Pennies For Hitler

by Jackie French

  2 cups self-raising flour

  ½ tsp nutmeg, grated

  1 cup ‘top of the milk’ (Before milk was ‘homogenised’, with the cream distributed evenly through it, the cream used to rise to the top of the bottle. Use cream instead or light sour cream.)

  Rub a cake tin with dripping (the fat scooped off the pan after meat is roasted) or, these days, with butter. Dust with flour so the cake won’t stick.

  Mix all ingredients except the apples. Pour the batter into the tin. Slide in as many slices of apple as you can, pointed side down. The cake will rise up in the tin as you cram more and more apple in.

  Sprinkle with nutmeg. Bake for forty minutes at 200ºC or till the top is lightly brown and springs back. Eat hot — the cake turns gluey and crumbly when it’s cold. But it is better than no cake at all.

  War-Time Apple Pancakes/Pikelets (pikelets are just small pancakes, especially good for afternoon tea)

  An experienced cook could have fresh hot pikelets or pancakes on the table by the time the kettle boiled to make the tea, served on an embroidered ‘tea cloth’, with lace or crochet at the edges. Pikelets could be made sweet with a topping of jam, which was made with only a little sugar in those war years, so it didn’t keep well. But it was good.

  I still make apple pikelets, but I add an egg to this mix. It gives the pikelets a better texture.

  1 cup self-raising flour

  1 cup grated apple

  1 cup milk

  Grease a frying pan with dripping (these days, use butter or half butter and half olive oil). Heat it on top of the stove for five minutes on a medium heat, then scoop in spoonfuls of the mixture in small rounds. When they begin to bubble turn them over with a spatula (this takes practice). Leave for about as long as the first side needed to cook, then use the spatula to take them out of the pan. Add a bit more butter (or dripping) and pour in more pikelet mixture till it is all cooked.

  Butter and eat them while hot, or eat with jam and whipped cream, or, just as they were eaten back then, with fruit stewed down to a thick paste with just a little sugar to seem like jam.

  Apple and Date Spread

  My grandma made this in the war years to use on toast or scones instead of jam that needed sugar to make. It is so good my mother made it when I was young, and I still make it sometimes.

  2 cups pitted dates, finely chopped

  10 Granny Smith apples, peeled, cored and chopped

  3 cups water

  Simmer everything till the mixture is thick and goes glop! glop! glop! The dates will have dissolved into the apple to make a thick sludge. Keep it in the fridge for up to ten days, in a covered container. Eat on toast or scones or in a bowl with a good helping of natural yoghurt. Warning: don’t let it ‘glop’ on your skin — it’s hot. If a bit gets on your arm or hand put under the cold tap and run water on it till your skin is cool.

  SPAGHETTI IN THE 1940S

  Tinned spaghetti in tomato sauce and tinned baked beans became popular in the 1930s, especially hot on toast or cold in sandwiches. Kids at school would say ‘swap you a beetle for a worm’ — in other words, you take my baked bean sandwich and I’ll take one of your spaghetti ones.

  But few Australians ate spaghetti that didn’t come from a tin till the 1960s, when the growing number of Italian restaurants made ‘spag bol’ popular enough to even feature in women’s magazine recipes. Georg and Mud would have graduated in the early 1950s when Italian food was still strange to most Australians; even spag bol.

  JOHN CURTIN

  John Curtin was the prime minister who led Australia through the most dangerous time of World War II. He took office on 7 October 1941; and was a quiet, incredibly dedicated man, who walked to Parliament House every morning rather than be driven in a car.

  Curtin fought fiercely and openly with Britain’s prime minister Winston Churchill to bring Australian troops and equipment back to defend Australia. If it hadn’t been for Curtin standing his ground, Australia would never have been able to turn back the advancing Japanese in New Guinea. Curtin also put the US General, Douglas MacArthur, in charge of Australia’s defence forces, instead of relying on leadership from England.

  Curtin declared that seven days was too short a week. He worked every day till midnight, even on Christmas Day, forcing his body to keep going even when he was ill.

