March 2026

First Prize

Something Missing by Ian Wood, Beaconsfield, UK

 

Second Prize

24 Hours in New York, Lucy Chambers, Newcastle-upon-Tyne, UK

 

Third Prize

How I Know Where The North Is, Marcin Ostasz, Spain

 

Short List

24 Hours in New York, Lucy Chambers, Newcastle-upon-Tyne, UK

How I Know Where The North Is, Marcin Ostasz, Spain

Karwa Chauth by Fiona Harvie, Queensland, Australia

Like a Butterfly by Deborah Bell, Northampton, UK

Something Missing by Ian Wood, Beaconsfield, UK

Painted Lady by Susan King, County Durham

 

Long List

24 Hours in New York, Lucy Chambers, Newcastle-upon-Tyne, UK

How I Know Where The North Is, Marcin Ostasz, Spain

Karwa Chauth by Fiona Harvie, Queensland, Australia

Like a Butterfly by Deborah Bell, Northampton, UK

Painted Lady by Susan King, County Durham

My Favourite Ghost by Yvette Naden, Crewe, UK

Something Missing by Ian Wood, Beaconsfield, UK

Saint Teresa of the Weald by Liam Wallace, Exemouth, UK

The Lever by Natalie Panesar, Guildford, UK

The Wrong Fish Fingers by Richard Smith, Newcastle under Lyme, UK

Something Missing by Ian Wood

 

Gran has her faith. Dad has his naïve optimism. I have my mates. My Mam, well, she has six months at best. When you’re fourteen, six months sounds like a long time.

 

Everyone said the operation went well, even Gran. That’s good, isn’t it, that everything went well. I mean, Gran keeps telling us the story of how her dad went in to have his tonsils out and never woke up. Overdid the Ether, she says.

Then Mam’s cancer came back. I remember that afternoon. Dad was trying to solve the problem, like it was a broken carburettor.

 

“At least try,” he shouted, his voice raw, despite being muffled behind closed doors.

 

He didn’t like being unable to fix things. Especially not me Mam. It broke him. He wept; he fought. It wasn’t helping, so Mam told him to leave.

 

“I need you to help me die well,” she cried. “If you can’t do that, then go.”

 

The door was flung open, and he stormed out, thrusting a punnet of blackberries into my hands. We watched together, through the window, as the white Volkswagen spluttered into life and then sped off the drive. Dad always drove like he was being chased.

 

It was left to Mam to explain it to me.

 

“You’re all I’ve got,” she said.

 

“That’s not enough,” I said. “For anyone.”

 

“You’re all I need,” she said.

 

“What about Dad? You got him.”

 

“Sometimes you’ve got to give things away, even if you love them. They cost too much to keep.”

 

“You’re not going to give me away as well, are you?” I asked, turning back to where Mam was opening and closing cupboards.

 

“No duck,” she said. “You’d only come bouncing back like a didgeridoo.”

 

“You mean, like a boomerang,” I laughed.

 

“An Orangutan?”

 

We both laughed. She beamed at me. Her mouth was so wide it looked like her head might fall off.

 

I danced around her like an ape, only stopping when she gasped as she reached for the flour.

 

“Let me,” I said, climbing a chair.

 

“Thanks love, it’s just out of reach.”

 

A lot of things were now.

 

“Let’s bake,” she shouted gleefully.

 

It comes to me easily. Just close my eyes and sink back into a comfortable chair, and I can conjure up the smell of cake baking in the oven. It wraps you in a warm blanket, makes you believe nothing will ever change.

 

“How do you make it so good?” I asked.

 

“Love,” she said.

 

I pointed to her cookery book.

 

“There are recipes, sure. But you need to add your own flavours, your own mix. You’ll fail sometimes, but when it works, it’s a kind of alchemy and better than any recipe.”

 

She held the bowl tight to her waist, the mixture turning under the wooden spoon. The sweet oily richness of the walnut cut through the velvet bitterness of the coffee.

 

We sat staring into the oven’s window, watching the batter rise.

 

“You have to wait,” she said. “And hope.”

 

“Or pray,” I added.

 

She finished it with a flourish of the fork, whipping the glistening buttercream curls up into a stormy sea.

