Refugees and Me

 

 

Here's my dad, not long after he married my Leeds Irish mum, in the very late 1940s. I wrote about his wartime experiences and those of his family, in a book called The Last Lancer, currently out of print, with a revised edition due to be reprinted later this year. 

Britain has gone crazy over immigration.  All our media have gone crazy over immigration.  It's impossible to turn on the TV or radio, or pick up a newspaper, without getting the impression that the whole country has been flooded with threatening young aliens.

Every time I hear an interview with an angry man or woman advocating drowning or burning the incomers I think of my dear dad. It's not everyone, or even the majority, but as with all senseless and crass hatred, those are the ones that stick. 

Dad had been part of the Polish Home Army, the resistance, initially as a young courier in the Polish east, then in the Warsaw Uprising, followed by a spell in a German Labour camp, where he worked in the infirmary. This was followed, after liberation, by some time in Italy, in 'General Anders Army' - essentially part of the British army. 

There is no reference to his time in the Home Army in his official papers. This is hardly surprising, because people who had been in the resistance, returning to Poland in the post-war years, were often sent to Gulags, as enemies of communism. Stalin was no friend to Poland. My grandfather was dead at the age of 38, probably of amoebic dysentery, having been imprisoned by the Russians in some hellhole and then released to trek east. He is buried on the Silk Road. My grandmother  was believed to be lost, although many years later, the Red Cross facilitated a reunion. She had survived. I often think of her and so many other family members when I watch Doctor Zhivago  - each becoming 'a nameless number on a list that was afterwards mislaid.' Dad's much loved Aunt Ludka died in Bergen Belsen just before liberation. 

Under 'next of kin' on his army papers, Dad had written a Polish phrase that translates as 'closest family to nobody'. 

Julian Czerkawski came to England in 1946 to a Polish resettlement camp near Helmsley in Yorkshire, and was later demobbed to a job in a textile mill in Leeds. The choice initially was mills or mines, and dad chose a mill. He was an 'alien'. Years later, I wrote a poem about that term. You can read it at the end of this post. In my naivety I thought we might be past all that, during those years when we were members of the EU, but it seems that Britain will never ever be past all that. 

 The camps worked, largely because they were properly organised, that word 'resettlement' being the key, with language classes, gardens, healthcare, education and even visits to nearby halls for dancing. By the 1950s, there were some 250,000 Polish refugees here. Of course this wasn't handled by big private companies, milking the taxpayer for every last pound, which is perhaps why it seemed to work pretty well.  

Not long after that, dad met my mum, Kathleen, and was soon absorbed into her large Irish immigrant family. My nana at least knew all about prejudice. These days, people will tell me how much they liked the Poles. How they fitted in. Except that mum told of somebody saying 'Don't you think they should send all those Poles home?' to which my forthright mum replied 'Not really. Seeing as how I've just married one.' 

Neal Ascherson writes of a 'packed out rally in the Usher Hall in Edinburgh where a church minister was cheered as he abused Poles as scroungers and Papists.' 

Even after I was born, when we were living in a tiny, shabby, two room apartment in central Leeds, whenever a crime was reputedly committed by a 'foreigner', the police would come knocking. Often in the middle of the night. Or they did until one night my mum - with a new baby and a short fuse - went down and told them exactly what she thought of them. They never came back. 

Dad went to night school after work, studied, and eventually had a long and distinguished career as a research scientist, contributing to his community, especially once we moved to Scotland, in a great many ways. Today, people still make a point of telling me how much they liked him. 

But as I wrote in The Last Lancer, 'we became complacent. Brexit seems, in part at least, to have been facilitated by the same jingoistic resentments of incoming foreigners that caused people to scrawl "Go Home Poles" on walls in the post war period. The skewed perception that it is the poor who take jobs and houses from the poor.' 

We are not alone. There are problems with the rise of the far right all over Europe, and - to an even more alarming degree - in the USA. 

