Monica

From Bardo to Paradise

‘Where are you from?’ It’s a simple enough question. Right up there with ‘what’s your name?’ or ‘what do you do?’ Whenever you get into conversation with someone new at a dinner party, these are the staple questions. I guess that knowing the answers helps people to frame an idea of who you are, your deeper identity

Okay then. My name is Monica Devilliers. You may even have heard of me. I was the woman behind the fashion label Monica. I sold the business decades ago, but back in the 1960s it was a chic little fashion house where hip young things would shop for the latest trends. I was quite a big name in my day, but my route there was neither traditional nor easy.

Monica Devilliers. Or was that Monia Kowalska?Or Monique. In my lifetime, I have been known as all three. I still am, depending on who I’m talking to.

What about where I come from? The easy reply would be ‘London’. Sometimes I allow it to get as complicated as, ‘Well, I grew up in South Wales, but these days I live in Chelsea.’ But it’s a question I always used to struggle with. ‘How long have you got?’ I usually wanted to reply. ‘Do you mean now? Most recently? Where I grew up? Where I was born?’

People close to me know that I grew up in a small mining village in the South Wales valleys. But that is just a tiny part of the story.

Back in the summer of 1966, when my doctor told me I was pregnant, the news knocked me for six. Not because I didn’t want children; rather, the prospect of having a child forced me to think about my own childhood. I had hidden from the demons from that time of my life for many years.

I was born 21st January 1938, in the tiny little village of Les Baudrats, near the mining town of Montceau-les-Mines in Burgundy, central France. So I must be French then, right? Not really. We need to go back further for the real answer. To before I was born even: back to a unique and turbulent moment in European history, and to an obscure village that found itself, unwittingly, caught up in it.

Today, it is difficult to fully appreciate the impacts of theFirst World War. France, for example, was officially on the winning side of the war, but when she tried to pick up as an industrial nation, she could not. There were simply not enough men left to work in all the factories, the steel works, and particularly the coal mines which fuelled them. Factory machinery lay quiet, blast furnaces cooled, ships were left in their moorings, trains in their sheds. To say nothing of heating for homes, factories, offices and municipal buildings. Without coal, you could not function.

Meanwhile, on the other side of Europe, another nation with deep wounds to lick was Poland. Poland had a proud history as a nation in its own right, but for just over a century before the First World War, it had been non-existent, partitioned up between the Russians, the Prussians and the Austro-Hungarians. It is a period of Polish history known as ‘The Partitioning’ or ‘The Annexation of Poland’. But throughout this century of subjection, the Polish people never lost their sense of identity. They maintained their language, their culture, their history and their traditions. Everyone had to learn two languages: Polish and German or Polish and Russian. They were always confident that, one day, they would somehow re-emerge as a proud nation.

But for now, they had nowhere on a map to point to and call Poland. They were just like the Israelites of the Old Testament (an analogy that was not lost on them) – only, sadly, they were to have no Moses to lead them from captivity.

During the war, a lot of fighting had taken place in what was notionally Poland. Towns and cities had been razed to the ground and millions slaughtered. Unlike France, however, there was no pre-war normality that anyone could look forward to when it was all over. The country had been little more than a colony for over a century. During that period, it had fallen behind other nations, who had grown much more industrialised, and it was now a very poor relation to the rest of Europe. What little infrastructure that existed had been designed to serve its former masters. It was disjointed, outdated and not designed with the future of a new nation in mind.

Yet suddenly this was a new nation. As part of the post-war treaty with Germany, Poland was once more a nation in its own right. The second Polish Republic had been born. This was far from a steadying development for thePolish people, however. Over their long century of occupation, Poles had dreamed of independence, but when it came, it was not everything it was cracked up to be. Within a year of the First World War ending, Poland was already at war again, with both Czechoslovakia and Ukraine, in disagreements over sovereignty of territories and borders. The fledgling Polish government frequently collapsed or was dissolved, as different political factions fought for control. Meanwhile, the people in the provincial and rural backwaters starved.

One such backwater was a small historic town near the Czech border in the former Prussian-controlled partition of south western Poland, a crossing point on the Eastern Neisse river called Bardo. With a population of under a thousand, in any other part of Poland, Bardo would probably have been regarded as a village, and a small village at that. But all these things are relative, and in that part of the country, even such a speck on the ground as Bardo served as an administrative centre.

