More paternal pictorial memorabilia

I found three boxes of photos under the telephone table in the hall at my parents' house. Not enough time to do a full sorting (there are scores of photo albums from the 1970s onward which also need to be looked at), but here are a few that caught my eye.

Left: photo taken in Warsaw, dated 19 January 1930, in the style of street photographers who'd shoot their subjects against a stately rural backdrop. My father was then six years old, turning seven on 5 April. This reminds me of the that classic Michael Nash photo of Warsaw in ruins, immediately after the war, with a street photographer taking a photograph of a middle-aged woman against a similar backdrop of a palace in the countryside.

Right: Munich, April 1946. After his liberation from the prisoner-of-war camp, my father enrolled in the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA) University in Munich. He completed two semesters, studying civil engineering, before leaving for Italy to reach the UK with the rest of General Anders' army. Aged 23, he's wearing a US army uniform - the tie, belt and a few other items (water bottle and camp bed) made it to Cleveland Road.

Left: photo from 1958. My paternal grandmother Stefania Dembińska, née Witkowska, and my father, on the porch of 15 Croft Gardens, Hanwell, the house my parents bought in 1955. Here, my father is 35 years old - and a new dad (I was about ten months old at the time) - whilst my grandmother is 65.

Below: my grandmother, me and my mother, summer 1958. By this time, travel from communist Poland to the UK for family reunion purposes was allowed.

Below: two photos from June 1973, taken in the flat where my grandmother lived with my father's older brother, Zdzisław (he of Mazowsze song-and-dance troupe fame - he was lead violinist). My father, here 50, and his mother, now 80. She died in January 1975. My family still lives in the same flat on ul. Filtrowa. In the same building in which General Antoni Chruściel 'Monter' gave the order the begin the Warsaw Uprising (though no one knew that back in the 1970s).

Below: my father with his uncle, Zdzich, who sadly was to die of a heart attack before the end of 1973, at the age of 52. Modern medicine would undoubtedly have saved his life.

It's that time of day when I miss my father most - coming up to ten pm in Warsaw, nine pm in London, my father would have finished his evening meal and Basia or Violetta would have administered his eye drops - and I'd ring him up as I did most every evening these past four years since my mother died. A part of my daily ritual, now gone.

This time last year:
Wider-angle London

This time two years ago:
First snow. first frost of the year
[today daytime high +8C]

This time nine years ago
Childhood memories of Warsaw