Category: Candle in the Window

Epigraph

In a world where most people move on, I stayed — and became the keeper of the corners others come back to find.

Introduction

Life has a habit of sending stories to my doorstep — sometimes literally.

I’ve lived on this corner for almost sixty‑four years, long enough to become the unofficial curator of local memory, the man people ask when their own recollections start to wobble. I never set out to be the last archivist of St Thomas, but time has a way of choosing its custodians.

And every so often, a story arrives — unannounced, unexpected — that reminds me why staying matters.

This is the tale of three Australians, one confused corner, and how I narrowly missed my chance to be discovered by Hollywood.

A 9,000‑Mile Pilgrimage, About Nine Time Zones, One Monsoon Season — Only to Arrive at the Wrong Corner

It began with a small mystery on a grey Devon morning — the sort of mystery that only reveals its meaning once you step into it.

From my front window I noticed three men — two younger, one older — standing outside my house, studying it with unusual intensity. They were pointing at the front garden tiles, looking up at the bedroom window, and taking photographs of each other as if my corner of Buller Road were a landmark of great significance.

And I’ll admit it: for a fleeting moment I wondered whether they were scouting for Spielberg or Coppola and preparing to cast me as the Don of St Thomas — a sort of Devonshire Vito Corleone presiding over the corner of Buller Road. Perhaps Hollywood had come at last to pay for my firewall which is in urgent need of repair.

Many years ago, the little refrigeration business across from me was an old, quaint corner shop — the sort you rarely see anymore. One day, without warning, a full film crew descended on it. Lights, cables, cameras, people shouting instructions… the whole spectacle. I can’t even remember what they were filming — a commercial, a TV drama, something involving boiled sweets perhaps — but it was thrilling. I had never seen anything like it, and there it was, practically on my doorstep.

So when I saw those three men studying my house with such intensity today, I thought perhaps my luck had finally come round. Maybe this time it was my corner’s turn for fame, something a little grander than a soap opera cameo. Perhaps Hollywood had returned to St Thomas, and I was about to be discovered.

But the truth, as it turned out, was far more human. It wasn’t Hollywood after all, but something better. I didn’t get a location fee — I got heritage, and it was far more moving.

I watched them for a while, curious but not alarmed. Their behaviour was odd, but open, not furtive. Later, when I poked my head out again to see what they were up to, I saw they had moved on to St Thomas Park. They didn’t look like surveyors or council workers. Still, something about their focus stayed with me.

I decided I would walk over to the park to investigate further. But when I stepped outside my back door, there they were — right in front of me, as if the story had been waiting for me to join it.

And that is where the real encounter began.

The older man turned to me with a hopeful, almost fragile expression. He told me he believed this — my house — was where his mother had once lived back in the 1970s. He even gave me her name.

I had to smile. I’ve lived here nearly sixty‑four years. I don’t know every family who lived in this house before us — that history is lost to time — but I do know the families who lived around us. Clarence Road, Brunswick Street, the adjacent terraces… in the old days we practically knew everyone. He mentioned a family in Brunswick Street with five children, and I’m almost certain I knew exactly which family he meant. That was the way of things then: doors open, names known, lives overlapping.

So I gently told him he must be mistaken about my house.

He looked genuinely puzzled. Then he said, “But this is Clarence Road.”

“No,” I replied, “this is Buller Road. Clarence is the side road running alongside it.”

And in that instant, everything clicked. His face lit up with the sudden clarity that only comes when a long‑held memory finally aligns with reality. He turned, pointed across the street, and said, “That one! That’s the house!”

Of course it was. Two corner houses, both with their own odd angles and presence. Memory had simply shifted the corner by a few feet — as memory does. I could understand it completely. If my Father had ever returned to his Ukrainian village after decades away, he would almost certainly have stood outside the wrong house with absolute conviction, only to be gently corrected by some local who had never left.

The three men were from Western Australia. They had recently lost their mother, they told me, and this journey was their way of reconnecting with her beginnings. I suppose you could call it a pilgrimage — something I understand well, having travelled to see my own Mother’s home in Ukraine in 2015.

The younger son laughed and admitted he had taken hundreds of photos of his father proudly standing in front of the wrong house — my house. We all laughed together in the drizzle.

I told them that the house they were seeking had once been an Edwardian post office, and that there was a photograph of it in a local history book. Then, without hesitation, I went inside and fetched my copy and gave it to them as a gift. It felt right — a small act of kindness for travellers carrying grief, memory, and hope in equal measure.

They were touched. We took photos together — this time in front of the correct house — and then they headed off toward Exwick, where more fragments of their past awaited them.

