This Tumult E-Book

Caroline Preston

• Herausgeber: The Lilliput Press
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 443

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017

Beschreibung

The Tottenham family is falling apart. There is no money to maintain the crumbling house and farm in County Westmeath, so decisions have to be made. Brothers Nick and Tony, with no prospect of a future in rural Ireland, make the long journey to their uncle's ranch in Australia. As World War Two looms, the entire family signs up to fight: mathematician mother Eleanor calculates flight paths; sister Rose repairs radar masts in Lincolnshire; Nick and Tony, like thousands of others, enlist in Australia; even their ageing father Gerald signs up for duty in the Far East. Little does each foresee what terror, starvation and heartache lay ahead, and what it would take to survive. In a gripping narrative that spans four generations and encompasses the battlefields of Syria and Egypt, the Australian outback, night sorties over Germany, English airfields and the horrors of a Sumatran prison camp, this is a harrowing story of hardship and heroism, based on an Irish family's experience.

Leseprobe

the lilliput press

dublin

Dedication

For Eliza and Arthur and in loving memory of Joan, Nick, Tony, Barbara, Mary and Peter

Author Note

This novel is based on the true story of an Irish family in World War Two. I have had to imagine how they coped with what befell them and how they battled with separation, fear and deprivation. The people they encountered and who helped them survive are also entirely fictional.

Epigraph

Nor law, nor duty bade me fight,

Nor public men, nor cheering crowds,

A lonely impulse of delight

Drove to this tumult in the clouds

W.B. Yeats

One

WESTMEATH, IRELAND, MAY 1938

Nick Tottenham was reluctant to leave the warmth of his bed. Watery sunlight broke through the cracks in the shutters and dust motes floated sluggishly in the narrow beams. A muffled, busy clatter rose from the bowels of the old house. Lilly was in the yard chasing the scrawny brown hens from their nests. Martha was baking in the basement and the smell of the sweet dough had already reached his room. It was 20 May and Nick’s sixteenth birthday although he felt none of the giddy excitement that birthdays used to bring. He lifted his nose above the sheets while the despair that had been consuming him for months settled on him once again.

Perhaps today would be different, he told himself as he dressed. Today his father might stop treating him as a child. He was at an age when boys went to the front not very long ago. He walked purposefully down the stairs for his first breakfast as a man who might do such things, crossed the hall and entered the morning room. His mother sat in the window, engrossed in the paper. Gold glasses were perched on the end of her nose and strands of her chestnut hair fell onto the page from the loose knot at the nape of her neck. A cigarette rested between her lips. As the morning light struck her face Nick could imagine the beauty she must have been before bearing six children.

‘Morning Mother.’

‘Hmm, yes darling.’

‘Lovely day.’

‘Hmm …’ The minutes ticked by.

‘Mother, you do realize it’s my birthday.’

He briefly regretted his tone. He knew he was being disagreeable. His mother was not, after all, in the front line of those whom he believed were conspiring to ruin his life. Besides, she was not going to change and he understood that she buried herself in crosswords and puzzles to avoid the wreckage around her. He wondered why he had bothered to remind her that it was his birthday. Now she would try and make up for forgetting it and he would not be able to relish his grievance and fatten it all day as the hours passed and no one wished him well.

‘Oh darling, I’m so sorry – I thought of it earlier but then I forgot.’ She stood up, all lavender and grey. ‘Come, give me a kiss.’

He dodged the curl of blue smoke and found her powdered cheek. She had six birthdays to remember after all. He supposed that she was exhausted. It wasn’t just that there was never any money for things like birthday presents; his mother seemed to have grown tired of the business of motherhood. The Little Ones, Maggie and George, ran wild most of the time since there was no one to take them to school. His mother had taught the eldest three at home – Rose, himself and Tony – at least until Rose went off to her posh school in England thanks to Uncle Geoffrey’s money and the boys were dispatched to Queen’s Hospital school on the other side of the country. She seemed to have given up with the youngest three. Poor Kate, his next-youngest sister, did her best to look after Maggie and George, to teach them the arithmetic and poems she was learning at the school to which she had to cycle ten miles every morning. As the eldest boy and still at home, he received most attention from his parents but it was always critical. It seemed to him that he couldn’t do anything right. And yet they expected him to make his future here, farming in Westmeath and a life tied to mounting debts while watching his parents routinely dulling the pain of their disappointment with whiskey. The crushing weight of their expectations shadowed him like the masonry of the old house.

He stared morosely into the empty hall. The ceiling paint was peeling and the doors leading from each corner were warped from lack of use. Grim-faced portraits of his forebears, all in military uniform, hung on thick brass chains. They too seemed to radiate disapproval of him. The house was closing in on them as one room after another yielded to dust sheets and the cold and damp rose from the wormy floors. The family was also in retreat – his father with whiskey, his mother in her crosswords. Tony had his model airplanes and dreams of flying, Kate her wild flowers, and the two Little Ones, Maggie and George, built playhouses in the woods. And where could he get away from them all? The morning room was strewn with the mess of family life: his mother’s sewing, games of Snakes & Ladders, dusty accounting ledgers, bits for bridles and stirrups for saddles, fishing rods, tennis rackets, books of pressed flowers, glue and pieces of tiny Tiger Moths and Sopwith Camels waiting for Tony to fit them together, but none of it was his.

