The Voyage of Their Life

by Diane Armstrong

  39

  When Silva Rae arrived in Australia with her parents and two small children, she felt optimistic about the future. The glamorous young Estonian had enjoyed the voyage and her unexpected role as assistant purser. She was young, strong and not afraid of hard work, and with her mother to help her take care of the children, she was confident of building a better life for them here.

  Her father, who had owned a restaurant in Tallinn, was also an optimist. ‘I don’t mind what work I do,’ he would say, ‘I’ll pick oranges and sell them if I have to.’

  Most European migrants had been led to believe that Australians were so easy-going and devoid of ambition that anyone prepared to work hard would do very well. As for Silva, she couldn’t wait to start work at the Mitchell Library. Her aunt who sponsored them had written to tell her that she had made enquiries and had been given to understand that a job would be available for Silva when she arrived. She had also found a little house for them to rent in Waitara, close to where she lived. It looked as though everything was falling into place.

  But one week after they had moved into the house, the landlord gave them notice to quit because he didn’t want small children. Silva sat on the doorstep, holding her head in her hands. What kind of a country was this, where people could be evicted simply because they had children? Where would they go? Suddenly she heard a cheery voice from next door. ‘What’s up, love? It can’t be as bad as all that!’

  It was the next door neighbour whose cottage often resounded with the shrieks and screams of her four children. Although Silva usually kept her problems to herself, her neighbour’s concern broke through her customary reserve. ‘I don’t know what to do,’ she said. ‘We have to leave but don’t have anywhere to go.’ Looking thoughtful, the woman disappeared inside but emerged a few minutes later.

  ‘I’ll tell you what we’ll do,’ she said. ‘I’ll put my boys in the sleep-out and you and your family can have their bedroom until you find a place.’ Silva gratefully accepted her offer but insisted on paying one pound a week.

  But the worst blow was yet to come. All the colour drained from Silva’s face when the personnel officer at the Mitchell Library told her that the library diploma she had gained in Germany was not recognised here. They could offer her a job if she had a Bachelor of Arts degree, but she could neither afford the sixty pounds for the course nor the time to study, as she had her children and parents to support. Coming to Australia had been a terrible mistake. If only she had the money to return to Europe.

  That’s what she says to me now in her unemphatic, reflective way, with a soft Baltic lilt. ‘I did wish I had the money to go straight back to Europe. I didn’t think I could survive here.’ Silva speaks excellent English, elongating the vowel in a way that’s typical of Baltic speakers, pronouncing the word ‘survoive’. Slim and elegant now in her late seventies, I can imagine how alluring she must have been on the ship when her ash-blonde hair curled down to her shoulders. Beneath the understated manner and soft voice, however, I see an unflinching gaze. This is a woman who may stagger from life’s unexpected punches but stays on her feet.

  I found Silva through the Derna’s Estonian network, which led me from Helle Nittim to Uno Mardus. Uno, the laid-back young man whom Colonel Hershaw had co-opted as his assistant, tells me about his life in Australia in the friendly manner that made him so popular on the ship. When he first arrived he worked as a baker, but eager to better himself, he studied engineering at night. Several years after graduating, he started working at the Atomic Energy Commission at Lucas Heights and stayed there until he retired thirty-two years later. ‘As soon as I started working for the government, I began to feel I belonged here and stopped thinking about going back to Estonia,’ he says. The legacy of the Derna lives on in Uno’s life because several years ago he married Aino Liivat, who had sailed on the ship with her late husband, Karl.

  It was Uno who gave me Silva’s telephone number. Now widowed, she lives with her dog Sally, a honey-coloured Sydney silky terrier, in a handsome white house situated in a leafy crescent in south west Sydney, about an hour’s drive from the city. ‘My children would like me to live closer to them, but if I did, they would tell me what to do. I want to stay independent as long as possible,’ she says with a wry smile.

