Palace of Tears

by Julian Leatherdale

‘They can call us “bomb dodgers” if they like, but that’s it!’ Adam said the next day as he looked at the photos in the Sydney Morning Herald of damaged houses in Woollahra and a crowd of boys gathered around a crater in front of a corner store in Bondi. ‘We’re moving camp to Leura for a while. At least until the real threat blows over. I need to keep an eye on the hotel and . . . well, I think it’s for the best.’

  Mama seemed perfectly happy to move back up to their big weekender in Jersey Avenue, but Monz and Lottie hated the whole idea. They desperately missed their new friends at Queenwood and dreaded having to start another high school.

  ‘We all have to make sacrifices,’ announced Papa. Monz and Lottie’s misery deepened when, on their first day at Katoomba High, they discovered they were among five hundred extra students enrolling, all children of families who had relocated from Sydney.

  ‘The whole place is so bodgy!’ Monz complained to her diary.

  The principal, Mr Bentley, has called in teachers from all over the place to help out – the blind, the lame and the incredibly ancient. They’re even holding classes in the corridors and the outdoor lunch shed. Our maths master Mr Greenwood is some poor bomb-happy chap from the Great War. He tries to keep order by shouting and threatening to cane everybody but his hands tremble and the boys make fun of him. It’s a total shambles.

  Monz and Lottie’s suffering was mercifully short-lived. A letter arrived a few weeks later from Miss Rennie, the head of Queenwood, informing Mr and Mrs Fox that, because so many parents had moved away, she had arranged for her co-principal, Miss Medway, to evacuate with a group of students to Glenleigh, near Penrith, at the foot of the mountains. Other private schools were doing the same. The junior boys from Sydney Church of England Grammar School had already moved to Mount Victoria while the girls were accommodated at the grand Chateau Napier guesthouse on the hill overlooking Leura. Mona and Lottie would have to catch a train an hour each way every day to Glenleigh but Monz rejoiced: ‘I will be reunited with Shirley and Valerie and Antonia and escape this purgatory!’

  Monz tried to fit back into her old life in Leura but it was not easy. Leura was a pretty little town, especially in autumn, but the freezing cold waters of Katoomba Baths were no substitute for a swim at Balmoral. And the bush that had once been her playground no longer called to Monika the way it had when she was little. She had changed.

  It was not just the fault of the mountains. Despite the cinematic distractions offered by the Embassy and the Savoy in Katoomba, the dreariness of the war crept like a numbing fog into every minute of Monika’s days. Into her lunchtimes in the school hall making camouflage nets with rough hessian and rope. In the shortages of everything from tinned tomatoes to sugar and, worst of all, no hot-water bottles! In the deafening roar that woke her and Lottie every morning before dark as the trains carried workers to the Small Arms Factory at Lithgow further west.

  Two anti-aircraft batteries guarded the Lithgow factory against air attack. Every time a plane rumbled over the mountains, necks craned and eyes squinted skywards. As a senior girl guide, Lottie had put her hand up to train for the Volunteer Air Observers Corps as a plane-spotter. She didn’t get a special uniform but she did get a splendid badge with a golden eagle. Every Wednesday after school and on weekends, she reported for duty at Wentworth Falls. She was insufferably proud.

  Their brother, Alan, like all small boys who spent hours each day playing outside, learned rhymes to memorise the shape and names of aircraft, friend and foe.

  Four engines hurl the tapered wings

  Across the topmost skies,

  Its turrets guard the bombs it brings

  When Flying Fortress flies!

  Over and over, Alan and Lottie would practise these rhymes together after school until Monz wanted to scream and tear her plaits out.

  It seemed as if everyone except Monz had war fever. Even her mother, the glamorous society queen, had decided it was time to ‘do her bit’. Laura Fox had played a part on Red Cross and Comfort Fund committees, but in May she went one step further. She enlisted with the Red Cross Voluntary Aid Detachment looking after TB patients at the Bodington Sanatorium in Wentworth Falls for four shifts a week. At her induction parade she stood to attention with her fellow nurses in her short-sleeved VAD dress and soft wide-brimmed hat. ‘Mama always looks like one of those Hollywood stars in the magazines,’ Monika wrote in her diary. ‘Today she looked like a cross between the Virgin Mary and a lady lawns bowler.’

