dinner.

Even the little wind had died down. The quiet – and I swear that this is how I remember it – seemed to bulge, to become expectant. As if the universe had exhaled and now, very slowly, was beginning to draw breath again. What word or sign was coming? I thought of our enemy, that double-headed monster with its crooked cross and red star, and imagined it heaving again to its feet, filling its lungs with fire as it prepared to wade across the sea towards us.

I looked up at the sky. In my hand I was loosely holding a small brown envelope, my note to the lieutenant commander. Suddenly the envelope knocked my fingers apart and leaped to freedom. I stared after it, astonished. Then the sound came.

2

Jackie mounted the steps to the main door and took the key out of her coat pocket. But then she paused and looked around. She was doing a very, very bad thing, and she knew it. Running away home in the middle of the school day. Not asking Mrs Graham could she go, not telling anyone but just slipping out of the gate and off down the steep Campbell Street brae while all the other girls were lining up in the yard to go in and get their dinner – it was just bad.

Why did she go? It was because of her name and the big girls. Every day when they went out to the yard, Ina Ramsay pressed up against her and said: ‘O my, it’s Jacqueline! O my, and how is Lady Jackie Jackass the day?’ And her gang, with their big chests wobbling in their jerseys, would squeal with laughter. Today Jackie had hidden in the toilets for as long she dared. Mother and Uncle Mike, the Polish officer-lodger, always said: ‘Remember, you’re as good as they are. Just you tell them to get away and mind their manners, and they’ll back off.’ But being named Jacqueline, and wearing spectacles, and being clumsy and only nine years old, meant that she exactly wasn’t as good as they were. So today, when she came out into the yard and saw Ina and the gang over by the tree, and fancied them laughing when they made her say where she’d been, that was it suddenly. She took her gas mask case off its hook, because it must be carried at all times, and ran.

She would get a row from Mother, a bigger row from Mrs Graham, something much bigger than a row, because running away from school was enormous, unforgivable. Even the joy of racing down Campbell Street, feet taking over so she thought she mightn’t be able to stop, made it worse. That joy would need paid for, too. Yes, she would get it. Nothing would be the same again.

Union Street, when she got there, was different. At this time of day it had become a place Jackie scarcely knew; the normal shadows were wiped away, the granite setts shone emptily. The Dunrod Dairy was closed for dinner. Nobody was about. But as she approached the house, something pale moved. The huge dirty-white tom cat with red eyes, the cat which belonged to nobody but which was said to kill wee dogs, jumped off a wall and slouched past her. Jackie dreaded this creature. But today she felt a sordid recognition coming from it: another evil-doer.

She slid the key into the lock. It wouldn’t go. She pushed it harder until it clicked and then she turned it. The world blew up. Something slugged her body, knocking her sideways down the steps. A sound which began as a deafening crack, the sky splitting, swelled into an insufferable roar which made her clutch her head; she felt the stone house above her heave and dance. Dust filled her mouth, and even with eyes shut, she sensed things flying back and forth, skittering and smashing.

The sound died into echoes rumbling off distant hills. Jackie spat out dust. Then she tried to stand up, but her legs wouldn’t hold her and she sat back on the step. A coping stone floated down to the pavement in front of her and silently flew in pieces. She thought vaguely: here’s what I should do, and pulled open the cardboard gas mask case, but her fingers were shaking so much that the floppy mask slid out of her hands. She forgot about it. There was a loud singing in her ears. Was this the punishment?

After some while, she managed to get up. Union Street was twinkly with broken glass, the smooth pavements hidden by tree branches, dustbin lids, fragments of wood and stone. Bits of paper were drifting to the ground. People were coming out of their doors, running and calling words she couldn’t hear.

She looked up at her house. The main door was wide open, swinging. The downstairs window was smashed, and little darts of glass were still falling from somewhere upstairs. A man in a blue uniform with a brown steel helmet was standing in front of her shouting. She couldn’t hear what he was saying, but he looked very angry with her.

