The Last of the Bonegilla Girls

by Victoria Purman

  In her dreams, he called her Francesca. In her dreams they were in Rome, tossing a coin into the Trevi Fountain, making a wish together.

  ‘I’m sorry, I’m …’

  ‘You are thinking of something.’

  ‘Yes, I am. Just memories from the past, that’s all.’ And then she couldn’t keep it in any longer. ‘I still have the coin you gave me at Bonegilla, you know. I’ve kept it all these years.’

  ‘You have?’ He closed his eyes and sighed deeply.

  She nodded. Did he understand what that meant? What she couldn’t say here in front of his wife and his family and Iliana?

  ‘Oh, Francesca. There is something I need to say—’ He suddenly stiffened in her embrace and his grip on her waist and her hand eased. His expression transformed in a blink from warm to stone cold.

  ‘I would like to dance with my husband.’ Domenica, elegant, perfectly coiffed, her chin held high and her eyes narrowed, placed a hand on Frances’s left shoulder and pushed her back from Massimo. She slipped into the space between them and shot a last condescending look over her shoulder.

  ‘Of course.’ Frances stepped back, glanced around. The humiliation burned and burned. She turned, wound her way through the crowd of dancers and the tables full of wedding guests and made her way down the side of the reception hall, to the toilets. She rushed inside the cubicle, fumbled with the bolt lock, sat down on the closed lid and bit down on her fist. Silent tears streaked her cheeks and her head throbbed with an instant headache, one she was familiar with after all these years.

  This was her life.

  She was twenty-five years old. A spinster teacher with a shameful past. She’d been in love with a Catholic boy for ten years. She was surrounded by people all day: teaching colleagues who admired her; students who hung on her every word; parents who sought her out for her advice at the end of a school day.

  But she went to bed every night feeling like the loneliest person in the world.

  Chapter Thirty-four

  1966

  The cherry strudel was still hot from the oven when Elizabeta sliced it, set a piece on a plate, and passed it to her mother. Berta held the plate up high for her inspection. Elizabeta waited for her mother’s approval.

  She had practised and practised this recipe over the past six months. With Little Luisa in school now, and young Johnny almost three years old, she had time during the day between walking her daughter to school and picking her up to learn more from her mother. John was a placid little boy, nowhere near as boisterous as Little Luisa had been at the same age, so Elizabeta was able to sit him in front of the television to watch Play School and some of the other new programs meant for the little ones. He loved the song about the bears and the chairs and would happily sit on the rug in the living room, singing along with the lady and the man talking to him from the screen.

  At twenty-eight years old, Elizabeta needed distractions. Little Luisa and Johnny weren’t enough. Nikolas was a vague presence in her life and the lives of her children. He worked, he was out at the German Club many nights of the week, and she was at home with her cooking and her memories. For three years now, there had been someone else in his affections. The woman with the perfume was still making her mark on Elizabeta’s husband, staking her claim on someone else’s life.

  Her mother needed her more than ever now, to help her cope with the ghosts in her family. And it wasn’t just Luisa.

  The ghost was in her mother. It took her over sometimes, sending her to bed for weeks on end, stealing her energy and her smile and her love for her own granddaughter. Perhaps it had been there when her first daughter died, but Elizabeta had been too young to know it then. She had been old enough at Bonegilla to see it come back when the German soldier found them, to understand how it haunted her mother after Luisa died. Elizabeta had begged her mother to see a doctor but Berta had refused.

  ‘What would an Australian doctor know?’

  ‘They have very good doctors here.’

  ‘What do they know about what happened to me? These people who didn’t have a war. They didn’t have all the things that have killed me from the inside.’

  ‘Mutti,’ Elizabeta had pleaded. ‘You’re not yourself. We have a good life here, better than we would have had in Germany, or Hungary, or anywhere. Look at me. I’m married with two grandchildren for you. Aren’t you happy about that? Aren’t you happy that we’re in Australia?’

  A look came over Berta that scared Elizabeta.

