Free A Special Duty by Jennifer Elkin Page B

could get, and that job was an assistant in an ironmonger’s shop.
    His next job was as a food inspector, which suited him better because he could keep on the move, but his mind always returned to Poland, and the friends he had left behind. Any news of Poland in the national newspapers caught his eye, and he read that Stanislaw Mikolajczyk, who had returned to Poland in 1945 as a Deputy Prime Minister, had fled back to England, having been unable to protect his country from Communist domination. He had met Mikolajczyk in 1944, and his plight prompted Tom to write him a letter, sympathising with his situation and saying: “I am happy that you have sought refuge in this country, as I did with your people”. Mikolajczyk very quickly moved on to America, where he settled, but he remembered Tom, and took the time to reply and wish him well before leaving. And then, in April 1947, just a few months before I was born, the body of Peter Crosland was found on a wooded hillside in the Cabar district of Yugoslavia, where it had lain since November, 1943. The woodsmen who found him buried his remains on the hillside, retaining the identity tags, which enabled one of the RAF search parties (MRES 1 ) to locate his body during a sweep of Yugoslavia, and re-inter his body in the Belgrade War Cemetery. Tom read about it in a national newspaper and wrote to the RAF to confirm that the story was true, later travelling to London to identify some of Peter’s personal effects.
    The family continued to grow with the birth of my younger sister Susan in 1949, and by this time we were living in an ‘Airey House’ 2 on the outskirts of Ludlow, which was a good place for a young family, and we loved it. The football pitch was at the bottom of our road, Clee View, and every Saturday we walked down to watch from the touchline as Dad, always taller than anyone around him, streaked down the pitch flicking the ball between his feet, and weaving through the opposition. At around this time we acquired an old Austin car, in which we would travel to Carlisle to visit our Cumbrian family. Wrapped in blankets, we would be loaded into the car at bedtime so that we could sleep, but somehow we always managed to be awake for the thrill of Shap Fell. It was a long haul to the top of this barren section of the A6, and in the dark it seemed to us bleakest and most frightening place we could imagine. My memory always had us driving through fog, sleet, or lashing rain. The lights of oncoming cars would be blinding, and yet Dad never flinched or appeared worried; these were the conditions that were familiar for him and he seemed completely at ease. I remember once on a particularly bad night asking him how he could see where he was going. He said: “I keep my eyes lowered on the left edge of the road, and I never look at the lights”. We loved his reassuring presence because he made the frightening feel normal, and we would arrive in Carlisle, having overcome the perils of Shap, feeling like adventurers ourselves.
    It was the move to Lancaster in the north west of England that really changed everything, and yet it was a very positive move to a beautiful part of the country. Dad had got a job as a travelling salesman for Jewsbury and Brown, soft drinks merchant, and not only did the job come with a house and a car, but the move, close to the sea at Morecambe, was hopefully going to help Susan, who suffered from chronic asthma and had spent long months in a sanatorium before the move. This was an ideal job for Dad, who loved being behind the wheel of a car, and had an easy-going, genial manner that enabled him to develop a rapport with the managers of the busy theatres and piers in the seaside town of Morecambe, which formed his ‘patch’. For him, it was a bit like being back in the RAF mess, propping up the bar at the Winter Gardens, the Alhambra, the Gaumont, and the Central Pier, and for us there was the thrill of him arriving home with our autograph books signed