John related some of the stories he had been hearing from fellow journalists about the targeting of Germans, especially troublemakers like union leaders or professional men with a public profile. The Hun-hating newspaper The Mirror had published a list of the names and addresses of ‘prominent’ German-Australian citizens who should be locked up. The wave of surveillance and arrests continued unabated.
‘Don’t get me wrong, I believe in the cause. Why else would I be joining up? But here at home, the military have been given the authority to interfere in everything,’ said John, sipping his beer with his heels propped up on the veranda railing and looking gravely at Freddie and the two women. Angie listened keenly.
He told them about letters being opened at the General Post Office, newspaper editors being told what they could print, and Germans being sacked from all public-service positions. ‘They have yet to catch one proven saboteur or spy, but the net is cast wider all the time. The Minister of Defence now has the power to intern “disloyal natural-born subjects of enemy descent” and “persons of hostile origin or association”.’
‘What does that mean?’ asked Freddie.
John took another swig of beer. ‘That means just about anyone they don’t like.’
The following year, 1916, brought worse news. Freddie still insisted that Angie read him the headlines over breakfast every morning, despite the irritation it caused Freya, who dismissed the whole business as ‘madness’. The Gallipoli campaign had turned into a bloody stalemate which ended with all ANZAC troops pulling out in December 1915. When the news of this undignified withdrawal reached Australia in January, another spate of violent anti-German riots, brawls and assaults broke out in Sydney and Melbourne.
The secret coffee klatsch at the Palace had started meeting late at night to avoid attracting suspicion from their colleagues. These meetings grew even more feverish and paranoid when in April Australian troops began to arrive in France. They would soon be facing German bullets and bombs, a prospect that would surely intensify hatred for the enemy back home.
Freddie was stunned when Muntz announced one night that Councillor Johannes Berghofer had been voted off the local council. Johannes was a well-liked tavern owner, and one of the most respected public figures in the Blue Mountains. He had discovered a safe route for motor cars down the steep western slopes which had been named Berghofer’s Pass in his honour. His son, George, was serving with the AIF. Everyone had thought that Johannes, though German-born, was untouchable.
‘So that’s the thanks you get for years of devoted service. Would you believe they’re even taking his name off the pass!’ said Muntz. ‘The world has gone crazy.’
Then, in May, the government broadened the legal meaning of ‘enemy alien’ to include naturalised residents and ‘any Australian natural-born subject whose father or grandfather was a subject of a country at war with the King’.
‘We are no longer citizens in our own country!’ declared Freya in tears the day the notices arrived in the mail for her and Freddie to register. ‘How I’ve prayed that it would not come to this.’
Angie was at school that morning when her parents went down to Katoomba police station to fill in their yellow ‘enemy alien’ registration forms. But she felt the profound change of mood in the cottage when she got home that night. Terror sat like a black dog at the back door, baring its teeth.
‘Don’t worry yourself, my angel,’ Freddie told his daughter as he kissed her on the forehead that night. ‘We’ve done nothing wrong, so there’s no need to worry.’
She wanted to believe him, her big strong father who had always protected her, but in the instant before he turned out the lights she saw fear in his eyes.
Two weeks later, Angie had just arrived home from school and was in her favourite hiding place in the hedge when she saw an unfamiliar car pull up in the driveway of the Palace. Senior Constable Malcolm Robertson from the Katoomba police stepped out with a red-capped military officer and was greeted on the front steps by Mr Hawthorne. The trio then walked across the lawn in the direction of the hedge so Angie could hear them distinctly. The thin-lipped man introduced himself as Captain Woodcock from the Intelligence Section of the Second Military District and explained the purpose of his visit to the general manager.
‘We have been reliably informed that a Mr Frederick Octavius Wood who works here at the hotel might have access to firearms or weapons. He is of hostile origin and frequently associates with other German nationals on your staff.’
Angie heard Mr Hawthorne call Benedict. ‘Where’s Freddie, do you know?’