  While her sister kept watch for Zeros screaming over the Grose Valley and her brother collected scrap metal in a billycart as a member of the local Ginger Meggs Salvage Corps, Monz’s only escape from all this wartime dullness was lying on the rug in front of the AWA listening to her favourite radio program, The Argonauts Club. No matter how tedious each day, each night promised the rousing chorus of the rowing song and ‘adventuring to yet uncharted shores’. The budding writer sent in dozens of poems and stories which were judged to be so outstanding they earned their author enough points for an Order of the Dragon’s Tooth certificate as well as book prizes displayed proudly in her bedroom. Laura and Adam sometimes joined Monika when one of her compositions was being broadcast and they made an appreciative audience with cries of ‘Bravo!’ and ‘Boffo!’ and loud applause. ‘She’ll make us proud one day, that girl!’ Adam predicted.

  As it turned out the Japs did not invade Australia that year to make Monz’s life a misery. Instead that job was left to Mr Curtin and his well-named Minister for War Organisation, Mr Dedman, with their religious zeal for a new kind of wartime drabness called Austerity. In the middle of the year everyone was issued with ration books for clothing, which meant no more lovely evening gowns or hats and gloves or smart suits or summer dresses or swimming costumes. Everything had to be patched and darned and homemade. Monz and Lottie were no longer expected to wear a new school uniform and made do with threadbare blouses and skirts instead. Father was reduced to wearing his old suits, shiny at the cuffs and elbows, and he put the Hudson up on blocks in the garage. The Palace struggled again as prices were fixed for meals and fine dining was cut back to two courses. Austerity ruled supreme.

  Adam and Laura and Lottie and Alan seemed to take all this in good spirits, but Monz pined for the sparkling warm waters of her harbour and her sunny, comfy life back in Mosman. It did not look as if they would be returning there any time soon. Father had let out the house to a family of Hungarian refugees who were prepared to pay good money on a long lease.

  Here she was, twelve years old, a prisoner in her darned lumpy jumpers and prickly wool stockings, locked up like a nun with not a male in sight under the age of fifty except telegram boys delivering tragic news on their bicycles or bunches of brats not much older than Alan collecting scrap metal and rubber for the war. No dances, no parties, no fun.

  ‘Everyone is making sacrifices, Monika,’ Laura lectured whenever Monz looked glum or complained. ‘And privileged families like ours must be seen to be doing their bit like everyone else. Never underestimate other people’s capacity for envy, you mark my words.’

  ‘Visiting hours are over, I’m afraid.’

  As Lisa packed up the Scrabble board, she studied Monika out of the corner of her eye. It was all so disconcerting, learning about the inner world of her mother as a twelve-year-old, privy to her intimate hopes and fears for the future, only to come to the Ritz every Tuesday and Friday to see this same life staggering to its conclusion. It was like reading the opening and final chapters of a story at the same time. It made her feel traitorous and yet also tremble with a feeling she had never imagined she would feel for her mother: compassion.

  Monika had won Scrabble again of course and was very pleased with herself as the nurse served her lunch.

  ‘See you, Mum,’ said Lisa as she headed for the door.

  Monika, preoccupied, did not reply. ‘Boffo!’ she said under her breath, a small smile playing on her lips at the sound of this word she had dredged up from so long
ago. ‘Boffo!’

  CHAPTER 12

  * * *

  Angie

  Liverpool, October 1916–May 1918

  If Freya and Angie had any notions that Liverpool was an escape from the intrusive and belligerent atmosphere of Meadow Springs, they were soon dispelled. In accordance with the War Precautions (Aliens Registration) Regulations, Freya had filled out Form E – ‘Notice of Change of Abode’ – in triplicate at Katoomba police station and presented her certificate of registration to the aliens registration officer.

  Within two days of their move to Liverpool, she had presented herself again, as required by law, to the registrations officer at the police station there. He inspected her papers, asked her several questions about her family, her business, her intended movements and if she had changed her name. He then recorded her address. ‘How old is your daughter?’ the ruddy-faced man asked as she turned to leave.

