Legends of the Lost Lilies

by Jackie French

  Lucky Danny, back at Thuringa where cattle did not argue with the human who had decided to be their manager. He was currently organising a cull of elderly bulls and cows — it had been two years since anyone had time to actually assess the stock — and choosing which of last year’s calves would replace them.

  She stood and pulled the chain, though it did not need pulling. But someone might be listening. She walked to the basins, washed her hands, checked her hair and lipstick and, handbag under her arm, made her way steadily out the door and down the corridor, then opened the door to the boardroom.

  The chair at the head of the table was already filled by Mr Grigson, the sales manager. The meeting had begun, even though she had notified all the members she would be attending.

  What would Mum do? What would Aunt Lily do? Rose smiled blindingly. ‘Mr Grigson, how kind of you to step in and take my place. I’m so sorry I’m late.’

  The men at the table stood, because that was what polite men did when a woman entered a room. Rose took advantage of the momentarily empty seat to slide into it, leaving Mr Grigson no choice but to find one further down the table. Rose picked up the first paper on the table. ‘Ah, the agenda. A slight change, I’m afraid. The first item is obviously confirming my position as chairman of the board.’

  Someone gave a small chuckle, quickly hushed.

  ‘My dear Miss Vaile,’ said Mr Grigson kindly. ‘The position of chairman is voted on by the board.’

  Rose’s voice was equally kind. ‘And the board is appointed by the shareholders. I think you will find that I hold proxies for the entire shareholding of what is still, of course, a family company. Naturally you are all free to resign and have Manpower assign you to a factory job or the armed forces, but I truly hope you won’t. With my mother away and my father ill,’ a euphemism she and Danny had adopted, and yet also perfectly true, ‘Higgs is going to depend on all your experience and wisdom, and Australia and the Empire depend on Higgs’s Corned Beef. I will depend on you, too.’ She extended her smile around the table.

  ‘Your mother couldn’t have made that speech better.’ The voice was approving, not ironic.

  ‘Thank you, Mr Pinkerton.’ He was one of the last board members who remembered her grandfather, she knew, and now in his seventies — he had put off retirement till the war ended or he did, he’d told Mum.

  ‘I still think —’ began Mr Grigson.

  ‘I believe the best course of action here is to move as swiftly as possible to the second item on the agenda, the loss of shipping to Japanese submarines. The situation is becoming critical.’

  The table nodded at Mr Pinkerton’s words. The general public was not supposed to know how many cargo ships had been sunk that year alone. Nor, in fact, did Rose know the full number, only the number of lost ships in firms Higgs had contracts with, but even that much information meant she knew the total must be a very large number indeed, enough to cause panic if broadcast. But, given that most of Australia was linked only by tracks, not roads, with even insufficient rail stock for military transport, the only way to transport vital equipment, food and supplies was by ship, in waters increasingly controlled by the Japanese.

  ‘I propose we unanimously elect Miss Vaile to the position of chairman,’ said Mr Pinkerton. ‘A seconder? Thank you. Any objections? Congratulations, Miss Vaile. Now, to the question of shipping.’

  ‘Retired ferries,’ said Rose.

  The entire table stared at her.

  ‘I have made enquiries at Cockatoo Island. It seems that the ferries are seaworthy for short voyages, as long as they can seek a port if the weather turns. Now if you will look at page two, I have outlined the ports available between Melbourne and Townsville. I think we need to stop all shipping on the Townsville to Darwin route and convince the authorities that if the armed forces that far north want bully beef, they must accept shipment to Townsville, and arrange the transport to Darwin by rail from there. If you look further down page two you will see the capacity of the ferries currently available . . .’

  She lifted her eyes for long enough to see Mr Pinkerton’s approving nod. The other men had obediently turned to page two — excellent, experienced men who would not bother about trivialities when they had a logistics problem to consider.

  She could almost feel her mother smile at her as well.

  Chapter 31

  Humanity’s default state is ‘let’s forget anything uncomfortable to remember’. This is not always bad, for otherwise the weight might be too heavy for us to bear. But in every generation there must be those who say: remember.