  The effort killed him.

  Curtin died on 5 July 1945, just six weeks before the end of the war in the Pacific.

  KIDS EVACUATED

  During the bombing of London and other major industrial towns and ports in England, many kids were evacuated out to the countryside. In 1940 some were sent as far away as Canada and Australia. One thousand, five hundred and thirty children were sent to Canada, 577 to Australia, 353 to South Africa, 202 to New Zealand and another 838 children were sent to the United States.

  One ship of kids going to Canada was torpedoed, though all aboard survived, then on 17 September the SS City of Benares was also torpedoed by a German submarine. Seventy or seventy-seven of the ninety kids on their way to Canada drowned. The horror of their drowning, as well as the lack of destroyers to accompany the ships taking evacuees, meant the end of the official evacuation programme, though it seems likely that some children were sent on ships later in the war by their parents.

  I’ve only been able to trace the records of two ships that brought evacuated British children to Australia. I have made the Georg of this book come on the second of them. I’ve been unable to find much detail about them however; and most of that detail is in this book. Georg’s ship is based on the small amount I’ve been able to discover about the two journeys to Australia, including letters from a child sent here and one of the escorts, as well as letters from escorts and kids sent to Canada. While the latter voyages had escorts or were in convoy, there is a reference that indicates that at least one ship with children aboard was sent unescorted apart from the first few days out from England. It’s possible that records with more detail about the ships and evacuees no longer exist.

  Many children sent to Australia from Britain suffered cruelty and abuse in orphanages and other institutions. But the few records that remain indicate that unlike these children the Blitz evacuees had mostly good experiences, possibly because there were relatively few of them, so went to homes where they were genuinely wanted. However, I base that on the very few records I know to exist, and it is very possible that the stories of other evacuees on the ships to Australia, New Zealand and Canada were not as happy as the ones I have come across.

  INTERNMENT CAMPS IN AUSTRALIA

  Australia had internment camps for any Japanese or German nationals living here. Even German Jewish refugees were sent to internment camps. Some Aboriginal people were also imprisoned in the north of Australia, as the government was afraid that they might help the Japanese if they were promised their lands back. By 1944, nearly 7,000 men, women and children were interned in eighteen camps spread across the country.

  Prisoners of war were also held in Australia. By August 1944, there were 2,223 Japanese, 14,720 Italians and 1,585 Germans held in various camps in Australia. The biggest Japanese and Italian prison camp was in Cowra, in central western New South Wales.

  Most of the Italians had been captured in the Middle East. They’d fought bravely but now they made the best of being prisoners. Soon the people of Cowra welcomed them. They worked on farms, made wine, played music at dances. Many later married Australian women and others returned to Cowra to live after the war, sponsored by the community.

  Since World War II Cowra has become a ‘Centre of World Friendship’. Japanese and Australians lie together in the Cowra War Cemetery. In 1979, battling drought and using faith and ingenuity to raise the money, the Cowra community opened Cowra’s superb Japanese Garden, lugging water in buckets in the blazing sun to keep the trees alive.

  AUSTRALIANS

  This is a book about hatred. Although Georg is unable to kill a man he believes to be a helpless enemy, I also be
lieve that Alan Peaslake in this book — who did attack and kill the enemy — was a hero, who died serving his country. If the German or Japanese armies of World War II had conquered our country many Australians would have been killed; all would have lived under a cruelly totalitarian regime. Sometimes you need to fight. But even then, it is worth remembering that an enemy can also become a friend.

  Like many Australians, my different ancestors came from many countries. Some were Irish, Scots, Welsh, English, French, Native American, probably long ago Spanish and Danish too; and others were from many other places too far in the past to be remembered. Over the centuries the Irish have fought the English or the Scots; the Scots have fought the Danes; the English have fought the Welsh, the Spanish, the Danish, the Native Americans and the French.

  I wonder if any of my ancestors ever dreamed that their descendants would marry their enemies. Less than a hundred years ago my Presbyterian grandmother was cast out of her family for marrying a Catholic. Now the two religions share services sometimes, to celebrate or pray for those in trouble or despair. Like their members, they are friends.

