Empire Day

by Diane Armstrong

  Dedication

  For Michael

  Contents

  Cover

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Other Books by the Same Author

  Copyright

  Chapter 1

  As soon as Hania heard the explosion she looked at her mother’s face and knew that the fragile calm of their home had been shattered.

  Eda Kotowicz sprang towards her and clutched her arm. ‘They’re shooting!’ she cried, her eyes wide with terror.

  She pushed Hania past the table heaped with woollen jackets and skirts waiting to be hemmed, and they stumbled to the back of the house where a stained bathtub stood between the mangle and the copper laundry tub.

  ‘Quick, get down,’ Eda panted. ‘They’ll be here any minute.’

  Hania crouched behind the rusting tub, her fingers scraping against the rough surface as she squirmed to free herself from her mother’s grip.

  She tried to speak but her mother clamped a hand over her mouth and whispered, ‘For God’s sake, don’t make a sound.’

  As the frightening staccato noise continued, they heard someone banging on their front door. Her mother’s body grew rigid and her eyes became black pinpoints of alarm.

  ‘I won’t let them get you,’ she mouthed.

  They heard people running and shouting, but the thumping on the door didn’t let up, and above the din they heard a girl’s voice calling out, ‘Hanny, come out and see the fireworks.’

  Hania pulled away from her mother and ran down the hallway, almost tripping on the worn cotton runner in her haste to open the front door. Beverley, her friend from across the road, was jumping from one foot to the other, and flicking her fine fair hair from her eyes.

  ‘Hurry up, Hanny. You’ll miss all the fun!’

  Hania liked Beverley’s version of her name. Hanny sounded affectionate and made her feel less foreign.

  Beverley was pulling her arm. ‘Come on, it’s Cracker Night, and we’ve still got loads of Roman candles and double bungers left.’

  Hania stood on the narrow verandah of their Bondi Junction semi under the curved iron roof, and stared at the bonfire blazing in the middle of the road. So that was what the teacher had meant by Empire Day, and why the boys in the street had spent the afternoon collecting bits of wood and fallen branches and piling them up on the edge of the pavement.

  She hardly recognised Wattle Street. Night had fallen quickly, and the sky was the colour of the dried ink inside the inkwell on her desk at school. The crackling flames leaping towards the starlit sky, and the flash of the fireworks lighting up the faces of the children as they darted around, gave this ordinary backstreet an air of mystery. It was like watching a magic show: nothing was as it seemed, and anything could happen.

  ‘Hey, youse kids, hurry up with them branches.’

  Hania looked around and saw their neighbour, Pop Wilson, throwing bits of wood onto the fire. Straightening up with a groan, he wiped the sweat dripping down his knobbly nose. His face, which was always red, now resembled a ripe tomato about to burst.

  Behind him, Beverley’s father, Bill Noble, snapped a branch across his knee and threw it onto the fire while small boys raced around it, whooping and yelling. They hurled their tom thumbs on the ground and ran for their lives when they heard the bang. A safe distance from the flames the girls let off Catherine wheels and Roman candles; the little kids waved sparklers, their eyes round with wonder at the arabesques of light.

  Hania gazed at the lively scene around the bonfire, and ached with envy. They were all so light-hearted and carefree, even the parents, and their lives were so uncomplicated.

  Once, she had felt like that too. That was back in Poland, when she had lived with people she loved. Every Sunday they would take her to church where the priest used to say that the Jews had crucified Our Lord.

  She had been happy there until the day a strange woman suddenly appeared, thin, bony and angry like a witch in a fairytale. Hania was eight, and by then she’d spent almost six years with the Majewskis, whom she called Mamusia and Tatu, and whom she regarded as her parents. She shrank from the strange woman’s embrace, and she clung to Mamusia’s hand when the woman started crying and shouting. Without raising her voice, Mamusia said that they’d risked their life to look after Hania and they’d die before they let her go.

  To Hania’s relief the woman went away, but the following day, when her foster parents were out, she reappeared. ‘You have to come with me, I’m your mother, and I love you. You’re not Catholic, you’re Jewish, you’re my child,’ she kept saying.

  Hania felt sick. She didn’t believe any of the shocking things this woman was telling her, but the woman dragged her away and took her to Warsaw. She never saw her foster parents again.

  Even though four years had passed, every night before she fell asleep, Hania wished she could hear her foster mother’s soothing voice again and feel her gentle hand stroking her hair.

  Her reverie was broken by her mother’s shrill voice. ‘Come inside!’ Eda shouted. ‘Look at those stupid people, lighting fires and setting off explosions. It’s dangerous. Come inside at once!’