As brilliant historian Timothy Snyder wrote, 'Strongman rule is a fantasy. Essential to it is the idea that a strongman will be your strongman. He won't. In a democracy, elected representatives listen to constituents. We take this for granted, and imagine that a dictator would owe us something. But the vote you cast for him affirms your irrelevance. The whole point is that the strongman owes us nothing. We get abused and we get used to it.' 

I wish those intending to vote Reform in our next election would bear that in mind, but I'm not holding my breath. There will almost certainly be trouble ahead. 

ALIENS

I am small in springtime

on my father’s shoulders.

I can see everything even the

bald patches on the

heads of passing men,

a precarious and thrilling position.



My father’s hair is coal black and curly,

Polish hair as foreign as he is.

The word refugee is as familiar

to me as my own name.

I hold his ears for balance,

while he trots with me aloft.



My father’s papers proclaim him alien

which makes me half alien too.

Poland might as well be Pluto but

the iron curtain is real.

I see it sweeping across Europe

made of polished metal,

dividing kin from kin,

as unfathomable as space.



Small and safe on his shoulders

his hands steadying me,

I grip his ears and laugh.

We are what we will always be

to one another:

complicit and loving

alien invaders of

a mystifying new world.

From Midnight Sun, Collected Poems by Catherine Czerkawska

Dad on the right, looking into the camera.

What's In A Name?

I switched on BBC Scotland's Television News on Sunday morning to be met with the deep voice of a male Scottish newsreader mangling Iga Świątek's name. It's perfectly reasonable to ask 'where does the 'n' come from?' because unless you know about Polish diacritical marks - the technical term for the various squiggles that change the sound of a letter in many languages - the name looks as though it should be pronounced swiatek or similar.  Most of us know how to say Señora, even if it's written with an ordinary 'n' but in an unfamiliar language, we tend to ignore these marks if we're not set up with the right keyboard. I'm guilty of it too, although when I was writing The Last Lancer, I went through the final draft and reinstated them all. 

I'm usually very understanding about the difficulties of Polish pronunciation for English monoglots. But in this case, I was irritated enough to shout at the television. He didn't mispronounce it. He mangled it. And - given that she had just won the Wimbledon Women's Singles Final - her name had been on the news since the night before. He should have known. He could have asked his phone. I've just done it, and up popped a clear audio file. Given the ease of finding out the pronunciation of foreign words, it has become ill mannered not to try, given a little advance notice. But he simply couldn't be arsed. 

My own name is almost invariably mangled. I've spent my whole life reassuring apologetic people, and I honestly don't mind. I'm happy to answer to Catherine. And I know exactly what it feels like to be confronted with a spelling and potential pronunciation  I've never met before. After all, I worked in Finland for two years. But then I'm not a BBC announcer. 

My Scottish doctor pronounces my surname perfectly, without being prompted. And when the late great Ray Bradbury introduced my radio dramatisations of some of his Tales of the Bizarre many years ago (I did them along with the wonderful Brian Sibley) he pronounced my name properly as well.

But from my first day at school until - well - now, it has been challenging. I could have changed it, but I was damned if I was going to. One of my first publishers persuaded me to change the spelling, so that it looked a bit English, but it also looked ridiculous to anyone with even a little knowledge of Slavic languages and I changed it back as soon as possible. 

Now, it's increasingly a badge of being 'foreign' and although we seem to have passed through an all too brief period of that not mattering, once again, it does. My late biochemist dad was a refugee alien who, by the time he retired, had a 'double doctorate'. He had a PhD but he was also a Doctor of Science -  a higher doctorate, only awarded for significant and original contributions to a scientific field, usually at the peak of a fine career. In Germany, where they like to acknowledge such things, he was once called 'Doctor Doctor' which amused him. 

What he was never awarded, in spite of his popularity, the distinction of his work, the way in which he wore his learning lightly, his ability to engage with and to manage people, was the headship of his department in the Scottish government research institute where he worked for many years. That went to the man developing 'spreadable butter'. 

