The General Langfitt Story
Chapter 6 - Resettlement in Australia (continued)
Cunderdin Camp, Western Australia, 1950
(Courtesy of Barbara Kaluzynska)
It was very heavy work and I got sick. After that they gave me better work cleaning and scrubbing the floors in the hospital. Sometimes I washed the children and after a while the sister in charge said I could give them injections but I did not like the nursing duties.There was one Catholic lady from Perth who belonged to a charitable organisation. She told me through an interpreter that they wanted my son to be a postman. I said he was too young so she said that she would try to put my son in a Christian Brothers School. In October he went to the school and she found me work as a cleaning lady in Perth at the Sacred Heart Convent. I lived in the convent but it was a very small wage - only £3 for a week and that £3 I gave for the board and education of my son. I had to work every day because there was no-one to help us, no-one. But my son graduated and went on to university and now he is a scientist with the CSIRO. He has three children, two of whom are at university and one is doing school matriculation.
Wladyslawa Smenda, another trained and experienced teacher, did much the same, working as a domestic at Northam Camp for two years while her daughter Teresa became a monitor for the Education Department at a school in Cunderdin. As her son Janusz observed:
I think most of us adapted quite well but it was more difficult for the older people. My mother was then fifty and her English wasn't anywhere near good enough to work as a teacher. She had about £50 and I had £5 when we came here. That was the sum total of our possessions, plus a few personal things. Mum started work as an office cleaner so I could go to uni full time. In that sense she sacrificed a lot of her time for us.
This was a theme common to many: mothers' determination to improve the lot of their children. Ryszard Pawlowski finished his contract and then:
decided to go to the bush where I worked in the timber mill in the south-west. After that job I came back to Perth, mainly due to my mother insisting that we should try and improve ourselves by doing some kind of a course. She used to say, 'You don't want to be a labourer all your life and work in factories. Try and do something'. She kept insisting and encouraging us, so I started going to English classes at night school. All that time I was attending a course in mechanical drafting at Perth Technical College but it wasn't easy in those days to get employment in Perth. I was trying to get something in line with what I was doing at school. A friend who was in Melbourne wrote me a letter saying that there were more opportunities in Melbourne so I moved to Melbourne in 1957.
Many of the young adults who were unable to resume studies because of the work contract and the need to earn a living commented upon the inhibitions this placed upon their future prospects, although many later resumed studies, either in conjunction with working or raising a family. Where this was not directly related to improving job prospects, it was undertaken for the sheer satisfaction of the achievement - a legacy, perhaps, of the efforts of their Polish teachers in India and Africa, a youthful training which focused upon a 'useful and productive life'. It was also a way of showing their gratitude to the mothers who had brought them through so much to reach freedom.