Shine on You Crazy Diamond

I don’t know if my brother liked Pink Floyd, but in many ways, he was a crazy diamond.

There was a lot I didn’t know about him. My half-brother, to be correct. I didn’t even know he existed until I was eighteen, when my father told me about the son he’d had to a previous marriage.

I was nineteen when I first met him. I still remember the occasion so clearly, as though it were … but no, it wasn’t yesterday. It was a long time ago, when we were both young, though he was a good few years older than me. When the world was our oyster.

It isn’t Mike’s oyster anymore. Mike. That was his name. Mike Skorupski, son of Waclaw and Iza Skorupski.

Have you noticed I keep using the past tense? That’s because Mike is no longer part of the world he once inhabited. Last week, I found out that he’d died. In the south of France, in a military hospital.

Mike was a soldier with the French Foreign Legion for many years. He was also many other things, including bodyguard to the Prime Minister of the Lebanon, a skiing instructor, a linguist, a great cook, a loyal friend, a passionate lover (so I heard), and an intrepid adventurer, including suffering frostbite during his mountaineering days in the Himalayas.

He lived a full life—with all the temptations and dangers that go hand in hand with a full life. He was generous, outgoing, interesting, hard, charming … he fell in love many times and married twice. At least I think it was just twice, though he was hard to keep up with. The photo in this post is of Mike and me at one of his weddings – the first, I think – back in the 1990s.

Mike was truly international. He was born in England, moved to Cyprus as a small child, then to Chile; he studied in Scotland, spent many years in France, a few years in the Congo (mining for diamonds and acquiring a gorgeous Congolese woman along the way – I think he was between wives), and had soldiered in many parts of the world.

I always looked up to him. Okay, I’ll admit it: I had a downright crush on him. Hardly surprising, all things considered. He was tall, lean, handsome, confident and multilingual. He must have killed people as part of his soldier’s life—I never really wanted to know about that—but he could also be tender with whomever happened to be in his life at the time. And he could cook divinely. Oh, could he cook! He knew all about wine, too, and how to lay a table beautifully, how to dress for special occasions, how to impress people at social functions… but yes, he could also kill.

I’ll never forget the first time I met him. I was nineteen, a student of music, visiting my father in Reading for the weekend. It was a Saturday, late morning. The doorbell rang.

‘Wandzia, could you get that?’ my father asked—Wandzia being my Polish name.

‘Sure,’ I said chirpily, always happy to be visiting my somewhat eccentric, thrice-divorced father, who lived in a charming bedsit in an old, detached house on a leafy avenue near the river Thames in Caversham.

So, down the steep Victorian steps I skipped, curious to see who this visitor might be. My father had lots of Eastern European friends, and I always enjoyed their fascinating company.

Opening the stained-glass-panelled door, I looked up at this tall young man who threw me a sunny smile. It was a drizzly day, from what I remember, but this visitor was the personification of allure and confidence. He was wearing a brown leather jacket, jeans and tough-looking boots; his teeth were white and even, his moustache of the aristocratic type, his forehead high and his brown eyes sparkling in a cool, suave manner.

‘Hi, is Mr Skorupski in?’ he asked in an accent that had an international-American twang.

‘Yes, he’s upstairs,’ I said. ‘I’ll go and get him. I’m his daughter.’

‘Oh, yeah?’ he replied. ‘I’m his son.’

And that, precisely, is when my fascination for this enigmatic half-brother of mine began.

I saw him several times in my life after that. Even after I was married and living my own full life, both in England and Poland, whenever I saw Mike again, my heart always did that teenage fluttering thing in his presence. Not having grown up with him, he didn’t seem like a brother, so I allowed myself the harmless, secret indulgence of having a crush on him. Of course he never knew my guilty little secret, and neither did my husbands – neither the first one nor the second.

I last saw Mike at my daughter’s wedding in Krakow, several years ago. He was still that same charming, slightly intimidating man – freely speaking in Spanish and English to our guests, as well as a smattering of Polish; still flashing that cool, sunny smile, knocking back the wine without it affecting him in the slightest. The same old Mike, even in his sixties.

But his health finally started failing these last few years – probably too many years of hard living. And finally, last week, he died.

So now, allow me to raise my glass in a toast to the memory of Mike Skorupski, my ex-soldier charmer of a brother, who, like Shakespeare’s Othello, lived not wisely, but too well.