At the end of his career, he spent two wonderful years based at the IAEA in Vienna, touring the world as visiting expert in agricultural projects for developing countries. It was a kind of reward, I think, and he enjoyed it very much. It was also a small slap on the face to the authorities here who had baulked at promoting a foreigner. 

There is a weird kind of low key xenophobia in the British psyche. People like to pretend it isn't there, but it is. All my life, I've been aware of it, popping up when least expected, even in my own career as a writer. I once wrote a short story about it, called Mind the Gap. You can find it in my anthology A Bad Year for Trees. Almost all of the stories in that anthology have been published in various magazines or collections, and two of them have had another life as radio plays. Mind the Gap was turned down immediately and brusquely, given that I was an experienced and very well published writer and might at least have expected the courtesy of an explanation. I think it made the editor feel deeply uncomfortable. I certainly hope so. 

What's in a name? Quite a lot as it turns out. 

Days of Hatred

Yesterday the hideously xenophobic nature of England became all too clear. I don't often make political posts on here, but the deaths of 27 refugees in the English Channel elicited the kind of response on social media that made me, the daughter of a refugee myself, feel a deep despair for the country where I was born.

I can't see any way back for England now. I just can't. Scotland has a slim chance. That's about it. 

These were human beings like us, with hopes and fears. Every single person alive today in this (dis) United Kingdom is descended from an economic migrant. That means you. Even those of you proudly proclaiming your Anglo Saxon and Viking roots. Economic migrants all of you, searching for a better life. Without them, you wouldn't be here. 

These were refugees. They aim for the UK because their second language is English. We take fewer than any other European country. Many of them have relatives here. Many of them are young men, because few want to send elderly women and children across a continent in search of a new life. Some young families risk it. But who wouldn't, if they could, send their sons ahead, hoping for their safety and the possibility of a home and a future? 

What surprised me was that the very worst, the most racist, most disgustingly inhuman comments were on Facebook, rather than on Twitter, which generally tends to have something of the bearpit about it. Mostly they came from older men and women. A few were quite obviously bots. It's a fair bet that if you misspell country, but get all the long words right, you're not posting from the White Cliffs of Dover. But far too many weren't. Far too many were people who would otherwise consider themselves to be fine upstanding human beings. 

Dehumanizing others leads to catastrophe. 

Perhaps if the refugees dressed up as cats they'd meet with a bit more sympathy from the denizens of Facebook..  

Brexit, Bereavement, My Dad and Me.

For the first time since he died, back in 1995 - far too young at the age of 68 - I find myself with a sense of relief that my dear dad isn't around today. I'm especially glad he wasn't around on 31st January, to see groups of idiotic but dangerous xenophobes decked out in union flags, cheering as they burnt EU flags or jumped up and down on them in the mud, or told anyone with a 'foreign' appearance and a 'foreign' accent to go back where they came from.

My dad was a post war refugee alien and that made me half alien too. Proud citizen of nowhere, me. He came to Yorkshire via Monte Cassino in Italy, and the dreadful battle that was fought there and that he survived.

When he married my Leeds Irish mum, he was marrying into a family that already knew a bit about prejudice and hatred. My nana's own grandmother had come to Yorkshire fleeing famine, at a time when the incoming Irish were both exploited and insulted in equal measure by the native population. They were accused of being filthy layabouts, 'coming over here' but stealing English jobs at the same time. The people who make those accusations never, then or now, seem to notice the contradiction at the heart of what they are saying.

'Don't you think they should send all those Poles back where they came from?' somebody asked my mum, in casual conversation. That must have been about 1949, well before I was born. 'Not really,' she said, never exactly a shrinking violet. 'Seeing as how I've just married one.' You can read more about that time here.

The truth was that there was nothing and nowhere for dad to go back to. His mother was missing. His father had been imprisoned by Stalin, along with so many Polish officers. Most of his extended family were dead, killed by Nazis or Russians. Released when Uncle Joe changed sides, but forced to trek east, my grandfather died of typhus and is buried in Bukhara on the silk road. 'Lancer Wladyslaw Czerkawski' it says on his grave.