‘Down at the sheds last time I saw him,’ the fat waiter replied.
‘Ask him to join us, would you?’ Hawthorne commanded.
Angie’s heart thumped painfully in her chest with fear and pity for her father. She wanted to warn Freddie of this coming danger but realised with a jolt of anguish that there was nothing she could really do to help him.
Freddie looked stunned when confronted by the policeman and the army officer, accompanied by Mr Hawthorne, but he showed not the slightest sign of resistance. He was courteous and cooperative as these men inspected the outhouses, where they found the usual array of tools needed for heavy work and repairs around a hotel. These included several axes for chopping wood and clearing the bush.
‘I am afraid these will have to be stored separately under lock and key and not made available to Mr Wood,’ said Captain Woodcock, refusing to make eye contact with the storeman.
Angie saw her father gulp for air and pump his hands, half-forming them into fists and struggling to repress his rage. He lowered his head to stare silently at his shoes in an effort to hide the hot flush of shame that suffused his face.
‘Do you have any firearms in the hotel?’ the captain asked the general manager.
Hawthorne confirmed there was a gun room inside the hotel for guests to hire guns or store their own firearms for game hunting and clay-pigeon shooting.
‘I think, to be on the safe side, the gun room should be locked at all times and the interior of the hotel should be out of bounds to Mr Wood, restricting his access to guests as much as possible,’ Woodcock decided, making notes in a small black book he had fished out of his jacket pocket. ‘Mr Wood will be required to report to Senior Constable Robertson at Katoomba police station weekly and I will be checking with you, sir, that he has not breached any of our agreed conditions of his continuing employment here. He will also agree not to have any further private conferences with the other German nationals on staff.’
My God, thought Angie, who on staff had been spying on her father so closely and reporting all this to the police?
The final indignity was the requirement that Freddie surrender all his keys to Mr Hawthorne. ‘In future you will collect a key as needed by sending one of your staff up to the manager’s office,’ said Woodcock. ‘You will also be accompanied at all times by another member of staff when you enter any of the private areas of the hotel and particularly when you handle the barrels of spring water for the clinic.’
Angie saw her father flinch as each instruction struck him like the lash of a whip. Unable to bear this scene of humiliation any longer, she slipped from the hedge and ran back to the cottage, devoutly wishing she had never seen her father suffer so.
She barely recognised Freddie as he lurched into the cottage later that night, muttering curses and reeking of alcohol.
Freya barked at Angie to go to bed. Soon after, the light in her parents’ room went out and she heard her mother singing softly in the dark, just as she had when Angie was small:
‘Wie ist die Welt so stille,
Und in der Dämmrung Hülle
So traulich und so hold!
Als eine stille Kammer,
Wo ihr des Tages Jammer
Verschlafen und vergessen sollt.’
How still is the world
In twilight furled
So intimate and sweet
Like a quiet room
&nbs
p; Where our daily gloom
Fades and is forgotten in sleep.
Little by little, Freddie’s moans gave way to deep snores.
CHAPTER 9
* * *
Angie
Meadow Springs, July–September 1916
Freddie went back to work and Angie to school and Freya returned to her painting. They were determined to continue their lives as if nothing had changed but in their hearts they all knew that a storm was gathering strength over the horizon. The air in the cottage and the hotel grounds and the schoolhouse hissed with its deadly charge. It would strike the Wood family with full force in mid-September but it would claim its first victim weeks earlier.
In the first week of July, Eveline wrote to her sister to say she had received a letter from John stationed with the 59th Battalion, 15th Brigade, somewhere behind the lines in France. John complained in a jocular way about his uncomfortable new steel Brodie helmet as well as the cold and the mud but otherwise reported, ‘I am in excellent spirits and keen to join the fight with my brothers-in-arms. Please send my good wishes to Freya, Freddie and Angie. Tell them how proud I am to be here and how much I look forward to seeing them again.’