 

“Don’t leave it. It’ll go stale. Eat it now, while it's warm.”

 

So, I did as I was told. Pulses of coffee and walnut filling my head in an aromatic fug. I devoured it like it could be snatched away at any moment. At the end, I slowed. Cutting each piece in half, so that it would never end. But eventually, it was gone. Just a smear of icing left on the plate and a walnut numbed tongue.

 

“How do you feel?” she asked.

 

“Full.”

 

“Sugar-baby.”

 

“You can’t call me that, I’m not a baby.”

 

“And what else?”

 

“A little sad it’s gone. But I know you’ll make another.”

 

“What if I can’t?”

 

“No more cake?”

 

“No more cake, Davey.”

 

“I can still smell it,” I said.

 

“Describe it.”

 

“Like burnt toffee. Bitter and sweet. Soft and mellow.”

 

“That’s a good smell.”

 

“The best.”

 

She hugged me, stiff with pain, but held me all the same. My head buried in her.

 

“Can you smell it now, Davey?”

 

“Yes, Mam.” I said, just wanting to cut this moment in half.

 

I felt her shudder, then her arms eased me back, my weight balanced again on my feet. She turned quickly, her hair hid her face as she climbed the stairs, painfully, pushing herself up one step at a time.

 

***

I don’t have a girlfriend; I have Mandy Andersen. She’s adopted me. I tell the other boys it’s because she fancies me.  This is a lie. Mandy’s sixteen and six inches taller, but it makes them laugh. Mandy’s mum died when she was thirteen. But we don’t talk about that.

 

“I’m just looking out for you,” she says. “Anyway, I couldn’t be yer girlfriend. I’m not pretty enough.” Mandy pats her permed hair and smiles with stretched lips as she tries to hide her braces.

 

“You’re the most beautiful girl in school,” I say, loudly enough that everyone can hear. She punches my arm, which hurts. But pulls me close and kisses the top of my head. I’ll take that. It’s just a game, I get it, but she helps.

 

Fu-Fu’s her boyfriend and he’s the hardest kid at school. He was only fifth hardest at his last school, but we’re a bit soft here. It only took him a week to work his way up the hard kid ladder.

 

I know you’ll ask. If he’s so hard, then why’s he called Fu-Fu? No one knows, and if you ask Fu-Fu, he’ll kick the shit out of you. So, Fu-Fu it is.

 

Even weirder is that Fu-Fu has appointed me, second-best mate. This has catapulted me from 117th place of most popular boys at school to third. Second is Bug. Fu-Fu and I discussed it. I could be number two if I wanted, but I would have to fight Bug. Who wants to be a number two anyway, I said. Fu-Fu punched me in the arm and told me that’s why he liked me, cos I’m funny.

 

***

 They said it was six months. But it wasn’t. They couldn’t even get that right. Mam moved her birthday forward. It wasn’t proper, like I’d planned. Mam baked a cake, and Gran tried too hard to smile.

 

I know I’m supposed to be brave, to not be difficult, for me Mam. But I can’t, not all the time. I smashed the cake all over the carpet. Ran out and sat on a bench in the park, drenched by the rain. Mandy found me. She knew I’d be here. It’s my thinking bench, and it’s where I’d carved Mandy loves Davey on the wooden slats.

 

She took me home. She hugged my Mam and said goodbye. I watched her leave. Head down, shoulders bobbing. Fu-Fu was there. He looked at her and gathered her in his arms. They just stood there. Mam called me away.

We ate the broken cake that night. In Mam’s bed under the bedspread.

“We shouldn’t,” I say. “It’s been all over the floor.”

 

“Well, it’s not going to kill me,” she said, then winked as she swallowed a chunk.

***

Three months and Mam’s got the priest coming around today. Not the new one, we don’t like him. Mam says he’s got a stiff collar. I thought they all did. The old one, Father McSpirit. He brings his bible and a half bottle of Jamesons. I hope he makes her laugh like before.

 

“I’m going to play footy on the park,” I shouted up to the bedroom. No reply. I walk up the stairs and shout again. Then I hear the door open. She has a lace veil over her head. She seems so old, I look away.

 

“Why do you have to play that game?” she said. Her voice is a whisper. “You had such beautiful teeth.”