The paper on which his mother had scribbled her anagrams lay on the table. The headline was from a world far away from the morning room by the lake in Westmeath: Czechoslovakia orders a partial mobilization of armed forces along the German border. He wasn’t exactly sure where Czechoslovakia was, but wherever it was, it wouldn’t disturb life here. Nothing would. There was talk of war on the wireless but there couldn’t possibly be another one; his father had only just come back from the last. Even that would not provide an escape for him.

He heard a rhythmic clip on the hall floor and his father entered the room. As always his father seemed to fill the space and Nick imagined himself physically shrinking beside him. It was not just his impressive size and straight back but the way that he assumed that he was the most important person in the room. Nick saw the slight stiffening of his father’s shoulders and a tightening of his fine features when the older man realized Nick was at the table and then, just as quickly, as his mother caught her husband’s eye, the immediate softening of them. He smiled at her and Nick’s chest squeezed with resentment.

‘Good morning, Father. You’re up early.’ He searched his father’s face but there was no smile for him.

‘That bloody cattle dealer is coming to rob me blind again. He is a rogue.’ He sat down at the head of the table.

‘Tea, dear?’ His mother simply didn’t appear to notice when her husband was out of sorts. Gerald Tottenham’s hand shook as he lifted the porcelain teacup to his lips. He peered at Nick over the rim with his reddened eyes.

‘If you were any good you’d take over the cattle.’

‘It’s Nick’s birthday, Gerald,’ his mother said, using the velvety voice she saved for mornings such as these. ‘He is seventeen today.’ She paused for a second, unsure. ‘That is right, isn’t it Nicholas?’

‘Sixteen,’ Nick corrected her. He didn’t trust himself to say any more.

‘Whatever he is, Eleanor, it’s time the boy took up his share of the work around here.’ His father was glowering fixedly at Nick as he snatched at the paper. ‘That bloody corporal will have us at war again. You wait and see. We should have polished off the Hun when we had a chance,’ he said as he cut himself a slice of bread, dipped the spoon into the jam pot and tried to spread Martha’s marmalade but it slid off, dripping over his hands. ‘This marmalade is too damned thin,’ he snapped. Throwing his napkin on to the table, he pushed his chair back and reached for the decanter on the sideboard.

Nick stood up. ‘I promised Kate I’d join her by the lake this morning. She has something she wants to show me. I won’t be long,’ he said. He could not watch his father drink at breakfast this morning.

Nick shoved open the kitchen door, which swung open on its rusty hinges, and stormed out into the yard. He pulled his head into his pullover like a turtle, lit a cigarette from the yellow packet and drew hard, his eyes narrowing. ‘Bloody fool,’ he muttered aloud. It would always be like this. Even on his birthday his father had rounded on him. Why should he stay for this? Heading down the path to the lake, he kicked a stone into the reedy grass. Take over the cattle? If only he’d bloody let me. He turned and looked back at the black bulk of his home. The shutters were closed on most of the upstairs rooms and the house looked asleep. Spring weeds grew in the cracks of the sills. A rotten cedar in the garden had split down its length and its limbs lay on the ground, white and jagged. Cornicing from the west side of the house lay in lumps on the ground below, moss already creeping over them. A wig of bushy ivy topped the wall around the kitchen garden and thin cattle stepped gingerly over the gaps, lured by the smell of uncut and rotting cabbages.

I can’t do this, Nick thought.

The water of the lake was black and still, with only a small fishing boat breaking the line of the far shore. Cinnamon sedges hovered above the water, daring the trout to break its oily calm. Nick threw the butt of his cigarette into the water. A gentle puff of wind rippled the surface of the lake, cooling his temper but doing nothing to shift his unhappiness as he walked along the shore towards the boathouse. He liked to come here to get away from them all, to listen to the slap of the water and watch the light dapple the arch of the roof. He reached for the slimy rope and stepped into the boat. Pushing off the limestone walls, he plopped out on the lake and leaned back against the bow of the boat, his arms resting on the oars, and stared at the gunmetal sky. He was sixteen, for God’s sake. Something had to change.

‘Hey Nick.’ The hollow echo of his younger sister’s voice crossed the water.

‘Hello Kate.’ She was sitting on a lichened rock by the shore, head bent over the sketchbook on her knees. In the black fug of his resentment he had forgotten that he had meant to meet her on the shore. She was, as always, barefoot. Her cotton dress, white with sprigs of forget-me-nots, was tucked up to resemble shorts. She had been paddling, moving the minnows with her feet in the sand.

‘Come here! I’m making something for you.’

He guided the boat onto the sandy shore, and clunking the oars into it, stepped out.

‘You’ll never believe what I found,’ she said. ‘It’s a bee orchid, Nick. Isn’t it wonderful? They’re so rare! Look, I’m drawing a picture of it for your birthday. Its striped body is so yellow it almost glows and look at the lovely purple wings. It is just like a bee, although of course Tony says it’s like an airplane.’

Nick leant forward to view her prize, parting the wiry grass to get a better look.

‘You must never pick them because then there will be no more of them.’

He squatted next to her, reached out and ruffled her mop of russet curls. ‘Well done you. It really does look as though it is about to fly away, doesn’t it?’ Lucky bee, he thought. ‘Are you drawing it for me? For my birthday?’

‘Yes. I’m sorry. I would have liked to buy you something.’ A frown had creased her brow.

