The seed… How it all started…
- Bea Biechowiak
- Feb 10, 2019
- 2 min read
I was born in Poland. I came to this world on one January day. I don’t know details but I know that at the time my parent lived with my grandparents (from my mother’s side). The house was a huge, post war terraced property, Ground floor belonged to our neighbour. The first floor and the attic belonged to us. While my grandparents shared huge two rooms on the first floor, the gigantic loft-bedroom was for me and my parents.
From stories told by my family, my mother and her mother were housewives, my father was finishing his Architecture Degree and my grandfather, who was working or doing some dark businesses, and then retired due to ill health.
That’s for a little background. My father worked as a builder, which was a first step to his career. He often came back drunk, which was a sort of “tradition” on the building site. From what I heard, my grandparents didn’t like him very much, which probably was a part of the fuel for quite frequent rows. Two and a half years later my brother was born,
When I was about 5 years old, we have moved to another town, where my father got a site supervisor job on another building site. I can vaguely remember how he was coming home totally drunk. My parents were always rowing (the flat was very tiny, I’m not sure whether it was a bedsit or one bedroom flat). Almost always, the argument ended with my mother getting a beating. I could never understand that.
I remember once that my mother had to go somewhere and we (my brother and I) had to stay with dad at his work. There were barracks for workers with some limited facilities (remember, it was 70s). It was winter and it was getting dark very quickly. Polish winters were very harsh at the time. The building site was in the middle of nowhere and we were sitting in freezing building waiting for dad to finish and take us home. It was a late evening, when some guy came over and asked who we were. Then people there discovered that papa had a lot to drink and someone took him home. We were packed into someone’s car and delivered to our flat, where my mother was beside herself, because papa was totally incommunicado and she couldn’t get a word out of him. We had no telephone and she was just about to run to the police, when we arrived.
This just one of many episodes, which formed a background to what was to happen in the future. It’s a little, innocent taster to what was to be. Yes, innocent comparing to the future. You will know it all. I hope to manage to finish my story before my time is over.
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