OUR Ukrainian guests have gone home. Or at least, my husband’s driving them to Luton airport. I waved them off an hour ago, biting my lip until they were out of sight. “Don’t cry,” said Mary, “or you’ll make me cry, too.”
So I’ve been walking aimlessly round the house, stumbling across discarded things. A pair of slippers and another of winter boots in the utility room. Kids’ travel sickness pills and an assembled Lego funfair with a big wheel, a reminder of an outing to the London Eye, ready to pass on to some other child, in the dining room. Shampoo and conditioner by the sink in the bathroom, the bottles too bulky for travel.
In the spare room wardrobe, neatly folded clothes – too many to pack without exceeding the baggage allowance, some of them kindly donated by wellwishers, along with Anna’s school uniform. I ought to return it to be used by some other needy family, but I’ll hang on to it for a while, just in case the war takes a turn for the worse and they have to come back. If not, I’ll return it to the school in a term or two.
Hoping they’ll come back. Hoping they won’t.
I’m going to miss them terribly. We all are, even the dog, who loved her new nine-year-old playmate and is now just lying quietly at my feet, sensing that something’s changed and life won’t revert to the way it was yesterday.
We’ve told them they’ll always be welcome to come back. But if they do, it’ll mean things in Ukraine have got even worse. It’ll mean failure, not least the failure of world leaders to deal with Vladimir Putin once and for all.
We in Salisbury understood already how little he cares for the suffering of ordinary people. How he feels free to subject innocent civilians to terrifyingly random acts of cruelty. We still can’t make sense of it. And now he’s doing the same thing on a global scale.
Meanwhile, our would-be leaders faff about pretending to their party members that they have the ability to make everyday British lives better. They don’t actually have the faintest notion of how to deal with a monster holding the Western world to ransom. They don’t even know how to deal with the people who have fled here, seeking sanctuary. Not in the longer term. Housing, jobs – jobs that pay enough for single parents to live independently, I mean – childcare …. Not a clue.
I barely knew, before all this, anything about Ukraine. I’d never needed to know. And as a result I didn’t question the oversimplified way foreign news can be reported to us.
Now I’ve begun to grasp a little about this complicated, divided country. Mary is a native Ukrainian speaker, though she speaks Russian, too. She told us that many Ukrainians actually supported Russia – even some of those who have found their way here, their homes flattened by the dictator they so admire.
So among her fellow countrymen here in Salisbury she never completely relaxed, never really knew who to trust.
She trusted us, but there were so many ways in which we couldn’t help.
For 12 years she taught English in a school in Lviv to children across the primary and secondary age range. But schools here don’t need people, however highly qualified, to teach English as she did, as a foreign language.
And she didn’t have the right pieces of paper to work in a language school. You have to pay to study for a Celta certificate in Britain. She didn’t have the money.
She couldn’t even get an interview as a classroom assistant. Mostly, the vacancies were for supermarket cleaners and shelf-stackers, care assistants …. Shiftwork impossible to fit round childcare or school holidays for a lone mother, which is what so many of our Ukrainian guests are, with their other halves forbidden to leave their country.
She’d say: “How will I ever earn enough money for a deposit and rent on a flat?” I had no answer.
I asked Wiltshire Council leader Richard Clewer. Not unreasonably, he told me: “What do you think the people who’ve been on our waiting list for years would say if they saw refugees jumping the housing queue?”
Then came the decider. Her headteacher in Ukraine said she could not hold her job open any longer.
We’d offered her a home for a year. We couldn’t commit to longer. She stayed for 14 weeks.
So I’ve been walking aimlessly round the house, stumbling across discarded things. A pair of slippers and another of winter boots in the utility room. Kids’ travel sickness pills and an assembled Lego funfair with a big wheel, a reminder of an outing to the London Eye, ready to pass on to some other child, in the dining room. Shampoo and conditioner by the sink in the bathroom, the bottles too bulky for travel.
In the spare room wardrobe, neatly folded clothes – too many to pack without exceeding the baggage allowance, some of them kindly donated by wellwishers, along with Anna’s school uniform. I ought to return it to be used by some other needy family, but I’ll hang on to it for a while, just in case the war takes a turn for the worse and they have to come back. If not, I’ll return it to the school in a term or two.
Hoping they’ll come back. Hoping they won’t.
I’m going to miss them terribly. We all are, even the dog, who loved her new nine-year-old playmate and is now just lying quietly at my feet, sensing that something’s changed and life won’t revert to the way it was yesterday.
We’ve told them they’ll always be welcome to come back. But if they do, it’ll mean things in Ukraine have got even worse. It’ll mean failure, not least the failure of world leaders to deal with Vladimir Putin once and for all.
We in Salisbury understood already how little he cares for the suffering of ordinary people. How he feels free to subject innocent civilians to terrifyingly random acts of cruelty. We still can’t make sense of it. And now he’s doing the same thing on a global scale.
Meanwhile, our would-be leaders faff about pretending to their party members that they have the ability to make everyday British lives better. They don’t actually have the faintest notion of how to deal with a monster holding the Western world to ransom. They don’t even know how to deal with the people who have fled here, seeking sanctuary. Not in the longer term. Housing, jobs – jobs that pay enough for single parents to live independently, I mean – childcare …. Not a clue.
I barely knew, before all this, anything about Ukraine. I’d never needed to know. And as a result I didn’t question the oversimplified way foreign news can be reported to us.
Now I’ve begun to grasp a little about this complicated, divided country. Mary is a native Ukrainian speaker, though she speaks Russian, too. She told us that many Ukrainians actually supported Russia – even some of those who have found their way here, their homes flattened by the dictator they so admire.
So among her fellow countrymen here in Salisbury she never completely relaxed, never really knew who to trust.
She trusted us, but there were so many ways in which we couldn’t help.
For 12 years she taught English in a school in Lviv to children across the primary and secondary age range. But schools here don’t need people, however highly qualified, to teach English as she did, as a foreign language.
And she didn’t have the right pieces of paper to work in a language school. You have to pay to study for a Celta certificate in Britain. She didn’t have the money.
She couldn’t even get an interview as a classroom assistant. Mostly, the vacancies were for supermarket cleaners and shelf-stackers, care assistants …. Shiftwork impossible to fit round childcare or school holidays for a lone mother, which is what so many of our Ukrainian guests are, with their other halves forbidden to leave their country.
She’d say: “How will I ever earn enough money for a deposit and rent on a flat?” I had no answer.
I asked Wiltshire Council leader Richard Clewer. Not unreasonably, he told me: “What do you think the people who’ve been on our waiting list for years would say if they saw refugees jumping the housing queue?”
Then came the decider. Her headteacher in Ukraine said she could not hold her job open any longer.
We’d offered her a home for a year. We couldn’t commit to longer. She stayed for 14 weeks.
NB I wrote this a month ago but waited to post it till I was sure they weren't planning on coming back.
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