Two weeks before Poland

My husband dragged out the suitcases today and I said, “But we’re not leaving for two weeks.”

In his usual charming and gentle way, he just shrugged and pointed to mine as well.

We are both excited. And with the itinerary locked in and the suitcases now sitting in the way of everything for the next fortnight, I knew it was time to kick-start this blog.

So here I am.

And for those of you who know me, you will know this blog is really just an extension of things I have loved for as long as I can remember.

While I mostly reserve my fictitious ponderings for grandchildren, writing courses, competitions, or the page itself, my imagination knows no bounds when given half a chance.

I do not remember a time in my life when I was not drawn to stories. True and untrue. Family stories, history, novels, scraps of memory, invented lives, other worlds. All of it.

Perhaps, as a lonely only child, stories found me early and gave me both company and escape. Maybe that is part of it. Maybe not.

But writing, reading and imagining have always felt like home to me.

Some people love to bake. Some feel most themselves with their hands in the garden or with paint on a brush.

For me, it is words.

This is my happy place.

I write mainly for the pleasure of it, though pleasure hardly seems a big enough word. It feels more like climbing onto a magic carpet and being carried far and wide into other worlds, where characters and places invite me in and show me their lives through their own eyes and hearts. When the carpet lands and they come rushing at me with their stories, it can feel intoxicating.

But it can also be maddening when, in the middle of something momentous, they suddenly fall silent and I have to dig deep to find them again, refuel the carpet, and somehow get us all back into the air.

Still, there it is. A pull towards people, places, memory and story, and a need to give them shape on the page and see what they might become.

Since moving to Tasmania, I have returned to writing more seriously, both fiction and non-fiction, including short pieces for competitions and other projects.

So this blog, and this next chapter of travel, feel like a natural coming together of things I have always loved. Travel has always stirred me, and so has the urge to give people and places, real and imagined, a life on the page.

If any part of what I write here lands somewhere meaningful for even one reader, I will count that as a gift.

But even if it mostly just satisfies something deep in me that has been wanting to stretch its legs for years, that will be reason enough to begin.

And if parts of it bring discomfort, uncertainty or sadness to those who know me, I hope they will understand that this is written not to wound, but to honour the truth as I have come to know it.

Writing asks for courage, and sometimes, so does reading.

For me, that courage came in the form of wading through the complex mixed emotions of one of the biggest stories ever to find me.

Not a tidy little tale either, but a big, true, improbable one that I do not think I could have invented, even at my most imaginative.

In time, I came to realise I had gained far more joy and depth in my life, and that a part of me had always sensed something missing, waiting to be found.

At the heart of it all were three younger brothers I have come to love as though we have always known one another. Bound by a father lost too soon. And although I will never meet him, through them I have come to know him.

It was as if the universe gave me a giant nudge and said, come on then, get off your arse. If you want a story, I’ll give you one.

And dear God, didn’t it ever.

So many people have said to me over the years, “You should write about this.”

If ever there was a story to be told, this is it.

And I generally nod, smile, and offer one of my well-practised responses.

“Yes, I agree. One day I will. Maybe.”

Or, “Oh yes, I have plans. I want to write a book. A big book.”

Sometimes I even get quite carried away.

I describe the main characters, the time frame, the sweep of history I want to dive into. I talk about the women I long to bring back to life, women I never met and who never met me.

But they do not feel entirely unknown to me. We are linked not only by lineage, from mother to daughter to granddaughter, but by something deeper. Across different continents and vastly different eras of history, all three of us have known what it is to protect and raise our children largely alone.

But mine has been in a safe world, where I have had a voice. Theirs in lives that mostly allowed no such freedom.

They live in fragments already, in photographs, diaries, family stories, and in that odd pull of recognition that cannot always be explained.

And there is also the one man for whom, for reasons that go deeper than biology, I feel a profound love and compassion.

A man I somehow mourn, even though I never knew him.