When he pointed at the house and grabbed her arm, she tried to say: ‘I never meant it, I didn’t know.’ But perhaps the words didn’t come out aloud. The angry man dragged her towards him. She broke away and started to run down Union Street, her good shoes stumbling on the debris. She ran across Ardgowan Square and past the Tontine Hotel, where a crowd of officers in all kinds of uniform had swarmed out of the bar on to the pavement. Several of them shouted at her, but she kept running. Near Nelson Street, she tripped and cut her knee, blood mixing with the dust on her leg.

More and more bewildered people were gathering and standing in her way. An old man came out of a close and said: ‘Poor lassie, come in the hoose till I sort your knee.’ He put out a hand. She smacked his fingers away and ran on.

*

What Jackie was doing was what I had always done. I kept running for so many years, starting when I was a child, an only child like Jackie, in Poland. My mother constantly – my father only regularly – used to tell me that you can’t run away from difficulty or from bad deeds or half-finished decisions. They will travel with you, they said, and climb through the window to be with you wherever you go. But I believe exactly the opposite. The train begins to move, the abyss between the ship and the quay suddenly gleams, the undercarriage thumps into the wings of the climbing aircraft, and there begins a solo wheels-up party for the escaper. The baggage, unlabelled and unclaimed, remains behind. Somebody will eventually loot it, pressing their face into those beautiful but well-worn shirts. Let them.

So I am an escapologist, and a proselytising one. This Scotland is supposed to be a Protestant country, where people are taught that they can be born anew, sinless, clutching a white stone with a new name writ thereon. And yet it’s just these Scots who assume that they aren’t on the list for rebirth. Only a few know how to escape without a struggle or a lifetime of guilt.

The others need to be taught. Just go! Don’t wait to tie up those loose ends, don’t spend years choosing which photograph or budgie cage to take and which to leave behind. Don’t waste time buttoning yourself into your conscience; don’t brood on how what’s coming is only what you deserve. The enemy have reached the bridge; they are just the other side of the wood; in five or ten minutes they will be here. You can still make it. Go!

With me, the skill came early. I ran away from school when I was eleven, because I considered the reverend father-teachers stupid. Home was forty miles away, but I walked through the woods by day and in the evening took a ride on a peasant’s cart. Six years later, I ran back to the old city where the school was, because I couldn’t stand the hypocrisy – as I saw it then – of my father, pumping out cloudy left-wing opinions while being fed, waited on, dressed and driven by semi-literate servants whose own families lived like animals. In the city, where I consented to live in a small flat owned by my mother, I began to study law.

The next escape was from a pretty, merry girl. I was alarmed to discover that my parents knew Wisia’s parents and thought that she would be good for me. But in spite of that, we became engaged. One summer afternoon in my flat, I persuaded her into the bedroom. She smiled a warm, hospitable smile as if I had asked her to cook me one of her special omelettes, and she let me undress her. I got into the bed. Then I saw her kneel down naked at the bedside, cross herself and mouth a little prayer to Mary for forgiveness.

She jumped up, laughing happily and climbed into bed. But no, I had already escaped. No to that future, that closing trap! All lust had gone. I said that I was suddenly feeling ill. She dressed again, and – full of concern – went out to look for some cachets Faivres, the chic imported painkiller in those days. When I heard the main door bang downstairs, I kicked my way into my clothes, dropped some books, my razor and my diary into a bag, ran to the station and took the express train to Kraków.

It was a year or so later that Germany and Russia, the Nazis and the Bolsheviks, together invaded my country. My country! Where is it now? When was it? Nowhere and not now. Of course there is a Poland again today, even a smart successful post-Communist one. But it is not the land I escaped from or, to be more honest, which I fled from and lost.

I was brought up in the east, in a borderland which used to be called Volhynia. To me, a Poland which is nothing but Catholic, Polish-speaking Poles (without Ruthenians and, above all, without Jews) is not my country. That place which I remembered began to vanish when our Jews, in their poverty and prophetic dignity, were driven away to be slaughtered. A Fourth Partition once again tore the ‘Poland’ page out of the atlas, and my own eastern borderland was seized and swallowed by the Soviet Union. The Polish families in those lands were deported in cattle trains to the east, where some were murdered by Gulag guards and very many more died as slaves. Unknown to me, the deportations began while I sat day-dreaming by my Clydeside window.