On 28 July Australian newspapers included in their reports a short British military communiqué: ‘Yesterday evening, south of Armentières, we carried out some important raids on a front of two miles, in which Australian troops took part. About 140 German prisoners were captured.’
These ‘important raids’ were conducted by troops of the Australian Fifth Division, newly arrived in France, on the Sugarloaf salient near the small village of Fromelles. As the men of the 59th and 60th battalions waited on the fire step, they did not know that the artillery bombardment laid down to prepare for their attack had made no impact on the enemy’s concrete bunker overlooking the battlefield. They advanced across no-man’s-land in four waves, five minutes apart, to be cut down in a lattice of German machine-gun fire. Eyewitnesses later described ‘hundreds . . . mown down in the flicker of an eyelid, like great rows of teeth knocked from a comb’. Over five and a half thousand Australians were killed or wounded that night.
In mid-August the official death notices began to arrive in Australia.
The phone at the Palace rang just before dinner time and a woman on the other end begged Mr de Witte, the front office manager, to fetch Freya Wood from the cottage next door. Moved by the tears of his caller, de Witte sent one of his staff to the cottage and he returned with Freya, who looked wan and anxious.
The caller was Eveline. She had just received a telegram to say that Private John Rupert Marsh had been killed in action ‘somewhere in France’. Their baby was due in two weeks’ time. Freya broke down and wept, right there in the front lobby of the Palace, as guests stopped and gawked.
Hearing the sound of a woman sobbing, Mrs Wells emerged from Mr Hawthorne’s office where they were conducting a meeting.
‘Why is this woman using the hotel’s telephone and causing a disturbance?’ she demanded of the front office manager.
Mr de Witte began to explain as fast as he could. ‘The circumstances were unusual, Mrs Wells. There has been a death in the family and I thought—’
But the housekeeper cut him off. ‘Get her out of here!’ she commanded in a low, angry voice.
Freya whispered to her sister, ‘I have to go, my darling. But I will come to you soon. Very soon.’
Her hands were shaking so badly, she could barely put down the receiver. As she looked up at the scowling housekeeper, she caught sight of an enamel badge pinned to Mrs Wells’ blouse. It showed two flags crossed, a Union Jack and an Australian Red Ensign, encircled by the words ‘Anti-German League’. Freya’s temples began to throb, blood surging with rage as she realised it must have been Mrs Wells who had reported her husband to the police and the military.
Mr Hawthorne came out of his office and stood behind Mrs Wells as the housekeeper raised her hand to point at Freya. ‘I said get this woman out of here!’
Before anyone had time to move, Freya took a step towards the housekeeper and spat in her face. She heard the shriek of dismay and the gasps of horror all around her. But she did not look back as she marched out the front door of the Palace and headed towards the distant lights of the cottage.
As she waited for her train to school the following day, Angie stared at the recruiting poster on the wall of the railway station at Meadow Springs. It was one of Mr Norman Lindsay’s best efforts. A firing squad of spike-helmeted German soldiers aimed their rifles at a young Australian farmer, his back pressed against a corrugated-iron water tank just like the one behind her cottage. His mouth was bloodied and his chest exposed to their deadly muzzles through his ripped shirt. Behind him, his mother had fallen to her knees, begging the German officer in charge to spare her son, but it was too late: he had already given the order and one of his men struck the woman down with the butt of his rifle. The farmer’s father, with his long beard and grey hair, lay dead on the ground, a trail of blood oozing from a bullet hole in his head. Flames engulfed the farm as more enemy soldiers violently restrained the family’s daughter. WILL YOU FIGHT NOW OR WAIT FOR THIS? the poster demanded.
Angie sighed. Did anyone really believe the Kaiser’s soldiers would invade Australia? She knew exactly what this kind of nonsense was meant to do: make everyone feel as if they were in mortal danger from the dreaded Hun. It was what boys like Micky Shales and women like Mrs Wells needed to believe in order to feel they were part of this great drama, even though it was all happening thousands of miles away. And it was probably also because they felt guilty about their sons, fathers, brothers and uncles facing death far away when all they could do was send puddings in tins and knit socks. If they couldn’t shoot German soldiers on the battlefield, they could at least do their bit by rooting out ‘the enemy within’, the only Germans they could hate face to face.
