Lisa had continued to work on deciphering the childish handwriting in her mother’s diaries and its anarchic, freewheeling style of notation in pencil. She had scanned most of the pages from the first three volumes and two of the photo albums onto her laptop. Luke kept in touch with messages about the latest ex-staff member or guest who had surrendered some precious photo or memento for the hotel’s growing archive. Every now and then he would ask how her reading of the diary was progressing. She knew how much he wanted access but Lisa felt a strong sense of protectiveness that she could not fully explain, though she suspected it was probably some misplaced expression of loyalty to her mother. She promised she would share them with him very soon.
It was Lisa who suggested Luke meet her for coffee in Katoomba. She had decided to hand over the 1930s photo album for copying. There was nothing there to hide and she knew how excited he would be.
Luke was ecstatic when he saw it, turning the pages of the album reverently. His eyes seemed to feast on every little detail, as he nodded and murmured, ‘Ah, yes, I thought that was when they extended the garden beds’ or ‘Well, that is unusual.’
The conversation inevitably came round to the diaries from which Lisa was making notes and marking up pages she thought Luke would find interesting.
‘Those damn diaries,’ said Lisa. ‘They’re driving me mad. In a good way, I guess. Pages of the most pedestrian stuff: roller-skating and dances and cake-making. And then, out of the blue, amazing things I never imagined.’
‘Such as . . . ?’ asked Luke, arching his eyebrows in an exaggeratedly prying manner. Lisa laughed. She couldn’t help herself.
‘Such as my mother spending half her childhood in the scrub, building cubby houses and playing Bushies and Bobbies with Lottie and Alan. And trapping and shooting rabbits! Turns out she was some kind of Aussie Annie Oakley. She got her first lady’s rifle when she was only seven and was taught how to use it by her father. She ended up quite a crack shot, apparently. Even won ribbons at the Lithgow Show.’
Lisa warmed to her storytelling as she saw how much these details delighted Luke. Was there anyone else – even her brother – who would greet these discoveries with the same enthusiasm and wonder that she felt?
‘An Aussie Annie Oakley. I like that.’
‘It gets better. One time, she and Lottie got caught clay-pigeon shooting with their parents’ gramophone record collection out on the tennis court. The old man went berserk!’
It was an image to conjure with: a flock of 78s spinning like giant black discuses overhead and then exploding in mid-air in a shower of shellac. Bing, Billie, Benny, Fats, Art, the Count and the Duke, Judy and Frank, all blasted to smithereens. Such savage vandalism, so shocking and liberating.
‘Priceless!’ laughed Luke.
‘And how’s this?’ said Lisa, leaning closer for dramatic effect. ‘When she was only seven, Monika got lost in the bush. They had to send search parties out to find her. She survived out there for nearly two days in the middle of summer. The story even made the local paper. I can’t believe she never told us any of this.’
‘I’ll have to check the newspaper and police files for that one.’ Luke made a note.
Lisa was in her stride now. ‘There was one entry a few nights ago that really caught my attention. April 1936. A young girl visited Laura for about eight days in Leura. Spatzi, they called her. German for sparrow. “Spatzi, a good friend of Mama’s all the way from Germany, stayed the whole week. Very pretty, lots of fun.” She and Laura played tennis, went on walks, took in the sights. Adam was away on business at the time. The whole visit had this air of secrecy about it. Monika seemed to know instinctively not to tell her father. Very strange. I wonder if Spatzi could be the link to Ulrich? I’m so tempted to ask Mum.’ ‘So why don’t you?’ asked Luke.
Lisa looked at him directly. She felt she could trust Luke – or sincerely hoped she could – as she did not want to take this journey totally alone. Even so, there was a moment of hesitation before she replied. Luke looked back at her with a sympathetic half-smile but did not jump to fill the silence.
‘The truth is, Luke, I’m afraid.’
‘Afraid? Of what?’
‘That I might uncover something terrible.’ Lisa’s voice had dropped to a whisper. ‘It’s all very well for me to go digging around in Monika’s past. But what if she has turned her back on it for a very good reason? What if I end up hurting her all over again? Am I being selfish, Luke?’
‘I don’t really know the answer to that,’ he said. ‘But I think you’ll know what to do when the time comes.’
