If you’re joining this journey here, you may enjoy reading Part 1 first, where I reflect on the childhood we never realised we would one day miss.

If I close my eyes, I can still walk through that childhood as though it happened yesterday. Not because I remember every detail perfectly—memory has a habit of polishing some things and quietly stealing others—but because I remember how it felt. Strange, isn’t it? We rarely remember what we had for lunch last Tuesday, yet we can still smell our grandmother’s kitchen forty years later.

My grandmother never believed children should only watch adults working. If she was cooking, there was every chance you would soon hear my name followed by a task. Not a pretend task to make me feel included, but a real one.

“Bring another bucket of water.”

“Put more wood on the fire.”

“Cut the cucumbers for the salad.”

By the time I was four or five, I knew how to carry a bucket that was probably a little too heavy for me, although I insisted it wasn’t. I knew where the wood was kept and how to choose the pieces that would burn well. My grandmother cooked on an old wood-burning stove, the sort that today would probably fail every safety inspection before breakfast. Back then, it came with one metal hook and a grandmother who simply showed you what to do.

She would lift the heavy iron plate with the hook, push another log into the fire, and then step aside for me to do the same. There was no dramatic speech about danger, no carefully prepared lesson. She showed me once, watched me do it, and somehow that was enough.

“Don’t burn yourself.”

That was the entire training programme.

The same happened in the kitchen. If the salad needed cutting, I cut it—with a real knife, the very same knife everyone else used.

My grandmother’s and my mother’s safety briefing has stayed with me all my life.

“Nie zarżnij się.”

Don’t cut yourself.

There was something wonderfully Polish about it. Direct. Practical. Slightly dramatic, just in case, and then everybody simply carried on. If I happened to nick my finger, the solution arrived just as quickly.

“Put it under cold water.”

“Press it.”

“It’ll stop.”

And that was the end of the medical consultation.

No panic. No discussion. No family meeting. Certainly, no internet search to discover that, according to somebody somewhere, I was probably moments away from losing my entire hand.

As I write this, something else suddenly makes me smile. I have often wondered where I picked up the habit of wiping my wet or dirty hands on the side of my trousers or the front of my clothes. Every now and then, I still catch myself doing it without even thinking. I used to blame myself for it. Now, while writing these memories, I realise exactly where it came from.

My grandmother, my mother, and, if I think about it, just about every adult around me.

My grandmother always wiped her flour-covered hands on her apron before coming over to see whether I’d done the job properly. She never hovered while I was doing it. She waited until I had finished, quietly looked at what I’d done, nodded if it was right, or showed me how to do it better if it wasn’t, and then life simply carried on. My grandfather wiped his hands on his trousers after working outside. My mother did exactly the same when she was busy. It was so ordinary that I never noticed it at all.

Until now.

Isn’t that how childhood works? The things we remember being taught are surprisingly few. The things we quietly absorb without anyone saying a word seem to stay with us for life. Children are extraordinary observers. They don’t always do what we ask them to do, but they become astonishingly good at doing what they see us do.

Today, if a child wiped their hands on their clothes, there would probably be an immediate chorus of, “Use a tissue!” or “Go and wash your hands properly.” Back then, the apron would be washed tomorrow, the trousers eventually, and childhood carried on without anyone believing a little dirt was the beginning of a crisis.

Looking back, I realise those little jobs were never really about helping. They were simply part of family life. We peeled potatoes because potatoes needed peeling. We carried wood because the fire needed feeding. We fetched water because someone needed water. Nobody praised us for learning life skills because nobody imagined we were learning them at all. We were simply living the sort of life where children naturally became part of whatever needed doing.

School didn’t end our adventures. If anything, it added a few more. We climbed ropes in the gym until our hands burned, jumped over the old wooden vault with more enthusiasm than elegance, balanced on beams convinced we were circus performers, and proudly practised cartwheels whether they were straight or spectacularly crooked. We learned to sew, hammer nails, and make things with our own hands because those were considered perfectly ordinary things for children to know. Nobody wondered whether climbing a rope might damage our confidence. Apparently, scraping both knees before dinner was considered sufficient training.

I remember one summer afternoon when I was probably six or seven. Somewhere in that wonderfully confident little mind of mine, I decided I was perfectly capable of climbing onto a horse by myself. I had watched my older cousin do it often enough. How difficult could it possibly be?

There was just one tiny problem.

I had chosen the wrong horse.

