The Voyage of Their Life

by Diane Armstrong

  After Jack’s death, her mother became so depressed that Rita knew she’d have to get her away from the farm and rent a house in Brisbane where the whole family could live together. ‘The last straw was when my uncle told us he’d arranged for us to pick cotton in the fields nearby. He contracted us out like a gang of slaves to work together under his supervision,’ she says in a voice crackling with anger. ‘When my aunt and uncle found out that we were all leaving, they were furious. Uncle threatened to sue us. He said he’d paid the Red Cross for our passage and we owed him 600 pounds. He said he’d seen a solicitor and if we didn’t pay him back, he’d take us to court.’

  As Rita’s wages at the hospital were too small to enable her to repay her uncle as well as support her family, she applied for a second job, as a dressmaker. ‘Although I had no idea how to use a machine, my employer was a kind Jewish woman who also came from Latvia. She taught me how to sew.’ Although she got on very well with her employer, Rita antagonised her Australian workmates by working fast. ‘Take it easy, or you’ll make it tough for the rest of us,’ they would say in a warning tone. Occasionally one of the women would shout, ‘Go back where you came from, you bloody Balt,’ and then Rita would let fly with words she’d heard her uncle use on the farm, curses she didn’t understand that shocked the bullies into silence.

  ‘Even with the extra money I earned sewing, I still walked for miles to save a penny tram fare, and every morning I’d put a piece of thick cardboard inside my shoes to cover the hole,’ she recalls. The best years of her life were slipping by and she felt worn out. On hot summer nights when the syrupy scent of frangipani wafted into her room and the sound of laughter rose from the street, she cried herself to sleep, but the following morning, she splashed cold water on her puffy eyes and told herself to snap out of it. There was no sense wallowing in self-pity.

  One day, unable to hide her unhappiness, Rita poured out her heart to her Australian neighbour. ‘I wish I could marry my sweetheart, but I won’t be able to because I can’t have children,’ she sighed, and told her about the accident in Germany.

  ‘Don’t believe everything the doctors tell you, love,’ her neighbour said. ‘They told you you’d never walk again and you did. I’m going to take you to a specialist.’

  After examining her, the gynaecologist uttered the most beautiful words she’d heard since arriving in Australia. ‘There’s nothing wrong with you, Miss Lindemanis. I can’t see any reason why you couldn’t have children.’ That night, bursting with happiness, Rita wrote a long letter to Eric.

  By then she was no longer the sole earner. Her mother was working as a cleaner in an insurance office and her aunt Lilija was working at the dress factory. When her uncle’s job at the Tennyson power house ended, he went cane cutting with Rita’s other brother Ted. After a year, Rita left her poorly paid hospital job and started waitressing. The little French restaurant in Wickham Terrace was popular with French woolbuyers who pinched her bottom but left generous tips.

  When Rita’s English had improved sufficiently, she visited the Red Cross office to resolve an issue that had puzzled her for a long time. The director seemed surprised by her question. ‘We have no record of your uncle paying 600 pounds, or any amount at all,’ she said, adding that the Australian Red Cross did not organise passages for immigrants. It seemed to Rita that she had scrubbed miles of hospital floor on her hands and knees and sewn thousands of garments at break-neck speed to repay money that they had never owed.

  As Rita reflects on her disappointing experiences with her relatives, a commotion inside the house makes us start. A young butcher bird has flown into the kitchen through a chink in the screen door and cannot find its way out. Trapped inside, the bird is panic-stricken and hurls itself repeatedly against the glass window which refuses to yield under its sharp beak. Finally it knocks itself out and drops to the floor. Rita hobbles in, tenderly picks up the small limp body, coos to it and carries it outside. A few moments later the little bird stirs, makes a feeble attempt to flutter its wings and just makes it to the fence.

  Resuming her story, Rita says that as soon as Eric received her letter with the wonderful news, he made preparations to leave London. Now that they would be reunited at last, she could hardly wait. When the other girls in the dress factory often chatted about the petticoats, scantee sets, nighties and negligees they were putting away in their glory boxes, Rita listened, wishing that she could spare a few pounds for her own trousseau.

