We were delighted when Dad told us he had befriended a refugee and was bringing him home for Christmas. We couldn’t have been more pleased if he’d promised us a marmoset— as stranger-starved Aussies in 1949 we were intrigued by our first Pole. So Henrik came to Christmas dinner and we shyly regarded him—a man handsome in the way of the Polish with the look of an aristocrat made temporarily poor. Our Christmas heat bemused him as did the silly game we played over by the window to catch the breeze, spinning the baby’s top—a houseful of flushed and friendly…
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