He is perhaps the main anchor to my story. On some level, I feel his guiding hand, and through him an unspoken ode to the two women who protected him and loved him with a fierce maternal devotion that I understand only too well now that I am a mother, and more than that, a grandmother.

Across time and blood and mystery, I feel their love, their fear, their endurance, and their determination to protect the child at the centre of their world.

I am, after all, their most direct female descendant.

That alone leaves me feeling both daunted and deeply compelled.

Compelled not only to tell their story, or try to find their voices, but to honour what they endured, their sacrifices, their hardship, their courage, and the kind of endurance future generations in their bloodline should never have to know.

I am compelled by the enormity of my gratitude. Not just for my own existence, but for the lighter, safer life I have been allowed to live because they survived what they did.

Even now, as the world seems once again to stir with unrest, menace and old shadows, we still walk in lighter shoes and breathe safer air than those who walked before us.

And I am compelled by the knowledge of the countless people who never had a voice, or the chance to tell their stories, because the horrors of war swallowed them before they could.

If I write at all, I feel I must try to write for them too, for the remembered and the forgotten.

But I feel daunted too, maybe even a little terrified, not to do them justice.

Do I have the right?

Will I hurt anyone?

How will I ever know the whole story without having to imagine parts of it?

Is it acceptable to use a writer’s imagination with real people and real lives when the diaries and memoirs fall silent?

Or is that exactly what writers have always had to do: research richly, honour what is true, and then trust themselves enough to step into the gaps?

And yet here I am, seven years after finding that bag of secrets, and the tapestry of treasures inside it, still only peeking in from time to time, imagining the story, then closing it up again and finding another excuse not to begin.

The excuses have been many.

First: I’m not good enough as a writer.

Years ago, another writer I admire deeply, my daughter, an educated journalist, suggested I should study the craft properly first.

Fair advice.

Writing has always been one of the great loves of my life, and also one of my regrets: that I did not pursue it sooner, or more seriously.

But I listened. I learned. Tick.

Second: I’m too busy.

I told myself that one day, when I found myself living in a sleepy little rural town and semi-retired into a slower life — when my days were filled with picking apples and making jam, well, maybe then.

Well, rather astonishingly, that happened too.

Here I am in southern Tasmania, in a cosy office looking out onto a garden full of colour and odd little treasures I call Nanny’s Fairy Garden.

On the other side of our old farmhouse, the land rolls down towards the river, with mountains beyond, and rainbows, and sometimes even the aurora arriving unexpectedly like a gift to my literary heart.

Another tick.

Third: I need good health first.

My body and my mind. And, very much, my husband’s too.

That, too, has come. Not easily, not without struggle, but with time, perspective and peace.

Another tick.

And then there was the final excuse. Perhaps the biggest one of all.

I need to go to Poland first.

I have told myself this for years. That I need to walk the ground my father’s family walked. That I need to feel the place in my bones before I can do justice to the people whose lives have reached me through memoirs, diaries, photographs, letters and records, an extraordinary inheritance.

It has often felt as though they were reaching out across time to say, “What more can we give you?”

Go to Poland, then.

It is half your blood.

Go to the country of your father and grandfather, your grandmother and great-grandmother. Walk where they walked. Grieve where they grieved. Love where they loved. Eat the food, hear the language, stand among the ghosts and the beauty and the history that helped make you.

Feel the bloodline.

Feel the story.

Feel what it means to belong to something larger than you ever knew.

And now, with that journey only two weeks away, I have finally run out of excuses.

I will go to Poland. I will meet the brother I have not yet met. I will make this journey with Les, who has walked every step of it beside me.

I will take notes, photographs, impressions. I will pay attention. I will open my heart.

And I will begin.

Perhaps that is what this is.

Not the book itself, not yet, but the opening of the gate.

A blog. A place to begin. A place to record what is found, remembered, imagined and felt. A place to let the story reveal itself, rather than forcing it too soon into shape.

And there is Scotland too.