For the last 100 years, the governing Prussian authorities had called it by its German name, Wartha, but no one who lived in Bardo ever took after them. Bardo was a pretty little town, and its inhabitants were all very proud of it. It had a picturesque town square, edged with tall mediaeval town houses, and a historic bridge dating back to the fifteenth century. In its day, this bridge had put the town on the main trading route between Prague and Wroclaw, and from there to Warsaw and all the other cities of Poland. The town was also the seat of a historic monastery and basilica commemorating the miracle of the visitation of the Virgin Mary. In the Middle Ages, this had made it a destination for pilgrimage. Religion was a very important part of life in Bardo.

If you head down a dirt track which starts on the riverbank opposite the southern edge of the town, after no more than a mile, in the shade of densely forested hills, you will find a small hamlet made up of three farms and a scattering of cottages. Those wooden cottages once housed the labourers who worked on those farms. It is in one of those cottages that my story begins. Both my grandmother and my mother were born there, and possibly many other descendants before them.

The interior of the cottage was very spartan, made up of one living room and one bedroom where the whole family slept. There was a wood burning iron stove in each room, but these were painfully inadequate against the cold that characterised much of the year. The air inside both rooms was always heavy with damp and chill. All the stoves seemed to do was make it smoky and smelly into the bargain. In the summer, though, the character of the cottage and the surrounding countryside changed dramatically. It was a very beautiful setting.

Leaving the coldness and harshness of winter to one side, it sounds peaceful, idyllic even. However, river crossing points on major routes near national borders have always been strategically important, and this is especially true in eastern Europe, where, for much of history, national borders have only ever been drawn in light pencil. As a result, over the centuries, Bardo was constantly getting sacked, invaded, burned to the ground, bombed or just basically flattened in whatever way was most fashionable at the time. The true miracle of Bardo was not so much the visitation of the Virgin, but simply the fact that it was still standing to commemorate the event.

My granny, whose name was Alinka, lived in a cottage with her own parents, Sophie and Josef, and her husband Zarec. They had two sons, Pawel and Michiek. My mother, Jasia, was not born until 1920. She was the archetypal war baby. During peace time, the family could only be described as peasants, farm muscle living on the whim and benevolence of their landowners; during the war, they were cannon fodder.

Expectations were very different back then. It was considered a good year if everyone in the family survived the winter, or made it through whatever diseases or food shortages might at any given moment be sweeping through the town. It was a very meagre existence, right on the edge. During theFirst World War, Bardo was heavily shelled, and many buildings were in ruins. In our family, Zarec, Josef and Alinka’s two brothers had all been conscripted into the German army and sent off to the Eastern Front to fight the Russians. The fighting had been ferocious, and the casualties sky high.

Things were not much easier back home. Alinka had to find ways of feeding the family, and that was getting harder and harder the longer the war went on. Any food that was available was diverted out to the troops on the front line. The livestock from the surrounding farms had gone virtually immediately after the war broke out. This meant that there was no money coming in either. Mind you, even if there had been, there would have been nothing to spend it on. The family had to survive on what they could grow themselves in very poor soil. In the spring and summer, that was just about feasible, but wintertime was cruel, and the winter of 1918 especially so. My uncles, Pawel and Michiek, became terribly malnourished. Already of a slight build, Michiek in particularly suffered badly. He was still skinny even when I knew him as an adult. These were years where growth and bone development were at a crucial stage, and that year of virtual starvation left Uncle Michiek with a limp for the rest of his life. Pawel was always a big lad, much more powerfully built and a few years older than his brother, so he had more resilience about him.

My great grandmother Sophie also became very ill, her resistance no doubt lowered by malnourishment, catching a fever in the late summer of 1918. She was bedridden, too weak to walk, and as the fever took its grip, she became unable to hold down food of any kind. She held on until the end of the war, no doubt hoping she would get to see her husband again, but that was not to be. Pretty much as soon as the armistice was signed in November, she passed away.

Near the end, Alinka, my grandmother, was sitting by the side of her bed. Alone in the room with her mother, all she could hear was the patient’s breathing, irregular and unrhythmic. ‘It’s like I was sitting with her in a cellar with the door closed,’ she remembered in later life. She could sense how every breath was becoming harder and harder to take. The sound of the breathing grew deeper, like her mother was moving further away, even though she remained lying in the bed next to her. Without her realising it, Alinka’s breathing started to mimic her mother’s, growing deeper, ragged, slowing… Until it stopped completely. Alinka caught herself not breathing, and realised her mother just was not there anymore. She could see her, but her body was, somehow, visibly empty. Her soul had left its body – that was unmistakable.