  Sophie Higgs-Vaile-Greenman, Dowager Countess of Shillings, a lecture published by the University of Queensland, 1968

  FEBRUARY 1943

  SOPHIE

  Dolphie did not say goodbye to her before he left with Fräulein Kunster, presumably so that the housekeeper did not suspect a newcomer at the lodge.

  Sophie spent the next weeks peacefully, in Hannelore’s bed, while Hannelore slept on the truckle where a maid would have slept a generation earlier, when a woman of quality was allowed neither privacy nor the effort of retrieving her chamber pot from under the bed.

  It seemed the kitchen’s discipline was informal enough with Fräulein Kunster gone for no one to notice Hannelore’s forays for Sophie’s food, or perhaps the two maids just thought Hannelore’s appetite had improved. More likely, Sophie thought, they were careful not to query anything that might put their comfort here at risk.

  The food was good, even if the ingredients were local. Grünberg was, indeed, an excellent cook. Poached carp, whose muddy flesh was disguised by a sharp bilberry sauce; Dampfnudeln, a sweet, steamed yeast roll cooked in a pot with milk, soft and white on top and crunchy at the base, served both with a sauce for a main course or with custard for dessert, or by themselves for a mid-morning snack; broths of dried mushrooms and fresh beetroot; potato cakes fried in lavish butter; cabbage stuffed with Weisswurst; a sweet and sour ‘head cheese’, more savoury than the brawn of England and Australia, served with sauerkraut; honey cakes; and an apple cake that was only slightly gritty, from the pale brown beet sugar processed at the farm.

  Sophie ate. After the second day of exhaustion her appetite suddenly raged like a tiger’s. Perhaps Hannelore, too, had ordered more succulent food than potato soup to tempt her, using the removal of her ‘housekeeper’ as an excuse for culinary extravagance. Sophie’s breakfast plate held rye bread with a pat of butter, or sometimes vast soft pretzels, with sweet mustard that surely must have been stored since before the war; slices of the farm cheese, always Weisswurst and sometimes other kinds of sausage too, boiled and thinly sliced and never with the inevitable Australian tomato sauce.

  And Hannelore worked, as she had said. Sophie watched her through the window, carefully hiding her shape behind the curtains. Hannelore wheeled barrows of potatoes and more barrows of what looked like compost or manure, and probably was, for other fertilisers would be almost impossible to find, Sophie imagined. Sometimes the barrow contained a hay rake or potato fork, and on those days Hannelore was particularly tired at night.

  Now and then she saw the women who must be Simons and Grünberg, picking herbs perhaps, lugging baskets of potatoes, beets or turnips or the vast hard cabbages that seemed to be the only kind grown here. They wore faded dresses covered by white aprons, or even more-faded coats, woollen stockings and wooden pattens, with silk scarves on their heads that Hannelore must have lent or given them, always with the yellow Star of David that proclaimed them Jewish prisoners vivid below their collars.

  Twice the two women simply sat for a short while by the lake, watching the far-off swans — any remaining wild bird in Germany had learned by now to stay out of the reach of hunters’ traps or guns. It seemed, as Hannelore said, that the two servants lived as well as anyone in Germany, except for imprisonment, terror and probably anguish for family, friends and what had been their country.

  Mostly, however, Sophie read a little — Hannelore
had a large collection of English classics — and dozed, unable to sleep deeply either day or night, with no position that did not bring pain that must be relieved by moving each half-hour. But the sulpha drugs, the food, the rest, the lotions, were working.

  ‘Pain’ had now become ‘it hurts’, unless breasts, toes or vertebrae were touched. By the third day at the Lodge she could haul herself out of bed and onto the chamber pot; by the fourth wash herself and totter carefully about the room, bent like a crone and dressed in garments that fitted surprisingly well and were far too big to be Hannelore’s.

  ‘Whose are they?’ she asked on her seventh night at the Lodge.

  ‘Amelia’s. Dolphie’s wife,’ said Hannelore shortly, looking down as she turned the frayed collar of a coat.

  ‘What was she like?’

  ‘Blonde, big boned like you. Do all colonials grow so large?’

