Leonia Piwkowska (secretary of the Polish Composers’ Union in 1950-90)

I met Tomek in 1954, after the death of his mother. Professor Sikorski, his father, brought him to the Union and we immediately became friends. He really needed warmth and care – this may have been why he grew so attached to me. Later, the three of them – Tomek, Zbyszek Rudziński and Zygmunt Krauze – would come together. At that time Dr Śledziński was President. The Union was experiencing its ‘golden age’. After graduation they all went on a scholarship to Paris. I corresponded with Tomek then and during his American scholarship in the 1970s.

He was not successful in his private life. He was very lonely. He was unable to pull himself together. He did not agree with his own self, he kept trying to escape from himself. People couldn’t bear his terrible despair and incredible aggression.

He was always in financial trouble. He spent almost all his money on alcohol. He drank a lot and tried to do something about it. I helped him get medications. Without them he couldn’t sleep or work at all, and he claimed that he lived only to write something new. He was going downhill into an abyss and no one could do anything about it. Once he came to me with Baudelaire’s The Flowers of Evil  and said about himself: ‘I’m such a flower of evil.’