Poles apart from a Biggles villain
From my avid reading of the works of Enid Blyton as a child, I just accepted that foreigners were likely to be suspicious (English Heritage recognises Blyton and Kipling’s racism – but blue plaques to stay, 17 June). But as someone who had never met anyone else with my name that I was not actually related to, I completely went off Capt WE Johns when I came across the villain Igor Louensky in Biggles of the Special Air Police.
To this day I cannot shake off the childhood conviction that he must have encountered my father (a former Polish wartime resistance fighter) and stolen his surname. And worse, it was the moment that I understood for the first time that to the likes of Capt Johns I could never be “one of us”.
Mark Lewinski
Swaffham Prior, Cambridgeshire
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