It was as good an answer as she could reasonably expect.
Two nights ago she had started reading Monika’s entries for the end of 1941.
The Palace had survived the Depression by lowering its full board to two pounds, eighteen and sixpence a week. It remained heavily booked throughout the toughest years as many families closed up their houses in Sydney and came up to live more cheaply in rooms at the hotel. It also remained a favourite honeymoon destination and its menu was still one of the most popular west of Sydney, with mains of roast baron of beef with horseradish cream, baked saddle of spring lamb in mint sauce, roast larded fillet of veal with lemon seasoning and roast suckling pig, all with lashings of savoury rice, mashed swedes, French beans and Saratoga chips. Chantilly wine trifle, apple pie and cognac sauce pudding were favourite desserts.
The family moved to Mosman in September 1938, leaving the mountains and Monika’s tomboy childhood behind her, despite frequent return visits on weekends. The girls missed the bush a little at first, but the Foxes soon took to their new beach and city life in Mosman. Adam even bought a new car and The Seagull, a small yacht for harbour racing. Lottie and Monika were enrolled at Queenwood School for Girls, not far from their home.
It soon became clear to Lisa as she read her mother’s diary that the carefree days of Monika’s childhood in the mountains – the endless parties and games, the freedom and wildness of the bush – were beginning to vanish. Like Australia itself, forced to face the crisis it had long feared, eleven-year-old Monika would watch the untroubled, privileged life she knew begin, bit by bit, to fade.
Since it had started, the war had seemed a remote drama to Monika Fox, mostly stories on the radio about Herr Hitler and Mr Churchill and the Blitz. When Prime Minister Menzies announced cutting the petrol ration to only one thousand miles a year, Monz thought father would ‘blow a gasket’ as he stormed around, yelling, ‘Bloody hell! This will kill the Palace stone dead. No one’ll be able to drive to the mountains. And we’ll have to cancel all our day trips for guests out to Jenolan.’
Papa liked nothing better than to drive the family up to the Jersey Avenue house in Leura on the weekend in the Hudson so he could get in a round of golf at Leura or Blackheath and keep an eye on the Palace. Monz and Lottie liked to play croquet on the lawn and hide-and-seek on the verandas and in the hedges and feed Captain Pogo’s meat scraps to the kookaburras. Bowing to the inevitable, Fox had installed one of those big ugly charcoal gas producers on the back of the Hudson and cut back his visits to about once a month. Sacrifices of wartime and all that.
Business had begun to pick up slowly at the Palace when the war began as more and more young men hastily tied the knot on enlisting. On one of Papa’s trips to the hotel, Monz and Lottie saw five Diggers in their slouch hats loitering in the drive. They were on their honeymoons, waiting for their young brides to fix their hair and make-up and join them for a sightseeing tour to Echo Point and the Three Sisters.
‘I was a bit surprised by their loping and larking about, smoking cigarettes and cracking jokes,’ Monz noted haughtily in her diary. ‘It was not how I imagined real soldiers to behave.’
When the government took ‘hotels and restaurants’ off the List of Reserved Occupations later that year, five of the Palace staff joined up, including the general manager Mr Merewether’s son Roger. Monz was amazed. ‘Roger is such a drongo. He can hard
ly tie his shoelaces much less fire a gun. God help Australia if we’re going to need boofheads like Roger to save us.’ Monz loved to collect juicy words like ‘drongo’ and ‘boofhead’ for her diary, words that would shock her parents if they knew.
Everything changed three weeks before Christmas 1941, when the two girls were called into the living room after school. Mama and Papa looked very solemn.
‘What is it?’ Monz asked nervously, wondering if Captain Pogo had dug up Mama’s pearl earring that she and Lottie had buried as treasure in a box in the rose bed last spring. Instead they were told to be very quiet and gathered around the AWA walnut cabinet to listen to the new prime minister, Mr Curtin, announce in his broad flat voice: ‘Men and women of Australia. We are at war with Japan.’
Monz wrote that night under the bedsheet with her torch: ‘Tonight Mama and Papa looked the unhappiest I have ever seen. They told us not to worry but said that this was one of the most important days in Australia’s history. I hope we are all going to be safe and that Papa does not have to fight in the war.’