 

I smiled my best crooked smile. There was a faint quiver at the corner of her mouth.

 

That made me pull my lips tight across my broken teeth so as not to offend her.

 

Fu-Fu says that broken teeth are a price you pay for taking part. Fu-Fu’s not like what you’d imagine the hardest kid at school to be.

 

“It’s alright Mam, I’ll go to the library instead.”

 

“Go on with you. Go and play footy.”

 

I walked up the road, pulling my anorak tight around me, as the wind tried to push me back down.

 

Don’t get me wrong. I’ll pop in the library on the way home. Since Mum got ill, she likes it if I read to her. She lies on her side, her head propped on a pillow, looking down at me while I sit on a cushion. A bowl at the ready, just in case.

Before Mam was sick, if Dad had known I was going to the library, he’d get mardy, lob the books in the bin. Not one for books, our dad. Mam was different.

 

“Listen to your father,” she’d say and smile, like she was saying the opposite. In those moments she always wanted to hug me. But with the cancer, she couldn’t. I don’t know why; maybe it was catching, or maybe it just hurt to hug.

 

That day, I chose How to Kill a Mockingbird. But I never got to read it to her.

 

***

 

The day we said goodbye, I never felt like I was there. I was on the edge like some reluctant ghost. It was a day of stifled coughs and heels clipping on wooden floors. Murmured voices whispering in my dad’s ear. Telling him how sorry they were. He stood alone in the crowd, in monochrome, nodding, wearing a suit now too big for him.

 

Mandy took me away, upstairs to my room. We sat on my bed, side by side. There was nothing to say, so I kissed her. Full on the lips, no tongues. She pushed me away and smiled. Then gave me a cigarette.

 

“Aren’t we supposed to have sex first?” I said.

 

She laughed.

 

“You’re going to be alright, kid. Maybe not today or tomorrow, but sometime.”

She opened the window and took our cigarettes. Lighting them both in her mouth, then passed mine back to me. We stood, not speaking, just watching the crows in the twilight, balanced on the telephone wires, staring back at us.

Downstairs, the priests were fighting again. Father Forsyth, the new one, was all penitence and duty. He couldn’t put the problem of jurisdiction aside. Father McSpirit had always been full of joy, but not now. He left with a quiet shutting of the door and wasn’t coming back.

 

Forsyth grumbled on until my father stepped in, yelling insults. Then came the familiar slam of the door, the crunch of his feet on frost. Gone, again.

 

And then, tea and apology. Gran’s holy sacrament. Her voice seeped through the floor, in deference. And the word, Protestant, used as an insult.

 

Then the sound of knees hitting floorboards. Like a yawn, a quick prayer, could never be resisted. The wake was beginning to break up. I lay in bed, pillow over my face, waiting for the silence. Mandy pulled it back.

 

“Suffocation is not the only way out,” she said. Her breath smelt of the cigarettes and rum she’d stolen from downstairs. Then she kissed me.

 

***

 

We went our separate ways, searching for something that could replace my mother in the different things she had meant to us. Dad lost himself in drink and failed relationships. Gran forgave God and denounced Father McSpirit until Forsyth was defrocked for unspecified reasons.

 

And me. Always fourteen, despite my age. Trying to figure out how to grow up. Failing. Even now, despite the face that looks back at me from the mirror, I’m still pretending I know what I’m doing.

 

Forever, just a boy with something missing. Like coffee without walnut.

 

 

24 Hours in New York by Lucy Chambers

 

‘Have you ever been to New York Miss?’ a pupil asks me, as I set them off on their ‘dream destination’ task.

 

The Big Apple. The City That Never Sleeps.

 

It’s meant to be our honeymoon. We’re meant to be bathed in newlywedded bliss. Strolling Central Park hand in hand, climbing the Empire State Building, eating giant dollar pizza slices and New York cheesecake.

 

We planned it meticulously. You even had a spreadsheet. But we couldn’t have planned this.

 

I’m frantically pounding the pavements of the unfamiliar blocks trying to find painkillers, water and some food to try to perk you up. Typical me, thinking food can solve our problems, fix you, make everything better.

