Gabi Coatsworth

CONTEST WINNER

My father was stranded in England after World War II. So, he wasn’t an immigrant, exactly—he hadn’t made a plan to leave Poland for better things. I suppose, technically, he was a refugee.

What he had done, before the world went to war, was to leave his homeland in 1938 to work in the Polish consulate in Toulouse, France, for a year. He was an agricultural economist, and at 25, had no ties to prevent him from going.

While he was there, he bought his mother a porcelain bottle of Violettes de Toulouse perfume, shaped like a tiny watering can, intending to give it to her when he returned home.

But when Hitler marched into Poland, my father joined many of his compatriots who were living and working in France to form a Polish Army. They fought the Germans side by side with the French, only to find themselves backed up against the English Channel at Dunkerque, praying for a miracle.

They got one. Almost everyone was rescued and delivered to England by a flotilla of small fishing boats, dinghies, and yachts, which volunteered when the troopships couldn’t manage alone.My father arrived on the south coast, with only the uniform he stood up in, and the perfume for his mother, to be put on a train along with his comrades, bound for the north of England, where he trained as a paratrooper.

At the end of the war, Polish soldiers in Britain were offered a free (one-way) ticket to Poland, now an officially Communist country.

My father had met my English mother by then, and fallen in love. He was faced with a heartrending decision. To travel back to his family – parents, siblings and cousins, whom he hadn’t seen for six years, in the knowledge that the Polish Government would be unlikely to let him leave if he did. Or to stay in Britain until the Communists left.

He decided to stay in Britain. It wasn’t easy. His homeland now had a new name – the People’s Republic of Poland, and his old consular passport was of no use. After he married my mother, he applied for a British passport, hoping this might let him visit Poland, but the British wouldn’t grant him one.

My father became a stateless person and he died sixteen years later, without a country, and without seeing his mother again. When I traveled to Poland at the age of ten, I delivered the Violettes de Toulouse to her, not understanding the significance of her tears, until many years later. And when I returned again to see the family in 2018, my cousins presented me with the bottle I’d last seen in 1960.

It's empty now, but that little watering can is full of the scent of history.