‘But I love your flower pictures, Kate! I’ve kept them all. Let me see. I think I like the yellow ones the best, the marsh marigold and the yellow iris. I wonder why they call it a “flag” here? Oh, and then there is that lovely … the one with the funny name. What’s it called?’

‘The creeping Jenny,’ she answered. He smiled. She was always able to melt the anger in him, if only for a moment. She picked up the purple crayon and started to colour the wings of the orchid on the page.

He stood up, restless, and skimmed a flat stone across the water.

‘Tony is better at that than you,’ she said.

‘Tony is better at everything,’ Nick said without any sourness. Kate’s words were rarely intended to wound and he understood only too well that Tony was fair and sunny and he was dark and brooding. They were inseparable, he and Tony, but it was hard being Nick. One day Kate would grow up and leave and so would Maggie and George. Rose, his glamorous big sister, had gone off to England already. There was not enough here for both Tony and him, so Tony would be allowed to go too and Nick would be left behind, endlessly mending holes in the roof, pulling ivy off walls, negotiating credit from local traders and fighting with his father.

Nick took a deep breath. ‘I’m thinking of going away for a bit. Next year probably.’ He fixed his eye on the distant fishing boat, afraid to look at his sister. Kate’s head snapped up.

‘How long?’

‘Oh a year or so, and …’ he hesitated and still he could not meet her eye, ‘… Tony too.’

‘Both of you? I mean, how will we manage? We need you here. Where’re you going? Is it far? How will Poppa manage? What will we do here on our own?’

‘I don’t see why I can’t have a life of my own, Kate. Father expects me to stay here as some sort of unpaid farm hand. It’s not fair.’ He stalled again. ‘Australia.’ He had given it no thought until this moment.

‘Australia? It’s so far away. Tony will only be fifteen this September!’

‘Tony needs to get away too, Katie. There’s no point in him going back to school,’ he said, knowing that this was not the whole truth. He felt a rush, unsure whether it was the excitement of seeing a way out or the idea of doubly hurting the old man by taking Tony with him. He could see that he was upsetting Kate but all the frustration he had nurtured for so long drove him on. Talking to her made the idea possible so he ignored his sister’s crumpled face and grey eyes now filling with tears. The bee orchid forgotten, she pulled at the quicks of her nails as she always did when she was unhappy.

‘What are you going to do there?’

‘Jackaroo.’ He looked at her as she miserably contemplated the unfamiliar word. ‘It’s rounding up sheep and cattle on horses, that kind of thing.’

‘But you hate horses.’

‘Look Little One, I know this is hard but Father won’t give me any responsibility. I can’t just hang around here and watch him drink the place away. I might actually learn something in Oz that’ll help me when I have to run the farm here.’

‘He doesn’t drink every day.’

‘I know, and he’s had it tough, in Flanders in the war and all that. It’s just that there can’t be two people in charge, Kate. We simply don’t get on. When he’s ready to hand over then we can come back.’ He would not tell her that he didn’t think the old place could survive, that it was too far gone. He would leave her that dream. They sat in silence. Nick thought about the idea, mesmerized by the swallows swooping for midges and making rings on the surface of the water. His father would never let him go, he told himself. It was just a pipe dream.

‘Poppa loves you. He just doesn’t know how to show it. It’s all that stiff upper lip stuff.’ Kate paused and looked squarely at Nick. ‘He doesn’t know anything about this, does he?’ As usual, she had seen how things really were, that courage had failed her brother and that he had not raised the idea with either of his parents.

‘You’d best start with Mummy,’ she added miserably.

‘I wish things were not as they are,’ his mother said later that day to both boys, ‘but actually I think it is a good idea. God knows there is no money to send either of you back to school and you in particular need to spend some time away from your father. Honestly, Nick, you really must learn not to fight with him so much. You will have to leave it to me to bring him round.’

He was surprised by his mother’s tone but was also comforted by it. Maybe she had understood him all along. To his horror, he thought that he might cry. Despite his mother’s diminutive stature, gentle voice and absent ways, here was strength and something resolute. He felt strangely humbled by her, as if he were seeing her clearly for the first time. Who might she have become had she not walked into that teashop in Aberystwyth and met his father when she was nineteen? The clever daughter of a rural doctor with her heart set on teaching mathematics and the first woman ever to graduate from the university. Everything that she had once been or could have become had been buried in the stories of his parents’ chance meeting, the spicy hint that their marriage did not have the blessing of their families and the glamour of them heading out to make their life in the Far East. She could not resist his handsome father with the row of medals on his uniform on his way back from the front. He had promised her a life of plenty here in Westmeath with the prize herd of shorthorns that he would fatten on the magnificent farm he was going home to. She had given up everything for a life in a grand old house with manicured gardens and gravel paths on which she could push her children in prams like carriages. The babies had come, six of them, but in every other way her life had turned out to be very different.

‘Of course it mightn’t be for very long. After all, Father went off to Malaya before he came back to farming. And it will be great experience for me to learn all about agriculture … and Tony also,’ he added.

‘It will be such an adventure, Mummy,’ Tony said. ‘Of course, Nick hates horses but he will have to put up with that. I will be fine though. I mean, not that I am any good at riding or anything but I have just done a bit more I suppose …’ His words tailed off as his mother’s eyes hardened.

