Background

I never knew my father, not because we never met but because I was too young to remember. For example, I have no memories of this photo being taken!



My parents met during WWII, my father was in England, fighting with the Polish Airforce. They married at the end of the war and divorced a few years later. My mother almost never spoke of my father, and certainly had nothing good to say about him. Initially she tried very hard to keep any information away from me, later she spoke a little but by this time she had very little information to give me. Things were very different in those days to now, divorce was still frowned on.
After the war my father chose to remain in the UK and was trained as an explosives expert in the mines. In 1950 he married again, by this time he was naturalized and known as Winston Lawrence, he subsequently had a son.