This is a full text transcript of Alec Dyki – interview.

Oral history recording transcript
Duration: 1 hour 04 minutes
----
Chapters
01 Family Roots and Wartime Turmoil
02 Polish School and Scouting
03 Football and Community Life
04 Family Traditions and Charity Work
05 Polish Identity and Heritage
06 Childhood Memories and Conclusion

🕑 00:00:00

Barbara Furmanowicz: This is 27th of March 2021, five o'clock afternoon. I'm interviewing Alec Dyki, my name is Barbara Furmanowicz. Alec, I'm very happy to have you today.

Alec Dyki: Thank you.

BF: I would like to ask you for the beginnings. I know that your parents settled in England after the war and I would like to ask you what happened that they had to come to this country?

🕑 00:00:38

AD: Well, my mother came from Równe, my father came from Lwów and my mother was sent to near Arkhangelsk, Podniewice I think it was, in northern Russia. My father was a Polish officer and I think he ended up initially as a German prisoner of war. And I think that was in Poznan. He was then sent to a Russian prison camp and I think that was Lwów or Przemyśl and then, somewhere just beyond Moscow, I can't remember the name of it. So he was in three prisoner of war camps, but the last one was well inside Russia. After that, when the amnesty happens, my mother and her family were travelling from the north through Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Persia, Iraq, Lebanon, Palestine, and she eventually ended up in a place called Witley in Surrey, which used to be a Canadian base for their air force, I think, or their army. Meanwhile, my father took a similar journey after they released him and he joined the Anders Army and he became a sapper. And I think he built bridges near the camps in, possibly, Persia, and then eventually he ended up in Monte Cassino and a couple of other places, in Bologna, possibly. And he also ended up in Witley in Surrey, which is a very small village and by sheer coincidence my daughter lives there now, you know, literally maybe a mile away from where the camp was, which is a very strange coincidence. So everything's revolved and came back to the beginning.

🕑 00:03:23

I was born in 1950. My parents married in 1949, I was born in 1950. By then they moved to Victoria, London. My father was a head waiter there in a local hotel and that's where I was brought up. Then in 1953, the Queen was… what's the word? Crowned. Queen Elizabeth, was crowned and this was in our locality, so I believe my mother took me there when I was three years old and, you know, those were the beginnings.

BF: So you stayed in Victoria till which year and what happened after?

🕑 00:04:17

AD: I think about 1955. So I'm five years old and we moved to Brixton and he bought a house there, and now there was more of a Polish community in the area. At the same time I went to my first school and I couldn't speak English, [laughter] which was… I think that was quite common amongst the Polish communities. At that age you learn another language easily. It's not a problem. And so, yeah, we moved there approximately 1955 and we stayed there till 1962. And we then moved to Streatham, where I stayed until I got married in 1972. So those were my early years. But the community was in Clapham. There was an English church, or Irish church, St Mary's in Clapham. The family would go there every Sunday and eventually I think there was… The Poles bought their own church in Balham, but that was many, many years later, but there was also a church inside Clapham College and sometimes we would go there for, you know, for ten o'clock, because St. Mary's was one o'clock and that was too late, so my age group wanted to go early. So, yeah, those were the beginnings anyway.

Password access wall