  The world’s hatreds are bitter, but in ten years, or a few hundred, they can be gone.

  A Further Note from the Author

  Sometimes many stories come together and become a book. More than ten years ago a story told to me in my childhood by a man — a kind man — who had once been a guard in a concentration camp, became the book Hitler’s Daughter.

  But there were more stories of that time. The whispered memory of a friend’s father who had watched his fellow students thrown out a high window at a graduation day by a band of Nazis; the oral history of a Jewish boy who was told he had the ‘most Aryan head’ in the whole class; a neighbour who had escaped Nazi persecution in Germany as a small child, but then became a German enemy in England before finally — unexpectedly — discovering love and happiness in Australia.

  All of these stories are in Pennies for Hitler, although altered. But the greater part of Pennies from Hitler came from a letter written to me by a fourteen-year-old boy.

  This boy was in a class for children with special needs and Hitler’s Daughter was the first book he and his friends had ever read.

  His letter said:

  Dear Jackie French,

  What I have learned from your book is to be very wary of anyone who tries to make you angry.

  Yours,

  James

  I had never realised that message was in Hitler’s Daughter, but perhaps it’s the most important one there is.

  So this book is for ‘James’. It is about a boy who isn’t there, who can’t be anywhere, because wherever he goes he is the enemy. It is about how hatred is contagious, but it is also about how kindness, love and compassion are contagious too. In a world where there are still destroyers, like the Nazis, there are also loving people like the Peaslake family and indomitable friends like Mud.

  You never know quite what you create when you let stories loose. Pennies for Hitler is an adventure and, in a strange way, a love story too. But I suspect that readers will find more in it than I knew I’d written, just as with Hitler’s Daughter.

  Acknowledgements

  Pennies for Hitler has been a long time growing. My gratitude to those who created the foundations of this book should probably begin with the gentle neighbour who helped me with my German homework, late at night. He told me with shame and anguish the stories of his childhood in Nazi Germany, which years later led me to write Hitler’s Daughter.

  Since Hitler’s Daughter was published over a decade ago, there have been hundreds, or even thousands, of requests for a sequel. Perhaps one day I will write one, but Pennies for Hitler is not that book. Instead it is a companion volume. Hitler’s Daughter is about ‘a girl who wasn’t there’, a foster child of Hitler who knows almost nothing of the vast tragedies around her, even though she lives in the heart of the Nazi world. Pennies for Hitler is about a boy who must remain invisible, existing only as the illusion he must present to the world. The questions and themes they both face, the hatreds they need to conquer, are each the other face of the same coin.

  This book owes much to the continual reinterpreting and brilliance of Eva, Tim, Sandie and the casts of Hitler’s Daughter: The Play. Usually when a book is published I tuck it away as ‘been there, done that’. Each new production made me rethink its themes, the times, the implications.

  The Sydney Jewish Museum, and the inspiration of those who work and volunteer there, meant the scene of children measuring each other’s heads to judge their racial worth was added long after I thought Pennies for Hitler was finished.

  I owe an enormous debt too to my high school English teacher, Gillian Pauli, for the weekly piles of books she lent me, not only opening the door to possibilities of literature far beyond those I could have found myself, but who also trusted a teenager to read The Protocols of the Elders of Zion to see how contagious a lie and hatred can be.

  To Kate Burnitt and Kate O’Donnell, so many, many thanks for your care and vigilance, and to Angela Marshall, as always, decades of gratitude for so many things.

  Most of all, though, this book is due to the teamwork of Lisa Berryman and Liz Kemp. I gave them a short book. They demanded I fill the silences. Because of them I cried as I wrote versions two and three of Pennies for Hitler, but never doubted they were needed. Lisa may be the only publisher who can say ‘can do better’ with so much tact, support and inspiration to get it done. I owe you more than I can say.