Later, Churchill, Eisenhower and Stalin came to an agreement. It didn't involve much regard for Poland at all and doomed them to years of misery.  Dad's home was now in the Ukraine. All the borders had shifted. So if you try to tell a Pole that Scotland isn't a real country, you'd better remember that Poles never ever confuse state and nation. They know the difference all too well.

Nowhere to go back to. Dad with his parents.

Dad made the best of things. He was a hard working, clever, kindly man. His contribution to his adopted countries, England and then Scotland, which he loved, and the good he did, is not really the subject of this blog, but it is real enough. All these years later, I still meet people who tell me of the small but positive ways in which he influenced their lives.

All the same, he had enough experience of fascism, of the lies that are told, of the fear that is imbued, of the way in which people can be groomed into evil, to be able to say with absolute certainty 'It can and will happen anywhere, if the conditions are right.'

So he would have been sad and worried about our disunited kingdom, but he wouldn't have been remotely surprised. He would have seen the signs long ago. Today, I read a harrowing account from a young black woman travelling on a London bus at night. A group of white men boarded the bus and racially harassed any passengers that they perceived to be 'other' - black, foreign, Muslim. Everyone else looked away. Nobody dared to defend the victims. Nothing to do with them, was it? Not yet, anyway.

It happened before. But now, it has been legitimised and the elected government do nothing to challenge it. Instead we're treated to gung-ho flag waving, the validation of 'England for the English' (unless you're wealthy) and the myth of a united country.

All of which helps to explain why I wake up every morning with the feeling of living in a nightmare. It feels like a bereavement except that it is compounded by a sense of helpless rage. I'm certainly not alone. Scotland neither voted nor wished for this and it is being imposed on this nation without compromise and in the most contemptuous way possible.

Too many people are sleepwalking into the kind of fascism, here and in the US, that my wise dad said could happen anywhere. And he would say too, that large numbers of people wouldn't realise it was happening until it was too late to do anything about it, and maybe not even then. Every cult has its adherents who will go to their graves refusing to admit that they were duped.

It all seems so ordinary, so harmless.
'Evil comes from a failure to think. It defies thought for as soon as thought tries to engage itself with evil and examine the premises and principles from which it originates, it is frustrated because it finds nothing there. That is the banality of evil.'
So says Hannah Arendt.

The US has its own intractable problems. So do parts of the EU. Now we seem to be governed by banal but fundamentally (and openly) dishonest people from whom a rational person would hesitate to buy a used car, never mind a policy. So I'm left wondering, did people sit at home like this in pre-war Germany, making the best of things, not wanting to rock the boat, shrugging off each successive outrage, each official lie, reassuring each other that 'everything will be fine. Because they wouldn't do anything too bad, would they?'

Until ... what? A slow descent into totalitarianism - or the kind of chaos that will result when the whole project collapses under the weight of its own contradictions?

What interesting times we live in, to be sure.

Opening Pandora's Box - Brexit, Xenophobia, My Polish Father and Me

The day after the Brexit referendum I remember my husband saying 'they have no idea what they've unleashed.' To be fair, I don't think any of us realised what had been unleashed, although by now, many of us have a fair understanding.

I was born to a Polish father and an English /Irish mother, in smoky post war Leeds. A couple of weeks ago, I travelled to the Polish consulate in Edinburgh, carrying a sheaf of papers, including copies of my birth certificate, my parents' marriage certificate and dad's naturalization papers, as well as my own application for the restitution of the dual nationality I once had. The consul was polite and helpful; the process was fiddly but reasonably straightforward. It remains to be seen whether the application is successful and it could take some time - but the process is under way.

I had been thinking about doing this ever since the referendum, but it seemed wrong to undertake it purely to retain my freedom of movement in a post Brexit world, even though it was bound to be a consideration. In retrospect, I think I delayed for so long because I wanted to be sure that there were other, better reasons.