‘Tony you need to be very careful what you say to your father before I manage him about this. He spent four years in the trenches in Flanders before we went to Malaya. Your grandfather would not contemplate our coming home at all. It was hardly the gallivanting that this appears to be. Malaya was no picnic either. Home was in the jungle miles from anywhere. For months we lived in a tent with no shelter against the endless rain.’

‘Why didn’t you come straight back here after the war?’

Eleanor hesitated and fixed her eye on the lakeshore through the window. ‘I never knew why your grandfather wouldn’t have us. I think perhaps he had hoped for a rather different daughter-in-law with – how shall I put it – more blue blood and less blue stocking?’ She smiled. ‘Isn’t it just as well I love your father as much as I do. Otherwise I might not have forgiven him. But even I cannot make the books balance here so you should go and see what the world has to offer. We’ll find the fare somehow. It won’t be like the grand ship Poppa and I travelled on.’ Her eyes glazed over again. ‘Oh my goodness – those banquets every night.’

She sighed. ‘I didn’t know which knife or fork to use. Poppa had to show me and I was so afraid of letting him down. I was such a ninny really.’

‘How did you cope with the jungle after all that?’ Nick asked.

‘Oh you know, as I do now. Arithmetic.’ She looked apologetic. ‘Working out the square root of sub-prime numbers in my head. It distracts me from any unpleasantness.’ She looked up at her sons and smiled. ‘Yes, dears. I know you all think I’m a bit odd like that. Your father has not had it easy either. I only hope that you will match up to him one day.’

The door opened and Kate stepped into the room. Her face was blotchy and her dress was still tucked artlessly into her knickers. She held out the bee orchid.

‘You picked it?’ Nick gasped.

‘Everyone is going to fly away anyway,’ she sobbed. Turning around, she fled, banging the heavy door behind her.

Two

It was September already, and his mother had said nothing. Nick was alone, his head bowed over the Westmeath Examiner, when Kate found him.

‘There you are. I’ve been looking everywhere for you,’ she said brightly.

He ignored her, then grunted, threw the paper on the floor and left the room. Kate was not to be deterred because she bounced behind him down the stairs to the pantry and out into the kitchen yard, keeping up her chatter.

‘Will you partner me in the mixed doubles?’ Nick flicked the ash from his cigarette at the hens pecking at the moss on the cobbles of the yard. ‘It’s the end-of-season friendly tournament. Please Nick. Will you?’

‘I am going to town but I have things to do. I don’t know how long it will take. Ask Tony.’

Kate’s shoulders slumped and she looked away across the lake with her top tooth pressed into her bottom lip. She lifted her chin as she turned back to face him.

‘You don’t do anything with me any more. You just float about on the lake on your own. And you talk to me all the time in the same voice you use for Maggie and George. And you and Tony are always huddled in a corner.’

‘Go and play with the Little Ones, Kate. Tony and I have things to do.’

‘What things?’ Her expression was crushed and curious at the same time.

Nick regretted being mysterious with her. He should have known better. She had sharp antennae and now he needed to divert her quickly. ‘Oh nothing, just some school stuff. Look, I’m sure Tony can play this afternoon if it’s so important to you.’

‘Your backhand is better than his and anyway Tony doesn’t want to win like you do.’

‘That’s because he usually does,’ Nick said. He was not in the mood for humouring Kate today. He could hear Tony whistling and moments later his stocky brother appeared, striding up the hill from the lake. His cap was set on the back of his head and his round face was flushed pink from his climb. The tips of his ears, which stuck out a bit too much, were bright red. He had been swimming and his fair hair was still wet. It made him look even more fresh and eager than usual. Tony vaulted the gate, and the chickens, alarmed at the commotion, stuck forward their heads, flapped their useless wings, and took refuge in the corner of the yard. He always makes an entrance, Nick thought.

Nick knew that if his mother failed to persuade the old man to let them go, booking the passage would be a declaration of war. It had to be a secret but Tony was guileless. Nick needed to warn him to be careful what he said to Kate and the Little Ones. He followed him across the cobbles to the big barn and stepped into the gloom behind him. Nick felt uncomfortable in there. It was Tony’s special place, and, as the boathouse was for him, his sanctuary. He hoped that Kate might respect that and leave them alone but she was right there behind him. The two workhorses, Dolly and Daisy, heavy bay Irish draughts with loose muzzles and thick silky legs, stood in the stalls. Nick walked in a wide arc behind them. He could not understand how Tony had no fear of these huge animals with their unpredictable teeth and feet. Even Ben, the grey cob who pulled the trap, had a mind of his own and made Nick nervous. And Tony’s pride and joy, a wild-eyed thoroughbred called Firefly that he had saved from the knacker’s yard, was simply terrifying. The mare trusted no one but Tony and now she stamped her feet like a diva to demand his attention.

But it was not only the horses that bothered Nick in here. Unlike all the other buildings the barn was spotlessly clean, its windows sparkled and the wood was freshly painted. Tony had fixed the latches on the stalls and put new mangers in each of them. Shining saddles were mounted on racks and labelled bridles hung above them. The four animals stood in their stalls, tugging gently at the hay and blinking their bog-pool eyes. Tony had been up at first light as he was every morning to groom and feed them, muck out the stalls and polish the harnesses. For Nick the very order and cleanliness was an affront given the state of the rest of the place.

