She touched one of the sprays of wisteria, its scent softly honeyed in the night. ‘Did it? I do not know. But finally I realised I had not cared about those I murdered. In my sight they were just unpersons, to be disposed of, just as Herr Hitler created unpersons too, and persuaded so many others to carefully not see. Once I knew that I knew Violette Jones must cease to be.’
But war is a different world and a complex one, thought Sophie. Or was it? There had been moments in history where World War II might have been prevented. There might have been more if there were more people like George and Ethel, willing to risk their lives or social ostracism, using kindness and forgiveness as tools for peace, trying to understand the enemy, not shrug them off as . . . what word had Violette just used? Unpersons.
Daniel had once shown her a study proving that on average one person could convince fifteen others that hatred and violence were justified. Hatred was contagious. But one person could convince fifteen to be kind instead. So simple, even simplistic. Just be kind, so no one — human, dog or landscape, was an unperson.
At last Sophie said, ‘You . . . you feel you have atoned?’
‘Instead, perhaps, that there is no need. The girl Violette was dangerous. Now Sister Margaret listens to her Mother Superior, and to her Sisters, too. It is easier to know what is right when surrounded with other people searching for that too. What was it that Aunt Lily said? “Do not waste your life on what you regret from yesterday, but wonder what may be done tomorrow.”’
Sophie smiled. ‘I don’t remember Lily saying that. It sounds like her, though.’
‘We were sitting at breakfast here, the two of us alone. She taught me much, not just how to eat my bread with grace, but how friendship can change a life, a world. It has been a hard time for Brazil. But we can stay strong together . . . Ah, it is time for the bridal waltz. I am glad they have kept that. And a string quartet too! I have missed that in South America. But we do have music, music for the soul and music to dance to.’
‘You don’t miss designing dresses?’
Sister Margaret laughed. ‘I design them all the time. We turn the old clothes donated to us into pretty frocks for little girls, for tired women, into shirts for boys and men. God gives us talents to use, not hide away.’
‘Are you happy, Sister Margaret?’
‘Yes,’ said the woman who had been Violette. ‘And you, my dear Sophie? The decades have brought you joy?’
Sophie considered. Yes, just sometimes there were nightmares, but Daniel comforted her, as the owls boomed and the possums growled outside, telling her that war was far away. Age brought loss, too, days when she’d think, Lily will laugh at that, or, I must tell Midge. But loss was the inevitable other side of love. As Dolphie said, so long ago, she had been so very rich in love. ‘I have both joy and contentment,’ she said at last. ‘I was addicted to challenge for so long. The hard years in Europe cured me of that.’
‘Grandma, Aunt Hanne’s kangaroo has fallen into the jelly in the bathtub.’
Obviously even the Thuringa kitchen was not large enough to keep cool all the confections necessary for the wedding celebrations of a man named ‘Jelly’. Was the jelly to eat, or to be mistaken for bath water? Not that it mattered . . .
‘Then take it out,’ said Sophie mildly, as Daniel approached to lead her to the waltz.
One could not leave a reception when one was hostess, even when one’s feet ached and one was stifling yawns. So Sophie returned to her comfortable chair, where she could watch the guests. Even that would have constituted such a faux pas back in 1914, when a hostess must stay brightly smiling among the guests, despite her corset, her long gloves and half a ton of diamonds including a tiara.
But the guests were enjoying themselves, even the bride and groom, which was not always the case in the stress of weddings. Tomorrow Jelly would pilot his worryingly small plane towards France, for two weeks sampling the vintages, then Switzerland, where Jennifer could enjoy a honeymoon discussing the possibilities of crossing Simmental cattle with Herefords, and Jelly could indulge his passion for parachuting, gliding eagle-like above the Swiss valleys, which he would then paint in ways no one had imagined before. Sophie had never told her grandson that she, too, had balanced on the air. Sometimes grandmothers should discreetly minimise their adventures.
Tomorrow most of the family would drive back to Sydney, to work, to school, and, for her granddaughters, veterinary science for one, and the maths that had not been taught to women in Sophie’s childhood for the other.