Monika’s parents had good reason to look grim. Within days there was a call up for more recruits, the petrol ration was cut again, the Christmas vacations were shortened and holiday train services cancelled. The Palace began refunding bookings. Business looked doomed. Adam slept badly, pacing his study at night, smoking cigars out on the balcony and watching the lights on the harbour. Laura observed his anguish, soothing it as best she could but unable to make it go away.
And then a miracle happened. In the weeks following the attack on Pearl Harbor, the Blue Mountains woke up to find it had become a refuge for thousands of people fleeing Sydney. ‘Invasion panic’ took grip like a bout of flu. All the guesthouses, hotels and cottages were booked solid. Mr Merewether at the Palace was laughing when he rang Adam.
‘The phone’s been ringing off the hook all week, sir. I’ve raised the rack rate twice but the calls keep coming. Rents and house prices have gone crazy from Katoomba all the way out to Bathurst. People are paying up to eight pounds a week for rooms and five guineas a week for a cottage, can you believe it? I’ve seen houses for sale up here for one thousand four hundred pounds, cash on the nail.’
That morning Monz and Lottie were playing a game of Beetle in the front room while their mother was flipping through the Women’s Weekly picking out a dress for a luncheon with her Mosman crowd the following week.
Papa bowled in and announced at the top of his voice, ‘Guess what? The Palace is booked solid until the New Year. And I just got a twelve-month lease on one of our cottages in Blackheath!’ Adam hugged and kissed his wife with the air of a man who had been given a stay of execution.
The atmosphere of triumph was infectious and the children cheered and clapped and were scooped up in their father’s embrace.
‘Let’s take The Seagull out for a sail,’ Adam suggested. ‘What do you say? A beach picnic somewhere. And we’ll take a few special treats to celebrate.’ He winked at Laura. ‘Special treats’ usually meant pastries, lollies and ice-cream for the children and a gourmet hamper and bottle of French bubbly for the parents. A fresh breeze had just sprung up and the sky over Sydney Harbour was a cloudless delft blue. It was perfect sailing weather.
The next few weeks Papa was the happiest Monz had seen him for some time. The Blue Mountains continued to attract a steady stream of new residents and the Palace thrived. Adam scoffed at the angry letters in the papers lambasting these ‘bomb dodgers’ whose wealth bought them a way out of danger ahead of others. The nastiest of these letters targeted refugees from Europe, particularly German Jews, as the worst offenders. ‘War always brings out the worst in people,’ Adam said over his morning coffee. ‘It was the same in the Great War.’
He and Laura also read in the papers about the attacks on Italians and Germans living in Australia. Shop windows smashed, assaults, boycotts. New South Wales Premier Mr Mair called for the government in Canberra to intern all ‘enemy aliens’. Camps had been opened in Hay, Cowra and Holsworthy and Japanese civilians would soon be joining the German and Italian families already interned there.
‘I can’t believe it’s happening again!’ cried Laura, crumpling the pages of newsprint in her fists. ‘Haven’t we learned anything?’
‘What’s the matter, Mama?’ asked Monika, alarmed at her mother’s distress. The girls were about to head out the front door to school. Pogo raced up and down the back veranda, barking.
Laura tried to calm herself but her chest heaved with sobs.
‘What is it, sweetie?’ Adam asked, taking her in his arms and stroking her hair. He had not seen Laura cry like this before.
‘I don’t know. I’m sorry. It just seems so cruel,’ said Laura.
Adam paled a little at that. He turned to the two girls. ‘It’s alright, my darlings. Mama will be fine. Now, hurry along. You mustn’t be late for class.’
Singapore fell to the Japanese the following February and there was an air raid on Darwin four days later. Panic was in the air like lightning over dry scrub.
Papa told us today that Mr Merewether got a telegram from the Red Cross saying that Roger is now a P.O.W. (that means a prisoner-of-war). He is one of 15,000 poor Aussie soldiers captured by the Japs in Singapore. He’s in a place called Changi. I hope he’ll be alright. He doesn’t deserve to die even if he is a drongo.