  Hania sighed and looked around, reddening with embarrassment because their neighbours, Mrs Browning and Miss McNulty, were standing nearby, listening to her mother’s angry foreign words.

  Verna Browning, who was leaning against her picket fence, gave Hania a sympathetic smile. Although she couldn’t understand what Mrs Kotowicz had said, she could hear the anger in her voice, and she felt sorry for her daughter who was obviously not allowed to join in the fun.

  ‘What a shame,’ she said in a low voice to her next-door neighbour. ‘She’d probably like to come outside like the other kids.’

  Maude McNulty tightened her lips and smoothed down the crossover apron she wore over her grey woollen dress.

  ‘These people don’t fit in,’ she said. ‘The government’s making a big mistake bringing them out here with their strange ways. Oil and water don’t mix. Australia for the Australians, that’s what I say.’

  ‘But Our Lord says we should love our neighbour,’ Verna said.

  ‘Charity begins at home,’ Maude McNul
ty rejoined. ‘Anyway, some of these foreigners aren’t even Christians. They’re changing our country, and not for the better.’

  Verna pushed a strand of white hair from her plump face and murmured something vague that stopped short of assent. If only Alf was still alive. He always knew what was right, while she could never make up her mind about these matters. It was true that a lot of foreigners had settled in Bondi Junction in the past couple of years. In their street alone, apart from Hanny and her highly strung mother with the unpronounceable surname, there was that strange European fellow across the road. And another foreign family had moved in a couple of weeks ago, a couple with a pretty daughter, who kept to themselves.

  She looked up and saw the newcomers standing inside their gate. She waved and the wife gave a timid smile, but the man just bowed and looked away, as stiff as a clockwork toy.

  Whenever she went shopping in the Junction these days, Verna heard foreign voices, and they always sounded as though they were arguing. And these peculiar shops were springing up, called ‘delicatessens’, which sold smelly cheeses and dark bread speckled with funny seeds. But at the same time she felt sorry for these people. It must be terrible to leave your home and country and start again in a place where you couldn’t even speak the language.

  She turned to Maude McNulty. ‘Mr Calwell says we need migrants,’ she said.

  ‘That’s all very well, but he doesn’t have to live next door to them,’ her neighbour retorted. ‘I wouldn’t be surprised if they were Communists. Once you could understand what everyone was saying but nowadays they’re all jabbering in their own lingo on the trams and buses, loud as you like. No manners. They should all go back where they came from if they don’t want to learn English.’

  She lowered her voice and moved closer. ‘And I don’t believe they’re so poor, either. Only yesterday there was an article in the Daily Standard saying they were buying up all the flats.’

  That gave Verna the opportunity to change the subject to something closer to her heart. ‘Ted’s got a job on the Daily Standard,’ she said proudly. ‘He’s not a cadet any more. He’s wanted to be a journalist ever since he was a nipper, and now he’s done it.’

  Maude McNulty nodded and turned her attention back to the fireworks. ‘Empire Day isn’t what it used to be,’ she mused as more rockets and Roman candles flashed in the darkness. ‘In my day we had wonderful pageants and parades, and the ships in Port Jackson were lit up like Christmas trees. Even the ice carts and potato stalls had Union Jacks on them. Every year thousands of us children would form a giant Union Jack in Centennial Park. Did I ever tell you about the time I headed the procession dressed as Britannia, in a helmet and shield and a long white frock?’

  Verna Browning nodded absently. She’d heard this Empire Day story every year on 24 May since she’d moved to Wattle Street as a bride twenty-five years before. Despite its name, there were no wattle trees on the street even then, only the same low hedges and the frangipani trees whose trunks twisted towards the sun and scattered their creamy flowers on the footpath.

  Back then all the homes were semis, snuggled up against each other like stitches cast too tightly on knitting needles, and all the neighbours knew each other. These days blocks of flats were springing up all over the place, and some of the large homes were being turned into boarding houses. The Aussies still left their front doors open all day so the kids could run in and out, but with all the foreigners flooding in, things were changing fast.

  Verna looked up, and in the window across the road she saw a man’s pale face. As she watched, the light was switched off. A few moments later a shadowy figure emerged from the gate and disappeared into the night.

  Maude McNulty, whose rapier gaze never missed anything, nudged her. ‘Did you see that?’ she whispered in a conspiratorial tone. ‘It’s the mystery man. He’s like a ghost. Never talks to anyone. I’d like to be a fly on the wall and see what he’s doing in there, with all that tapping and hammering. Must be up to something.’

  Verna didn’t like gossiping, but she couldn’t deny that there was something odd about the man. He walked without seeming to move, never looked you in the eye and, although he’d moved in several months before, she had never heard his voice. As far as she knew, he’d never spoken to anyone in the street.

