I grew up in Australia, which is the kind of place that exists to push back against nature. The sun bears down, the desert winds buffet you all year long, and there’s an obvious, deliberate ahistoricity to life, as if we were all born on the land just to live and die on it. It was a strange place for my Polish family to end up – everything in Poland had always been so grand and sentimental, full of emotion – so they had a particular need to keep to their own way of expression. At the heart of this was Polish Christmas Eve.

Our Polish Christmas was from the very beginning one big act of survival. Mum says that when she got off the plane in 1983, the country was on fire and there was ash in the air – she knew she’d probably need other people like her around in such an unfamiliar place. Our Christmas Eve, or Wigilia, was made up of a group of other Poles and their children, like me, who were born on Australian soil, but still had some lingering claim to Polishness. We would come together every year to celebrate but also to commiserate, because in the Polish imaginary, Wigilia carried the folklorish weight of exile. The centuries of displacements, ever since the 18th-century partitions of Poland, had left their mark on Polish art and literature, and ‘Wigilia in Siberia’ became a recurring theme.