Hania Jakubowski

Hania Jakubowski

Interview transcript

The Christmas before my Mum and Dad were married my mother had prepared a very traditional Polish Christmas eve 12 course meal. And she waited and she waited and he never showed up. And she was heartbroken. So she went to his lodgings where he was staying in London and his landlady promptly told my mum that he’d gone off to Paris to see an old girlfriend. And my mum went home and she told me that she’d just written him off. It was the end. But what really had happened was that my dad had seen some pearl necklace in a store in Paris and he’d decided the women he was going to marry was not going to get an engagement ring, she was going to have this necklace. And on the 23rd of December he took the boat to Paris to buy this pearl necklace. Problem was the English Channel was horrific and the boat couldn’t get back across so he was stuck on the French side of the Channel with this necklace and my mother on the other side in London swearing at him that she never wanted him in her life again. But he finally arrived very late on Christmas eve and he asked her to marry him and he gave her this pearl necklace.