  Other titles by Jackie French

  Historical

  Somewhere Around the Corner • Dancing with Ben Hall Soldier on the Hill • Daughter of the Regiment Hitler’s Daughter • Lady Dance • The White Ship How the Finnegans Saved the Ship • Valley of Gold Tom Appleby, Convict Boy They Came on Viking Ships • Macbeth and Son Pharaoh • A Rose for the Anzac Boys Oracle • The Night They Stormed Eureka A Waltz for Matilda • Nanberry: Black Brother White

  Fiction

  Rain Stones • Walking the Boundaries • The Secret Beach Summerland • Beyond the Boundaries A Wombat Named Bosco • The Book of Unicorns The Warrior — The Story of a Wombat • Tajore Arkle Missing You, Love Sara • Dark Wind Blowing Ride the Wild Wind: The Golden Pony and Other Stories

  Non-fiction

  Seasons of Content • A Year in the Valley How the Aliens from Alpha Centauri Invaded My Maths Class and Turned Me into a Writer How to Guzzle Your Garden • The Book of Challenges Stamp, Stomp, Whomp The Fascinating History of Your Lunch Big Burps, Bare Bums and Other Bad-Mannered Blunders To the Moon and Back • Rocket Your Child into Reading The Secret World of Wombats How High Can a Kangaroo Hop?

  The Animal Stars Series

  1. The Goat Who Sailed the World

  2. The Dog Who Loved a Queen

  3. The Camel Who Crossed Australia

  4. The Donkey Who Carried the Wounded

  5. The Horse Who Bit a Bushranger

  6. Dingo: The Dog Who Conquered a Continent

  Outlands Trilogy

  In the Blood • Blood Moon • Flesh and Blood

  School for Heroes

  Lessons for a Werewolf Warrior Dance of the Deadly Dinosaurs

  Wacky Families Series

  1. My Dog the Dinosaur • 2. My Mum the Pirate 3. My Dad the Dragon • 4. My Uncle Gus the Garden Gnome 5. My Uncle Wal the Werewolf • 6. My Gran the Gorilla 7. My Auntie Chook the Vampire Chicken 8. My Pa the Polar Bear

  Phredde Series

  1. A Phaery Named Phredde

  2. Phredde and a Frog Named Bruce

  3. Phredde and the Zombie Librarian

  4. Phredde and the Temple of Gloom

  5. Phredde and the Leopard-Skin Librarian

  6. Phredde and the Purple Pyramid

  7. Phredde and the Vampire Footy Team

  8. Phredde and the Ghostly Underpants

  Picture Books

  Diary of a Wombat (with Bruce Whatley)

  Pete the Sheep (with Bruce Whatley)
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  Josephine Wants to Dance (with Bruce Whatley)

  The Shaggy Gully Times (with Bruce Whatley)

  Emily and the Big Bad Bunyip (with Bruce Whatley)

  Baby Wombat’s Week (with Bruce Whatley)

  Queen Victoria’s Underpants (with Bruce Whatley)

  The Tomorrow Book (with Sue deGennaro)

  Christmas Wombat (with Bruce Whatley)

  A Day to Remember (with Mark Wilson)

  About the Author

  Jackie French is a full-time writer and wombat negotiator. Jackie writes fiction and non-fiction for all ages, and has columns in the print media. Jackie is regarded as one of Australia’s most popular children’s authors. She writes across all genres — from picture books and history to science fiction.

  www.jackiefrench.com

  Copyright

  Chapter 37 is reproduced a condensed version of a letter sent by Prime Minister John Curtin to Australian schoolchildren on 30 September 1942. The letter later appeared in various publications.

  Angus&Robertson

  An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers, Australia

  First published in Australia in 2012

  This edition published in 2012

  by HarperCollinsPublishers Australia Pty Limited

  ABN 36 009 913 517

  harpercollins.com.au

  Copyright © Jackie French 2012

  The right of Jackie French to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her under the Copyright Amendment (Moral Rights) Act 2000.

  This work is copyright. Apart from any use as permitted under the Copyright Act 1968, no part may be reproduced, copied, scanned, stored in a retrieval system, recorded, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

  HarperCollinsPublishers

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