  ‘Happy? Australia killed Luisa. That’s what Australia did to me.’ The roar from the back of her mother’s throat silenced Elizabeta. The rage in her was frightening. ‘And then you dare call your daughter the same. You did that to hurt me, didn’t you? Calling your own daughter after my daughter. My Luisa is gone. I don’t want your Luisa. Take her away.’

  Over the previous few months, Elizabeta had tried to talk to her father about it, cautiously, politely, respectfully, but he had made his own peace with living with the ghost, and careful avoidance was at the heart of it.

  So, Elizabeta did what she knew might make her mother happy. She cooked. Every day at her mother’s house, Elizabeta asked Berta to teach her the recipes of her mother’s life and she cooked while her mother fussed and corrected her from her seat at the kitchen table: stuffed capsicums, strudel, Apfelkuchen and sauerbraten and goulash and jam dumplings and uborkasaláta and cabbage rolls and chicken paprikash and beigli and mushroom soup and cabbage balushka and palacsinta.

  She cooked for all those years when there had been stale bread and flour soup and the sniff of a piece of bacon instead of a fat, smoked rasher. Food soothed her mother but it didn’t heal her. It rounded her stomach and plumped her chin but no matter how hard Elizabeta tried, it couldn’t fill the hole made by her two dead children or the German soldier. The secrets sat inside her like stones.

  As each day passed, Elizabeta’s children felt more and more Australian. They were slipping away from her. They had lost their German and didn’t speak to their oma other than to say hello or goodbye and reluctantly bestow a kiss on her cheek. There was a gulf between them and Elizabeta felt tossed in the middle, neither one thing nor another.

  She had lived longer in Australia than anywhere but did it feel like home? Where did she truly belong?

  For her, there was the tug of loyalty to a place that hadn’t wanted her, and it was confusing.

  She had assumed it was clear for her children, her little Australians. But she’d been wrong about that too.

  It was a Friday and Elizabeta had finished with her mother for the day and had sat Johnny in his pram for the walk to school. It was a warm November day, with north winds blowing in from the deserts up north and rustling the leaves of the bottlebrush trees in the streets.

  When Elizabeta reached the school gate, she parked the pram away from the other mothers. A clutch of them looked over at her, and then turned away, continuing their discussions without her. They had never smiled or waved or said hello.

  Johnny sat in his pram quietly. In eighteen months he would be going to kindergarten and then a year after that, this school. She wondered if he would make friends with the Australian boys, if the sons of those women who turned their backs on her would not care that Johnny’s parents didn’t speak English well enough for them, that they were from somewhere else in the world that wasn’t Australia.

  The bell sounded to signal the end of the day and there was a rush of children to the gate, jostling, laughing, their satchels bouncing against their legs as they came out to meet their parents. Elizabeta waited and waited. Finally, Little Luisa emerged from the back of the crowd, dawdling, her face downcast, her mouth angry.

  Elizabeta didn’t want to call out her daughter’s name. Her accent was thick and people would stare at her, so she waited until Luisa came to her and Johnny and stood quietly, holding on to the handle of the pram as she’d been taught to do for the walk home.

  Elizabeta stroked her daughter’s hair, tucked th
e curly strands that had come out of her long plaits behind her ears.

  ‘Did you have a good day at school, mein Liebling?’

  Her daughter shook her head and cast her eyes to the ground.

  ‘What happened today?’

  Luisa wasn’t one to keep secrets from anyone and she quickly blurted out, ‘One of the boys in my class, Kevin. He teases me all the time.’

  ‘Ach.’ Elizabeta smiled. ‘Boys will be boys. Perhaps he likes you and that’s why he teases you.’

  ‘But Mutti. He calls me a Hitler.’

  Elizabeta stilled. ‘He did what?’

  ‘He calls me a Hitler and a Nazi. And he points his finger at me and shoots. Bang bang bang.’

  Elizabeta snatched Luisa’s satchel from her little hand and bumpily turned the pram around towards home. Step after step, she got faster. Luisa began to jog along alongside to keep up.

  ‘What is a Hitler, Mutti?’

  Elizabeta was shaking. ‘That boy is stupid. And I say you can tell that to him. I don’t care what the teacher says.’

  Chapter Thirty-five

  1974

  The twenty-year Bonegilla reunion was her husband’s idea.