  When the job at the Mitchell Library fell through, her aunt’s employers organised a clerical job for her at Angus & Robertson’s mail order department. Although checking outgoing invoices was easy and the boss appreciated her diligence, the salary was very small. Poring over the bills at night, Silva racked her brains trying to figure out how to stretch two pounds seventeen shillings to cover all their expenses. Her solution was to work overtime. At six o’ clock in the morning, just as the night mist was dissolving over Waitara station, her solitary footsteps echoed on the platform. At nine in the evening, she returned home, long after her children had gone to bed. By working long hours, she was entitled to an additional two shillings tea money each day. That paid for her lunch and the rest of her wages went on food and rent.

  After they had been living with their neighbours for about six months, they heard of a vacant flat in Randwick. Delighted at the prospect of living in a more cosmopolitan area closer to the city, they were considering ways of raising fifty pounds key money when Silva’s father came across Mr Tondi, a childhood friend from Estonia who owned a cigarette factory. He offered to lend them the money, but shortly after they moved in, the rightful tenant returned from his overseas trip. The agent had swindled them and they lost the money as well as the flat. Although Mr Tondi wanted to waive the debt, Silva and her father insisted on repaying every penny.

  Mr Tondi became a caring friend who took them for drives and invited them to his mansion in Kensington. Inside his study, Silva was puzzled to see two flags hanging on the wall: the Estonian flag with an emblem of the president, and a Russian banner with Stalin’s head embossed in gold. She didn’t think any more about it until the day she was called to the telephone at work. Without identifying himself the Australian caller said, ‘Did you know that your friend Mr Tondi belongs to the Communist Party? If you know what’s good for you, stop seeing him. You’re a newcomer and you’ll have trouble.’

  Silva’s mouth went dry. ‘Who is this?’ she asked, but the caller had hung up.

  So that was the significance of the two flags. She and her parents had fled from Estonia to escape from the Communists, who were already creating turmoil in Australia in the coal mines, on the wharves and on the railways, causing strikes that paralysed the country with blackouts, rationing, transport chaos and fuel shortages. Mr Menzies, the new Liberal prime minister, wanted the Communist Party banned, a move that many of the Baltic migrants would have approved.

  One sunny autumn day not long after the anonymous phone call, Silva was walking past the colonnaded town hall at lunchtime. It was May Day and workers carrying red flags and banners were marching along George Street. ‘A group of big shots were standing at the top of the town hall steps and I was amazed to see Mr Tondi among them,’ she recalls. ‘And when I saw what he was doing, I just couldn’t believe my eyes. He was throwing five-pound notes to the marchers! We didn’t accept any more of his invitations after that.’

  By then Silva and her family were no longer living together. She was renting a small room with a kitchenette in Paddington with her father, who worked the night shift at Dairy Farmers factory, while her mother was living with the children in a farmhouse in Granville where she was employed as the cook. As she couldn’t speak English, six-year-old Tarno became her lifeline to the outside world and she wouldn’t board a train or enter a shop without him. ‘Whenever she had something important to do, we had to take him out of school so that he could be his grandmother’s interpreter,’ Silva says.

  It was a miserable period in Silva’s life. She worked long hours and saw the children only at weekends. In Germany she’d had a responsible, well-paid position, a reasonable income and time to enjoy the diversions of a so
phisticated city, while Sydney seemed to be a cultural desert where she drudged for a pittance. Even with overtime, it was a struggle to support the family on the wages at Angus & Robertson’s.

  Scanning the jobs vacant columns in the Sydney Morning Herald one day, she applied for a job as assistant book-keeper at an electrical firm. Seeing her potential, the boss asked her to move to their head office in Melbourne for six months to learn book-keeping. Aghast at the thought of studying in Melbourne, Silva argued that her English wasn’t good enough, but her employer didn’t budge. ‘Numbers are numbers in any language,’ he said.

  The six months she spent in Melbourne were the longest and loneliest in her life. ‘There were times I was ready to start walking to Sydney,’ she says. After morning lectures she worked in the office, but her workmates were not as friendly and open as Sydney people. She rented a room in St Kilda and looked forward to Sunday mornings when she walked to the GPO to buy the Sydney newspaper. Sydney had become home.

