My Hundred Days

IT WAS a Friday afternoon. I was on the roof of Chobielin, the old manor house I’m restoring, checking the tiles. They are old, and must be laid in an old-fashioned way; the workmen don’t always get it right.

This time they did, and I was just about to pronounce myself satisfied when one of them ran up, panting from the keeper’s lodge. There was a telephone call, he said, all the way from Warsaw.