My dad came to Yorkshire with General Anders' army at the end of the war. He spent some time in a Polish resettlement camp, and then worked as a textile presser in a woollen mill, learning English and studying at night school. He didn't apply to become a naturalized Brit till the mid 1960s. By that time, we had moved to Scotland, where he was working as a senior research scientist. Because he would occasionally have to travel to the Eastern Bloc and they wouldn't be able to offer him protection there, the Home Office advised him to renounce his Polish citizenship. It meant that both my mother and I lost our dual nationality as well.

I don't know what dad felt about it, because I was young and didn't ask him. It was one of those questions that you only think about later. I still felt very Polish and can only assume he did too. We celebrated Christmas in the Polish way, and he would become a little emotional over old Polish Christmas carols, something I don't think my mother, who loved him dearly, ever fully understood. Later, it struck me that she simply wanted him to be happy, and because he was usually a cheerful, kindly man, any intimation of despondency upset her too. I visited Poland several times, met long lost relatives and eventually spent a year working at Wroclaw University, teaching English under the auspices of the British Council.

Back when my mum and dad were first married, there had been the odd instance of xenophobia. I wrote about these in my recent book, A Proper Person to be Detained: somebody remarking to my newly married mum that she 'thought they should send all these Poles back now'. The fact that throughout the early years of their marriage, whenever a crime was committed by anyone vaguely foreign sounding, the police would come calling, until my mum, tired of the midnight hammering on the door, went down and told them in no uncertain terms where they could go.

But as time passed, these seemed like increasingly isolated incidents.

Now that I reflect on it from a Brexit perspective, I can see that we weren't immune. My surname caused me problems at school and as a writer, and still does. I was told it would have been better if I had done as some Poles did, and changed it, but I defiantly refused to do it - and probably still would refuse to do it. When I occasionally suggested that I'd like to write about Poland in my fiction, I was invariably told that 'nobody would be interested'. Much worse though, was that my father - a biochemist - was repeatedly refused promotion. Repeatedly turned down for the headship of his department in the government research institute where he worked. This would have been acceptable if there had been no evidence of his expertise, but some years after his PhD, he was awarded a Doctor of Science degree. This is a higher doctorate whose fundamental purpose is to recognise excellence in academic scholarship. He was, in effect, a double doctor. He was popular with the staff and he had become an expert in his field, working in particular on ways of helping to set up sustainable third world agricultural projects.

He was the only person in his research institute with such a senior qualification not to be given promotion. In fact few of his peers had that qualification or international recognition at all. They were too busy working on commercial projects for inventing 'spreadable butter'.

He should have moved, but he loved this part of Scotland, loved his work and his quality of life, so he elected to stay. Nevertheless it rankled. Fortunately, before retirement, he was offered a prestigious attachment to UNO City in Vienna, where he and my mum spent two very happy years, and from where he travelled the world, working as a special scientific adviser. I still have correspondence from that time, from researchers worldwide who clearly admired him as much as we did. It was long after dad's death, that I finally understood, or perhaps admitted, what had been going on.

What had been going on was nasty, low key xenophobia. Impossible to prove or challenge. But present all the same.

Along with many other people, I've spent our years within the EU blithely supposing that suspicion of foreigners was a thing of the past. Or that at the very least it was dying out. I wonder now how I can have been so ridiculously naive. It hadn't died out at all. It had just gone underground. Temporarily. People may have found it socially unacceptable to admit to it, but many of them felt it all the same.

When I look back now, I remember the odd occasion where I heard tourists or migrants, speaking in their own languages in public places. Fascinated, I would try to figure out where they were from. But how could I not have noticed the hostile glances? Now I remember the young men emerging from the Polish shop in town, being accosted by a vitriolic old woman, shouting at them to 'get back where they came from.' Nobody intervening on their behalf except me. The English woman on a Spanish service bus, saying angrily 'You'd think they'd speak the language' to her companion. She expected the driver, in Spain, to speak English. The hideous exclamatory headlines in all the tabloid newspapers, the newspapers I didn't buy or read, and tried to ignore. The fact that my dad would occasionally say that fascism could happen at any time and in any place. All that it needed was for the conditions to be right.