  The book-keeping course in Melbourne became a stepping stone to better-paid jobs. She became a book-keeper at Beard Watson, one of Sydney’s classiest furniture stores, and later for an Italian winemaker. By then she was earning ten pounds, fifteen shillings a week.

  But living apart from the children was disruptive for family life, and renting was expensive and insecure. The answer was to build a house of their own. They heard from friends that the Terminating Building Society were erecting fibro homes on vacant land at Revesby and some Baltic families had already started building there. They would need a deposit of 250 pounds for the land and another 250 for the house. Before leaving Germany, Silva had taken her aunt’s advice and bought some Leica cameras, photographic equipment and watches duty-free as an investment. By selling them, together with the jewellery she had brought from Tallinn, she raised 250 pounds and her father borrowed the rest from a friend. Pooling their resources, they had enough deposit for a twenty-five-year loan.

  At the time, Revesby was a vast paddock with a railway station. An open drain ran beside the unsealed road and rats skittered around at night. When it rained, Silva’s shoes sank into the mud. It took nine months for the fibro cottage to be built and when they finally moved in, they sat in the bare room on boxes because they couldn’t afford any chairs. But they felt jubilant because the roof over their heads was finally their own and they would never have to move again.

  During one of his visits to the Estonian Club in Campbell Street, Silva’s father heard that an Estonian manager at the Port Kembla Steelworks was looking for labourers. He poured cement five days a week for Australian Iron & Steel and came home at weekends. ‘My father couldn’t speak English so he could only do manual work here,’ Silva explains. ‘I don’t know if he was disappointed with his life in Australia. He had a stoic temperament and tried to make the best of things.’

  His stoic nature was about to be tested to the limit. During construction at the plant, the chain on the crane lifting the steel bars broke and a bar crashed on his foot. In the weeks that followed, the toes did not heal. Although he tried not to complain, the pain became so excruciating that Silva had to travel to Port Kembla and bring him to Sydney to see a specialist.

  The doctor at the Auburn Catholic Hospital took one look at the toes which by then had turned black. ‘Gangrene has set in,’ he told Silva. ‘I’m afraid we’ll have to amputate his foot.’ Self-contained and outwardly composed as always, Silva thanked him for his advice and wondered how she was going to tell her father what the doctor had said. It wasn’t until she returned home and looked up gangrene in her well-thumbed dictionary that she fully understood.

  ‘Telling my father that they were going to amputate his foot was the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do. But by then he was suffering so much that if losing his foot meant being free of pain, then he thought it was worth it,’ she recalls.

  The following day the hospital called her at work. ‘Did you know your father is diabetic?’ the doctor asked. She had to look up that word too. ‘Before we can amputate, we have to get his sugar level down,’ he explained. By now her father was writhing and sobbing with pain and if he could have got hold of an axe, he would have hacked the foot off himself just to end the agony.

  ‘It was terrible to see him like that and not be able to help him,’ she says. Although Silva’s boss gave her time off to be with her father, she made up for it by working at nights, because they had to keep up payments on the house. Emotionally and physically drained, several evenings a week she dragged herself to Macquarie Street where she worked as a doctor’s receptionist.

  By the time her father’s blood sugar level was under control, they had to amputate the leg above the knee, but held out the hope of a prosthesis when the wound had healed. Unable to work, he stayed home, demoralised at being unproductive and living on unemployment benefits. Although he couldn’t understand it, sometimes he still felt intense pain in the foot that was no longer there, as though the phantom limb was still attached. ‘Australian Iron & Steel only paid for the cost of the operation and his stay in hospital,’ Silva recalls. ‘We didn’t know we were entitled to any more.’