 

The steady drip of the rain falls on the pane of our hotel window at two second intervals throughout the night. Lying awake staring at the ceiling, feeling you sweating and shaking beside me. Terrified I’m going to lose you.

 

Your treatment ended. The doctors gave you the go ahead. You felt tired on our wedding day but we just thought it was all the socialising, excitement and early start. You could sleep on the plane and would be fine when we got there.

More painkillers. I go to Grand Central because it’s on the same street as our hotel. A kiosk will have some. So many stories of this place – the romance, the grandeur. I just feel scared. Like my whole world is about to end and if I find these painkillers I can stop it happening.

 

Painkillers in hand, I pick up a Hummingbird Bakery cheesecake I had seen on a travel programme while researching the trip. It’s probably a fifty, fifty cake to buttercream ratio which is sure to give you a sugar boost.

 

I can’t face going back to the hotel yet. So I walk. I walk pretending I’m just another young woman in New York, walking to work, on her day off, meeting friends. For people looking at me, I could be any one of those things.

 

I breathe in the smoggy city air. Walk past a grand Cathedral and step inside. St Patrick’s. The same name of the primary school I went to as a child. When I was full of hope and dreams. Thinking I would marry, have lots of kids and be just like my mum.

 

When we met, those dreams seemed closer. Catching my eye at the university ball, that twinkle in it telling me we’d be dancing later. You led me round the light-up dancefloor, serenading me to the dulcet tones of the Arctic Monkeys, telling me later that night, after many more tequilas that we’d get married one day.

 

Inside St Patrick’s Cathedral the air is thick. People pepper the pews, some kneeling, some deep in thought, some with their eyes closed. All seeking solace, comfort, consolation.

 

I finger the rosary beads I bought from the gift shop while I sit in a pew and stare at the altar, rubbing them until the pads of my fingers are raw, whispering Hail Marys in desperation like if I say them enough it will save you. The red candle flickers. A sign that God is here. As I complete the final decade, clinging to them in fear, they split and disperse all over the floor, the tinkling of beads disrupting people’s quiet reflection.

 

I make a pact with God. Tell him he can cover me from head to toe in psoriasis for the rest of my life, if he lets you live. It’s already flared badly because of the constant worry so what’s a bit more if it means more moments, days and years with you. I tell him I’ll volunteer more, give a percentage of my salary to charity, I’ll attend church every week for the rest of my life if he lets you live. 

Back at the hotel one mouthful of the cheesecake and you throw it up. You nibble a sandwich and sip water with your dry lips. I try to keep upbeat but can see you fading away. My love. My life.

 

We were too ambitious. Your treatment finished only a month ago. We thought we could do anything – we’re young, you can fight this no problem. It’s just a bump. How wrong we are.

 

You lie there in the double bed of the honeymoon suite, the Chrysler Building sparkling through the window beyond, while I silently sob at the life I’m about to lose. Or rather the dream of the life. The hope of the life that’s barely begun.

 

Morning comes and I manage to pull you out of bed, you take a shower and we head out for pancakes. We sit opposite each other in a booth while a sickly-sweet server comes to take our order, who has no idea our lives are about to collapse. I make small talk, pretending everything is ok and you smile and weakly reach out to hold my hand. God that touch. That memory.

 

You quietly tell me you’re ready to go home. I never eat pancakes again.

We leave after your third seizure of the trip. It has been less than 24 hours.

I book the next flight home and order a taxi to the airport.

 

We know there’s a chance they won’t let us onto the plane if you look so ill. So you let me put some of my makeup on you, nodding sadly as I ask if it’s alright. I put some blusher on your cheeks. You wear three layers of clothes to stop the shivering even though it’s 40 degrees outside.

 

The hotel staff are confused when I tell them we’re leaving and when I explain you’re not well they flash a saccharine smile and say ‘Feel Better Soon!’ If only.

The taxi driver asks how our trip has been. I lie and make up some stories about our trips to the main sights while holding your hand beneath the thick scarf we’re using as a blanket.

 

The wait in the airport seems endless. The middle of the night, nothing is open and the flight is delayed. We wait in line to board and you summon all your energy to appear normal so they don’t question why we were in New York for less than a day.