  ‘No.’ Sophie refused to change the subject. ‘Did you like her?’

  ‘Yes. Because I tried hard to like her,’ Hannelore admitted. ‘She thought being a countess was important, and all she saw in me was “princess”. She had always known much money and thought clothes important instead of simply pleasurable. She became mesmerised by the Führer just as I lost faith in him.’ Hannelore placed another stitch. ‘Tell me more of kangaroos.’

  ‘They hop about a lot and eat the grass that cows might eat. And sometimes they lean back and scratch their chests like this.’ Sophie demonstrated, ignoring the leap of pain. ‘And in spring the males box each other to see who will mate and lead the mob. I saw two big bucks fight for two days and two nights once, until they were so exhausted that finally both hopped away two paces, fell down and slept. And the biggest female immediately mated with a much smaller male. One day you will see kangaroos.’

  ‘One day,’ said Hannelore.

  It was as if the war had vanished. Each evening they talked, but not of plots or labour camps or even of Sophie’s weeks in England or Paris. She spoke of Daniel, described his clinic, the new school at Bald Hill, the first time Rose had fallen for a boy and stayed smitten till she met him the next holidays and found out he hated dogs and that she had loved a make-believe that was not him; Danny’s attempt at steer riding; of Midge, fruitcake and laughter and New Year by the river, holding up signs that said More pudding, please, or Pass the beer, mate, to Harry, who had lost his hearing in the Great War. The signs caused even more hilarity and were added to each year. Harry even made his own: Turn the gramophone down, I can’t hear you, which had somehow seemed hilarious.

  Hannelore spoke as she never had before, of her own childhood: the loneliness of having a mother who appeared at the isolated family castle only ‘to refresh’ every six months or so, the company of Dolphie, not much older than her, who had been orphaned early, and so brought up in the cold castle far from Berlin that the Russians had taken in the last war ‘and were welcome to. But they were not welcome to my land,’ said Hannelore.

  The Lodge did not even seem to be under a flight path to Munich or other cities. The curtains were drawn at night so the light didn’t attract the attention of British bombers, but that was the only precaution taken.

  And they waited.

  The Lodge did not have a wireless any more — Dolphie had been determined that his niece be removed even from knowledge of current politics — but there was a wireless at the farm. Surely Franz would come running up if news that the plot — successful or not — had been announced.

  But there was nothing.

  ‘He said a few weeks,’ said Sophie into the silence one evening.

  ‘He didn’t give me a time,’ said Hannelore. Neither ever mentioned the words plot, kill or Hitler.

  ‘Perhaps there has to be an opportunity Sophie winced as she moved incautiously.

  ‘I’ll get the cordial,’ said Hannelore, putting aside her darning. It was bitter, herbal, but also strongly alcoholic. It helped the pain, but that might have been the alcohol.

  And then they talked of other things.

  Dolphie arrived seven weeks later, driving without headlights, as they sat quietly after dinner. At the sound of an engine Sophie glanced at Hannelore. ‘Please not into the trunk,’ she said. She could not bear it. But of course she would bear it, to get home. She had just lifted her legs off the bed when the horn hooted a short tune.

  ‘Dolphie,’ said Hannelore in relief.

  She slipped into the corridor. Sophie heard muffled words and then ‘Have you eaten?’ and his gruff reply. Their footsteps came straight along the corridor to Hannelore’s room. Dolphie shut the door, then pulled the bolt. He looked more tired than Sophie had ever seen him, even after a sleepless night — or more — on the battlefield in the last war.

  ‘We failed,’ he said simply. He fell into an armchair and held his hands up to the stove. ‘I drove myself here. I must be back in Munich by the morning for a meeting.’ He shrugged. ‘You are so tactfully not asking what happened, but there is no reason not to tell you now.’

  ‘Every reason,’ snapped Sophie. ‘If we are captured we can betray you and you cannot try again.’