In the window of Tooheys’ newsagents, Monz and Lottie saw a big poster pasted on the glass. ‘Bloody hell!’ Lottie grimaced at the giant Japanese soldier striding across the globe, the Rising Sun at his back and iron-heeled boot planted on Australia. HE’S COMING SOUTH, trumpeted the poster. IT’S FIGHT, WORK OR PERISH.
‘I hope we never meet one of those marching up Middle Head Road,’ said Monz.
That night she sat with her torch under her blankets, her bedroom lights off and curtains drawn as Sydney prepared for war, writing in her diary and giving herself nightmares with her drawings of Jap planes dropping bombs and waves of buck-toothed soldiers advancing with bayonets dripping blood. Mosman was submerged in the murk of a ‘brown-out’ every night with windows papered up or covered with blackout drapes, streetlights hooded and car headlights masked.
As Christmas approached, the girls watched sweaty men with picks and shovels dig slit trenches in Memory Park and Rawson Oval and in the grounds of Queenwood School. When Laura took Monz and Lottie and Alan down on Sunday for a swim they found that the older gentlemen of the Volunteer Defence Corps – the Retreads as they nicknamed themselves – had strung up coils of barbed wire the full length of Balmoral Beach. ‘It’s all very well to stop the Japs but how are we meant to have a dip?’ moaned Laura, tramping back up the street in the heat with her three children trailing behind, whining.
The start of school was delayed for two weeks while the government ordered more trenches to be dug and hoped the drought would last so they would not fill up with rain. Monz and Lottie spent their afternoons on the balcony of their house watching the ARP wardens blowing their whistles and conducting air-raid exercises down at the pavilion with ladders, buckets, hoses and fake bombs made out of cardboard. They could also hear the whooshes and blasts of mortars and antiaircraft guns up on Middle Head. The city held its breath and waited for the enemy to come. It did not have long to wait.
Sunday 31st May 1942
Lottie and I woke up around 11.00. The windows were rattling and the whole house shaking from top to bottom. We could hear booming sounds like cannons being fired. Were they bombs? Was this the invasion? But there had been no air-raid sirens or planes screaming overhead. Were all the ARP wardens and the Retreads already dead and the Japs swarming up Balmoral Beach to kill us in our beds?
We ran next door where we huddled with Mama. I could tell she was afraid too. But she kept saying how everything would be alright. Captain Pogo was barking his head off and poor Alan began to blub. Papa was downstairs on the phone talking to Lionel, his friend who lives over in Lavender Bay. He shouted up the stairs: ‘All th
e ships near Garden Island have blacked out their lights. There’s some kind of hunt going on. Enemy submarines, they say.’
After a while, the night calmed down and there were no more loud noises. Mama and Papa let us bring in a mattress and blankets and sleep on the floor in their room. Alan fell asleep after a while but I don’t think anyone else slept a wink all night.
I kept listening for more explosions. Could this attack be just the start? When would the bombers come and destroy Sydney just like they had Darwin? I could see Papa staring out the window until the sun came up. He didn’t say anything but I saw him take his hunting rifle out of its case in the study and check if it was loaded. If it came to that, I am a crack shot myself and wasn’t going to let Papa fight alone.
There were more loud booms for hours the next morning, really close by. The whole house shook terribly. I have never been so scared in my whole life but I refused to cry. And part of me was a bit excited too.
Adam came home with the following evening’s special edition of The Sun headlined SYDNEY’S WILD NIGHT OF EXCITEMENT. The Foxes sat down to hear him read the whole story aloud after dinner. Three Japanese midget submarines had slipped through the Heads and attempted to torpedo the USS Chicago, sinking a moored ferry which was serving as a floating barracks instead. Houses were shaken by concussion waves from depth charges dropped in Sydney Harbour by the navy. Late-night ferry passengers had been scared out of their wits by bursts of machine-gun fire and the sight of red tracer pom-poms and searchlights sweeping the dark waters. The hunt for subs lasted all night long and the persistent booms that morning were an attack by depth charges on the last submarine, stranded in nearby Taylors Bay.
A week later one of the ‘mother’ submarines, which had launched the midget subs, bombarded the Eastern Suburbs. Only one shell detonated and miraculously there were no fatalities. But Sydneysiders knew nobody was safe anymore.
Palace of Tears Page 14