 

On the plane you sleep and I stare at a screen with the latest Hollywood releases thinking about us, our lives, our future, soon to be robbed. I imagine what our children would have looked like and see you playing with them in our garden, teaching them to ride a bike and reading them bedtime stories. You would have been a wonderful dad.

 

We arrive into Heathrow and need to make it back home up north. At Kings Cross I order two tickets on the London – Edinburgh train which come to £300.

‘Are you sure?’ the assistant asks.

 

I put it on my credit card and don’t think about it again. Money doesn’t matter when you’re faced with mortality.

 

You sleep some more on the train and your dad picks us up from the station. He takes us home and Murphy our golden labrador greets you at the front door.

 

He sleeps by your feet the following few days, mirroring your snoozes.

Family and friends visit. Your mum invites the priest round who talks with you at length.

 

By the third day at home, you seem to have found a peacefulness I hadn’t seen in you before.

 

You tell me you’re not scared. You want me to love again. Our vows are ‘until death do us part.’

 

‘You’re too young and gorgeous to be a widow,’ you tell me.

 

I laugh sadly, my heart cracking.

 

I sit by your bed chatting away, reading out our wedding cards we received the week before.

 

Then it happens. A gasp. You squeeze my hand and in the moment I look at you, your hand has loosened its grip. No big struggle, no dramatic end. A gasp and a squeeze and you’re gone.

 

***

 

A voice permeates my memory. ‘Miss, have you been to New York then?’ she asks, with an impatience in her voice.

 

I look beyond her to the rainy tarmac yard and the pebbledash houses beyond. And I say no. Saying yes means I have to tell her. Means it’s real. Means you’re gone.

 

Those 24 hours were ours. Beautifully, soul-crushingly, heartbreakingly ours and I’ll never set foot there again.

 

Those 24 hours were enough.

 

I zone back into the classroom, blink a few times and take a deep breath. ‘Ok Class 5, who wants to share their dream destination?’

 

And I listen, remembering ours and how it broke our hearts.

 

 

How I Know Where The North Is by Marcin Ostasz

The school bell rang. Next to me, my friend Kojak was copying my mathematics homework. The door opened, and our headmaster came in. His grey hair was sweaty—it was the middle of September but still warm.

‘Mr Lachs has retired,’ he said and pointed at the door.

 

‘Look at that,’ Kojak whispered, lifting his gaze.

 

A lady stepped into our classroom. She was young—younger than Mam, and taller than her. Her sporty body was clad in a summery dress with red and yellow flowers. Her hair was dark and wavy. She wore studious glasses with thick, brown frames. And, unlike any other teacher we knew, she smiled.

‘Mrs Wolfe—your new history teacher,’ our headmaster said. ‘Good luck.’ He patted her on the shoulder, and left, shutting the door.

 

Mrs Wolfe opened a window. The smells and sound of of spring—tree flowers, birds singing, a gentle wind—entered the classroom. She picked a history handbook from the teacher’s desk.

 

Mr Lachs had always read from that book, strolling up and down. And he always wore an army uniform top, which was too tight for him—he left it unbuttoned on his belly.

 

‘Don’t worry—the army will straighten you,’ he scalded Kojak, when he caught him perusing a comic book under the desk. In those days, every man served for a year.

 

Mr Lachs’ voice was as dull as Radio Programme One in the morning, but he’d raise the volume when reading about our best friend, Russia.

 

‘In September 1939, the Soviet Union ended the suffering of the working class of Eastern Poland and offered it protection,’ he recited once.

 

‘They invaded us and took half of Poland,’ hissed Kojak.

 

Mr Lachs smacked him on the head with the open book.

 

Mrs Wolfe read from the same book, but with a smirk on her face.

 

‘I like her,’ Kojak said. There was no comics book on his lap.

 

Sometimes she would tell us how in the olden days everyone was small and lived only thirty or forty years, and how castles and palaces lacked toilets, so that kings and queens used corners and walls. ‘The stench was unbearable, hence the powders and perfumes,’ she added. Or how the royal crowns that were sent from the Vatican to our first king kept getting stolen, so that he was only crowned in the last couple of days of his life.

 

‘History is made up of stories,’ she summed up, sitting on the edge of her desk.

‘How’s that new chick doing?’ Dad asked at dinner.