  In a tremulous voice, she says, ‘Sometimes I would think it wasn’t fair, but that’s how it was. It was my duty to help my family. With my father and brother gone, my family relied on me.’ Life became easier when Eric arrived in 1950, and in December that year Rita’s dreams came true as she walked down the aisle to marry her childhood sweetheart. At first Eric worked as a builder’s labourer, but before long he was working for himself.

  To Rita’s delight, the prediction of the doctor in Munich proved wrong and the children started coming. Three boys. ‘I still dreamed of returning to Latvia but we didn’t have the money,’ she says. ‘Anyway, I couldn’t leave my mother behind. She became more depressed as the years went on, and spent more and more time staring at my father’s photo. I think that in a corner of her heart, she was still hoping that one day she’d see him again.’

  While we are talking, the phone rings. It’s Rita’s younger sister Sigride. ‘She’s a physiotherapist,’ Rita tells me proudly and adds, without a trace of resentment, ‘She got the education I never had.’

  When we talk about the Derna, her face glows at the memory of her friendship with Helle. ‘My beautiful Helle,’ she says. ‘You know, we poured our hearts out to each other and talked and talked all day every day, but after we said goodbye that day on the wharf in Melbourne we never saw each other again. Sydney was much further away than I thought and I never had enough money to get there. But I’d love to get in touch with her again.’

  The sun is setting behind the jacaranda trees as the hospitable Eric, who spends his retirement conducting a Latvian choir and composing music, brings tea and chocolate cake onto the patio. Rita looks pensive. ‘You know, I never put down roots in Australia,’ she says. ‘Whenever I’m dreaming, I’m always in Latvia, never in Australia. I’ve been back several times. The first time was during the Russian occupation, in 1986. I was sorry I went. Everything was run down and neglected. You couldn’t go anywhere. Whatever we wanted to do, they’d say, “You can’t go here, you can’t go there. Don’t take photos of this or that.” Anyway, I went again with Sigride in 1992 after Latvia became independent. It was still shabby but it was beautiful. That’s when we finally found out what had happened to our father.’ She sighs. ‘They said that he was deported to Siberia, interrogated five times on Christmas Eve in 1941 and shot, but when we wanted to recover the body, they said it was impossible because so many bodies had been buried together in the snow and ice.’

  After so many years spent longing for Latvia, Rita would not return to live there now. ‘I’m too ill to travel. I’ve just had open heart surgery. Besides, my children and grandchildren live here. But apart from that, the people have changed. After fifty years of Communism they’ve become dishonest. They’ve learned to lie and steal.’

  Half a century after she and her mother opened the stable doors and let the animals loose, Rita’s family has regained the family farm with its wheatlands and tracts of forest. They have cut away the rotting trunks, cleared the fallen trees and restored the family cemetery where headstones were stolen or smashed. But the farmhouse of her dreams is occupied by strangers and the neighbours are people she wouldn’t want to know.

  The fading light casts long shadows across the patio and the butcher birds have stopped singing. ‘From the moment we left Latvia, we all thought we’d be back before long, that it was just a matter of time,’ she says. We’ll be back, we thought. We’ll be back. But time went on and on. Mum thought she’d go back too. And in a way she did. We took her ashes back. Just
like Angela’s Ashes.’ She takes out a photograph of a dark green river that flows beside the woods and points to a smooth-flanked boulder that pokes out of it. ‘I feel so close to that spot,’ she whispers. ‘When I die, that’s where I want my ashes to be scattered. That’s the rock where Eric and I used to sit and dream about our future. Little did we know. Little did we know.’

  22

  Inside the flat-roofed, two-storey building in East Sydney that houses the Estonian News, a woman with a reserved manner ushers me into the large office upstairs. As we sit at her neat desk she tells me that she has been trying to retire from her editorial job for some time, but the publisher has been ill lately so she is busier than ever. It’s Helle Nittim, Rita’s confidante from the Derna. With her thick fair hair and tiny waist, she was one of the most attractive girls on the ship.