You know, Pandora's Box wasn't really a box. It was a large storage jar. And in this case, the lid had been tipped for a long time. We just didn't notice. Every now and then, some right wing bloviator would give it a nudge. With his Brexit referendum, David Cameron lifted the lid clean off and out they all tumbled: xenophobia, prejudice, racism, hatred, bigotry and a host of other evils. Why did we imagine, even for a moment, that they had gone away?

I feel European because I am. For years, in response to 'where do you come from?' I've listed the complications of being English, Irish and Polish with a bit of Hungarian thrown in for good measure. But I've lived in Scotland for more years than I've lived anywhere else. Like so many much younger people, I'm happy being a citizen of nowhere, but if I can't have that, I'll settle for becoming a citizen of the places with which I feel most affinity: Poland and - with a bit of luck - a future independent Scotland.

As for my dad - I miss him more than I can say. I need his wisdom and his affection to guide me. But I'm very glad that he's no longer around to find himself on the shifting sands of prejudice all over again, to hear the alarming tales that I hear every single day now from EU citizens living in the UK: the jubilation over the ending of  free movement, the refusal of settled status to people who have lived and worked and paid their taxes here for forty or more years, the daily acts of bigotry, the lack of any recognition that when you characterise migrants as foreign invaders or - worse - as vermin, you are also talking about the neighbour who gives you fruit and veg from their garden, who feeds your cat when you're away, who chats to you in the street, whose child is friendly with your child.

It's no good saying 'oh but we didn't mean you.' I'm afraid you did. You did.

Over the past three years the cracks in what was once the United Kingdom have become gaping fissures. We're governed by men and women who lie as the birds sing. And the divisions in our society are now so deep that I doubt if they will be healed in my lifetime.

Xenophobia, Bad Behaviour and the Blame Game

I don't normally blog about politics, even though I have strong opinions (don't we all?) but sometimes politics and events in your home country overlap with the kind of character analysis you find yourself doing all the time as a writer and sometimes you just have to say something.

Way back in 1983, the Russians were accused of shooting down a passenger airliner, with great loss of life. It was one of those terrible incidents that could be attributed to a horrific set of coincidences - always much more likely to occur at times of international tension. The aircraft had strayed off course, and the Russian fighter planes claimed that they couldn't identify it as a civilian aircraft. Disaster ensued.

Our tabloids, of course, had a field day. I had only moved to this village some three years previously. And I had an Eastern European surname. It's my dad's name and I'm proud of it, so I always tended to use it professionally, even after I got married. But of course all Eastern European names sound the same to many people, and - going about my business on the quiet street where I live - I found myself the target for name calling and jeering from a group of young lads.

My husband happened to know and like the father of the chief culprits. He had a quiet word and it all stopped, as if by magic. And that was that.

The interesting thing though, is that those 'culprits' were not the chief culprits at all. They were invariably the fall guys. They are all grown up now, and they never really got up to any more than minor mischief. This is still a rural area, where farmers don't stand for any nonsense and everyone knows their neighbours. But the more I kept an eye on the dynamics of that group of lads, back then, the more obvious it became that the real villain, in a small way, was the neat, clever, good-looking, middle class boy whom everyone praised as being 'such a nice boy'. He would set up situations but when retribution struck, he was nowhere to be seen.

One example will suffice. From a distance, I saw him kick a football at a martin's nest, on the eaves of one of the old cottages, deliberately dislodging it and bringing it down into the street. A moment or two later, an irate householder emerged, to find the usual suspects, still hanging about looking guilty, while the real culprit had - as if by magic - melted into the scenery. He always contrived to do it, and for all I know, he may be doing it still.

He may have gone into politics, where he is still destroying lives, and then melting into the scenery, leaving those less cunning to take the blame.

A Post For Valentine's Day

This week, with Valentine's Day fast approaching, I'm writing about an old wooden coat hanger - the one in the picture above. It dates from the late 1940s, and it has, as you can see, the letter K burned onto it in poker-work. It's precious to me. I use it every day. You see my late dad made it for my late mum, and that's her initial on it: K for Kathleen. 