When they return to Australia, I imagine they’ll show that book to friends and say, “There was this kind man in Exeter who put us straight.” And perhaps a little part of me — and of this street — will travel back with them to the land of 30‑degree sunshine.

It wasn’t Hollywood after all. But it was something better: a moment of human connection, a reminder of how tenacious — and how treacherous — memory can be, and how sometimes the person who has stayed rooted in one place becomes the guide for those who have travelled oceans to find their way back.

After nearly sixty‑four years on this corner, I sometimes feel like the last archivist of the old neighbourhood — the final curator of its stories, its families, its vanished rhythms. And on this rainy morning, that role mattered.

A small story, yes. But one to cherish, and one that will make me chuckle for years to come.

P.S. Although I have to admit, a location fee would still have come in very handy.

This is an old black‑and‑white photograph I recently returned to. My Father stands beside the shed he built himself – a contraption of corrugated iron and a black asphalt roof that looked like stretched tar. He is dressed in a suit and tie, as if the moment demanded dignity, even though the backdrop was little more than an improvised shelter held together by stubbornness and ingenuity. I stand beside him in shorts, knee socks, and a tie of my own, a small boy dressed up for an occasion I didn’t understand. Behind me, half‑leaning and half‑withdrawing, is my Father’s Ukrainian friend, Ivan Ohloblyn, slouched slightly to one side as if embarrassed by the scene, yet unwilling to step out of it.

That photograph captures a world that has vanished. A world of making do, of improvisation, of people who had survived too much to waste anything. My Father could turn a spoon into a door handle, and did. He built that shed with his own hands, and though it eventually collapsed under the quiet laws of entropy, it lives on in that single image – a symbol of a generation that patched their lives together with whatever materials they had.

I think my Father was never so happy as when he was in his shed, tinkering away. It wasn’t eccentricity – more a form of survival, creativity, and perhaps even a kind of sanctuary.

My childhood was shaped by that spirit. We had little, but imagination filled the gaps which money couldn’t. A folded paper plane could occupy me for hours. A stick and a ball of string became a world.

But scarcity had its sting too. I remember the shame of second‑hand clothes, and the day I was sent to school in grey woollen bib‑front shorts – the sort with a flap and braces that belonged to another era entirely. They made me look like a toddler from the 1930s. I spent the breaks with my arms folded tightly across my chest, hiding the straps instead of playing with the other children. It’s strange how a child can feel both resourceful and exposed at the same time.

And then there was Ivan, part of our small Ukrainian circle in Exeter. He had a forceful manner that could easily tip into overbearing, though beneath it lay a kind heart. He carried himself with a certain bluster, the sort that came more from insecurity than malice– that loud, insistent way some exiles develop, a need to assert themselves in a world that had once tried to erase them.

My Father and Ivan rowed constantly, their voices rising through the house in a language I barely understood. I was witnessing something I couldn’t yet decode: the emotional grammar of exile. I once asked my Father why he bothered with a friend he disagreed with so much. He couldn’t answer me then, but I understand now. They were, in a sense, each other’s mirrors in a foreign land. And sometimes mirrors don’t soothe  – they provoke. They remind you of what you’ve lost, what you’ve escaped, what you’re still carrying.

Over time I came to see that the arguments were not a sign of dislike. They were a sign of connection. Two men far from home, bound by a shared past, a shared language, and the simple truth that even a quarrelsome friend is better than isolation.

For men of that generation, especially those who had crossed borders and left families behind, companionship wasn’t about harmony. It was about recognition – about having someone who affirmed your existence simply by being there, even if the way they were there was loud and argumentative.

They shouted not because they hated each other, but because they needed someone who understood the same ghosts. Someone who could push back. Someone who made them feel less alone.

I remember the day Ivan discovered the dark patches on his skin. He was preparing to drive some of the Ukrainians to the annual gathering in Leicester – a jamboree of singing, dancing, and community that I found boring as a child but which meant everything to the adults. The diagnosis was leukaemia. Terminal. He had to cancel the trip. The shock rippled through our small community.

He came to see my Father one last time. I can still see him sitting in the back room, silent, tears rolling down his cheeks. I didn’t know what to say. I said nothing. I only watched, not understanding death but sensing its weight. He had always been kind to me – slipping me two shillings once, a fortune in those days, which I spent immediately on plastic soldiers. Perhaps he felt sorry for me. Perhaps he recognised something of his own childhood in mine.

One by one, my Father’s Ukrainian friends died in those years – men in their fifties who had survived war, displacement, hunger, and trauma, only for their bodies to give out early. Big Ivan, small ‘malyi’ Ivan – all gone. My Father lived on into his eighties, but the circle around him shrank until only one or two remained. For my Father, losing those friends wasn’t just losing drinking buddies or fellow Ukrainians. It was losing the only people who understood the same history, the same wounds, the same language of exile. And without realising it, I became the one left to fill the silence.