For about twenty minutes, Alinka just sat there by the bed, still holding her mother’s hand. She could feel nothing coming back. No grip, no feeling, just the weight of her bones. She cried for about an hour before leaving the room, then went straight to the priest.

Apparently his first question was how she was to pay for the funeral. The only things the family had of any value were a broach and some small bits of jewellery that had belonged to her now dead mother. She handed it all over to him and, would you believe it, was grateful he accepted it. Sadly, this began a regular pattern with my granny. In so many ways, she was the wisest and most intelligent woman I ever knew, but there was something about the Catholic Church that always blindsided her logic. The family were on the edge of starving to death, and the only objects of any value in the house, she gave to the damned priest. And what is worse, the priest accepted them, knowing full well that the family were starving, and that they had nothing to buy food with.

Alinka had the thankless task of writing to her father on the frontline to tell him the terrible news. Not knowing what impact it might have on him, she prayed every day at the basilica, as she had with her mother when she had been alive. Now her companions in prayer were the other women of the town; they all prayed that their families would be delivered from the horrors of war. But Alinka was never to see either of her brothers again. Both were killed in action in some meaningless skirmish, fighting for a cause they did not understand, for a country they neither belonged to nor cared anything about. Alinka only found out what happened to her brothers when her father and her husband returned from the war. No one in the German authorities had felt they owed the family an explanation of how or where they had died, so no letter or telegram had ever been dispatched. What do two more dead Polish peasants matter to the Kaiser? Like I say: cannon fodder.

The morning Zarec and Josef returned from the war was misty and late in the year, the sun rising later in the day so that, while Alinka was drawing water from the well, the light was still quite low. She looked up momentarily and could make out two men in uniform walking down the track towards the hamlet. She dropped her bucket on the floor, letting the water spill as she ran up the track to meet them. She barely dared to hope. As she got closer, she could start to make out their faces through the mist, and she called to them excitedly. ‘Papa! Zarec!’

Her father dropped the bag he was carrying from his shoulders and held out his arms to embrace her. ‘Moj Koteczek,’ he said to her, as she ran into his arms. It means‘my little kitten’ and it was the name he had called her since she’d been a little baby. She had been a busy, curious child, interested in everything, and the name had stuck.

Zarec just trudged on, not even stopping to acknowledge her. She and her father chattered all the way back to the cottage, with Zarec a few paces ahead of them. At that point she had not asked about her brothers. For some reason she just assumed they would be joining them later on. She sang to herself while preparing a dinner for the family. There wasn’t much, but there were enough vegetables and potato to make a soup, so that’s what she did.

The bombshell about Alinka’st wo brothers didn’t drop until the family were all seated at the table to eat dinner. ‘Have you heard from either of them?’ she had asked excitedly. There was a protracted silence. Neither her father nor her husband could look her in the eye. Her face dropped and a tear formed. She could not help herself. Before either of them could say anything, she had run out of the cottage into the night air. She sat under a tree on the edge of the hamlet and buried her head between her knees to cry for their loss. She hadn’t truly considered it possible that either of them would die. Maybe it had been their youthfulness or their optimism when they had left. For whatever reason, this news could not have been more of a surprise to her.

Alinka and the family had all hoped that, once the war was over, life would become more manageable. The men would come home from the front, the farm would once again have livestock that needed feeding and tending, there would be work, money coming in and food on the table. But living in Bardo, that was not to be. No sooner had Zarec and Josef returned from the First World War, having relinquished their call up to the German army, than they found themselves conscripted into the newly formed Polish Armed Forces, and were off fighting Czechoslovakia.

Alinka often commented that, looking back, she did not know how she ever coped with it. She had lost her mother and become aware of the loss of her two brothers in the space of a few months. She then had to watch as her father and husband returned from one war just to go straight back out to fight in another –and just as winter was taking a grip. She had to carry with her the very real fear that, if they did not return, she and her two boys might not survive. She knew how close to death they had already been, how fragile her grip on survival was. She also knew that, if Zarec did not return, their two children made a remarriage unlikely.

Things in Bardo were bad. And there seemed little hope in them getting better any time soon.