  In the backyard of their North Shore home, lying languidly on plastic sun loungers, Frances and Andrew watched their girls romping like seal pups in the brand-new above-ground pool, their Christmas present. It had taken days to fill, but the sounds of delight and the squeals of laughter coming from eight-year-old Vanessa and six-year-year-old Lyndall had been worth it.

  The humidity stuck to them like fog and Frances was sleepy. She’d had a busy year at school now that she was back full time, and she was relishing the summer break, spending weeks in a bikini and bare feet, eating dinners of cold salads and sliced left-over Christmas ham.

  Andrew reached across from his sun lounger and clinked glasses with her. ‘Here’s cheers, big ears. To our darling girls.’

  ‘To our wonderful girls,’ she replied, laying back and closing her eyes to the sun. ‘And to my wonderful husband for being brilliant and buying them a pool for Christmas. Which, coincidentally, gives us plenty of time to lie here watching them. I believe I might even finish this book.’ Frances lifted her paperback from the grass and opened it to her bookmark.

  ‘You’re reading Jaws?’ Andrew chuckled.

  Frances regarded her husband’s incredulous expression over the top of her sunglasses. ‘Yes. It’s very good. Why so surprised?’

  ‘Because it’s about shark attacks. And we live in Sydney. With all those miles and miles of beaches.’

  ‘This is light relief after a year teaching nine-year-olds. And anyway, you can’t have a go at me. You’re reading The Hobbit. Again.’

  ‘Every year at Christmas and I’m not apologising for it.’ Andrew lifted an arm and rested it casually above his head. He turned towards her. His feet hung over the end of the lounger. Long and lean, he looked like a fast bowler.

  ‘Frances, darling. Have I ever mentioned how much I like being a teacher, specifically because of all these holidays?’

  She lifted her eyes from her book. ‘I believe it’s what first attracted me to you. Such an endearing lack of ambition.’

  Andrew grinned widely. He had come into her life at exactly the right moment. Perhaps that’s why she’d allowed herself to fall in love with him. She’d met him when she was twenty-six, just a few months after Iliana’s wedding back in 1964, when she’d been at her lowest. Andrew was a new teacher in her school, fresh off his country service. He was unlike anyone she’d ever met. He’d arrived in the staff room with skinny trousers and a two-tone knit jumper, his hair sitting at his collar, and he asked out loud, in front of the very straight-laced headmaster, ‘How many weeks until school holidays then?’

  Ten years later, they were making a comfortable life on Sydney’s north shore in a solid family home. They worked at two different schools now, both not that far from where they lived, and life was good, settled and easy. Vanessa played piano and netball and Lyndall tortured her parents with her new recorder. It was a somewhat ordinary existence, but it suited Frances. So many things had happened in her life before she’d turned twenty-five that to be sitting in a sun lounger in the backyard reading a book, with her husband next to her and her girls swimming in the new pool, seemed like all she would ever need. They had dear friends—mostly other teachers—and weekends were filled with barbeques and progressive dinners and sleep-ins.

  There was a squeal from the pool and then calls of ‘Daddy! Daddy!’

  The girls’ candy-pink-coloured ball had bounced out of the water onto the lawn. Andrew leapt up, loped across the yard to retrieve it and then walked over to the pool. Vanessa and Lyndall scrambled over to the edge for a hug from their dad. Frances loved watching him with their children. He was a good father. When she was frazzled at the end of the day after hearing ‘Mrs Coleman, Mrs Coleman’ for what seemed like the hundredth time, he had infinite patience. He bounced into the house, wrestled with his daughters, helped them with their homework and still had enough energy to read them a bedtime story every night. They loved his dramatic readings of Carolyn Keene’s Nancy Drew series. And the girls loved their father equally as fiercely.

  Andrew refilled her glass of Moselle before resuming his position on the sun lounger.

  ‘Oh, I forgot to tell you.’ Frances put her book down on her bare thigh. ‘A letter came from Adelaide yesterday. From my old friend Elizabeta. It’s tragic really. Her father’s been diagnosed with cancer.’