Sophie gazed at them, still dancing to this modern shaking, stamping music in a mob of others, all with boundless energy. They were so young, so beautiful, so confident, so determined to bring an end to racism, sexism and war. Sophie had marched with them in Vietnam moratoriums, and in the protests against the visit of the racist all-white South African Springbok football team, hoping the girls were more proud than embarrassed that their grandmother walked beside them, swan-like among the shaggy heads and jeans, impeccable in her knee-length green linen dress, straw sandals and wide-brimmed sun hat under her placard.
‘Ah, my Sophie. You have found the perfect refuge.’ Hannelore put her glass of Old Baldie’s first attempt at champagne on the side table and took the chair next to her, sighing and putting her feet up on a stool. ‘I did not know that nuns danced rock and roll, or whatever young people call their dances now. And Judith is dancing with her! You are crying, my Sophie.’
‘Old age. All these splendid young women striding out into the world with no need of a man to carve their way.’
‘You found your own way,’ Hannelore pointed out, ‘and so did I.’
‘But we had Miss Lily. What would Miss Lily have thought of the world today? Young women in jeans marching in demonstrations, and old ones too, though we did not wear jeans . . .’
‘But the demonstrations took Australia out of the Vietnam War,’ said Hannelore earnestly. ‘They helped give us the new laws against discrimination because of race or sex or the colour of one’s skin. I was afraid of marches at first,’ she admitted. ‘And Judith too. We remembered the Nuremberg rallies, the crowds screaming hatred. Yes, there was some anger on the marches — there is still much to be angry about. But the protestors wanted peace and tolerance, even if they had to yell to be heard.’
‘You think Miss Lily would have been with us, carrying a banner?’
Hannelore nodded. ‘She taught women how to change the world, even from the background where most women lived back then, but she gave us confidence to step out from those shadows too. The clothes, the charm, the elegance were only tools for us to use. Mostly, she taught us love.’
‘And to love the whole of humankind, to build bridges instead of walls. But she would not have worn jeans.’
Hannelore considered. ‘Perhaps, if the jeans were cut well. A miniskirt, certainly.’
Sophie gazed out at the dancers, so many of them her descendants, or the descendants of her friends. ‘What would she say about the young women here?’
Hannelore laughed and shifted her feet more comfortably on her cushion. ‘That they are strong and lovely ladies. That their lives are a banner for the right of everyone to be free and strong and lovely, too.’
But we prepared their path, thought Sophie. They think they invented it all, and that is how it should be, for pride in what they have achieved will take them further.
Yet their grandmothers and great-grandmothers and every generation of women before them were there at every major moment in history, though the books rarely record us. We were the women men did not see — or rather men did see us, then carefully did not remember what we’d done. You, who will not let a man open a door for you now, have forgotten us as well.
As Miss Lily had been deleted from any public record, except the memorial Daniel had carved for her, though Bob Green’s heroism was remembered on a plaque in the Shillings village hall, as were Jones’s and Greenie’s. The women of SOE, those very public heroines of war, a
t least had their names engraved in stone: Violette Szabo, Yvonne Rudellat, Cecily Lefort, Denise Bloch, Lilian Rolfe and so many others, though the memory of women’s roles in earlier wars had quickly faded; and nor had the more complex roles women had played in World War II, from breaking enemy codes to running espionage networks, yet been added to the history books. Word of mouth alone was a slippery memorial. So many, so much lost . . .
‘Someone should write Lily’s story,’ said Sophie suddenly. ‘Lily’s life tells so much about how we women saw ourselves change. If we don’t write our stories they’re forgotten. Maybe each generation will find different parts of them important. But how will they understand their past if they don’t hear its voices?’
She remembered Rose’s and Danny’s serious faces as they absorbed the truth about their father. To her relief they had not blamed her or Daniel for not telling them earlier, nor even for the complications of their heritage. It had, it seemed, answered questions they’d not known how to ask.
