By Mike Thatcher

Michel Olszewksi bears no resemblance to Peter Falk, but I was put in mind of Colombo by the end of our meeting. “Oh one more thing, did I say I received a medal from the Polish President?” Or, “I almost forgot; I did the Everest base camp walk a few years ago and got airlifted out when my back went.” Had I been there two hours, rather than one, I suspect there would have been many more stories and he would have talked about them all with equal modesty I’m sure.

His father was a regular officer in the Polish army before the war and belonged to one of the few regiments that managed to get to England as a whole, fighting their way through France, arriving in 1940. Michel was born on an army camp in Germany to a half Belgian, half French mother, whom his father had met whilst liberating a town.

“I came to Hurst when I was two in 1948 and my first language was French. My father spoke Polish, French and English; my mother spoke Dutch and French so the common language at home was French.”

After the war, approximately 300,000 Poles were allowed to stay and, although there were areas of the UK where this caused friction as soldiers returned and looked for jobs, this was not the case for his father in Hurst. “People here were incredibly kind and understood what the Poles had done. My father never went back to Poland because he was a Lieutenant Colonel and so he would have been at risk after the Communists had taken over. He lost most of his family in the bombing of Warsaw and never wanted to return.”

It didn’t take long for Michel to learn English and soon he was off to a boys’ Catholic school in Brighton. If you ever need confirmation that things were different a generation or two ago then this is it. “Aged 6, I caught the bus from the church, would walk up the road to school in Brighton and I’d catch a bus back. The driver and bus conductor were Hurst people, they knew you and made sure you got on; they waited for you if you weren’t there. So it was very different, but wouldn’t happen now.”