"Housekeeper or housewife?" the soldier asks Silvana as she and eight- year-old Aurek board the ship that will take them from Poland to England at the end of World War II. There her husband, Janusz, is already waiting for them at the little house at 22 Britannia Road. But the war has changed them all so utterly that they'll barely recognize one another when they are reunited. "Survivor," she answers.
Silvana and Aurek spent the war hiding in the forests of Poland. Wild, almost feral Aurek doesn't know how to tie his own shoes or sleep in a bed. Janusz is an Englishman now-determined to forget Poland, forget his own ghosts from the way, and begin a new life as a proper English family. But for Silvana, who cannot escape the painful memory of a shattering wartime act, forgetting is not a possibility.
One of the most searing debuts to come along in years, 22 Britannia Road
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Q: What drew you to this particular story of Polish World War II survivors living in England?
A: As a child, I was always fascinated when the adults around me talked about World War II. These were older family members who had lived through it and I would try to stay quiet so I could listen without being discovered. Their voices changed to lower registers, there were weighted silences in the conversations, sad looks, secretive whispering and then somebody would notice me and send me out to play, their voice swinging up a register to convey a gaiety they probably didn’t feel. I would go to bed at night, sick at heart thinking about these stories, and wonder how the world ever managed to get back to the normal after that war.
Looking back, I think I never stopped wondering. Years later, I was standing in my kitchen and heard a Russian woman on the radio, describing her experiences of being a child during the war. “We were so hungry,” she said, “we ate the bark of the silver birch trees.” An image came to me, so clear and strong, it was more like a memory than an act of my imagination. I wrote down what I saw; a young woman in a silver birch forest. I had begun to write my novel.
Q: From Silvana’s exile in the forest to the petrol rations in post-war Ipswich, you paint a vivid picture of the novel’s historical settings and events. What sort of research did you do to get the details right?
A: I balanced my own imaginative input with research. I read social history books on the war and the postwar period, including a lot of oral histories on Polish immigrant experiences. I also read wonderful Polish poets like Zbigniew Herbert and Tadeusz Rózewicz, among others. I studied Polish fairytales and classic Polish literature from the nineteenth and early twentieth century. I discovered tango music had been very popular in Poland during the thirties, so I listened to some fabulous clips on YouTube and imagined myself there, in the 1930s, dancing at a club in Warsaw, just like Hanka, one of the characters in the book tells Silvana about. I immersed myself in books, music and literature and then I put aside all research and let my imagination go to work. Whenever I was unsure about a scene, I turned to my own thoughts and feelings, relying on my ability to imagine a moment and on my empathy for the characters, rather than history books, and I think this approach helped me really understand my characters and the time.
Q: What does the title, the address of the home Janusz chooses for his reunited family, represent to you symbolically? Why that particular address?
A: I wanted a very ordinary address. A typical English home. You can find a Britannia Road in most English towns and there is no mistaking the pronounced sense of place in this address. Janusz wants what the address offers. A new life and a new country. Ironically, this address, with its connotations of national identity and pride, also serves to highlight the sense of displacement Janusz, Silvana and Aurek, as an immigrant family, must have felt in a small town in Britain. Another reason I used an address was to show how important home was to the characters. For me, the novel is about finding a home, physically, psychologically and metaphorically. Home is a small word that holds within itself complex meanings. Change one letter and you have the word hope. And Janusz, Silvana and Aurek hope to make a home together.
Q: A powerful theme in this book is the pain of survival—even Janusz, who had a relatively easy escape from Poland, suffers from having outlived Hélène and other loved ones. What personal discoveries did you make about this theme while writing the book?
A: Writing the book and researching it made me very aware of how people are still suffering under wars. The mass movement of displaced people around the world continues and the number of children who are orphaned and families disrupted and broken by war does not diminish.
Q: You do an exceptional job capturing the psyche of young Aurek, who has clearly been traumatized by his experiences. Did you draw from case studies of children with similar experiences, or did you find your way to this character instinctually?
A: I wrote Aurek very instinctively. I felt I knew the boy from the moment I first wrote a small, tentative description of him, crouching in the back garden at 22 Britannia Road. I read Through The Eyes of the Innocents: Children Witness World War II by Emmy E Werner, which conveys the heartbreaking experiences of children, and that fed my own understanding of what Aurek might have been through but really, when I was writing Aurek, I found I could connect with him best on an emotional level. So I wrote what he felt. I tried to go beyond language with him and bring out his primitive sense of survival, his desire to feel loved and his need to love others.
From Publishers Weekly
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This book is vividly written and has complexity to the plot that continues to draw you in right up until the last chapter. The long lasting effects of war on people are brilliantly portrayed in the story. In post war Britain, the couple has every advantage- an intact family, a house, a car, a good job - but the lingering effects of what happened to them during the war destroy their chances to go forward. The son has been deeply influenced by his time in the forests avoiding both Germans and Russians and living off the land. In one scene his father shows him how to collect and save birds eggs and the boy can only think of how he wants to eat the eggs contents as he did so often in the forests. He has a particularly difficult time socializing and entering into normal relationships. It was heartbreaking and at times almost too sad to bear. In the end though this story is a triumph of the human spirit over adversity.