Jelly’s reaction decades later had simply been a grin and ‘Cool!’ Then he’d grown thoughtful. The result had been his three paintings in the Thuringa drawing room, based on blurred old black-and-white photos that had Lily or Bob in the background (both had tried to avoid photographers), and the tinted photo taken of Nigel and Sophie on their wedding day. Outside observers saw three faces. Those who knew saw the identical smile of love.
Sophie came back to the present to see anxiety shadowing Hannelore’s expression. ‘You will write your memoirs, Sophie?’
Dachau and your factories, thought Sophie. Assassinations in war-time Paris, the twisted threads of Dolphie, remembered also now with a cross Daniel had carved for him, for a man who tried to kill a monster. Ancient shadows holding daggers . . .
‘It would be fiction,’ Sophie reassured her. ‘Stories that hurt no one, but commemorate the path-makers.’
‘Ah, fiction.’ Hannelore smiled and lifted her glass of Old Baldie champagne, a wattle blossom floating on its surface. Behind them the kangaroo bounded towards one of the white damasked tables, perhaps hoping for more jelly. ‘Miss Lily would approve.’
Author’s Note
It’s customary to say that a book is not based on any real person, alive or dead. On the contrary, everyone and every incident in this book is based on people who existed and on real events, either true or compilations. Some, like the horrific suicides on the day Okinawa was invaded, have been left to fade from history. I’ve had to keep putting notes next to the editors’ queries in the margins in this book, and all the others in the Miss Lily series, saying: ‘This happened.’ ‘This happened.’ ‘This happened.’
Authors are often asked where they get their ideas. My books are mostly accidents. In a wide-ranging life I have met many and varied people, from European royalty and prisoners of war to the last of the ’30s swagmen. I listen to their stories, research the times and places they spoke of, remember the wisdom that they offer: a well-made wool cloak or leather lederhosen should last for generations; only royalty or women over sixty should wear diamonds before dark; always store ermine in linen bags; hang a wombat for three days before you cook it; you can pass off rat as chicken if you remove the bones. (I have not always needed or taken their advice.)
Legends of the Lost Lilies is the fifth and last of the Miss Lily series of novels. The series shows how women’s views of themselves changed and widened over the twentieth century. It is also about the women men did not see, or rather, did see, but then for a multitude of reasons omitted from history.
The vast contributions of women in World War I have been reduced in the telling to the relatively small role of official army or Red Cross nurses. The congregations of women working in everything from espionage to code breaking to factory management in World War II have become a few dramatic stories of the SOE women who were sent to aid the French Resistance, movies about code breakers at Bletchley and posters of Rosie the Riveter. There is no room in this book — or these notes — to even begin to list the achievements of women in other fields and other countries, but they will be the subject of other books. Once you begin to look for women in the major events of history, you find them.
The ineptitude, negligence, stupidity and sometimes fascist sympathies of British Intelligence in World War II as portrayed in this book have been kept secret partly because that intelligence work continued into the Cold War with the Soviet Union, but also from embarrassment, until pressure from those who wanted the stories told meant that from about 2000 onwards slowly information emerged. Luckily for the Allies their enemies’ intelligence services were as incompetent, and, in Germany and Japan, those who were competent either not listened to or forced into silence lest their warnings be treated as treason.
From 1942 onwards, in desperation, many small intelligence, technical and strategic groups were set up across Britain, some useful, some seriously inept, including one comprised of writers of fiction like Graham Greene, though the only reference I have found to it merely describes it producing three extremely useful ideas, among perhaps a hundred others that would have been disastrous. Information about many of those groups is either still classified, or no one bothered to keep the records. The latter is most likely. The war-time operation at Shillings is not based on any specific agency I know of, but as its agents were trained to be embedded for long periods, their roles would not be made public. We see aspects of World War II described in books, TV shows or movies, fiction or non-fiction, but all necessarily simplified. The war was complex, as was every person affected by it. We can aim to tell the truth, but ‘the whole truth’ is never possible, and, as Sophie says, perhaps each generation needs to take the stories it needs from the vast complexity of the past.