Now I sit in the same house, decades later, the shed long gone, the community dissolved, the voices quiet. I am the last custodian of these memories – of men who never returned home, of a childhood shaped by improvisation and embarrassment, of a Father who built things out of scraps and a friend who cried in our back room.

And perhaps that is reason enough to write it down.

But there is something more. I grew up in the shadow of a fear my parents never quite shook – the fear of being erased, of a people scattered until their stories vanished. I used to think that dread belonged to another time. Now I’m not so sure.

When I hear Ukrainians today speak of what is at stake for them – not just territory, but existence – I recognise the tremor beneath their words. It is the same tremor that lived in our house, in the arguments, in the gatherings, in the stubbornness of men who had lost everything once already.

So I write these small memories not out of nostalgia, but out of duty. Because if those who lived through exile are gone, and those who remember them fall silent, then a whole world disappears. And I cannot let that happen. Not now. Not again.

Introduction

Age brings a different kind of vision – you start to see not just the events themselves, but the human cost behind them, especially the loneliness of those left to carry memory on their own. What once seemed like isolated encounters now reveal themselves as fragments of a larger testimony: moments of endurance, compassion, and faith that shine quietly against the darkness.

My life and the archive have never been separate; they have always been one, and now they are fully intertwined. These reflections are gathered here as a supplement to the memoir, carrying forward the image first recorded in Appendix XXIII. The candle in the window is more than a symbol of memory; it is a reminder of the strength it takes to keep humanity alive, whether through compassion for others, courage in suffering, or faith in unseen companionship. Each meditation is part of a living archive, a way of keeping the flame lit so that witness endures.

Reflection : The Old Lady in Podil

In 1982, as a student wandering through Podil, the old quarter of Kyiv by the river Dnipro, I found myself in streets that seemed forgotten by time. Podil, literally the ‘lower area,’ was a district of  sagging 19th‑century houses and cobbled lanes carrying the air of a fairy tale. Silence hung over the streets, as though history itself had paused there.

Looking down into a basement window, I saw her: an old woman seated at a table, a single candle burning before her. No sound, no movement, only the flame and her stillness. It was as though time had forgotten her, leaving her stranded between centuries. I thought of the life she must have carried: wars, Stalin, hunger, fear. And yet here she sat, not defeated but enduring, her silence more eloquent than any speech. A vision out of Dostoevsky, preserved in candlelight.

Podil in 1982 was a place suspended in time, behind the iron curtain, where lives like hers were hidden from the wider world. To stumble upon her in that moment was almost like uncovering a secret fragment of history, one that most would have walked past without noticing. I felt a shiver of recognition — a premonition, perhaps, that I too might one day sit alone with only memories for company. But instead of fear, I felt a strange calm. To endure, to remember, to keep the flame alive — was that not also a kind of victory?

This vision, first recorded in my memoir (Appendix XXIII),  has stayed with me, and it continues to speak. In these reflections, the candle becomes more than memory: it is compassion for those who suffer alone, and courage to keep humanity alive even when pain tempts hardness. Each meditation is part of a living archive, carrying the flame forward into the present.

 Not Alone

Before I ever went to the Soviet Union, I heard a story on the radio that stayed with me. A BBC correspondent described visiting one of those vast, grey tenement blocks in Poland so common behind the iron curtain. The elevators had long since stopped, the place was empty and depressing. Yet in one apartment he found an old woman living alone. When asked if she felt lonely, she replied: “No, I don’t feel lonely at all, because God is always here with me.”

Her faith, rooted in Poland’s Catholic tradition, gave her strength to endure what otherwise would have been bleak circumstances. To hear such testimony was one thing; later, to see it for myself in Kyiv was another. The candle in Podil was a lived reality of the same truth: that even in isolation, humanity and faith can keep the flame alive.

The Cost of Humanity

In a dream I was offered release from pain, even joy, but at the cost of compassion. The bargain was clear: relief would harden the heart, strip away tenderness, and leave me untouched by the suffering of others. I refused, and walked away. That refusal has stayed with me, for it speaks to the deeper truth that memory and witness demand humanity, even when pain tempts us to abandon it. To keep the flame alive is to resist the easy bargain of hardness, and to endure with conscience intact.

History itself shows the contrast. My Father, through suffering, found compassion and humanity. Others, like the ruthless despot who unleashes war without care, have long since lost theirs. To gain the world but lose the soul is no victory at all. The candle in the window is not only memory and identity, but a reminder of the courage it takes to keep humanity alive, whatever harm has been done. It is a fragile flame, yet it endures, and in its endurance lies the strength of witness.