‘Dolly and Daisy look very smart today,’ Kate said, smoothing the hefty rump of the former with the flat of her hand.

‘I’ve been out with the currycomb this morning. Every girl needs a hairdo now and then, isn’t that right?’

‘Why are you and Nick going to town anyway? It’s not market day.’

‘We’re going to see about our passage to Australia.’ He was backing the cob out of the stall and slipping the harness over his dappled neck, and so he did not see his sister’s face collapse or the look of thunder that Nick threw him. Jesus. Tony, have you no wit? Nick thought.

Kate swung around to face Nick. ‘What? You’re not still thinking of going away are you? I thought all that stuff last spring was just you having a bad day, Nick. You’ve said nothing about it for months.’ She looked from one brother to the next. Nick felt a stab of guilt that he had kept her in the dark. It had been cowardice, of course. Kate was the only person who would make him feel that he was abandoning a sinking ship.

‘Who’s going to look after the horses when you’re gone?’ she snapped. ‘Nobody else will do it, you know. This barn will go to rack and ruin.’

She could find everyone’s Achilles heel, Nick thought. He moved to the door and lit another cigarette. Even Tony was avoiding his sister’s eyes by reaching down to pull at the grass growing through the cobbles to give to the cob.

‘Well?’ Kate insisted.

‘I think Father will let the tillage land for a bit so they can have a good rest out in the fields,’ Tony said eventually. The only sound came from the bit in Ben’s frothy mouth clinking as the pony worked the grass through his bridle.

‘Look at Ben – he’s covered in great dollops of green slobber. We’re going to turn up at the tennis club looking like bloody tinkers,’ Kate said, her voice rising.

‘Hey, easy now Kate – it’s not like you to mind about a silly thing like a dirty pony,’ Tony said.

‘Nothing is ever the way it should be here. Everything gets spoilt. Even bloody Ben can’t keep himself clean when you’ve gone to all the trouble of brushing him.’ She tugged at the rein roughly and the animal stepped back in alarm. She picked up the brush and slid her hand through the strap, then threw it roughly into a corner of the stall. Nick looked at her in surprise. He didn’t think he had ever seen Kate do anything so violent.

‘What’s it going to be like when you’re gone?’ She paused as if she were afraid to say more, and paced up and down the length of the barn behind the swishing tails of the two carthorses. ‘Lilly’s brother went to America and they all said he was coming back, but he never did. You won’t come back either. I’m right, aren’t I?’ Tears slid down her face.

Tony lifted his sister on to a bale of hay so that his face was level with hers. ‘Don’t be crying Kate,’ he said wiping her cheek. ‘We’ll be home in no time.’

By the time Ben had clopped his way as far as Dalystown, Tony was whistling again, and Kate, sitting between her brothers on the front bench of the trap, had regained some of her gaiety.

‘Hello Dan,’ Tony hollered at the publican as they trotted past his shop. The man, in a collarless shirt and braces, his trousers huge around his waist and worn at the knees, sat outside on the bench for most of the day and in all weather. His hand was, as always, cupped around the glowing tip of a cigarette, a pack of Sweet Afton beside him on the bench.

‘Does Dan stop smoking to eat, do you think?’ Kate asked as she and Nick followed their brother’s lead and waved at the old man, who raised a lazy finger at the passing trap without adjusting his face at all. ‘Poppa says he’s an old robber, that he charges too much for everything.’

‘Father thinks everyone is robbing him, Kate – that’s because he hasn’t enough money to pay them,’ Nick said.

By late afternoon the matches were over and Nick had finished his errands and joined them at the club to catch a lift home in the trap. Tony was standing outside the changing room with Fergus O’Dowd, a pale, thin youth with carroty hair and angry spots on his chin. His father was a solicitor and Nick didn’t like him. The boy swaggered with self-confidence because his father knew everyone’s business.

‘So you’re not coming back to school?’ Fergus said, throwing a narrow-eyed look at the other boys ranged behind him.

Tony shrugged and Nick looked away. He would let Tony answer for them both. He didn’t trust himself not to say something that would make Kate’s life in the tennis club intolerable. ‘I suppose I know enough to earn a living. I was never much good at schoolwork anyway.’

‘But Australia! That’s a long way, isn’t it? I never thought of people like yous having to emigrate,’ Fergus persisted, his mouth twisting as he lifted his chin to emphasize his challenge. His friends looked on eagerly and moved in closer.

‘It’s not emigration, for heaven’s sake. We’re just going to learn some farming, that’s all.’

‘Sure, people like you get other fellas to do the work for them, don’t they?’ Fergus’s lip curled unpleasantly.

Tony let his breath out slowly. With some effort he resumed his habitual smile. ‘Yeah, that’s right, we have hundreds of people, all with shiny buttons on their coats, to fetch and carry for us up there in the big house. We’re only going to get away from feckers like you.’

Nick had had enough. ‘Come on Tony, you don’t have to explain yourself to these fellows. Let them stay here and rot.’ He pulled at Tony’s arm to lead him towards the trap.

Ben trotted along the road in the lengthening shadows. The trap jigged as the pony spooked at the blackening bushes at the side of the road.

‘What’s up Kate? You’re very quiet for a girl who just won a medal,’ Nick said.

‘Why did Fergus say those things to Tony about us having lots of servants? I don’t think he was being very nice.’