My parents were small aristocrats – petty nobility, bonnet lairds – with liberal ideas. They became isolated from their peers because my father became noisily anti-clerical, entertained divorced couples as house guests, had ostentatiously many Jewish friends and advocated radical land reform. None of that helped my mother and father when the days of doom arrived.

I went to see them in my army uniform a few weeks into the war, in mid-September 1939. They repeated absurdities they had heard on the radio, for instance that six hundred British aircraft had arrived to defend Warsaw. I told them to get out fast, before the Germans arrived. They said there was no petrol. I said that I could go to the nearest army unit and get them enough petrol to reach Kraków. They pretended not to understand me, and fetched up a bottle of French wine in my honour. I became angry, to a degree I find hard to explain, and shouted that they must bury all alcohol, or the soldiers would get drunk and burn the house. They laughed indulgently. Three days after I had gone, the Germans came into the district, stayed for a week and then handed it over to their Soviet allies advancing from the east.

I know my parents left the house then, but I never saw them again. Somebody, a cousin, claimed many years later that he had seen my father standing in a file of convicts, on a Russian railway station close to the Arctic Circle. Apart from me, nobody now alive remembers them.

Perhaps this all suggests more attachment to the past than is appropriate for an escapologist. Don’t misunderstand me. The landscape I knew as my own was pre-modern, semi-feudal; round us, a small number of mostly Polish landowners employed Ruthenian-speaking villagers who scarcely knew what to do with a radio set or a bottle of shampoo. Their children were scabby, barefooted. In winter, we ran a porridge kitchen behind the stables, one meal a day, for children under ten.

Often I was made to help, dishing the stuff out with a giant iron ladle or chasing hungry dogs out of the yard. What I dreaded was the women who sometimes snatched my hand holding the ladle and tried to kiss it. But the moment my parents left, between the Germans pulling out and the Russians taking over, the same villagers broke into our house, threw everything out of the windows and set it on fire.

That was the world I escaped from, as a boy. Escaped? No, here again ‘fled’ is a better word. But in this case, baggage ‘unwanted on voyage’ has managed to track me down. I haven’t ceased to dream. I ride through the forests, or across the open fields of barren, sandy soil. I drive my boot deep into the snow behind the house, hearing the sound it makes which is like a raven’s croak. Sometimes I dream of waking in my own bedroom, where a fresh glass of tea is smoking on the table by the window, its saucer leaving a little disc of vapour on the shiny wood.

I also dream of that old city where I was a student. Often I find myself looking down on it from a high hill and about to utter some prophecy, maybe some lamentation for a Jerusalem coveted by all and lost to all. But my father and mother have never returned to me in dreams, never, although I would quite like them to.

Home? I have none. I soon became homeless, and then for a long time stateless. One lives in so many places. But sometimes a hut inhabited for a week with many others is clearer and dearer in memory than an apartment lived in for years.

Long ago, when I first got to know Jackie’s mother in Greenock, we used to spend hours facing each other and teasing each other across the kitchen table. Once Helen asked me which word brought tears to my eyes. The game was to shut your eyes, say the word out loud and then repeat it to yourself over and over until something did or did not begin to happen. ‘Mother’ didn’t work. I tried ‘Freedom’ and then ‘Poland’ and ‘Polska’. No tears.

I tried ‘Love’: still nothing. Helen put another sugar lump into her tea, and stirred. When I said ‘My Country’ and to myself ojczyzna, something twitched. But when I said the English word ‘Home’ a few times, my throat suddenly tightened; I saw a child lost in a forest, a fluttering bird whose nest has been taken away. I quickly opened my eyes. She was biting the corner of her lip and watching me. ‘But I don’t have a home, I don’t need one.’ I stood up and walked around the kitchen; it was cold in there.

To tell how I came to Scotland, I must return to 1939. No, no account of ‘my war’. We did our best. I was with the artillery until we ran out of shells and became infantry. Twice we stopped retreating and counter-attacked. But then the panzers would be behind us again, closing our way out. Their aircraft came at us every day as the sun rose. We had been driven back to the outskirts of my university city when we heard that the Soviets had invaded Poland from the east. By now, the twenty men originally under my command had become six. Three chose to go back to their villages. The other three escaped with me across the Romanian frontier, where we were interned.

