We played host to Ukrainian refugees because of a man called Ilya Neustadt. A Jewish Ukrainian, he was studying economics in Belgium when Germany invaded in 1940.
Britain took Ilya in. This may have saved him from the camps. He later became a distinguished academic, a mentor to my parents and a family friend.
It was by similar happenstance that a seven-year-old Ukrainian found himself standing in our London back garden in May 2022.
“Why have we come to England if the Russians are shooting missiles at England too?” Oleksii asked. He pointed to the white trails stretching out across the blue sky. His mother Mariya* explained that the trails had been left by airliners taking holidaymakers to and from Gatwick airport.
Their own home is near Kyiv’s main airport. The area took a pasting in the first few days of the invasion because Vladimir Putin hoped to land troops near there.
Mariya bundled her two children into her car and drove lickety split to Moldova and safety. She arrived in the UK a couple of months later with nothing more than the clothes the family was wearing, a single suitcase and her enthusiasm for 19th-century literature.
This column would be more arresting if I could write that my wife and I battled intransigent British bureaucracy to get Mariya and her boys out of Moldova. One colleague had epic difficulties with the visa-wrangling nabobs of the Home Office.
But for us, everything worked like clockwork. The Homes for Ukraine team at Bromley Council were fast, well-informed and efficient. A kind old official who looked like Santa turned up to welcome Mariya and her boys. He advised me to put a picket fence across the middle of our garden so the two-year-old could not fall into the pond.
I sweated over this job for most of one hot Saturday in June. Returning from the park that afternoon, Oleksii vaulted the fence so he could inspect the new infrastructure. Little Dmytro appeared too. Solicitously, Oleksii lifted his brother over the barrier so he could also see what I had been doing — from behind the fence that was supposed to keep him out.
The garden has been the scene of much other activity: kickabouts, swingball duels and some well-meaning but overenthusiastic help with watering.
We planted sweetcorn together. My family had regarded this as an insipid food, encountered floating despondently in lukewarm soup in British canteen serving areas. Mariya said that a person has not lived until they have eaten maize cooked straight off the plant.
Roots pushed out into British soil: weakly at first, then strongly. The ears of corn were delicious.
The family, members of Ukraine’s Russian-speaking community like President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, now switch comfortably between that language and English. Mariya has to stay on the boys’ case to ensure they keep up their Ukrainian.
The house share has worked out. We have become friends. Mariya says it is like borscht, her signature dish. Get the ingredients right and the recipe will succeed.
She found places for her kids at nursery and the local school. She took a part-time job — well below her pay and seniority back home as an IT project manager. But she is glad of the work. It is a step on the ladder.
Now she has secured a small flat on the street where we live. It is another step on the ladder.
For Mariya, the UK is both daunting and fascinating. But she is young, enterprising and hopeful. These are useful qualities for new arrivals in London, a city that can be merciless as well as accommodating to those of limited means.
Like every refugee ever, Mariya is learning to crack the codes of a foreign society. We have tried to explain the UK to her. We did not bother unpicking the class system. We do not understand that ourselves; perhaps nobody does.
No one knows how this story ends, either. Mariya wants to resume her interrupted life in Ukraine. But even a brief trip exposes her children to the Russian bombing she has sacrificed so much to avoid. Both armies are stalemated in the east, in conditions the men of my family experienced on the western front in the first world war.
Meanwhile, Ukraine risks becoming, in the words of a gloomy friend who helps sweep up after African conflicts, “just another of the world’s forgotten wars”.
But this spring I will plant sweetcorn. And this autumn, we will eat the fresh cobs and think of Ilya and Mariya.
*some names have been changed
