"I could go to prison for marrying her. Maybe Major Stock was right, but it was too late. We were very much in love with each other...." Stan Goodwin was born in 1918 and lives in Birches Head. His story is about his time in Poland at the end of World War two, where he found that the course of true love ran anything but smoothly.
I saw her standing there and I just asked her to dance. If I hadn't gone up then and asked her, it might have been a different story. We were in Germany and it was the end of the war - Daniella was a Polish prisoner at the officers prisoner of war camp my batallion liberated. My company commander, Major Stock, warned me not to get too close to Daniella, because nothing could come of it. Foreign aliens were not allowed to marry British soliders at the first few months at the end of the war. I could go to prison for marrying her. Maybe Major Stock was right, but it was too late. We were very much in love with each other. She wrote a letter to her mother and told her she was going to marry a British soldier. Her mother did everything she could to stop her from marrying me. Danny took no notice of her. Nobody knew about our first wedding. I got a friend to relieve me from guard for one hour, I cleaned myself up, rushed to church and got married, stayed about half with Danny and rushed back to guard.
I was the only Englishman in the church and the service was all in Polish. We were married in the eyes of God, but not in the eyes of the British army. When they lifted the ban on marrying foreigners - only a month later - we married again in Lubeck. The army became responsible for her then, and they arranged for her to go to England to wait until I was demobbed. We'd planned to go and live with Danny's mother in Poland, but the Russians stayed put and it was dangerous for us there. My sister and her recognised each other straight away at Stoke on Trent station, even though they'd never met. And Danny made the headlines in the local paper: 'Fenton Soldier's Romance'. Danny tried very hard to be English. She even worked on the potbank with my sister. But her eyes used to light up if she met a Polish person. We had two children - born in Polish hospitals in Britain, but the marriage wasn't working. Daniella was unhappy somehow. She wanted to be near Polish people, and you didn't get that where I lived. So she moved to London. She took our daughter, but I kept our son Michael, who was about 3 years old at the time, and brought him up myself. We always remained friends. I think Danny died of a broken heart because she wanted to see Poland a free country. | 