Making my way from Romania to Paris, where our government and high command were regrouping, took a little time. My hope was to join the Polish army being formed in France. But headquarters selected me to go to Britain as a liaison officer, to be attached to the French naval forces based in Scotland.

I protested: ‘Why me? I am not even in the navy! Most of our navy escaped to Scotland back in September – why can’t one of their officers do this?’ I was told: ‘Because they are too few and much too busy. Because you speak nice French and are wasting it on mam’zelles. Don’t question orders!’

When I reached Scotland, which turned out not to be part of England, it was in the middle of the coldest winter in memory. Big snow and ice were nothing new to me. But this was a damp, bitter chill which waterlogged one’s very bones. The British, or at least the Scots, seemed not to have heard of central heating.

In Greenock, I was billeted in a tall stone house on Union Street, with an immense view over the Clyde estuary and the anchorage called the Tail of the Bank. There was already a shortage of coal. Nothing burned in the open fireplaces, except a curious gas contraption, made out of fireclay batons, which was ignited only briefly at breakfast time.

I went to bed wearing white seaboot stockings and slept under a British naval greatcoat. In the morning, while it was still dark, I would be woken by the rumble of iron-tyred cartwheels over the granite setts in the street and the hammer-beat of iron-shod hoofs. Then I would get up, wash in a basin of cold water and go downstairs for breakfast. One greenish gaslight burned in the hall and spread a melancholy scent.

The others would be up already. The house belonged to Mrs Melville, a widow, who regulated the breakfast tea and kept the toast within bounds. Her son Johnston, Helen’s husband, wore a naval reservist’s uniform and spooned up his porridge quickly. Johnston was youngish, my age, with slicked-down red hair. He never spoke to me at breakfast, and left for his office with a muttered word to his mother and a nod to Helen. Jackie, wearing her school clothes, got a spoonful of sugar or sometimes a daud of treacle with her porridge. It was always Helen, never her grandmother, who went for Jackie’s sugar from the kitchen. Jackie was the next to leave, sweeping a jotter into her school bag. ‘Your gas mask, Jackie!’ It was always Mrs M, never Helen, who reminded her.

That left the three of us. As the main door banged shut, Mrs M would turn up the wireless news, quite loud, so that nobody could talk. Helen would rise and take the plates into the kitchen. The plucky Finns were setting about the Russians. The Japs were setting about the Chinese. British destroyers were showing the Jerry navy who ruled the waves, but Poland had sunk without trace. Sometimes I thought that my uniform was its only relic, and I was the only survivor of an Atlantis which had vanished with all its people a thousand years before. Mrs Melville, seated before her final cup of tea, tried not to look at me. She behaved as if my presence, festooned with strange lanyards and badges, was a vulgar prank. There were bad days when I wondered if she was right.

When I first moved in, I was underemployed until the French found a desk for me to occupy at Fort Matilda. So Helen and I began to talk. Her mother-in-law would leave the house after breakfast, to visit a relation or do some messages or other. Helen would make a fresh pot of tea, we would sit down again at the table and I would pull out a packet of duty-free British cigarettes.

At first, it was ‘teach me English – correct my accent’. I even wrote words down, offered her a few shillings for an hour of language.

I remember well why I did this. It was a conscious decision, but it sprang from a sudden impulse of caution. Teaching, keeping a table between us. Something to transact, something regular but regulated, which would end with a glance at a watch and a pleasant smile.

We had met the day before, in the afternoon, when she came into the kitchen, swinging a bag. She had been to the fishmonger’s. I was standing awkwardly in the middle of the floor, a very foreign figure in my uniform cape and long knee-boots.

‘So this is our Pole.’

‘So it would seem,’ said Mrs M from her chair by the range. My explanation about what sort of Pole I was had failed to charm her.

Helen took out a moist bundle wrapped in newspaper and laid it on the table. Then she looked up at me. I noticed that she had small blue eyes turned down at the outer corners, eyes you might imagine belonging to a sailor who spent time peering into the wind or laughing. Then I noticed something about myself: I was coming alert in a very familiar way. I was searching my small English vocabulary for a phrase to keep her looking at me until I could coax her