CHAPTER ONE 



A BREATH OF SEA AIR 



JAN reached the sea at Calais. He crossed the Channel, dis- 

 illusioned at first then gradually seasick till he had spewed out the 

 better part of a bad supper within sight of England's twin coast- 

 line of chalk. He did not understand the pastry-light skipping of 

 these little waves. They danced their one-steps in his stomach. 

 White capped and blue eyed as the sea was on that May day, it 

 was worse than anything he had been led to imagine from des- 

 criptions in Conrad's Polish prose of South Sea typhoons, cy- 

 clones and calms. But the Polish language was weak in marine 

 terms : Conrad could not be translated into his own tongue. 



Jan had been educated before the war when Poland's little 

 fleet of fishing vessels was less real and perhaps more glamorous 

 to a schoolboy than the films of Garbo or the uniforms with high 

 hats. Or maybe he had been educated during the war and his 

 only trade was sniping, his only art the management of an ambush, 

 his only ambition to kill more Germans. At any rate, he had been 

 educated. There was nothing left for a schoolmaster to teach 

 him, and he refused to learn the catechisms of a Commissar. 



He had thought his health feeble before he boarded the ship. 

 He was an invalid by the time he disembarked. The authorities 

 in charge of Polish refugees recognised this and shifted him from 

 a hospital in the Home Counties to a convalescence centre on the 

 main island of the Orkney group. It was while there that he first 

 became aware of the sea as a way of life. It brought back his 

 homeland to him . For hours he would watch the Orcadian inlets 