 

Dad was the head of the local police and a party secretary. Everyone knew him, and he knew everyone—and everything.

 

‘She smiles a lot,’ I replied. ‘She tells stories.’

 

‘What sort of stories?’

 

‘Stories from the past.’

 

‘She isn’t in the party for some reason,’ Dad observed and lifted a chicken wing, grease dripping from it.

 

‘She came from Kraków, right?’ Mam asked.

 

‘A rebellious city,’ Dad said, biting into the wing.

 

‘Perhaps it was the sirens that drove Mr Lachs out,’ said Kojak, nudging me, when a whining sound arrived from outside.

 

His father worked in the aircraft engine factory. Sirens meant a strike, which was when he and other employees refused to work. When they went off, Mr Lachs would close all the windows, even when it was hot.

 

Dad was allergic to them, too. He would curse under his nose and say,

‘There are people out there who don’t want to work.’

 

Mrs Wolfe took us out for a walk around our city. She showed us former palaces and mansions that were abandoned, or served as grain warehouses or tractor workshops. We visited parks with fallen trees and overgrown grass, and walked along old, elegant avenues, which were now straight lines of dual carriageways.

 

‘See, capitalism wasn’t all that bad. My dad says so, too,’ Kojak said, adjusting his baseball cap and licking his lollipop.

 

There were more sirens now. Besides the aircraft engine factory, they originated in the chemical factory, the power plant, and even the main train station. Dad was away for days—Mam said that he had to stay in the barracks because of the amount of work. When he returned home for a couple of hours, he’d park an armoured vehicle in front of our block of flats, have a long bath and a dinner, and then rest on the couch.

 

‘Lazy bastards,’ he scoffed whenever the telly showed moustached men in woollen jumpers, sporting a victory sign—two raised fingers.

 

The spare room in our apartment became a meeting point. It had a dining table and a set of chairs, a wedding gift from the party for my parents.

Surrounded by clouds of cigarette smoke, Dad and other cops, party members, and army officers kept asking the same question.

 

‘How will it all end?’

 

‘The Russians will come in,’ I overheard someone say.

 

‘They won’t,’ said Dad. ‘They would need the help of the Germans, and if the Germans enter, it’ll be a carnage.’

 

‘Right. Everyone would fight against those Krauts. Even I would,’ another serious voice else summed up.

 

In the last week before the first snow, Mrs Wolfe took us to a forest north of our city. She used a map to navigate through a web of paths, streams, valleys, and hills. When it was getting dark, she placed a device on the map. It had a fluorescent dial on a transparent rectangular plastic base.

 

‘What’s that, miss?’ Kojak asked.

 

‘A compass,’ Mrs Wolfe replied. ‘It always shows the north.’

 

‘How come?’

 

‘There are magnetic forces within the Earth. A compass uses the sum of them to calculate where the north is.’

 

‘I told you she knew her stuff,’ Kojak whispered to me later, when we walked out of the woods.

 

The sirens kept at it, and Dad was away for longer. Out of curiosity, Kojak and I cycled to the barracks and peeked in through the steel fence. There was a line-up of policemen in the middle of the barracks’ square. They had shields and long white batons in their hands. In front of them stood a cop, holding up a figure in civilian clothes. Another tall cop came forward, lifted a baton and hit that figure repeatedly on the legs.

 

‘Is that your dad?’ Kojak asked.

 

I froze. Dad pointed his baton at the line-up of cops. One of them stepped forward and hit the figure.

 

‘Well done!’ my father shouted.

 

‘Let’s cycle back,’ I said.

 

At the end of November, Kojak and I made an ice-rink in front of our block of flats. I remembered Dad’s advice to spread hot water on a layer of snow. We lit a small bonfire at the edge of the yard and heated the water in a steel bucket.

 

Mrs Wolfe put the book away. She told us about a place in Russia called Katyń, where the Soviet Union had killed thousands of Polish officers by shooting them in the back of their heads.

 

‘Miss, I remember the book says it was the Germans,’ I observed.

 

Mrs Wolfe opened her mouth, but a siren interrupted her. Instead of a continuous low-pitch whining, it was a series of wee-woo sounds—it belonged to a police car. I imagined my father driving it, jumping out, and hitting everyone within reach on the legs with his baton.

