Royal Air Force

The Royal Air Force appears in the novel as part of Agata Kowalski’s family history and the wider history of Polish service in Britain during the Second World War. Her grandfather was among the Polish airmen who fought alongside British forces; his later return to Poland and eventual resettlement in Britain connect military service to displacement, citizenship and the unsettled memory of the postwar settlement.

Polish Service in Britain

Agata explains that when France fell in 1940, the Polish Government-in-Exile moved to London, bringing nearly 20,000 members of the Polish armed services. During the Battle of Britain and beyond, she says, Poles formed the largest non-British contingent of pilots and airmen serving in the Royal Air Force. Her grandfather was one of them, remembered in the family as a war hero.

That account gives the organization a personal dimension: the RAF is not simply a military institution in Agata’s telling, but the setting for her grandfather’s service alongside the British during a period when Poland’s government and armed forces were displaced. His experience anchors her sense of a Polish history that is also bound to Britain.

The Grandfather’s Return and Resettlement

After the war, Agata’s grandfather was granted British citizenship. He returned to Poland hoping to help rebuild the country, but became disillusioned and believed the Soviets would not loosen their grip. Ten years later he returned to Britain, bringing Agata’s father and his two sisters with him. The family’s movement between the two countries gives the wartime alliance a long aftermath: service in Britain did not settle where the family belonged or where it could build a future.

Agata also describes a later chapter in that history. In 1997, after Russian forces had left and Poland was re-establishing itself as a nation, her parents took the family to live in Poznań. The account places the RAF generation’s experience beside the next generation’s changing relationship with Poland, as a family shaped by exile and resettlement returned to live there.

Alliance and Betrayal

Agata sets the pilots’ wartime contribution against the political outcome of the Yalta Conference. She recalls Winston Churchill’s promise that Britain would not forget its debt to Polish troops, then emphasizes that he agreed to let Russia retain large parts of Poland, displacing more than a million Poles, including many of those troops. Some refused to return to Poland, and thirty died by suicide rather than do so.

Her grandfather regarded this outcome as an ultimate betrayal. Agata links that judgment to the Polish Resettlement Act, which allowed troops, their families and others affected by the annexation to remain in Britain or settle there. The RAF’s place in the novel is therefore inseparable from a contrast between public gratitude for wartime service and the political decisions that left Polish servicemen and their families facing an uncertain home.

Family Memory and Belonging

Agata tells Jo Stuart this history while explaining why her parents wanted her never to forget her roots, or theirs. Her account makes military history part of an intimate conversation about identity: her grandfather’s service, citizenship and displacement help explain why she regards herself as both British and European, and why she is unwilling to reduce her inheritance to a single national identity.

The Royal Air Force is not depicted through a battle scene or an institutional portrait. Instead, it enters through remembered service and its consequences across generations. Agata’s family story preserves both the honor of fighting alongside Britain and the grievance of what followed, showing how public history continues to shape private ideas of loyalty, home and belonging.