Theirs was a love story as intense as any you will read in a novel. Julian was Polish, from a wealthy family. They lost everything in the war, including (most of them, anyway) their lives. He came over with a tank regiment, spent some time in an army resettlement camp before demobilisation, and stayed on as a refugee because there was no place to go back to. Kathleen was a young woman with a Leeds Irish background. 

(You would not believe, or perhaps you would, how many people have recently asked me if he came to the UK as a 'prisoner of war'. But that's beside the point. I know people who did, and who also made a good life for themselves here.) 

My Leeds grandfather was an English Methodist called Joe Sunter. Except that the family were probably descended from Vikings and Joe, with his auburn hair, looked the part. The family had been lead miners in Swaledale throughout the 18th and 19th centuries, but had finished up in Leeds by way of Castleford, during the Industrial Revolution. Joe's mum had died young, and his dad had remarried. His stepmother wasn't very kind to the boys, so Joe and his elder brother George left home early, Joe to join the navy and George to join the army. George was killed at the very start of WW1 but Joe survived and married Nora Flynn, my grandmother, a shirtmaker. 

By the time my mother and father met (at a dance) and married, Nora was running a tiny stone floored sweet and tobacconist shop, next door to which Joe had an equally tiny fishing tackle shop - all within a stone's throw of the factories and mills of Holbeck. 

Mum and dad's honeymoon was in January, in Scarborough.

My dad, I realise, must have seemed impossibly exotic to my mum. He was dark, handsome, foreign and very charming. He was also, fortunately, one of the kindest men I have ever known. I don't think they stopped loving each other for a single moment. 

Dad began by working in a mill, went to night school and eventually became quite a distinguished scientist, but he always loved to make things. In fact I remember that his hands were the hands of a working man, rough and capable hands that could garden and construct things and build toys out of wood. The coat hanger, with its letter 'K', wasn't one of his more challenging efforts. But it was, somehow, like him, that he would take the trouble to decorate it, just for my mum. In the picture at the top of this post, the hanger is resting on a rather battered wooden blanket chest that used to be in their house and is now in mine - and dad painted that too. 

I've realised over the years that I often find myself writing what I call 'grown up love stories'. They aren't really romances and my characters don't always live happily ever after. Not all of them are good and not all of them behave well. But at the heart of the novels is, I realise, something positive, some recognition of the power of affection and kindness to work a little magic in the world. 

I used to think it would be enough. 

Now I'm not so sure. 

Inside 32 Whitehall Road in the 1950s. 

Back in those post war years when times were hard and my dad was labelled an 'alien', as though he had come from another planet, somebody said to my mum, 'I think they should send all those Poles back where they belong now, don't you?' 

'No, I don't' she said, forthright as only Kathleen could be. 'Seeing as how I've just married one!' 

Although in every other way I'm sad that mum and dad are gone, I find myself glad that they aren't around to see the rise of post-Brexit xenophobia, to hear tales of children being bullied for their Eastern European names, people being told to go back where they belong, the Home Office letters exhorting people to 'prepare to leave the country', the outrageous suggestion from some think tank that visas for EU migrants should be restricted to those working anti-social hours. 

Either we are all, as they say here in Scotland, 'Jock Tamson's bairns', or perhaps we should all consider going 'back where we belong' - if we can decide where we do belong.

My dad belonged to a part of Poland that is now in the Ukraine. His mother had Hungarian ancestry. My great grandfather James Flynn came from Ballyhaunis in County Mayo but he helped to build Yorkshire's roads. My grandfather belonged in the Yorkshire Dales and, long before that, in Iceland or Norway or whichever country his Viking ancestor set sail from, as an economic migrant. They were all, when you think about it, economic migrants. 

Dad always said that fascism could happen in any country, at any time and in any place. I think he was right. Nowhere is immune. But after all these years I didn't expect to feel the fear of it in my blood and bones, the way I feel it now, here in the UK.