‘He thinks we’re newcomers and have it all easy – the big house and all that. He feels we don’t belong here,’ Nick replied, his voice tight. He tossed the end of his cigarette into the ditch.

‘But our house is cold and damp and we have to live in one room! We don’t even have electricity! I bet Fergus’s house has it and his roof has no holes in it. His family doesn’t have to eat only what comes out of the garden and he doesn’t have to spend all his holidays picking fruit. He goes to Wexford for his holidays,’ she said, as if Wexford were the most exotic location in the world.

‘It doesn’t really work like that, Kate. We’ll always be outsiders,’ Tony said cheerfully, putting his arm around her.

‘Why?’ she asked.

‘It’s our own fault really. Because we insist on doing things our own way, going to a different church, staying in the old house when it is falling down around our ears. We’re oddballs, I suppose.’ He shook the reins over the pony’s back.

Nick pulled in his breath sharply, and felt his temper flush his face.

‘Jesus Christ, Tony,’ he said, rolling his eyes towards the sky. He turned to his sister. ‘They think we’re bloody English or as near as damn it. Not because we are, but because hundreds of years ago we were, and we keep doing things to remind them of that, like going off to war for the English, like Father did. We’re never going to belong here so we should get on with a real life somewhere else and the sooner the better.’ The pony’s feet clipped along the road, and the curlews cried over the lake. ‘I sent the wire to the steamship company and I posted the letter to Uncle Herbert to tell him that we’re coming out. The rest is up to Mother and how she brings the old man around,’ Nick added. His temper had fuelled his courage, and his cruelty. She’s got to hear it sometime and now is as good a time as any, he thought.

‘Is that why you’re going away? Because we’re, what did you call it, oddballs? Is that why Dan never waves at us when we pass his pub?’ She looked down at the medal she and Tony had won that afternoon and flung it in the ditch. ‘I don’t understand anything any more.’

The next morning clouds hung over the lake and the wind drove sheets of slate-grey rain towards the house. By noon the wind had dropped but the rain continued to fall and water dripped relentlessly from the trees. Martha clambered stiffly up from the kitchen from time to time to place her pans under the latest leak. With all the family in the morning room, it had become crowded and stuffy. The gas fire hissed orange and blue in the grate. It was that time of the day when the rooks began their clatter over the trees and his father would soon ask what had happened to his afternoon tea. That was the cue for George and Maggie to be sent to the kitchen to eat with Martha and Jim. It didn’t seem that long ago when Nick had done the same thing. And he would prefer to go with the Little Ones now. He missed having tea with Martha, listening to Jim talk about the fish he had caught that day or the frogspawn he had found in the mill race. Nick was restless and nervous. Still his mother had said nothing about how his father might react. He wanted to go so badly. Had his mother managed to turn his father around?

Maggie and Kate were sitting on the floor surrounded by paper, paste, scrapbooks and pressed flowers. Maggie was already taller than his mother and bigger than Kate. She was going to get her size from their father, Nick thought. Poor girl. She was interested only in nursing small animals and broken-winged birds. Doe-eyed and trusting, she lived in a make-believe world in which she was always the attentive mother. Poor George had to ‘be baby’ for hours every day and did so without complaint, apparently understanding that this was his lot as the youngest in a family of six. Nick thought that he didn’t know his youngest brother very well – a serious boy with his mother’s mathematical brain who was happiest playing a game of bridge or working out a puzzle.

‘I don’t see the point,’ George said as Tony took the sticky model from him. Once again, he had made a mess of the Airfix. Nick wondered why the child volunteered to help Tony when he was so bad at it – perhaps it was a relief not to be making grass soup and feeding it to Maggie’s army of dolls.

‘Well, because then we will know all about the machines we’re flying when we are pilots.’

‘But they’re not real.’

‘Oh, for God’s sake, why don’t you go and do some bloody sums with Mummy then!’

He would miss all of this. Doubt was creeping into his excitement for the first time. He was so close to getting away and maybe it wasn’t what he wanted at all. He shook his head, as if that way he could rid himself of any second thoughts. ‘I don’t suppose the postman will come in this weather,’ Nick said, to no one in particular.

‘You expecting a love letter or something?’ His father’s voice rumbled from behind the paper. Clearly the old man was in great form today and the paper shook in his hand as he laughed to himself. Today was a day when Nick could risk talking to him. The photograph on the front page was of Neville Chamberlain addressing the London crowd the previous day. Peace in our Time read the headline.

‘That was close – I mean the agreement with Hitler, don’t you think, Father? Only last week they were digging up the parks in London to be used as air-raid shelters. I heard on the wireless that the zoo keepers in London had plans to shoot the animals in case bombs broke open their cages.’

‘Oh that’s awful,’ Maggie said, her eyes filling with tears.

‘Now look what you’ve done,’ George said, looking blankly at his sobbing sister.

‘I don’t know. I think it is time to give the Germans a lesson,’ Tony said. ‘I’m up for it.’

Their father lowered the newspaper and looked at his two older sons. ‘War is not the adventure you might think it is, boys. This fellow Hitler is quite simply mad, and I’m afraid the Germans think he will make amends for their humiliation the last time out.’ He glanced at his wife sitting in the window seat. ‘Actually, your mother and I have been talking. If you’re off to Australia we think you should get going fairly soon. There’s a real possibility that this will not settle down and then there could be all sorts of disruption to shipping. I can’t imagine that it will actually amount to war. It’s unthinkable that we could do it all again’ – he seemed to shudder – ‘but you never know where trouble can break out.’

