LIFE taught Jan Pops' Grenia to cherish simple pleasures. His one worry was how to pay for the funeral he wanted. Each week he would ask the staff at Credenhill Court care home if he had saved enough to be buried alongside his old comrades.

The Credenhill Poles have a corner of the village churchyard to themselves. Little wooden crosses mark most of the graves. Pops wanted a proper headstone and had been putting money aside for this for as long as anyone at Credenhill Court could remember - it was the only request in his will.

Every time Pops asked about his stone the staff said it would happen. They knew that even if his savings fell short, the home would make up the cost.

Pops joined his fellow Poles apart' last Friday. Like them he was given a graveside service. But as the last one to go, staff and residents from the home turned out to send him off, his family having long been lost to history.

And he's having his headstone. Sure enough, the home stepped in to help cover the cost.

Dawe Brothers made the funeral arrangements, as they have for all the others over the past 30 years, for not much more than what it took to pay a gravedigger. Usually, the Poles themselves did the digging.

The death of Jan Grenia at 83 ends an era. Pops came to Credenhill Court when it was still a rehabilitation home for Polish veterans of the Second World War, men who gave more than their youth to the Allied cause.

They were called the quiet ones', men who were deeply damaged and destined to live out lives haunted by the horrors of conflict or concentration camps, longing for a country and loved ones most of them would never see again.

Pops joined them in 1969. Like the others, he spoke little of his life before coming to Herefordshire - it was enough that he had a life left to live. Somewhere in his past he had a family - mum, dad and two sisters - that had been torn from him for ever in his teens by the Nazis who sent him into slave labour.

It is presumed that Pops found himself in the Little Poland' that hundreds of exiles had made out of the former American army camp at Foxley, near Hereford, at the end of the war.

For most, Foxley was the first stop on the way to new lives in the USA, Canada, or Australia as Poland was cloaked behind Communism's Iron Curtain.

Some, like Pops, stayed. He found himself a job cleaning barrels at Bulmers.

The Poles had a special place at Credenhill Court. Care for them came with the deal that saw the home pass into private hands.

There they felt safe to enjoy the pleasures they had. Pops liked to watch TV, always sitting on the same chair in the small lounge. Beneath the chair he would hide his stash' of daily papers, which he would read when there was nothing on TV.

He took days out to go to the bookies - he loved to bet on horses - or shop in Hereford. But these trips became fewer over recent years as his health deteriorated.

Pops died at Hereford County Hospital on September 4. He never paid a return visit to Poland or found any of his family.

And he had seen all of the quiet ones' die until he was the last. They live on now in the many pictures staff at the home have to remember them by, and the records at St Mary's Church, Credenhill, that dutifully record each death and burial in that corner of the churchyard that is forever Poland.

A memorial to them should be put up soon, paid for by Hereford Times readers after an appeal in in 2005.

It is hoped that the new generation of Poles making lives for themselves in the county - under very different circumstances - will make the spot a place of contemplation.