The writing itself is not new, and neither is the longing to travel to the places I most want to write about. Over the next two months, this journey will take me not only to Poland, but to Scotland as well.

That part of the trip matters deeply to both Les and me, through his father’s lineage and my mother’s, and through our shared connection to ancestral land in the hills of Scotland.

It also feels tied to the unfinished novel that has been languishing in my files, half-born and somehow lost. Unlike the women in my Polish story, those two women were born entirely from imagination.

But even imagined women deserve land beneath their feet, and it feels right to immerse myself in those settings, to walk that ground myself, so that they might finally be awakened on the page.

The secrets are old now. They matter less than they once did.

But the stories matter.

Family matters. Truth matters.

And I have come to understand that I belong to a much bigger family, and a much bigger story, than I ever could have dreamed.

This is my story, but it was never only mine.

And so, before this story goes any further, there is something else I need to say.

With a full and grateful heart, I want to thank my three younger brothers.

Thank you for finding me in the first place, for opening the door, and for welcoming me and my family so naturally into the family fold. Thank you, too, for the kindness, curiosity and trust you have shown me from the very beginning.

Thank you for entrusting me with our father’s records, his diaries, his photographs, his writing, his history, his Polish culture, and all the pieces that have helped me come to know the beloved father who raised you, and who is mine by blood too.

I do not say that lightly.

The father who raised me was, and always will be, my true father and another great man in my life. I carry him with me always, and I feel sure he would understand this journey and approve of it, as I believe he already does.

I am so deeply grateful for the kinship, love and loyalty that has grown over these past seven years. It could have been so very different.

Instead, it has been marked by decency, generosity and open hearts, and that still moves me.

And having had the privilege of meeting our father’s lovely wife, and the other extraordinary woman in this story, your own mother, it is no surprise to me at all that you are such decent men, or that the women in your lives are cut from the same cloth.

To my own mother, too, thank you.

Yours is an exceptional story in its own right. Thank God for your loving and open heart.

None of this has been simple. None of it has been easy. And yet, for all its complexity, it has also been miraculous.

I have felt you by my side with love and acceptance, and I know that from mother to mother, this thread that binds us knows no bounds.

Never has and never will.

And to Les. My husband. Thank you will never quite cover it.

You have walked every step of this by my side. You have steadied me, encouraged me, and helped me find the words when they would not come.

More than anyone, you have helped bring this part of me to life.

We are in this together.

I have also been richly blessed when it comes to fathers.

The man who raised me will always be my father, and my beloved stepfather has been a constant and loving presence in my life for many years. He is, in truth, the grandfather my children have known most deeply.

Family, in my experience, has never been confined to biology alone.

And finally, when all is said and done, I find myself pondering these things.

Science and spirituality.

Blood and family, not always the same thing, but both capable of running deep. Blended families, people tied by DNA, and others bound by something less measurable but no less real.

I have lived my whole life in that estuary of connection, where different currents meet and shape one another, much like the tides of the D’Entrecasteaux Channel flowing just beyond my window. Not everything that defines us can be neatly explained, and perhaps it does not need to be.

Who are we to judge the shape of such things, but rather to stand in gratitude and awe before them? Before science, before mystery, before the unseen workings of love, blood, time, chance, physics and spirit — all the known and unknown forces that help make us who we are, and bind our stories together in ways we can only partly understand.

And perhaps that is why it feels so incredible that, in two weeks, in Warsaw, I will meet my newly discovered older brother for the first time in our lives — in a country that binds us in ways far deeper than blood alone.

It feels remarkable that this meeting will happen only blocks from where our father lived as a small child, and from where, on 1st September 1939, the invasion of Warsaw set in motion events that would change the world.

It feels right, too, that this is where we should meet, and begin to learn more about the man who fathered us both and to come together in the country that meant so much to him feels profoundly right.

A hug will definitely be in order.

Probably some tears.

Some moments do not need much more said.

But write I will.