  ‘She has just turned thirteen.’

  ‘Well, don’t forget that when she turns eighteen she will have to be registered as an alien herself.’ The man smiled unpleasantly through tobacco-stained teeth.

  ‘Let us pray the war is well and truly over by then,’ said Freya, keeping her face as composed as she could manage. ‘For all our sakes.’

  Angie could tell her mother was fuming as they trudged back up George Street past Liverpool’s town hall. The petty official had reminded Freya as she left that she must report to him fortnightly and that failure to do so could result in a fine of a hundred pounds or a six-month prison sentence.

  Liverpool was much bigger than Meadow Springs but it still felt like a country town, with its broad main streets surrounded by the hot scrubby plains of south-west Sydney. It was also a military town. On the other side of the Georges River lay the largest training camp in New South Wales, preparing thousands of volunteers for the Australian Imperial Force. Originally rows of bell-shaped white tents, the camp was now virtually a town in itself, with barracks, stables, latrines, cookhouses and a hospital. From the weatherboard cottage on Rose Street that Freya, Angie, Eveline and baby Greta rented, the crack of rifle fire could be heard distinctly from the range across the river. Other smaller training camps were close by in Casula and Warwick Farm, all only a few miles from the sprawling German Concentration Camp in Holsworthy.

  There were at least six other German families renting cottages on Rose Street; all of them had relocated to Liverpool for the same reasons as Freya and Angie. Not surprisingly they kept a low profile but cautiously welcomed the newcomers. Mrs Eyl – whose husband was a doctor interned at Holsworthy – and her daughter Astrid invited them over for pastries and coffee.

  The Eyls were a cultured Jewish family, interested in the arts and politics, who had migrated to Australia from Leipzig twenty years earlier. Their daughter had been born in Double Bay in Sydney where Dr Eyl had his rooms. Mrs Eyl was deeply flattered to have the daughters of the great Wolfang von Gettner in her house and proudly displayed their collection of lithographs and paintings from Germany. While they loved the visual arts, the family’s talent lay in music.

  ‘My daughter takes after my husband as a fine violinist. You must come and hear her play sometime,’ said Mrs Eyl. Eveline revealed her passion for singing and they promised to perform a concert. Both Eveline and Freya decided they liked Mrs Eyl a great deal; it felt good to have a neighbour who was so sympathetic for a change.

  Before they left, Mrs Eyl gently warned them about their first visit to the German Concentration Camp – the GCC as it was called – at Holsworthy. ‘It can be a bit of a shock at first.’

  It was a shock. The camp was so big, so spread out, stretching as far as the eye could see. From the vantage point of the visitors’ compound, which was no more than a grassless paddock, Angie stared in amazement at the long parallel rows of wooden huts separated by narrow ‘streets’, once grass but long since trampled to dirt. Washing hung on improvised lines and men in white canvas giggle hats shuffled back and forth or collected in small knots.

  From a distance, the camp had the busy, almost grotesquely festive atmosphere of an outdoor marketplace, though it shimmered in the blisteringly hot sun with barely a gum tree in sight. Everything was coated in a thick layer of yellow dust, and everywhere you looked there stood a uniformed soldier with a slouch hat and a rifle with fixed bayonet sloped at his shoulder. Another group stood guard over a machine-gun on a tall watchtower to the south. Fence posts and stone boundary markers were all whitewashed and every view ended in a high, triple-layered wall of barbed wire.

  Freddie was thinner than Angie or Freya could ever recall seeing him. He had made an effort to shave and comb his hair but he still appeared grizzled and shabby, and was obviously ashamed of his canvas fatigues with ‘POW’ stamped on the back. Angie struggled very hard not to cry that first time. Tears brimmed at the corners of her father’s eyes, too, as he pushed his hands through the barbed-wire fence between them and gripped hers.

  ‘I’ve missed you, Papa,’ she whispered.

  ‘What about the cottage?’ he asked Freya on that first visit.

  ‘It will be fine. I’m sure Fox will look after it for us until we can return,’ she reassured her husband, who knew more than anyone the sacrifice she had made in leaving her father’s bush kingdom behind.

