Growing Up With Foreigners

The story is a mixture of adventure, fact, fear, fiction and fun about a German-Polish-Catholic woman from Upper Silesia and an Austrian-Jewish-Protestant man born in Vienna.

Before arriving in England in 1939, they enjoyed comfortable lives. The man escaped Nazi tyranny and the Holocaust but his parents didn't. The woman came to England to study. Her parents fled before the advancing Russian army to Bavaria in 1945.

They met, married and survived World War II together, living in poverty as stateless people. The man, being classified as an enemy alien, should have been interned on the Isle of Man. Had this happened, the woman would have been left destitute with a newly born daughter.

As we follow the lives of the stoic Pole and the excitable Austrian, their relationship is like Newton's first law of motion where the irresistible force meets the immovable object. It describes their exotic nature and their integration into English society in the 1950s and 1960s, whilst they still wanted to hold on to parts of their early lives that had gone forever.