Nick glanced at his mother. Eleanor seemed to be warning him to be careful, but there was also something slightly triumphant in her expression.

‘You mean we can actually go?’ Nick stammered, his voice reaching an almost girlish pitch.

‘A year or two away will do you both good. I mean, I was in Malaya and South Africa before I came home so I think it’s a good idea. I can manage here for a short time.’

‘Actually Gerald, there is a sailing of the Jervis Bay in March. Is that too soon do you think?’ Eleanor said.

‘In fact, Poppa,’ Tony jumped up excitedly, swinging his right arm in an arc through the air to make one of his model aircraft simulate flight, ‘we have already been in touch with Aberdeen and …’ Nick shot him a fierce look and his brother’s mouth snapped shut.

Kate emerged from behind her father’s chair. ‘Poppa, I’ll help you with the farm,’ she said, twisting her hands in front of her. ‘After all, I am fourteen now. I am not a Little One any more.’

Gerald turned stiffly, his face registering a mild astonishment that she was there at all.

‘We’ll cope, won’t we Poppa. They’re not emigrating, are they?’

Nick could not remember ever seeing his father at a loss for what to say to his children. Fascinated, he stared at him.

‘Come and sit beside me. The boys are growing up. It’s only for a short while and they will be back. And don’t forget that one day you too will go off and get married and live away from here.’ Gerald reached his long arm awkwardly to gather her to him.

‘I shall never leave you and Mummy,’ she sniffed.

‘Be a brave girl – the boys will write, won’t you chaps?’ Her father smiled and kissed the top of her head.

‘Every week, I promise, and so will Tony – isn’t that right?’ Nick was still trying to process what was happening.

Kate turned her face into her father’s chest, breathing in the smell of tobacco and damp wool. He smiled at his wife. Nick saw the look that passed between them, an unfathomable understanding of each other. He had never seen that before.

‘Right Kate,’ his father said briskly. ‘As you are my right-hand girl now we must take the dogs out and check the cattle, even in this rain. Will you come with me?’

There was a knock at the door and Lilly peered in, mobcap askew. ‘Willie Fitz is here, Mam, with a telegram. He cycled the whole way from town in this wet. He’s drowned, so he is. I’m thinking I’ll give him some tea, maybe with a drop of the Major’s decanter in it …’ Before she could finish Nick and Tony had shot out of the room and bounded down the stone steps to the kitchen, three at a time. Nick snatched the brown envelope from the table and tore it open: Booking confirmed. Shared Cabin. Vessel Jervis Bay departing Southampton 17 March 1939. Destination Freemantle /Melbourne Australia.

‘Jesus, Nick, we’re really going then?’

‘We are.’

Three

AT SEA

By the time they boarded the Jervis Bay in Southampton, the two boys were into the swing of things. Having made the journey across the Irish Sea they now considered themselves seasoned travellers. Nick felt a pinprick of hope that for the first time in his life he might at last blend in with the hundreds of young people hauling suitcases up the gangway and pushing to the rail of the ship to wave to their families. He and Tony found a spot amongst them and strained to pick out Rose, who had come to see them off. It was easy to spot their sister.

‘Cor, she’s a cracker,’ said a fellow beside him. Nick had to agree. His eldest sister had blossomed in the two years since she had left home, and everywhere heads turned to get a second look at her. She wore a crisp cotton blouse tucked into her tiny waist, and a full red-and-cream-checked skirt swirled above her pretty ankles. The outfit was the height of fashion and she tossed her bouncy blonde curls with effortless poise. She looked like a softer Marlene Dietrich. She had all the polish of an English private school as well as her own beauty. Perhaps things would have been different for him if he had had a start like Rose. He was more like the rough lads pressing against the rail beside him and crowding onto the decks around its central funnel. Nick felt an irrational dislike for them only because he knew that he would suffer from the same acute shyness with them that he had endured at school, when Tony’s popularity had melted some of the icy barricades around him. He had to admit that local schooling didn’t seem to be holding Tony back. He understood that it was unlikely that he would get to know any of his fellow travellers or make new friends and Tony would have to do that for both of them.

A uniformed sailor barked directions, telling them that they had to find their beds. Another, holding a list on a clipboard and ticking off names, stood at the heavy cast-iron door through which they had to stoop to enter what looked like a huge steel box and where they and 200 other young men and boys would sleep for the next two months. They wandered along identical rows of bunks trying to find their names.

‘This will be where they put the meat and butter on the return journey,’ Nick said.

‘Not the way Mummy and Poppa did it after the war, is it?’ Tony said, laughing.

‘No, I don’t think we’ll be asked to dine at the captain’s table somehow. You know poor Mother did not have anything like the life that Father promised her. She thought she was being taken out to Malaya for a grand life in the colonies. She even brought her dinner service! And she ends up living in a kampong. That’s where Rose was born. I’ve seen a picture of it. It was just a shack. No white person for hundreds of miles.’

‘She never complained.’

‘It must have been hard for her, especially after all the banquets and finery on the ship … Imagine. When they arrive in Singapore Father puts her on a cart pulled by an ox and they trudge through the jungle for five days. I don’t know how she ever trusted him again.’