  They tried to visit Freddie every fortnight for the two hours allotted on a Sunday afternoon, despite the obtrusive presence of the guards who patrolled the narrow passage between families and internees. Sometimes they were defeated by weather and train timetables and sickness. They brought Freddie comfort packages: soaps, Mrs Eyl’s schnecken and rugelach and, when they could afford it, books.

  He never complained once. He never told them how the guards tore apart all their care packages to check for illicit weapons or coded messages and sometimes just to steal things, as they had with his luggage that first day. He never told them about his sleepless nights, his fears of the criminal thugs and the drunken, corrupt guards, the daily taunting and swearing, the bitter cold, the rats and the swarms of blowflies and mosquitoes, the rotten food, the stench of the latrines, the queues for the cold showers. Worst of all, though, was the soul-destroying boredom. There were no lights in the huts so he read by the light of the moon: anything to take his mind off the tedium of endless repeated days. ‘Barbed Wire Disease’ they called it: depression, apathy, loss of hope.

  The war would end soon. This was the only prayer that sustained them. And the belief that, when the war ended, life would return to normal.

  Angie’s life was boring too but she could never say so. Her circumstances were not nearly as harsh as her father’s, so she had to bear it all in stoic silence. She knew she would get it in the neck from Freya if she didn’t.

  She missed Meadow Springs. She tried hard to hang on to her memories of the valley, the hedge and the Palace, but day by day they grew blurrier. Their rented cottage in Rose Street offered a meaner, more pinched view of the world. It looked over a small backyard boxed in by a gap-toothed, weathered grey fence with a lantana bush straggling along the back of the block. Beyond this, Angie could see the roofs and brick chimneys of neighbouring houses and the sparse forest of electricity poles. Instead of the chinking of parrots and carolling of magpies, all she could hear was the sullen cussing of crows perched in threes and fours along the electricity lines.

  Freya decided there was no point in risking exposure to persecution again at the local high school, so she kept Angie at home and took her education into her own hands with daily lessons in painting, art history and German. Angie was impressed by how much her mother knew. She even enjoyed the art classes, though she knew she could never meet her mother’s exacting standards. Too poor to buy oils, canvas and brushes, they stuck to life drawing with pencils and charcoal.

  Everyone tried their best to get along that first summer but the atmosphere in the cramped weatherboard cottage grew tense when Greta cried all night in the appalling heat and Angie, Eveline and Freya sweated and
tossed in their beds. Their only escape was when they would take Greta down to the river in the pram. Here they enjoyed the cool evening breezes, and the sight of the willows dipping their long leaves in the water and galahs coming down for a drink at the river’s edge. The two sisters and their children would sit and watch until the sun touched the horizon and the first star appeared in the evening sky and then hurry home to a simple supper.

  To Angie’s delight, Astrid Eyl was encouraged by her mother to join Freya’s lessons as she too was avoiding the local high school. Angie thought this was an excellent development as Freya had to modify her habitual strictness. What she lacked in academic brilliance, Astrid more than made up for in her genius for music. Angie never ceased to be astonished at how her friend’s air of awkwardness and misery evaporated when she tucked her violin beneath her jaw, closed her eyes and raised her bow. By some mysterious process, the music changed this melancholy plain-faced girl into a graceful angelic creature transported to a state of bliss. The concerts she gave at the house in Rose Street would become Angie’s best memories of that time.

  The landlord, Mr Hughes, hiked the rent on the cottage twice during 1917, thanks to growing demand from German families for accommodation in Liverpool as the population of the GCC climbed towards six thousand. Freya and Eveline were just grateful that Mr Hughes was happy to exploit them and not evict them, as had happened to several other families nearby. They were also thankful when every month a courier arrived with a brown paper bag of banknotes as part of Freya’s secret agreement with Adam Fox. Eveline’s widow’s pension and Freya’s allowance as an internee’s wife were barely enough to cover the essentials.

  And then, abruptly, the payments stopped.

  ‘“I regret to inform you that your agreement with Mr Fox has been rendered null and void as of today.”’