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a substitute. He shrank away from his father’s guilt and misery and humiliated pride. He did not want to join in the endless agonizing postmortem. (And Stalin said ... and Churchill said ... and Roosevelt said ... and Eden said ... and Sikorski said ... and Mikolajczyk said ... and Anders said ... and Bor-Komorovsky said ... and Bokszczanin said and Sosnkowski said ... and so on and so on.) While his father, who by this time had hardly anyone to talk to except his son, went on and on about the Curzon Line, the Count, whose ambition was to pass his exams and be an ordinary English Schoolboy, wrote carefully in his exercise book Miles puellam amat. Puella militem amat. He did not want to hear of those centuries of misery, of ‘partitions’ and betrayals and Teutonic Knights and what happened at Brest-Litovsk and what mistake Duke Conrad made in 1226. He would not worship Kosciuszko and Mickiewicz or even remember who they were. Worst of all, while his mother was stubbornly refusing to learn English, he was stubbornly refusing to learn Polish. (His brother Jozef had spoken excellent Polish of course.) After he went to school he uttered not another word of Polish, addressed in Polish he replied in English, then affected not to understand, then genuinely did not understand. His father gazed down at him with unspeakable pain and turned away. The tempest which raged in Bogdan’s soul rarely expressed itself physically. The Count could remember a few terrible incomprehensible Polish rows, his father shouting, his mother weeping. Later his father withdrew from his wife and child and also from his London compatriots. He never spoke again of returning to Poland. His mother and sisters had disappeared during the rising. He stayed on in England, a country whose self-interested perfidy he could not forgive. When the London Polish government (no longer the Polish government) was disbanded (some to choose exile, some to scramble back to Poland to try to gain some foothold in the new, as it soon became, Communist government), Bogdan took an office job in an English insurance firm. His idiosyncratic Marxism, unfed by any hope, had now dwindled and been succeeded by a fierce hatred of communism. He watched the events in eastern Europe with an almost spiteful pessimism. He now occupied himself with detesting Gomulka. He was momentarily cheered by the death of Stalin, but hoped nothing from the Poznan riots. He watched the Hungarian uprising and its fate with bitter envy, bitter anger. He died in 1969, having lived long enough to see Gomulka sending Polish troops to accompany the Russian tanks into Prague.
    The Count passed his childhood in an ardent endeavour to be English, tormented by his father and unable to communicate with his mother. Some narrow despairing ambition took him to the London School of Economics, together with the help of a Polish Relief Fund with which his father had been connected. The Count’s name was Wojciech Szczepanski. (‘That’s a dog’s breakfast of a name,’ one of his schoolteachers had kindly remarked earlier on.) The English amongst whom he lived had to put up with his surname (which was not hard to pronounce once one knew how) but refused to tolerate the bizarre consonants of his Christian name. At school he was simply called ‘Big’, since he was even then markedly tall. He was not unpopular, but made no friends. He was laughed at and regarded as rather picturesque. He was ashamed of his father’s outlandish looks and funny accent, though a little consoled when someone said, ‘Big’s father is a brigand.’ Of course (and to his relief) his parents never invited his school fellows home. At college someone made a joke about all Polish exiles being Counts, and thus the Count became known as ‘the Count’ and addressed as ‘Count’. Later it emerged that he had another harmless first name, Piotr, and some few people took to calling him ‘Peter’ or ‘Pierre’, but it was then too late to