  ‘God, that’s awful. She’s one of your Bonegilla friends, isn’t she? The ones you met when the Sar-Major was running the camp?’

  Frances tsked. ‘Don’t call my father that. You know how he hates it. And as I’ve pointed out a million times, he was never in the army. He was a Canberra bureaucrat. A paper pusher.’

  ‘Oh, he loves it. I think it actually broke his heart when they had to leave. How long has he been retired now?’

  ‘Three years, and Mum still goes on about how much she misses it. Dad had to explain that there was little point in having a camp director when migrants aren’t staying at the camp any more. It’s all gone back to the army now.’

  Frances had felt more than a pang of sadness when her mother had called to tell her the news. Bonegilla had meant so much to Frances as a child. It was her playground, her education, the place she’d made friends with Elizabeta and Iliana and Vasiliki, and where she’d fallen in love for the first time. Frances closed her eyes and let her memories take her back to those days. Her little room in the director’s house at the camp. Her atlas, full of the promise of places that she’d never visited. The cold. The gum trees. The myriad of languages like the bird calls of a hundred different species chattering all around her. The cinema. Posting letters at the post office to her cousins and her grandparents. She smiled at the memory of mutton cooling in the mess kitchens. It was a wrench to know that she couldn’t go back now. But who could revisit those places of childhood and have them remain exactly the same? She had put those childish thoughts away, of travel, of adventure, of the kind of love she might have had with a man she could never marry.

  And she tried so hard never to think about the baby she’d given away.

  ‘Frances?’

  She turned to her husband. ‘Yes?’

  ‘I asked, what kind of cancer is it? Elizabeta’s father.’

  She laid her book on her stomach. ‘Lung. He’s not actually that old, you know. Her father must be only about sixty or so. Although, it’s funny. When I think back to those days, I thought all the Bonegilla mums and dads were so old. They seemed … worn out, I think. I suppose the war and everything they’d been through took its toll on all of them. They were the same age as my parents back then but they all seemed like grandparents. Sixty.’ Frances pulled a face. ‘That’s not old, is it?’

  ‘Ancient.’ Andrew reached under the sun lounge and pulled out a worn leather pouch. He flipped open the top and pinched some drie
d leaves between his thumb and forefinger.

  ‘Oh, not now, Andrew. The girls are just over there.’

  ‘Loosen up, darling. They’re totally distracted.’ Andrew expertly rolled a joint, lit it and took a deep drag. He moved to hand it to Frances but she waved it away. ‘Not today.’ She was feeling too melancholic already.

  ‘So, these friends of yours. It’s been ages since you’ve seen them.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘Why have you let it go so long?’ Andrew’s eyes drifted closed. He took slow and deep drags on his joint.

  Why had she? It was hard to explain to anyone. Seeing Iliana always reminded her of Cooma and Massimo and that had become more painful as the years passed. And the others? They were so far away. She supposed she could have hopped on a plane to see Vasiliki and Elizabeta, but Vasiliki was so busy with her four daughters and her family and the business. And Elizabeta? She had called her once or twice on the telephone, mindful to keep the call brief because of STD rates, but Elizabeta wasn’t very chatty and Frances had felt uncomfortable, as if she was trying to get blood out of a stone in trying to get her to talk. Letters had been easier. A few brief words, an update on what the girls were up to, a photo every now and then. She had decades worth of letters from them all.

  Frances looked past the pool and her girls and into the hazy blue summer sky. She reached an arm out to Andrew and he passed her the joint. She took a long drag and passed it back.

  It was easier to let the past be the past. Hers was full of too much hurt and fear and shame. She had been desperate to begin again when she’d met Andrew, when they’d embarked on this life together, this ordinary suburban existence. Perhaps that was why she’d fallen in love with him, because he offered her simple and uncomplicated and beautiful ordinariness. When she was a girl, she’d longed for big adventures and grand tours to exotic places all over the world. Where had she wanted to go? Rome? Paris? Morocco? She’d had that huge atlas, had been obsessed by it. Where was it now? And what use would it be? Boundaries had changed. Countries had disappeared and new ones invented in the years since it had been printed. The past was no longer the past: it had been rewritten, redrawn and recreated.