Completely convinced I knew exactly what I was doing, I climbed over the broken wall, walked straight towards the horse I thought I recognised, grabbed its mane, and somehow managed to pull myself onto its back. The horse calmly started walking, and for a few glorious seconds I felt unbelievably proud of myself. In my head, I was no longer an ordinary little girl. I was a proper rider.

Then I heard shouting.

I turned around and saw my cousin galloping towards me as fast as he could, waving his arms and yelling for me not to let the horse run. At the time, I had absolutely no idea why he looked so terrified. Only later did I discover that the horse I had proudly climbed onto wasn’t our calm riding horse at all. It was the young field horse that had never been trained to be ridden, especially not by some little brat like me.

My cousin wasn’t riding over to congratulate me.

He was rescuing me.

The funny thing is that I don’t remember being frightened.

I remember feeling rather disappointed that my adventure had ended so quickly.

Children have a remarkable ability to survive experiences that adults later replay in slow motion. Perhaps that is because children live almost entirely in the present, while adults slowly become experts at imagining everything that could possibly go wrong. Somewhere along the way, we replace curiosity with “What if…?” Thankfully, those two words hadn’t reached me yet.

Of course, we got hurt. How could we not? We climbed higher than we should have, ran faster than our legs could manage, and were convinced that every race was worth winning.

I still laugh when I remember racing my brother home on our bicycles after a quick trip to the village shop. It was one of those completely unnecessary races that only children understand. Winning mattered enormously, although neither of us could have explained why.

Somewhere along the way, my foot slipped into the wheel.

The bicycle stopped.

I didn’t.

My solution, which seemed perfectly logical at the time, was to grab my brother. If I was falling, he was coming with me.

Together, we disappeared into the roadside ditch, laughing before either of us had worked out what had happened. I don’t know what amused us more—the spectacular fall or the fact that we had managed to end up in exactly the same place. It was only when I tried to stand that I noticed my foot had turned an impressive shade of blue and had swollen to a size that suggested it had ambitions of becoming two feet instead of one.

Oddly enough, the pain arrived only after I looked at it.

Childhood was funny like that.

Sometimes curiosity reached us before pain did.

My brother did what older brothers have done for generations. He ran home as fast as he could—not for an ambulance, not to phone anyone, simply to fetch the adults, because adults always seemed to know somebody who knew what to do.

The village doctor wasn’t there every day, so I was taken to an older woman who possessed that mysterious knowledge every village seemed to have. She gave me warm goat’s milk to drink, gently examined my ankle, rubbed something into it that smelt strongly of herbs, wrapped it carefully, and sent me home with complete confidence that I would be fine.

And I was.

By that evening, I was already walking around the garden again, convinced my swollen foot had somehow made me the hero of the day. Children recover quickly, not only because their bones heal faster, but because tomorrow always promises another adventure.

The funny thing is that writing this essay has become an adventure of its own.

Every time I think I have reached the end of one memory, another quietly walks in, sits beside me, and refuses to leave. Bare feet running along warm summer roads. Drinking cold water straight from the garden tap or the hose because we were thirsty and never once wondered whether it had been filtered. Walking to church with friends and coming home on our own because that was simply what children did. Being sent to the local shop to buy bread, sugar, or a packet of yeast and feeling terribly important because someone trusted us with a real job.

Then another memory appears and makes me smile.

One morning, I somehow managed to get ready for school, put on my school apron, tied the bow neatly at the back, and proudly left the house, completely forgetting one rather important detail.

The skirt.

Even now, I have no idea how I managed it.

I arrived at school wearing my tights, my apron… and absolutely nothing underneath.

My parents had already left for work. There were no mobile phones to rescue me, no quick message to explain the situation, and certainly no emergency delivery of forgotten clothes.

There was only one option.

Laugh.

And, somehow, that is exactly what we all did.

Looking back, I think that ridiculous little mistake taught me something too. The following morning, I checked twice before leaving the house, not because anyone decided it was time for a lesson about responsibility, but because life had quietly taught me one without announcing it.

There are still stories about racing through forests, climbing fences we probably shouldn’t have climbed, Sunday mornings that always ended around the family table, and ordinary days that now feel almost impossible to explain to anyone who didn’t live them. They keep coming back, one after another, asking to be remembered.

Not today.

There will be time.

For now, I’ll let them wait a little longer.

And perhaps, if you’ll join me, we’ll go back together for one more walk through that childhood in the final part of this essay.