" My mother came to England to a camp just outside Brandon. It’s where the Polish forces were. This is where my dad was stationed. They met at a dance and he said, 'will you marry me?' And she said 'yes'.

My brother was born in that camp, but in 1948, the family moved to Fowlmere, the Polish resettlement camp there. It was a former RAF station, and during the war the Americans moved in with their 339^th fighter group.

We lived in tin Nissen huts [named after Nissen, who invented them]. There were approximately 80 families. Our hut was split in half and had two families living in it. The washhouse was at the bottom of the garden."

" The Polish families had to create a community from scratch. I was born in the Fowlmere camp in 1950. My earliest memories were, that it was brilliant. The only thing we had was a church. It was literally an American army barrack. It was on ‘site 5’ along the Chrishall Road. It was too small, and people were even standing outside every Sunday for mass. We had our own priest. He had been a prisoner of war in Germany. He did christen me. Every time I go to the Polish churchyard in Newmarket Road, I still light a candle for him."

" Cambridge was a meeting point in this part of East Anglia, probably because of the church. I think the church had a big role to play. Sunday masses were very well attended. There were, I'd say, 200 plus people and the Poles had their own choir. Some of the women, my mother included, used to get together, take over the kitchen there [the Catholic church] and make Sunday lunches for after church, and the profits made went to charity."

The Polonia club:

" We started a committee to buy a house [for the Polish community]. Suddenly, we saw a big house on Chesterton Road with a lovely big room, that could be converted to make a bar, a nice kitchen and above a flat for the priest. They could have a Polish school there. It was in 1976. "

Henry talks about his experiences in school and how he learnt English, but kept hold of his Polish language roots:

" We had our own Polish teacher, There were 69 children in the camp. We also went to the local primary school. Most of the Polish children couldn’t speak English but we were learning very quickly. You spoke to your parents in Polish. "

" We went to school, we were five years old. There were a dozen English children on one side of the room, and six Polish children from the camp on the other. Miss Demske [the school teacher happened to have Polish heritage] would come in and say ‘Good Morning’. The Polish children replied with ‘dzień dobry’. ‘No’, she says, ‘say it in English’. The English children would ask us, ‘what did you say to her?’ They wanted to know how we spoke, and we used to say ‘dzień dobry’ to them too. One morning, the teacher came in and said ‘good morning’. We all laughed when we Polish children said ‘good morning’ and the English children said ‘dzień dobry'."

Henryk Madej recalls his childhood as the son of Polish refugee immigrants:

" I was sent to the Shirley School in Chesterton, but at that time my first and only language was Polish. I asked my mother why she sent me to a school of deaf children. That was because I was talking in Polish and everyone was looking at me very strangely. "

Henry and Henryk talk about the different employments, which their parents found in Cambridge:

" In those early days, the main work was farm work. My dad actually worked on a building site as a labourer, a lot of them did. Some worked at the cement factory or Pye’s, Fison’s, CIBA’s, everything local around Cambridge. The women used to go to Chiver's farm in Histon or local orchards in Melbourn and Harston. They used to come round with a bus and pick everyone up to take them fruit picking. But they always, and this was very good, let the kids go to school first before they arrived. Then the women got back to pick them up from school. It was basically a 9 to 5 job. In winter, there was not a lot to do for the women.

" After the war, my mother could speak both Polish, Russian, German and English, so she joined the RAF. She was stationed at Oakington, just outside Cambridge, where she met her husband to be... they came to settle down in Cambridge. "

" They all got jobs in local factories. My mother worked in a wool factory down York Street. She met lots of Polish people mainly through the church. My father was working for a company, which had contracts doing the approach and runway lights on USAF and RAF bases. So he ended up back at Oakington."

"Mother worked at Cathodeon, a part of the Pye factory, until she retired at the age of 60. She was there with a lot of other Poles."