house was divided from the stables by an archway. Turn one way and there were three looseboxes and a hay barn, turn the other and you were almost immediately inside the old lady’s living room. This was where Mira found herself now, staring at a room that was decorated with needlepoint tapestries all over the walls. It was furnished with old wooden furniture and armchairs that seemed to be covered in a floral print similar to the old woman’s shirt, so that when she’d made the tea and put the angel wing biscuits on the table and sat down, she almost disappeared into the upholstery.
“Do you read?” she asked Mira as she passed her the plate of biscuits and tossed one on to the floor for Rolf.
“Yes,” Mira said. “I love books.” And she realised as she said the words that this was what was bothering her when she looked around the room. There were bookshelves on the far wall but they were covered in ornaments. No books. She couldn’t see a single book in the whole house. Mira didn’t have many books of her own. She mostly read what she could from the school library, but she did have a few copies on her little bookshelf in her room, and she loved them. They were her most prized possessions.
“Hmmm.” The old lady seemed pleased with the reply. “Reading is good. I should like to be able to do it myself. But I can’t.” She looked at Mira. “Oh, yes, I tried! And I went to a very good school, so my education wasn’t lacking. My parents expected that I should be clever. My father was a professor and my mother had been a teacher. All my uncles and cousins were very intellectual, but … for me … it was never possible. From the very beginning, the words bounced around on the page and would not behave. My mother couldn’t understand it, because she had always read to me. We had a library full of books! They decided I must be stupid. I wasn’t, of course. It was dyslexia. These days people know all about it. It is a condition that means you get the letters jumbled up in your eyes and your brain and to decipher them becomes impossible. But back then, no one knew this. And so I was just the half-witted girl who couldn’t read. And I guess that was what they always thought of me …”
The old woman trailed off and dabbed at her eyes with a handkerchief that she took from her sleeve. “Anyway. It is not reading I wish to do. It is writing.”
She put the handkerchief down and threw Rolf another angel wing, although she did not offer another biscuit to Mira.
“I am dying,” she said.
Mira looked shocked, until the old woman added, “We are all dying, of course, but I am old, very old – I’m eighty-nine, if you can believe it, so I am closer to death than you. One day I will die from old age, and it might not be that long. And before I do, I have a story – one that I would like to see recorded so that it might be told. It is important, I think. I lived in remarkable times.”
She reached out to Mira with the plate of biscuits now, but Mira noticed how she held it back a little, as if the offer of the biscuit itself was contingent on what happened next.
“You will write for me,” the old woman said. “I will tell you my story and you will put it down in words on paper.”
“And why would I do that?” Mira asked.
“Because,” the old woman replied, “I will be making you an exchange. If you will write my story for me, then I will do something for you.”
“What?” Mira asked.
The old woman took a biscuit herself now and mashed it between her gums and followed it with a vigorous slurp of tea.
“I’ll teach you to be a horsewoman,” she said. “And if you are a good student and you mind what I say, then, yes, I’ll let you ride Emir.”
Mira couldn’t believe what she was hearing.
“What do you say, then?” the old woman asked.
Mira leant forward and very slowly and deliberately she took an angel wing from the plate.
“Excellent!” The old woman smiled and Mira saw just how gappy her grin was and how much work it must have been to chew that biscuit. “We shall start tomorrow. You will come back to my house. Bring the little dog with you if you like.”
“I have school tomorrow,” Mira said.
“Well, come before school, then,” the old woman replied, as if this solution were obvious. “I wake early.”
“OK,” Mira agreed.
The old woman stood up and made it clear that, with the arrangements sorted, their afternoon tea was now over. As they walked to the door, she made a fuss of Rolf and gave him one last angel wing. “For being a good boy,” she told him, with a pat. Then she opened the door for Mira. “I will see you tomorrow, child,” she said.
Then, almost as an afterthought, she called after her: “You haven’t told me your name. What do they call you?”
“I’m Mira,” Mira replied.
“It is a pleasure to meet you, Mira,” the old woman said. “My name is Zofia.”
My name is Zofia. And as I told you yesterday, I am Polish. I was born in a forest village, Janów Podlaski, to the east, miles from the excitement of the big cities of Krakow and Warsaw.
Don’t worry, Mira. I promise I will not bore you with the dull, happy days of my early childhood. I don’t want you to fall asleep when you should be writing! I will skip the first nine years of my life because nothing of importance happened, and I will begin this memoir on the date my whole life changed forever: 1 September 1939. The day when Adolf Hitler sent his Nazis to invade us and take over Poland. That was the start of the Second World War, of course, although we did not know it then. Within days of Hitler crossing our border, the French and the British declared war and after that … Hey! Mira, are you keeping up with me?
***
Mira, who had been frantically scribbling away as Zofia spoke, was suddenly shaken back to reality and the tiny living room where she was sitting once more with Zofia, Rolf, a pot of tea and a freshly baked batch of angel wings.
“Yes, I am keeping up,” Mira lied. She had such cramp in her hand from trying to write the old woman’s words and – look! They had only completed one page!
Zofia was suspicious. “It’s important that you stop me if you are being left behind, because I want to make sure you are getting all my words down correctly. This is actual history I’m telling you. After I die, who will know the truth about these events except me? This is a record of what happened and I don’t want any of it to be lost, so from here I will go slower for you …”
Rolf, who was sitting on Zofia’s lap, gave a theatrical yawn at this moment and Mira noticed how his little pink tongue unfurled and snapped back again behind his sharp teeth. Zofia chuckled at the antics of the little dog as he stood up and stretched and resettled himself, then she drank a sip from her teacup and resumed her story once more, speaking every bit as fast as before, so that Mira had to scribble frantically to keep pace.
***
Hitler was such a bully! And a liar! Do you