 

‘What do you think the workers want?’ Mrs Wolfe asked, derailing my train of thoughts.

 

‘They don’t want to work—that’s all,’ I replied, recalling Dad’s words.

 

‘Anyone else?’ she asked, scanning the class.

 

‘They want to be free,’ Kojak said.

 

‘What does it mean to be free?’ she asked.

 

‘To be able to say what you think,’ Kojak replied.

 

‘Freedom is a right to express what one thinks. Correct?’ Mrs Wolfe walked up to the blackboard and turned around.

 

We were all ears.

 

‘One is free when they live in truth. And truth is only possible when everyone is allowed to tell their story. That’s what the workers want,’ she said.

 

‘But how do you know what’s true?’ I asked.

 

‘Truth is the sum of people’s individual truths,’ she replied.

 

‘Like a compass, which sums all the forces within the Earth,’ Kojak said and winked at Mrs Wolfe.

 

Dad returned for half a day. He threw an apple core at the telly when it showed posters with the demands of the new free trade union called Solidarity—freedom of speech, freedom of gathering, free Saturdays, no further price increases.

 

‘We’ll put an end to this,’ Dad said, clenching his fist.

 

‘Perhaps all they want is the truth,’ I suggested.

 

‘What?’ Dad asked, his eyes piercing through me.

 

‘They just want to express their views, even though they might be different from the party’s,’ I replied.

 

‘Who told you that?’ Dad asked.

 

‘Mrs Wolfe.’

 

The following day, the school bell rang, the classroom door opened, and our headmaster came in.

 

‘Mrs Wolfe has left. I’m going to teach you history until we find a replacement,’ he announced, and took out the old handbook from the drawer of the teacher’s desk.

 

‘She asked to be transferred back to Kraków,’ Dad told me a few days later. It was his last stint at home before everything changed.

 

‘She missed the big, intellectual world,’ Mam added.

 

‘Yep. I had a feeling that she hadn’t been comfortable here,’ Dad said.

 

A thick layer of snow covered our ice-rink. Kojak and I went to a hill behind our estate to slide down on plastic bags filled with old clothes. On our way back, we had to cross a dual carriageway leading out of our city. We sat on our plastic bags, watching a column of military vehicles roll by.

 

Dad was right. Instead of a Russian/German invasion, Poland invaded itself. On Sunday, 13 December 1981, I turned on the telly to watch Teleranek, my favourite children’s programme, but instead I watched a general announce martial law. He said he was saving our country from falling into an abyss of violence by sending tanks onto the streets.

 

He also sent Dad to Silesia.

 

When the school reopened in April, Mr Lachs introduced one Mr Henn, whose monotonous reading accompanied us till we finished primary education.

 

I was out scouting once for meat in a different part of the city. I came upon a queue at a meat shop. I recognised Mrs Wolfe behind the counter. She looked thinner and more mature.

 

‘Two sausages, please,’ I said, when it was my turn.

 

‘Anything else?’ she asked and smiled.

 

‘I’m… sorry,’ I mumbled.

 

She wrapped my sausages in newspaper.

 

‘Sorry for what?’

 

My throat went dry.

 

‘I told my Dad about you.’

 

‘Do you think they didn’t know?’ She handed me the sausages. ‘You just followed your compass.’

 

I stood outside, watching her through the shop window. She signalled for me to go home. I found Dad watching the news—in Russia, Brezhnev, the man behind the thickest eyebrows in the world, had died of old age, and one Gorbachev had been nominated First Secretary. We had our first democratic elections, in which I voted for the democratic block, unlike Dad. The Berlin Wall fell. Kojak emigrated to London, where he still works as a bus driver. Dad retired. With his savings, he opened a DIY shop, which prospered due to his attention to detail, until a police car arrived and took him away. He was found guilty of killing unarmed miners in Silesia that winter of 1981 and put in prison. Mam and I ran his shop until his return a decade later.

 

I grew to love the outdoors. I refuse to use modern technology when orienteering. In the pouch on my belt, I carry my old East German VEB Plastverarbeitung compass. Sometimes when I take it out, I think that if there’s any good in me, it’s thanks to Mrs Wolfe and her infectious smile.