‘At least we are starting off at the bottom. Nobody could call this “grand”. I think it’ll be great fun – just like school really.’

‘And just as damp,’ Nick replied.

The next few days went by just as Nick feared they would. Tony made friends and joined groups to play soccer, French cricket, table tennis and badminton while Nick hid out of the wind behind the funnel. Running races were organized around the upper deck and the captain handed out prizes as if it were a regular sports day. Many of the third-class passengers were children even younger than Tony. The ship’s playroom was always full and when they sailed into Valetta, Nick was horrified to see a white sign fluttering on the pier with the words ‘Welcome Youth Ship’. He retreated to his place behind the funnel, his face in a book he wasn’t reading. For the next two weeks Nick could be found there whereas Tony outshone everyone in the games, just like he had done at school.

‘There are some chaps I want you to meet. They’re from Germany. They speak better English than the other Germans. They’re a bit older and I think you’d like them,’ Tony said. Nick wanted to be left alone but in some corner of his lonely mind he recognized that this was what he had expected Tony to do – to pimp friends for him – and the fact that they were a bit older was some solace. Besides, Tony had scampered off to fetch them before Nick could stop him.

‘This is Zach.’ Tony pointed to the smaller of the two boys, a slight fellow with narrow hips. He had dark good looks and an easy, fluid smile. ‘Zach, this is my brother, Nick.’

Nick felt a familiar hot burn flush his cheeks and neck and ran his finger around his collar to soothe it.

‘Hello Brother Nick,’ the boy said with a grin.

‘Zach? What’s it short for?’ Nick mumbled, belatedly holding out his hand.

‘Zachariah. Zachariah Schmitz. What’s Nick short for?’ the boy asked, looking steadily at Nick, his dark eyes fringed with thick long lashes.

‘Nicholas. Nicholas Tottenham,’ Nick said, rubbing the back of his neck again and realizing too late that the boy had been making a joke. He let out his breath as if he didn’t want to.

‘And this is my friend Yitzhak, but he is not called Yit,’ Zach said, pulling a silly face. The second boy put down the fiddle he had been cradling to shake Nick’s hand.

‘Can you play that?’ Tony asked him, miming the strumming of a guitar.

‘Yes a bit, but not like that,’ Yitzhak replied pleasantly.

Nick had an uncomfortable feeling that he and Tony were being slow, and that these fellows were making a joke at their expense. He wasn’t sure that he liked the way the one called Zach was looking at him so intensely.

‘He is very good. Not just a bit, like he says. He played in big orchestra in Vienna,’ Zach said. Nick’s unease grew. He and Tony could have nothing in common with such boys.

‘Gosh,’ said Tony. ‘Do you know jigs?’ And he started to throw his arms about above his head and hop from foot to foot in a lamentable imitation of the dancing he had seen the tinkers do on fair days at home. The other three laughed and Yitzhak tucked the fiddle under his chin and started to play. Nick wished he could do something like that or at least goof around like Tony, making people laugh. He tapped his toe against the deck self-consciously while Tony continued leaping about on the deck and the German boys laughed and Zach clapped.

‘Why are you boys going to Australia?’ Nick asked when Yitzhak put down the instrument.

‘Like everyone else here, we go to farms, ja?’ Zach said.

‘Are you going to family?’

‘No we are refugees. We were rescued by the British German Aid Society. They are gute Menschen,’ he said simply.

‘Gosh, I didn’t think there was a British-German anything these days. Rescued from what?’ Tony asked brightly, his eyes shining and his face pink from his silly dance. Zach’s eyes emptied of light and the corners of his mouth dropped. He seemed to be embarrassed and looked away over the ship’s rail to the horizon.

‘I don’t know how to explain you,’ he said. He searched for his words in a way he had not done at first. ‘It was very bad for us in Austria since the Nazis came. Storm troopers took my father away in the night and he never came back.’

‘Sorry. What did you say? What do you mean? Taken away? What are storm troopers? Where did they take him?’ Tony’s words were colliding into each other and his voice rose with each question. Now it was Nick’s turn to be embarrassed and for once he wished Tony would shut up.

‘They told us he had gone to a camp in the east,’ Zach said quietly running his long fingers through his black hair.

‘What camp? Had he done something wrong?’ Nick asked. The thought crossed his mind that there might be a reason why he would not want to know this boy. He was already disconcerted by the way Zach lunged from being a clown to a tragic wretch in seconds.

‘Nothing, unless being Jewish is something wrong. Vati is a heart surgeon. Yitzhak’s is – I mean was – a concert pianist.’ Zach threw an apologetic look at Yitzhak. ‘His father drowned in a moat at one of these camps. There are many stories,’ he added quietly.

His face seemed to cave in on itself and all the chirpy self-confidence of a few moments ago was gone. ‘I think maybe both my parents are also dead now.’

Nick did not know what to say but it was shock not shyness or embarrassment that dried up his words this time. In all the discussions at home about what was happening in the Third Reich, in all the information that he and his family devoured from newspapers and the wireless and in all the thundering roars from his father on the subject of the ‘bloody corporal’, there had been no whisper of any camps. He wondered if anyone in Ireland knew what was really going on at all.

‘Do you play chess, Nick?’ Zach asked, breaking the heavy silence.

‘Yes, a bit,’ Nick said numbly.

‘Actually, he’s pretty useful,’ Tony said.