22 Britannia Road by Amanda Hodgkinson
This novel was a Historical Fiction set in the years during and after World War II. It follows the lives of a young Polish couple, who were recently married with an infant son, when the Nazi invasion of Poland separated them, and threw their lives into chaos which changed them forever.
Both Janusz and Silvana grew up in a small village in Poland. Silvana, on a small peasant farm, and Janusz in a wealthy family. After they married, they moved to Warsaw, where their son Aurek was born. They were both very happy living in the city, until the Nazi’s invaded Poland.
Janusz quickly joined the military, but the train that was carrying him to training camp was attacked by air, and in fleeing the train, Janusz received a head wound, fell unconscious in a field, until days later, when he began to recover, and found that the train and its other passengers had gone.
Alone and abandoned for weeks, he eventually hooked up with two Polish soldiers, who told him the Nazi’s had already taken over Poland, and the two were headed for France to join the Polish Resistance. Janusz joined them, and once in France, ended up living with a French farm family, where he fell in love with Helene their daughter.
He felt guilty, being still married to Silvana and having Aurek, but everyone told him she was probably dead, and he really loved Helene. Then when the Nazi’s invaded France, Janusz left Helene and boarded a freighter for England where he joined the air force.
Before Janusz had left Warsaw, he told Silvana to take Aurek, and escape the city to live with his parents. On her way there, her train was attacked and destroyed. Her son Aurek was killed, and in the panic caused by his death and finding another boy his age who had been orphaned during the attack, Silvana took the orphan, called him Aurek, and pretended he was her son.
They began living rough in the nearby forest. She then basically spent the whole of the war, living in the woods with Aurek, eating what they could find.
One winter, near starvation, and utterly exhausted, Silvana gave up, and holding Aurek in her arms, she lay down to die. A peasant farmer discovered the two, and he and his wife nursed them back to life.
When the war ended, Janusz was able to buy a damaged house at 22 Britannia Road, which was in a bombed out area of London. He filed forms in an attempt to find Silvana and Aurek. At the same time they were in an English refugee camp in Poland, and they were sent to rejoin Janusz in England.
It was a very difficult reunion for both Silvana and Janusz, because both had changed so much during the war, but they both wanted to be a family again. The boy Aurek felt great resentment and jealousy toward Janusz, thinking of him as “the enemy” because of his mother’s attachment to Janusz.
Silvana felt full of guilt, feeling responsible for the real Aurek’s death, and had become extremely obsessed with keeping her adopted Aurek alive, she didn’t tell Janusz, this Aurek, was not his son, because she feared he would abandoned them.
Complications arose, that split the couple up, but in the end, their love and their strong desire to be a family, won out.
It was an unusual story, with Silvana and Aurek struggling to survive for so many years in the forest, which left Aurek extremely attached to Silvana, and pretty much a “nature” boy, growing up suited only for living in the woods, and having spent all of his formative early years devoid of people, so that he did not develop the normal social skills for interacting with others.
Toward the end of the novel, I realized that all three adult main characters, (there was also Nick, a black marketeer in post war England) were trying to love someone, projecting on them, someone else who they had loved, and who had been killed during the war. Janusz, with his French love Helene, Nick, with his intense attraction to Silvana, who looked like his dead wife, and Silvana, who had taken an orphaned child as a substitute for her original Aurek.
Our library’s Book Club, instead of having everyone read the same book, chooses a “theme” for the month and everyone can find a book that interest them, within that theme. In June, our theme was “Books With Numbers in the Title”. That is why I read Nineteen Minutes, that I blogged about the other day, and 22 Britannia Road. Both were novels that I really enjoyed reading, and that I would probably have not ever picked to read, if it wasn’t for our Book Club’s theme.
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