Fred

 

Our deceased neighbour, Fred, was mentioned in the House of Commons by Nadia Whittome MP a few weeks ago in relation to the invasion of Ukraine by Russia. Fred was Ukrainian and came to the UK as a refugee after the Second World War. Fred and his wife Joan lived over the road from us, and the Whittome family lived next-door-but-one to them. When we arrived on the street in 1989 I guess the couple had been there for around 40 years.

Both Joan and Fred died, but I would like to record some of Fred's story, at least the bits that I know.

They did not have children of their own but Joan loved to have children around and was a replacement or extra mum for many kids in the area. She would always buy our boys a toy or a selection box at Christmas and we would duly send them over to say 'thank you' on Christmas morning.

Joan's mobility was poor and she would sit in their tiny kitchen at the back of the house, smoking. One of her legs had had to be amputated as a result of her diabetes (and smoking?). She eventually acquired a mobility scooter and one if us would sometimes be called to manoeuvre it in and out of their garden shed. 

 Fred would ramble on, somewhat, about this and that. He had a strong accent and it could be difficult to understand him. His stories would come out of nowhere and were often incomplete but this is what I learned about his early life.

His family in Ukraine were poor and I think his schooling was minimal; he was sent to work on a farm at an early age. I don't recall him mentioning his parents, but don't know if he was orphaned or 'fostered' out to another family. When the Germans invaded in 1939 Fred was one of the millions of Ostarbeiter, workers taken to Germany to provide forced labour. He spoke of fleeing across the countryside with a band of men but I don't know at what point this happened. I think he worked on a German farm. 

After the collapse of Germany in 1945 the fate of the surviving forced labourers depended on which of the Allies was occupying the area they were working. Fred told me that the Ukrainians were desperate to go West - not East back to the Soviet Union. (They had lived through the Holodomor and knew what Stalin's USSR was capable of.) He told of people jumping off the trains that were travelling East. However he ended up in England where he was given a choice: work on the land, down a mine, or in a factory. 

My understanding is that Fred opted to be a miner as the pay was better; however he said that the National Union of Mineworkers prevented him (and presumably others like him) from this route. Presumably they felt that foreign workers threatened their existing members; their loss as Fred was a diligent worker. (C would tell him off when she saw him up a ladder well into his 80s). At some point, I guess in the 1950s, Fred's brother, who also came to Britain as a refugee, died. Fred knew that his brother's widow could not keep up the payments on the house the couple had bought in a middle-class area of Nottingham (our road) - and decided he would help by marrying her. That was Joan.

Joan died in 2015 and her funeral, which we attended, was in the Ukrainian Catholic church in Nottingham. Sadly we were away when Fred died the following year. We miss them both.