  He raised an eyebrow. ‘Will you?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I did not think you would. I have read your Paris records. As for Hannelore — even for her uncle she will not speak of Lorrimer or Lily. Just now I find I do not care.’ He turned back to the stove. ‘It is as if the spirit of evil protects him. He was to have been surrounded by tanks and arrested if possible, or shot if not, during his visit to the Ukraine. He cancels it. He was to be shot on the way from the airport at Smolensk, but the SS guard about him makes any shot impossible. A group of officers will shoot him at lunch, with the knowledge of Field Marshal von Kluge, but at the last minute Kluge forbids it, in case it provokes civil war between the SS and the army. And finally a simple plan, surely a foolproof plan — a . . . person in a position of trust . . . asked one of Hitler’s aides to carry two bottles of Cointreau back to Berlin as a gift to a friend. The bottles were rigged with explosives and a thirty-minute fuse. The man took them. The plane should have exploded in the air.

  ‘And then we heard the plane had landed safely. Two bombs in two bottles, but neither exploded.’

  ‘But the bombs?’ asked Sophie urgently. ‘If they were discovered —’

  ‘Exactly. Another . . . friend . . . exchanged the bombs for two bottles of brandy. Both fuses were defective and had iced up in the plane. And so we tried again. No defective fuse this time. All checked and correct. A volunteer carried the bomb on his person while the Führer toured an exhibition of Soviet flags and captured weapons in Berlin. The bomb had a ten-minute fuse. The volunteer lit the fuse as soon as Hitler arrived, staying next to him at all times.’

  Dolphie’s smile was as bitter as the cordial. ‘Despite all attempts to delay him the Führer galloped around the display like a colt in a paddock and was gone within seven minutes. The . . . friend . . . ran to the bathroom and removed the fuse with seconds to spare.’

  ‘And now?’ demanded Sophie.

  ‘No one seems to suspect us. We will try again. And again. But it will not be soon. I must go to Austria — there has been trouble there, and . . . the others . . . are unlikely to be close to the Führer either for a while, for a variety of reasons. We must wait till one of us can get near him without suspicion, and that is not as easy these days, for Hitler sees few people, trusts even fewer, believes even shadows are trying to kill him and moves quickly when in public. I think perhaps he hears the whispers at night of the billions who wish him dead.’

  ‘Will you help me get to Switzerland then?’ asked Sophie quietly.

  ‘No.’

  ‘You said you would.’

  ‘After he’s gone. After you have helped us negotiate. Until then, you stay.’

  ‘Dolphie, please! My family will think I am dead. Could you at least send word?’

  ‘Of course not. You think there are no spies within your intelligence service either? Once you are kno
wn to be alive half the Gestapo will be wondering how and why and where you might be, and that can only lead them here.’

  ‘But I can’t stay here!’

  ‘You have no choice. I brought you identity papers. They are in the car with some supplies for you.’

  Sophie gazed at him. He met her eyes, his own adamant.

  ‘Who am I now?’ she asked at last.

  ‘Frau Müller. Your home in Munich was bombed, your family killed, but you are originally from Alsace-Lorraine, which will account for your accent. Your identity won’t stand up to scrutiny,’ he shrugged, ‘but if it comes to scrutiny, we are dead anyway.’

  ‘How am I supposed to know Hannelore?’

  ‘Not an old friend — too many people would expect to have met you. Perhaps you met on a committee for some good cause? As to how you came to be here — I brought you here, tonight, from Munich, as company for my niece, and because I knew Hannelore would wish to offer a friend refuge.’

  He stood. ‘I must go — I am due at a meeting tonight. I have some boxes in the car for you — I will get the women to fetch them. There are two hams and coffee and Bierwurst and some French cheese and chocolates, as well as flour and sugar.’ He bent and kissed Hannelore, bowed to Sophie and was gone.

  Chapter 32

  One day, not in my lifetime I expect, but possibly yours, there may be institutions that study ‘constructive peace’ and other ways of solving the tragedies of the abuse of power, racism and other discriminations. I do not believe — I cannot believe — that force is the best solution. We must accept, however, that when too many people fail to see evil or injustice, or fail to cure these illnesses of the soul and of society, then force may be the only solution left to us.

  A lecture by Sophie Greenman, published 1982