What a stroke of luck

There is a beautiful church in Checkendon in Oxfordshire.  In the churchyard there is a cemetery which contains a number of graves of Polish displaced persons.  One of those graves contains the remains of my grandmother Anastazia Adamczyk (nee Syryca) who passed away in 1953.  She had lived with my grandfather Adam, in Checkendon Hostel which was situated about a mile north of Checkendon village. My father, Jan, passed away in August 1990 and we laid his ashes to rest in a plot about a foot away from his mother's grave. 

My mother passed away as recently as May 2008.  Whilst "surfing the net" for contact details to arrange for her ashes to be interred with those of my father, I chanced upon the  www.northwickparkpolishdpcamp.co.uk.  website - this was a stroke of luck.  As I explored this site and its links, memories of my childhood came flooding back.  Reading the information about various camps took me back to Checkendon Hostel where I spent the first 4 years of my life. 

Whilst Checkendon camp got a brief mention on the web page, I was slightly disappointed to find no link and consequently no information about it.  I "slightly disappointed" only because when I started reading about the camps, how they came about, accounts of life in the camps, then when looking at the photographs, it appeared to me that all these things could have just as easily described Checkendon Hostel, the people that lived there and how they lived. 

CHECKENDON POLISH CAMP /HOSTEL

My parents Rozalia Leszczyńska and Jan Adamczyk met and married in Checkendon Camp. I was born in 1955 in Battle Hospital Reading as were my brothers Krzysztof, who was a year older, and Edward, who was 2 years younger.  We lived in Checkendon until 1959 when we moved to Reading.  Naturally the first language I learned to speak was Polish and, whilst I still speak it fairly fluently, once we moved to Reading and I started making friends with children in the neighbourhood, English very quickly became my first language.

I have some recollection of living at Checkendon  as well as being told some stories about me and about life on the camp. 

My father worked at a car plant in Oxford, about 20 miles away. There was a bus station on the camp and sometimes we would travel by bus to Reading, about 10 miles away. Only recently, at my mother's funeral, I was reminded by some women from my mother's generation how they used to see me making my way to my grandmother's Nissen hut carrying my egg, being ever so careful not to drop it, for her to cook it for me for breakfast whilst my mother went to work in the shop on the camp.  I remember that we used to keep chickens and rabbits.

Another story which my mother told me was about when we went to visit a friend of hers who had moved to Sonning Common, about 5 miles away, and lived in a "proper" house, unlike us who lived in a Nissen hut.  I was so taken by the fact that our friends had pretty wallpaper on their walls that when we returned, I wanted to tear down the tar paper that lined the walls of our hut saying we should replace it with nice wallpaper.

The village of Nuffield was about 3 miles away, to the north - this is probably where the nearest doctor was and we had a car and a television set.  I know all this because I went to find by brother one day to call him back home so that we could watch our favourite television programme, Ivanhoe.  Unfortunately I found him pinned up against a hut, being attacked by a swarm of wasps.  He had disturbed their nest by poking it about with a stick.  I went to call by father who rescued my brother, took him home, stripped his clothes off, smeared vinegar all over him, wrapped him up in a blanket and drove him to the doctor's house / surgery in our car - I went along with them.  I was recently reminded that the doctor was called Doctor Foster and at the time would have been a fairly young doctor.  I am told he continued to work out of his surgery at Nuffield for many years until he retired.

RELIGIOUS LIFE

Religious life always played a large part in Polish History so it is no surprise that the first thing people wanted when they arrived in the camps was a priest and  a place of worship and Chekendon was no exception. One of the Nissen huts was converted into a Chapel and apparently next to the Chapel was a building that was used as a mortuary. There was another Polish displaced persons camp at Nettlebed, about 5 miles from Checkendon and possibly another at Kingwood Common not too far away from Nettlebed.

CORPUS CHRISTI PROCESSION

Every year the at Corpus Christi a Procession would wind its way around the camp to the four altars that were build in various places specially for  that day and every one took part come rain or shine.

My parents had quite a collection of photographs, many just loose but some in albums and my mother does feature in many of them.  I have been trying to sort them, analyse them and try to find out who some of the people were in them.  Having looked through the photographs on the Northwick Park web site, I have deduced that one of the people in the photographs below is General Anders and presumably he visited Checkendon.

VISITATIONS  from  DIGNITARIES.

General W. Anders and Infułat Michalski.

SOCIAL LIFE  and OCCASIONS

These are just some of the photographs that I have from that part of the lives of my parents and grandparents that was spent at Checkendon.  I also have some other photographs from their lives before and after Checkendon although unfortunately many, many of the photographs are of people whom I do not know or recognise.

Most recently, whilst in the process of selling my mother's house, I found the deeds relating to the purchase of the house by my father and his address was given as Number H.9 Checkendon Hostel near Henley-on-Thames in the county of Oxford.