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Romania and knew where the squadron was billeted, he would insist she join him. She was a brave one, his wife, and a good nurse too, efficient and compassionate without being sentimental, at least where her patients were concerned. As the woman he loved with his whole heart, she was as loving and passionate as it was possible for any woman to be. He was a lucky devil. If it hadn’t been for that foolish episode trying to fly under a bridge and coming to grief, he might never have met her. They came from different worlds.
    He was the younger son of wealthy Count Tadeusz Grabowski and his wife Zofia who had an extensive estate near Białystok, in north-east Poland, not far from the Russian border. Intended for the cavalry along with his elder brother, Jozef, he had insisted from his early teens that he wanted to fly. His parents had opposed the idea: his father because the Grabowski men had always gone into the cavalry, his mother because she saw it as foolhardy and dangerous. But he was nothing if not persistent and, after he had finished at the university, they had let him apply for a place atthe Polish Air Force Academy at Dęblin, hoping, he thought, though they did not say so, that he would fail in view of the strong competition. But he would not countenance failure. In 1936, he had been one of the ninety young men accepted out of six thousand applicants.
    Seventy miles south of Warsaw, the Academy’s headquarters was a magnificent eighteenth-century manor house and here he had learnt not only to fly, but to fight. In the classroom they learnt aerodynamics, navigation and maintenance. In practical sessions they learnt to fly several different aircraft, to use the aircraft’s guns and to keep their wits and eyes about them at all times. Discipline had been strict but that didn’t stop their off-duty escapades and that was how Jan had come to accept the challenge to fly under the bridge, realised too late that it could not be done and crash-landed in a field beside the river. It had been a hard lesson to learn, but learn it he had. On graduation he had, to his great delight, been posted to the Ko ś ciuszko Squadron based just outside Warsaw, enabling him to see more of Rulka.
    The war had put paid to fun and games. On the first day of September, Hitler had invaded on some trumped-up excuse that Polish troops had raided German territory. Now, so Jan had been told, there were over fifty German divisions on Polish soil, well-equipped with guns and tanks, not to mention hundreds of aircraft waging a war of terror on Polish troops and civilians alike. The fighters of the Polish Air Force were outnumbered and outgunned. Jan, along with his fellow flyers, had adopted a strategy of climbing above the bombers and diving down on them, or if that were not possible, they would fly at them head-on waiting until the last minute before firing their guns and peeling away. It was a question of whose nerve broke first and Jan andhis comrades were determined it would not be theirs. They had fought ferociously until, almost out of fuel and spare parts, it became obvious that if they did not withdraw they would lose the little they had left. Hence his unpalatable orders.
    He saw a newsboy standing on a corner with a pile of papers, shouting something that sounded like ‘Russia’. He stopped and bought a copy, sitting astride his machine to read it. Molotov, the Soviet leader, had made a deal with Hitler and the Red Army had invaded Poland from the east. He thought immediately of his parents. He hoped they would escape and not try to hold onto their lands, though he doubted his autocratic father would give them up without a fight. He stuffed the paper in the front of his jacket and turned the motorcycle round, intending to go back to Rulka and make her come with him. It was probably already too late to do anything to help his parents.
    The eerie sound of an air raid siren rose and fell, warning of another raid, making the people on the