I agree with another reviewer here who noted that Janusz' time spent wandering around Europe before finally getting to England seems far-fetched. Janusz seems quite amenable to staying put wherever he lands and sitting out the war - first the goose woman's cottage, then Helene's parents' farm - he seems quite weak and easily lead and just goes along. Granted, his life has been totally turned upside down, but I don't get the impression he's burning to fight for his country, or to see his wife and child again, or to do much of anything, except have an affair with Helene.
Silvana has a much rougher time (women in war often do), but she seems very shallow and unformed as well, basically a hollow shell doing whatever she's told by Hanka, then Gregor, then Janusz, then Tony . . . She and her son Aurek endure a much harsher deprivation in the forests of Poland, but something about that also didn't ring true for me. It went on way too long and became boring, and it seemed uneven - they stay for months with one farmer, then the Germans are coming and they must move on; then they wander a day and Gregor finds them and brings them into his dubious fold; next time they're abandoned they wander for days and days and see no sign of life - but then a farmer finds them near death. A while later, Gregor comes back into the picture and I thought, how come they didn't find Gregor or this farmer while they were wandering lost in apparently the same vicinity? Are these the densest, deepest, most desolate woods ever or the forest from "Midsummer Night's Dream", with characters constantly wandering on and off stage? It just seemed inconsistent. First Silvana is tough and independent, hunting and skinning animals with Gregor, and he tells her she'd be perfect for the Resistance - but when she and Aurek are alone again, they're eating whatever they find but almost starving. She forgot how to trap and hunt? Again, it seemed inconsistent.
I felt like I never got to know Janusz or Silvana, and I don't think they knew each other. They were so secretive with each other; I couldn't help thinking real lovers/partners would eventually share and talk about what they'd endured, seen, learned about themselves; not all at once, of course, but in dribs and drabs. Janusz and Silvana lived in the same house but seemed to rarely speak with or to each other; there seems to be no REAL talking until the last five pages. I frankly didn't care by that point; it just reinforced for me the feeling that here were two people who didn't have much in common to begin with - I couldn't help feeling sorry for Janusz for missing out on his chance with Helene! Finally, the plot twist at the end of the book with Tony (no spoilers, I promise), really seemed out of left field and I agree with another reviewer here, at that point the story seemed to descend into melodrama. If I didn't have to write a review of this book for the Vine program, I probably wouldn't have finished it.
I know some readers will find this a satisfying story of survival and "primal maternal love" as the back cover says, and I did find several of the scenes between Silvana and Aurek, and between Janusz and Aurek touching and almost painful; they wanted so much to be a family again. I also feel the author provided a somewhat interesting, if dreary, story of life in post-war Britain; but the love story between Silvana and Janusz just didn't work for me, or it was a case of too little, too late. I pitied the main characters but just couldn't like or care much about them, so I didn't like the book as much as I might have and rated it accordingly.
There are at least three layers to the story here, and I am not sure that they benefit by being laid on top of one another. One is the simple immigrant story that has been told many times, with different specifics (Andrea Levy's SMALL ISLAND being one magnificent example): what is it like to make a new life in a strange country, especially one beset by rationing, austerity measures, and labor unrest? Amanda Hodgkinson handles this effectively and without fuss. I could imagine Silvana's difficulties with the neighbors and the shops, Aurek's problems at school, and Janusz' determination to make a proper English home. I could imagine them, but not truly feel them in my gut; Hodgkinson's descriptions seem accurate rather than achingly personal.
The second layer was the one that moved me most: how people come back together after a separation. Janusz and Silvana were only just married when Aurek was born, and had hardly been tested as a couple. They are separated at the start of the war under circumstances where neither even knows that the other is alive. Now, six years later, they come together almost as strangers. They have each been changed by time, in some ways that they will only discover by putting them to the test. There is gratitude there and the memory of affection, but the main thing that connects them is their child. Yet Aurek sees his father as "the enemy" and resents him as a threat. The slow process through which Janusz gradually comes to win the boy's confidence is truly heartwarming. It would almost be worth reading the book if it dealt with nothing more than the repair of a broken family.
But there is more: the third layer. Both Janusz and Silvana have led difficult lives in the war, leaving them with secrets they do not want to share, traumatic suffering and dangerous moments of disturbing joy. We get a hint of this very early on, when it becomes clear that Silvana has not been the only woman in Janusz' life, but for the most part these things are revealed gradually in flashback chapters that alternate with those in the present day. Again, I found myself accepting without being fully involved. No single event is unbelievable, but the total begins to seem both melodramatic and a little too easy, as though one thing follows another merely because the author wanted it to. I don't believe that all this was necessary to make an effective novel, though the author takes the accepting reader on a journey with several surprising twists that many will find quite satisfying. In short, a strong romance -- but there are tantalizing hints that it could have been much more. [3.5 stars]
I only finished it because I hate to pay for a book and then not finish it. Read more
3.5 Stars Round up to 4
22 Britannia Road is a novel surrounding a family and their home in England. Read more
The book cover image initially caught my attention, then upon reading the brief cover I sat down to read... Read more
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