The many attempts to assassinate Hitler are true — there were others not mentioned in this book — as are his seemingly miraculous escapes from what were well-planned plots by men who knew explosives and how to use them. Dolphie is a composite from a time when anti-Semitism and even Eugenics — the belief that only the ‘best’ of humanity should breed — were common across Europe, including in Britain, and that early fascism attracted people of genuine goodwill, especially those in the military, including my great-grandfather, a man of intelligence, compassion and integrity who was certainly not anti-Semitic, although a member of Australia’s National Guard. Nor was he a fascist for long.
The sub-camp of Dachau is not based on any of those that I know existed, but the work, conditions and solidarity, courage and sabotage of the women at some of those satellites have been documented. In at least one, the women even went on strike for better conditions — and won them.
The Holocaust is not one story, nor even forty-four million stories — roughly the number of people directly murdered by the Nazi regime, not counting those lost to warfare — but many more, for it must include the stories of the survivors too, and the friends and loved ones or even students and neighbours of those who died and survived, as well as the guards and the guards’ families, anyone and everyone connected through the generations to those years.
The experiences at sub-camps of Dachau, or where concentration camp prisoners were assigned to factory work either during the day or as live-in workers, seems to be particularly varied, depending on who or what the prisoners were assigned to. The first workers assigned to Hannelore’s (fictional) factories would have been dissidents who campaigned against the Nazi regime, or who were seen as enemies of the nation for one of many reasons at the time.
The routines of Dachau also varied as the war progressed. This book is set towards the end of its existence as a Nazi concentration camp, when there had been changes, as well as far more exceptions to routine. As the Allied forces drew closer, the German armed forces were in increasingly desperate need of as many men as possible, and the long-term rulers of the camps were scared about what might happen to them when American or Russian forces liberated the camps and sub-camps, and so attempted to kill as many of the survivors as possible, a
s well as destroying records and burning anything incriminating.
This is where I stop attempting to explain the research behind the books, and instead thank those who have been such a deep part of the creation of this series. I have no idea even where to begin. The prison camp survivor father of a friend when I was three years old? I remember his stories, and those of people impossible to count, from my early violin teacher, an Auschwitz survivor, to Gillian Pauli, who, as my English teacher, brought me books to help me find the answer to ‘why’ the Holocaust happened, to my friend Olga Horek, to whom I owe so much, not just for her own story of survival and courage, but for her lessons in how to live — and live well — after tragedy.
The Miss Lily series began, however, with the ever-wonderful Lisa Berryman, Cristina Cappelluto and Shona Martyn of HarperCollins, who encouraged me to turn the first draft of a far more explicit book into five books that focused and enlarged on that book’s themes. Lisa has continued to be the brilliant and (almost) omniscient guide, critic, and co-creator of each book that has followed. Without her, this series and many others of my books, would not be written; nor, probably, would I have realised that I am still only beginning to learn my craft as a writer. Lisa never lets me write any book that is less than I am able. But, like Miss Lily, Lisa does that task so tactfully and with such charm that you hardly realise the iron hand that taps out the editorial emails. (NB Lisa’s only other resemblances to Miss Lily are her grace, elegance, impeccable and generous dress sense, and her ability to enthral a room simply by walking into it.)
Kate O’Donnell has edited every book with genius and passion, questioning my ideas at times, and at least half the time convincing me. She too, won’t let me get away with a sloppy chacterisation, and nor would Eve Tonelli, who has added so much to many books, rounding up the Miss Lily proofs and corrections with editorial sheep-dog tenacity and endless patience — or at least never letting impatience with illegible corrections and tardy replies show. As has Angela Marshall, who turns the dyslexic mess I send her into not just readable but historically accurate text, adding the knowledge of ships, horses, mathematics, the Georgian prison system, colonial shipping and much else, as well as the French and German languages I’ve mostly forgotten. (I am not sure I ever knew how to spell them.)
Legends of the Lost Lilies Page 42
