Page 28 of The Storyteller of Krakow

Outside the wired camp, the world opened in a way that still startled me. Iraq was not like Poland. There were no soft hills and hedgerows, no damp, rich smell of earth after rain. Here the land lay flat and pale, broken by low rises of baked ground and, now and then, a sudden slash of green where water ran. The road was more an idea than a thing in places, a track of crushed stones and tyre ruts that shimmered in the distance as if the earth was boiling. The sun sat heavy in the sky, white-hot, and by midmorning sweat would gather at the base of my spine and under my shirt as if someone had poured warm water down my back.

When I drove through the villages, they rose from the dust in clusters of mud-brick and palm shade. Children ran alongside the lorry for a few seconds, thin legs flashing, calling out words I couldn’t catch; sometimes it sounded like laughter, sometimes like a dare. Men sat in doorways or under makeshift awnings, watching with the calm, measuring eyes of people who had seen too many uniforms come and go. Women moved like quick shadows between walls, headscarves bright against the brown, carrying water or bundles. The air smelled of smoke, dung fires, and something sharp and sweet from a stall where dates sat piled like little lumps of amber.

I learned quickly not to stare too much, not to wave too eagerly. We were told: be polite, keep to the route, don’t go wandering, don’t get drawn in. ‘You’re not here for sightseeing,’ our British sergeant, Bell, had snapped on the first day, saying it first in broken Polish that he was still learning and then in English, as if any of us had ever imagined this place as a holiday.

Most days began before the worst of the heat. We’d line up with our lorries while the British NCOs walked along the row like butchers inspecting meat. ‘Oil,’ one would bark, tapping the dipstick with a grimy fingernail.

‘Water. Tyres. Brakes. You miss one, you’ll be walking back and I’ll enjoy the sight.’

After checks came the drills: driving in convoy, keeping distance, learning how to read the dust cloud ahead of you. We practised stopping and starting in a line, practised turning the whole lumbering column through narrow tracks without clipping the edges of ditches.

A British lieutenant with sunburnt ears stood on an ammunition box with a map board and talked about routes. ‘You follow concrete landmarks,’ he told us. ‘Landmarks don’t move. You follow bearings and you follow orders.’

In the evenings, we gathered in the mess and ate tin plates of stew and bread that tasted of dust, and there was always tea – strong, sweet, poured into mugs that had passed through a hundred hands. Some of the British lads stared at us at first, curious and doubtful, as if a woman behind a wheel offended a natural law. Then they watched us reverse a lorry into a narrow space without grinding the gears and they stopped staring.

A Scotsman called McLeod thumped my shoulder once and said, ‘Right then, you can drive. Don’t let it go to your head.’

Of course, all of it led to the same question, the one that hung in the air like the damned dust. When would this stop being practice? When would we actually go to war?

We heard scraps. Newspapers arrived days late, sometimes weeks, passed from hand to hand until the pages tore. Men argued in the shade about Rommel and the desert war, about whether the Germans would push again towards Egypt, about what the Russians were doing back in the east.

The British spoke in careful phrases: ‘up the line’, ‘over there’, ‘the show’. They’d talk about going in a month, maybe less, maybe more. It was always somewhere else. Always later.

One afternoon, when the sun was dropping and the camp finally loosened its grip on the day, I found Sergeant Bell smoking by the motor pool, his cap tipped back. I leaned against the lorry and asked the thing I’d been thinking for weeks.

‘Sergeant,’ I said, tasting the English on my tongue for a moment before continuing, ‘when do you think we will go to battle?’

He exhaled smoke through his nose and gave me a look that was half irritation, half something like pity. ‘Battle,’ he repeated. ‘That depends on the powers that be, doesn’t it?’

I nodded like I understood.

‘You might never fire a shot,’ he went on, ‘might never see battle as you put it. You might spend the whole war chasing breakdowns and hauling crates of biscuits. Or you might take a wrong turn, end up under a Stuka or a German patrol, and that’s that. Don’t go begging for it – for battle.’ He stretched out the word so it landed heavy.

A Polish lad from the next vehicle over, Staszek, all elbows and grin, called out, ‘But where will they send us? Libya? Italy? Germany? They will send us somewhere, won’t they?’

Bell snorted. ‘Italy, he says. Listen to you. I don’t know and you don’t need to know. When London decides, you’ll know. Until then you’re here, learning to keep a lorry running and not kill yourselves. There’s a war on everywhere, and most of it is none of your business until the paperwork says it is.’

He stubbed the cigarette out on a stone and added, softer, ‘Just try and do what you are told to do here. Talk, eat, sleep, and it sounds stupid, I know, but try and enjoy this quiet. You’ll be wishing for it soon enough.’

So I did what I could control. I drove the routes I was given, learned the feel of the steering wheel through my palms, learned how the tyres skidded differently on hard-packed sand than on gravel. I learned to keep a scarf damp and looped round my neck so the heat didn’t make me stupid.

At night, when the generators hummed and the air finally cooled, we would sit outside our tents and listen to the wireless if someone could coax it into life, catching fragments: names of places, numbers of ships sunk, a victory announced and then, a day later, a rumour that it hadn’t been so clean. It was like trying to understand a storm by catching individual raindrops.

And still I waited for the thing my instructor had promised: orders. A destination. A manifest with stamps and signatures that would turn all this circling into purpose.

In the quieter moments, I pored over maps they gave me, and annoyed the mechanics as I wanted to understand how the truck worked.

And it was on one day, when I was sitting in front of my truck on an upturned bucket, reading a manual that one of the mechanics had given me, that Wojtek returned.

The truck, similar although a little smaller than my own, came rumbling into the camp, stirring up the bloody dust that had finally settled after several windy days.

The grit immediately slapped me in the face, tracking its way up my nose and into my eyes. I placed the book down and stood, using my overall sleeve to wipe it away.

I looked up and saw that this truck was accompanied by two others, which all stopped in a neat little line, and Polish soldiers appeared, grinning from ear to ear, each of them with brown paper parcels in their hands.

The women, roused from their duties at this display, made a tentative walk towards them, but then stopped dead as the brown bear emerged from the cab, and walked on all fours next to that same red-faced man who had untied knickers from his head.

‘It’s okay!’ one of the men shouted. ‘He’s friendly. I promise you, he won’t hurt you.’