  On the day that I placed a notice in the Estonian News to say I was searching for passengers, the phone rang. ‘I hear you are looking for people who came out on the Derna ,’ a woman was saying in a low, even voice. ‘I am the editor of this paper and I came out on that ship with my family.’ Then she added, ‘Lea, our Girl Friday, was also on the Derna.’ I felt like a prospector striking gold with the first thrust of the spade.

  At first Helle seems rather guarded, but as we begin reminiscing about the disasters that befell our ship, she becomes more animated. I’m thrilled that she still has the diary she kept throughout the voyage, especially when she offers to give me a copy in English. From the snippets she reads aloud, I can tell that she was an observant and perceptive girl. When I ask who she remembers from the ship, she says, ‘There were Estonians, Latvians, Czechs and Jews—but of course officially there weren’t any Jews, they were listed as Poles, Czechs and so on.’ Although all the passengers were listed by nationality not religion, her tone suggests disapproval, and I wonder whether it is a sign of the antagonism that existed on board between some of the Baltic and Jewish passengers.

  By now Lea has joined us, a vivacious brunette with a jolly laugh who was in Helle’s cabin on the ship and now works for the same newspaper. Lea has brought along the journal in which her father, Arnold Ohtra, recorded statistical information and personal observations about the voyage. ‘There were some nice Jewish boys on board,’ she reminisces.

  Helle nods. ‘I liked the Czech one who played the guitar, but my father tried to keep me away from them. Not because they were Jewish,’ she adds quickly, ‘but because they were boys. Our fathers were very strict.’

  When I ask Lea whether she fell in love during the voyage, she shakes her curly head, but Helle, who has been scanning her diary, looks up and laughs. ‘Well, I’ve written here that you were making google eyes at somebody!’

  Lea is squealing like a teenager. ‘Tell me! Tell me!’

  Lea, with her mother and father and little sister Tiia, disembarked in Fremantle because her godfather had migrated to Perth during the economic crisis in Estonia in 1927. ‘All we knew about Australia was that there were poisonous snakes, spiders and queer-looking animals. My mother was so petrified, she sprayed anything that moved!’

  When the Ohtra family arrived in Perth, the four of them lived in a closed-in verandah and cooked on a primus stove. They were considering moving to Sydney when Lea’s godfather lent them 600 pounds to build a house. ‘My father was a fitter and turner, not a builder, but with an instruction book in one hand and a hammer in the other, somehow he managed to build a ten-square house. What made it even harder for him was that we were used to the metric system, which was so simple, but here he had to work out inches, feet and yards. Twelve of this, three of that, and 144 of something else. And then there were pennies, halfpennies, shillings, pounds and guineas. It was all very confusing.’

  Lea, who loved clothes, was intrigued by the way Perth women dressed. ‘I arrived with one heavy overcoat with a little fur collar which I got from American aid in Germany, a green wool crepe dress and red shoes with rubber soles which I thought terribly posh! We thought it odd that women in their fifties wore floral hats, bright frocks and long gloves, and plastered rouge in bright circles on their cheeks. The food was different too,’ she muses. ‘The only restaurants we ever went to were Greek “caffs” where the menu was steak and eggs, chops and eggs and sausages and eggs.’

  Suddenly she giggles. ‘I must tell you about my first party. I was told to bring a plate. A young man picked me up in his father’s car, a Ford Prefect which looked like a small box, but I felt very special being driven to the social in a car. When they asked us to go in for supper, I said, “I can’t eat anything because I didn’t bring my plate.” To my amazement, my escort looked into my mouth and said, “I thought they were your own teeth!”’ Helle and I are laughing as Lea continues the story of that disastrous evening. ‘When he asked what I’d like to drink, I said in my most careful English, “I would like wine.” Well, that didn’t go down too well because no one drank wine in those days. Boys drank beer and girls drank lemon squash. Needless to say, I never saw him again!’