  For the next twelve months, his wife took care of him and learned to inject him with insulin to control the diabetes. Every fortnight he returned to Royal Prince Alfred Hospital to regulate his blood sugar. But about a year later, the toes on his other foot became inflamed, exquisitely painful and discoloured. This time Silva didn’t need the doctor to give her a diagnosis or predict the inevitable outcome. They amputated his other leg above the knee as well.

  By then, Silva had a husband to share her grief and help her look after her father. In 1952 she married her second cousin Ilo, who lived next door to them in Revesby. Ilo’s mother had been a paediatrician in Estonia, but worked here as a seamstress because her qualifications weren’t recognised. His father, a former judge, had started making leathergoods.

  ‘Ilo was not just my husband, he was my soulmate and my best friend,’ Silva says and despite her restraint, her voice becomes unsteady. ‘We could talk about everything. We understood each other.’

  When New Year’s Eve came round, Silva’s father wanted to spend it with them at their place. She was not very enthusiastic, as she had invited some friends over for the evening and wondered how she’d manage to look after him in his wheelchair. It was very inconvenient, but he was so insistent that she didn’t have the heart to refuse. Already the tingling and numbness had started in his fingers and she dreaded to think about the future. In the diabetic ward at Prince Alfred, she had seen young men with their arms and legs amputated, and she froze whenever her father mentioned this new numbness.

  That night he was happier than he had been for years. He laughed, sang and joined in the conversation, just like old times. After the party, she and Ilo bundled him into the car and drove him home. Next morning, Silva was cleaning up after the party when the phone rang. It was her mother. ‘Your father has passed away,’ she sobbed.

  ‘At least he was spared the agony of losing his hands,’ Silva says. ‘Thank God I hadn’t stopped him from coming over that night. I wouldn’t have been able to live with myself if I’d deprived him of that last little pleasure on earth.’

  When Ilo developed arthritis some time later, the doctor recommended that he give up his work as a machinist and find an occupation that involved outdoor life. As it happened, they knew some Estonian poultry farmers who had settled around Thirlmere in the 1920s. With post-war migration, this was now a thriving farming community of around 200 people, whose members often told them what a fantastic business this was.

  ‘Why are you working so hard in the office and the factory when you could be doing so much better? We sell our eggs to the Egg Board and get a regular cheque for 100 pounds!’ they would say. Silva and Ilo bought a poultry farm at Austral.

  ‘That’s when we discovered that it wasn’t as simple as that,’ she says. ‘When we committed ourselves to paying off the farm in two years at eighty pounds a
week, we didn’t realise that the government cheques were only paid per fortnight. Another problem was that the chicken feed had to come out of our earnings, and we had to feed the chickens for six months before they laid a single egg.’ She gives a rueful smile. ‘I think the biggest fibbers in the world are poultry farmers and fishermen!’

  In the meantime, Ilo’s father became ill and asked Silva and Ilo to take over the leathergoods business so that he wouldn’t lose his income. After Silva came home from her book-keeping job, she fed the chickens and then she and Ilo would sit up late into the night making fancy watch straps and suede souvenirs. Without any trace of self-pity, she says, ‘We worked eighteen hours a day. I was so slow at first that it took me all evening to decorate one watch strap. Luckily my mother did the cooking and took care of the children.’

  In time Silva became more proficient, and eventually they diversified to wallets, purses, keyrings and bookmarks. ‘Most of our customers were Jewish shopkeepers who were very kind and recommended me to each other, so our business built up. Some of them even thought I was Jewish,’ she chuckles. ‘Whenever they mentioned a holiday, I would nod and pretend I knew what they were talking about, but at the next shop I’d ask, “What holiday was that?”’

  Their clientele increased so rapidly that Silva relinquished her office job to keep up with the orders. At the same time they were paying off the poultry farm. In seventeen years, they did not take a single holiday. By the time they had paid off the farm and increased it to 5000 laying hens, disaster struck. England started subsidising its own poultry farmers and Australia lost the European egg market. ‘Battery-produced hens were being introduced and everything was changing, so we sold the chickens. I was very glad to see the end of them!’ she says.