  She noticed Hanny, the little foreign girl next door, watching the fireworks from inside her gate. ‘Come outside, love,’ Verna called. ‘You’ll get a better view.’

  But Hania shook her head so vehemently that her thick brown plaits bounced against her white school blouse.

  ‘I’m all right, thank you, Mrs Browning,’ she said in her foreign accent, and Verna marvelled that after such a short time in Australia Hanny could already speak English.

  ‘You can call me Aunty Verna,’ she said. ‘The other kids do.’

  Hania had noticed that all the children on Wattle Street called the adults ‘aunty’ and ‘uncle’. They all had real aunts and uncles, too, as well as cousins, grandparents and godparents. After their visits, the kids would come out into the street and show off their new socks, hankies or Little Golden Books. Hania liked calling the neighbours aunty and uncle, but when her mother had heard her addressing Beverley’s father as Uncle Bill, she’d worked herself up into a rage. ‘He’s not your uncle! Your aunts and uncles are dead and don’t you forget it. These people are total strangers.’

  Hania was turning to go back inside when the boy across the street, the freckled kid they all called Meggsie, jumped over her fence. His nose was smeared with ashes from the bonfire, and his hair, which was the colour of boiled pumpkin, stuck out from the top of his head like a cockscomb.

  ‘Here y’are,’ he said, handing her a sparkler which sizzled with tiny stars. ‘Wave it around. Don’t be scared. It won’t hurt you.’

  As she stretched out her arm to take it, she felt her mother’s hand grip her shoulder. ‘How many times have I told you to come inside?’ she shouted. ‘Shut the door and get in now!’

  ‘I’ll stick it in the fence so you can see it from inside,’ Meggsie called out.

  Hania went into her room, slammed the door and listened for her mother’s footsteps, half expecting her to burst in and shout at her again, but the house was quiet. She was probably hemming the clothes she’d brought home from the factory. Tiptoeing to her bookshelf, she took down her Polish edition of Alice in Wonderland and poked her finger inside the brown-paper cover until she felt a tiny object wrapped in tissue paper. She unwrapped it, and took out a small gold cross. Stroking it lovingly, she knelt beside her bed and, exulting in her defiance, put her hands together and prayed to Jesus to restore her to her foster parents.

  Chapter 2

  The bonfire was still crackling and sparks were flying into the night sky when Emil Bronstein slipped out of his house that evening. From the way the two women across the road were watching him, he sensed they’d been talking about him; pulling his hat low over his narrow face, he continued walking.

  With its small brim and the dark green feather in the grosgrain band, Emil’s hat broadcast its European origin in defiant contrast to the understated wide-brimmed fedoras worn by Australian men. It was the jaunty style he’d always worn before the war, and he’d bought it just before boarding the ship, without realising that it didn’t suit his state of mind or his new country.

  The pungent smell of cordite and the smoke rising from the bonfire made his chest constrict until his breath came in short gasps. A black cat with a heart-shaped white spot on its chest shot across the road in front of him, terrified by the bunger one of the boys had just hurled to the ground. The children were still running around, yelling and letting off crackers, while their mothers shouted at them to be careful and not to go too close to the fire. Emil hunched his shoulders and, quickening his pace, left the noise and smoke behind.

  At the end of Wattle Street, past the corner shop with its posters for Kinkara Tea, Craven ‘A’ cigarettes, Vincents APC Powders and Dr McKenzie’s
Menthoids, Emil turned into Barton Street. The spacious two-storey homes with their wrought-iron balconies contrasted with the labourers’ semis in Wattle Street, but Emil didn’t pay them much attention. He walked rapidly without knowing where he was going, driven by a need to keep moving. High above him the night sky glittered with a million stars whose icy beauty reinforced his solitary existence and the indifference of the universe.

  In Glenayr Avenue the elaborate façade of Kings Cinema was hung with gaudy posters advertising the coming attractions. Emil stopped and stared at the face on the poster which had been pasted so carelessly onto the wall that the face was pleated with tiny creases. The man whose compelling gaze seemed to pierce the poster wore a shiny top hat, a scarlet cape and a neatly trimmed black beard. Behind him a woman seemed to float in the air, and on one side a girl spilling out of a tight sequined dress was pointing a pistol at the magician. In thick black letters the notice announced that in a month’s time, Morris the Magnificent would electrify the audience with his death-defying bullet act.

  As he gazed at the poster, Emil could feel his fingers moving as though of their own volition. He imagined they were spinning dozens of billiard balls at a time, making bouquets of flowers appear and disappear, sawing a woman clean in half. He saw the audience’s eyes widened in amazement, and heard their gasps of terror.