  While Lea was settling down in Perth, Helle and her family travelled to Sydney by train. She stared at the unfamiliar gum trees, a name that made no sense when she looked it up in the dictionary. These trees did not exist in Estonia. ‘So this is the beginning of a new life,’ she wrote in her diary. ‘End to DP stage, although we are still refugees, hoping to return to our homeland. Are we ever going to see that lovely little country again? Let’s hope so!’

  When the overnight train finally chugged into Sydney’s Central station next morning, their sponsors, the Waabels, were there to meet them. At their brick home in Balgowlah, with its shady verandah and bay window, Helle and her little sister Maret shared one bedroom, their brother Rein slept in a tiny space among the brooms, brushes and ironing board, while their parents slept in a shed with latticed sides lined in tar-paper. ‘So the wind won’t blow you out of bed,’ Helle used to joke.

  She was feeling buoyant because among the mail awaiting them was a letter from her boyfriend Ilmar from whom she had parted heartbroken in Germany. After months of longing and dreaming, he had finally emerged out of her daydreams and returned to the real world. How wonderful to be in touch again even though we’re thousands of miles apart, she thought as she danced around the house with her letter.

  Another reason for her high spirits was that Mrs Waabel had given her some material. Painfully self-conscious about her short dress with the knees showing when everyone else was wearing skirts with longer hemlines, Helle quickly learned to use a sewing machine and made herself a green dress with a big collar and a full skirt that accentuated her small waist.

  Before long, however, tensions arose because Mrs Waabel was keen for Helle to become a waitress in her restaurant. The Waabels, who had arrived in Australia in the 1920s, owned a high-class restaurant in Pitt Street frequented mostly by businessmen. But waitressing was one of three jobs Helle was determined she would never do. ‘I told my father I would never be a waitress, nurse or shopgirl. I was too shy. I’d rather scrub floors. I feel the same way today,’ she says in her down-to-earth way.

  Even after she had found a job with a dressmaker, however, their sponsor continued trying to persuade her to work in the restaurant. ‘You’re a good-looking girl, you’ll get good tips,’ she would say, but Helle stood her ground. When the new term started, she enrolled at evening college and persevered until she matriculated. ‘I was the only girl among twenty-nine guys doing Maths I and II. They were all helpful, but I was too shy to talk to them because I was terrified of making mistakes. It took nearly two years before I felt confident enough to speak English.’

  She soon discovered that she didn’t like anything about Australia and found it difficult to make new friends. ‘I felt especially miserable at Christmastime and still do,’ she says. ‘That’s the time I miss Estonia the most and feel quite homesick, even now. Nothing feels right here, even though every year I prepare our traditional roast pork and sauerkraut, and bake little star and h
eart-shaped gingerbread cookies called piparkoogid for the kids.

  ‘It feels wrong to be having Christmas in the middle of summer. We all sit outside in the yard with the traditional food and salads, talking together, and yet I feel as if I’m floating on the edge of it, as if I’m not really there.’

  Helle’s father, a lawyer who had worked as a bank manager in Estonia, was unable to obtain even a clerical job because his English was so poor. ‘His pronunciation was so bad that my brother Rein and I had to go with him everywhere to translate. We were always fighting over whose turn it was, because we were both too embarrassed to go,’ she recalls. Fortunately her father liked carpentry and found work at Hallstrom’s factory making Australia’s first refrigerator, the Silent Knight. Later he worked for the Warringah Shire Council. As soon as they could scrape up enough money, they bought a block of land. ‘Dad built a garage and we lived there at first. We thought it was marvellous, because it was ours and we were all together again, but Mum had to clean the Waabels’ house, like a servant. Such a contrast to her life in Estonia.’

  After a few years, Helle met an Estonian she liked at a dance held at the Estonian House which became the social centre of their community. Lembit had arrived on a two-year government contract and worked in Wollongong for a concreting company. ‘I was doing book-keeping at the time. I just sort of picked it up,’ Helle shrugs. Genuinely self-effacing, she tends to minimise her achievements to avoid any semblance of boasting. Asked how she came to be editor of the Estonian News, she says that she started off as the book-keeper, later typed a few articles and then just ‘fell into it’.