Battle of Britain

The Battle of Britain is invoked in Agata Kowalski’s account of her family’s Polish roots, not staged as a wartime episode. Her grandfather’s service among Polish airmen makes the campaign a point of connection between Britain and Poland, while the history Agata recounts also exposes the distance between public promises of gratitude and the political decisions that followed the war.

Family history and Polish service

Agata explains that her parents wanted their children to remember both their own roots and those of the family. She recounts that, after France fell in 1940, the Polish Prime Minister brought the Polish Government-in-Exile to London, accompanied by nearly 20,000 members of the armed services. During the Battle of Britain and beyond, Polish pilots and airmen formed the largest non-British contingent serving with the Royal Air Force. Agata’s grandfather was one of them, and the novel identifies him as a war hero.

His service links the campaign’s broad military history to a single family story. After the war, he received British citizenship and returned to Poland in an effort to help rebuild the country. Ten years later, disillusioned and convinced that Soviet control would not loosen, he returned to Britain with Agata’s father and his two sisters. The family’s movements place Polish military service, postwar political uncertainty, and migration within the same inheritance.

Alliance and perceived betrayal

Agata’s account does not end with recognition of Polish service. She recalls Winston Churchill’s promise that the British people would not forget their debt to Polish troops, then sets that promise against the Yalta Conference, where Churchill agreed to allow Russia to retain large parts of Poland. Agata says that more than a million Poles were displaced, including many of the troops who had fought alongside Britain; some refused to return to Poland, and thirty died by suicide rather than do so.

For Agata’s grandfather, the outcome felt like an ultimate betrayal. The British Government’s Polish Resettlement Act allowed troops, their families, and others affected by the annexation to remain in Britain or settle there. In her telling, that measure sits beside, rather than erases, the failure of wartime promises as he understood them. Her closing reflection that times have changed gives the historical account a present-day edge: gratitude, refuge, and belonging are not fixed outcomes of an alliance.

Meaning in Agata’s present

Agata shares this history during a personal conversation with Jo Stuart about identity and her affinity with Poland. She describes herself as both British and European and says that she does not want to choose between those identities; if Britain leaves the European Union, she intends to take up Polish citizenship. Her family’s past helps explain why national belonging, for her, is not an abstract matter of convenience.

The recollection also complicates the evening’s intimacy. Jo is learning about a history that Agata treats as part of her family’s inheritance, and their conversation turns somber as the account reaches displacement and the deaths of Polish servicemen. The Battle of Britain thus functions as historical memory within the novel: a reminder of shared wartime service, but also the beginning of a longer story about political decisions, migration, and the difficulty of being asked to choose one home over another.