The following evening, Angie was to feel the full heat of that hatred.
It was coming on to dusk, the valley sunk into purple shadow and the first star visible low on the horizon. Freddie was outside having his customary smoko and Angie was doing her homework at the kitchen table. Freya was not there; she had caught the train to Sydney two days earlier to help Eveline with the birth of her child.
Angie was roused from her reading by the sound of shouting from next door. She came out onto the veranda and saw her father had already risen from his wicker chair and was listening to the commotion on the other side of the hedge, voices raised in a frightening chorus of triumph and aggression.
‘Can you hear what they’re saying?’ Angie asked.
Freddie shook his head. ‘Not really.’
But the steely expression on her father’s face indicated otherwise, as did the note of urgency in his voice. ‘I’ll go take a look. Back inside, missy. Right now!’
Angie obeyed her father and retreated behind the flyscreen door as he stubbed out his cigarette and headed into the garden. She could make out some of the words, more distinct in the cacophony next door: ‘Death to the Hun bitch!’ ‘Let her burn!’ She smelled smoke and saw the first flicker of flames making a halo of light against the darkening sky. Her stomach cramped with terror. Up until now, she had dismissed the possibility of violence against her family as fantasy, despite the horrible letter in her desk at school, the threats from Micky Shales and his gang, and the stories of attacks on Germans in Sydney. She refused to believe that anyone she knew here in Meadow Springs would actually do them any harm. But the hammering of her heart and the knot in her chest told her in a way more forceful than words that she was wrong.
She stepped out onto the veranda again and looked for her father in the thickening gloom, praying he wouldn’t reveal himself to the mob. The flames were crackling loudly now and sparks danced into the night air.
Angie crept out into the garden and found her usual vantage point, hidden in the heart of the hedge, from where she could watch the scene unfolding on the lawn beyond. A group of fo
rty or so people, mostly men but including the unmistakeable figure of Mrs Wells with her stiff-backed carriage and tightly coiffed hair, stood in a circle with the light of a blazing fire illuminating their angry faces. The group erupted into rowdy cheers and cries of ‘Burn! Burn!’ and ‘Kill the bitch!’ as they punched their fists into the air.
The object of their rage was a burning piano. Even from this distance, Angie recognised the Bechstein from the casino, the glossy black grand piano with a polished plate that read: In gratitude to the Palace staff – Baroness Bertha Krupp von Bohlen und Halbach, December 1908.
Without warning, a sob broke from Angie’s throat at the memory of herself and Robbie hiding in the storage area behind the stage in the casino, so close to the palm court orchestra she could read these words. The memory was so vivid it was as if her skin recalled the warmth and weight of Robbie’s body next to hers as they lay squeezed together in the dusty darkness and her eyes drank in all the forbidden wonders of that evening. Tears streamed down her cheeks. She cried with an overwhelming sense of loss for the past: for a time when she and Robbie were just friends, and her father was happy and loved by his boys, and a rich German woman could show her gratitude to the Palace with a beautiful and generous gift.
The Bechstein had been hacked at with an axe. It must have also been doused with petrol; Angie could smell the acrid stink of it in the air. The piano’s glossy hide peeled away in black scrolls and the heat caused the piano strings to warp and snap so the whole unnerving spectacle was accompanied by an eerie music of high-pitched shrieks, explosions and loud groans. As if to mock the piano in its death throes, the Katoomba Anti-German League members had propped the lid open and arranged sheet music on its stand. The pages of the burning sheet music were turned as if by invisible fingers; they curled up, floated into the air in a brief waltz of glowing scraps, dissipating as embers. The crowd’s whoops and cries grew louder and louder as the flames roared higher.
Palace of Tears Page 11
