The Last of the Bonegilla Girls Read online

  ‘Cheerio,’ he muttered under his breath. ‘You idiot.’

  ‘What are you looking at?’

  Tom jumped back, looking sternly at his sister. ‘How do you know those Bonegilla girls?’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Just tell me, Frances.’

  ‘I don’t know why you’re so big brotherly all of a sudden. They seem perfectly nice to me. Look. They brought me flowers.’ Frances sniffed the leaves. Eucalyptus.

  ‘Who are they exactly?’

  ‘Why do you want to know? You think they might be communists or something?’

  ‘Oh, don’t be ridiculous.’

  She sighed. There was no mystery she should be ashamed of. ‘I was talking to the Italian one, Iliana, just before I got hit by the football yesterday.’

  ‘It’s a soccer ball.’

  ‘The soccer ball then, Mr Know It All. Her brother was one of the players who carried me to the hospital.’ Frances wished she could remember more about that part of the previous day’s adventure but, sadly, those details had been lost in the fog of her headache. Instead, she’d had to imagine Massimo’s arms around her. Every time she did, she felt her cheeks burn.

  ‘At least they’ve got some sense about them,’ Tom huffed as he watched the three girls walk away.

  ‘And as for the other two girls, they are Elizabeta and Vaski … Veshta … oh goodness, I can’t remember her name, the other one.’

  Tom let the curtain fall back into place. He walked to the corner of the room where the big radiogram sat, and fiddled with the dial, flipping between stations. There was Bing Crosby crooning one minute and then the serious tones of an announcer the next. He couldn’t seem to settle on either so found some more music, classical this time, and then the room was filled with laughing voices, deep baritones and trilling female laughs. Then with a quick turn to the left, the radio was off and Tom was stalking across the room.

  ‘Vasiliki,’ he said. ‘It’s Greek, you dolt.’

  Chapter Eight

  Elizabeta, Iliana and Vasiliki reached the end of the path from Frances’s house to the road and stopped.

  Elizabeta looked to her left and then her right. ‘I walk here,’ she said pointing ahead, but was then suddenly not so sure. She’d only been at Bonegilla a week and it was such a vast place she wasn’t certain she wouldn’t get lost on the way back to the family’s hut. She remembered that if she found the mess, she knew her way from there.

  Iliana pointed in the opposite direction. ‘Thank you,’ she said, smiling. ‘Vielen Dank.’

  ‘English is good,’ Elizabeta said with a shake of her head. ‘Not German.’

  She didn’t want to feel German, not here, when so many around her had been victims of the Germans, just as her family had. But she’d already heard it spoken as a common second or third language by people from all over Europe. They’d survived occupation by learning some of the language of their oppressors. It had certainly helped this morning when Iliana and Vasiliki had found her at the playground. She’d taken Luisa there after breakfast to give her mother some time alone. She had seemed sad again and not in the mood for Luisa’s inquisitive questions. Not long after Elizabeta had given Luisa one hundred pushes on the swing, Iliana had arrived with her two young brothers. There had been a tussle with another boy over taking turns and Elizabeta had intervened. Iliana had been thankful and when she had heard Elizabeta speaking English to the interlopers, she had asked for her help. In German, she explained what had happened at the soccer game the day before and that her family wanted to say sorry, but her English wasn’t good enough. She’d tugged on Elizabeta’s sleeve, urging her to help.

  ‘Bitte? Bitte?’ Please, please.

  No one wanted to get in trouble with the director of Bonegilla. It would seem ungrateful when they had been welcomed with open arms, provided with somewhere to live, food to eat, and the promise of jobs one day soon. She was glad she’d agreed because she had been able to see inside an Australian house. It had many rooms, with a radio and a carpet rug and armchairs with soft fabric. And it was warm, so warm. Perhaps Elizabeta’s family would find a house like that one day.

  It must almost be time for lunch at the mess. Her father would be wondering where she was.

  ‘I go. Goodbye,’ Elizabeta said.

  ‘Goodbye.’ Iliana tugged on Vasiliki’s arm but Vasiliki seemed rooted to the spot, staring back at the director’s house. Elizabeta looked too and the curtain in the window moved, as if someone was setting it back in place.

  ‘Goodbye, Elizabeta,’ Vasiliki said, and the two girls walked off, arm in arm. There was a skip in Vasiliki’s step that Iliana tried to match.

  Elizabeta dawdled back to the family’s hut. There was so much on her mind that she needed the aloneness of her walk to process it all. She walked along the roadway, stepping aside to let a rumbling truck pass her by, on its side the words Holdenson and Neilson. She wondered what was being delivered today.

  As she walked, Elizabeta pulled the sides of her cardigan closer, and crossed her arms over her chest. The day before the sun had been shining but today, above Bonegilla, the vast sky was cloud-filled and a wind was blowing down from the mountain ranges to the south. There were goosebumps on her bare legs. Her father had told her those mountains in the distance would have snow on them in the winter, and she’d asked him if they were like the Bavarian Alps. He’d laughed.

  ‘They are not so big. They’re not the same.’ He was right. Nothing about Australia was the same as the places she’d lived in. Not the size of the mountains, not the weather, not the trees or the birds. There was a smell at Bonegilla that was foreign: mutton mixed with the fresh breezes that blew off Lake Hume and the mountains and the scent from the leaves on the trees. When they’d woken up on their first morning at Bonegilla, her mother had looked across the paddocks and the cows grazing in the distance and asked, ‘Are we in Texas?’

  Elizabeta had the chance to be someone now, someone who belonged to the place in which she lived. How long would it take to feel Australian, she wondered. And what did that really mean? To feel Australian? She was physically in Australia, that was clear, but Bonegilla still felt like somewhere else, somewhere in between her old life and her new one. Learning more English would help, of course, because it was important to be fluent enough to hold a conversation with another person and understand what they were saying in return. She would need that if she were to get a job in a shop. She tried and tried to practise, but because she was already sixteen years old and therefore too old for school at Bonegilla, she had to work hard to think in English and use the words she knew and sometimes the effort became too wearisome and she turned off, letting the words flow over her head like gobbledygook.

  Perhaps the Australian girl Frances might help her. She seemed friendly and nice. Maybe it would help if she was able to make friends with a real Australian, to practise the Australian ways of speaking and thinking. Because she needed to help her family make a home here. Somewhere her mother could be happy, where she wouldn’t have to remember forced labour camps and cattle trains and schools that were closed and constant hunger and old shoes and her mother looking like a walking skeleton and soup made from flour and water and selling her clothes for food. The memories were still close, even though the war had been over for almost a decade.

  All that was in the past now.

  They were in Australia now.

  But Elizabeta had brought the memories with her too. Of the time her father had been arrested by the Hungarian authorities and sent to a labour camp, forced to work breaking rocks in a quarry. He’d been a weaver before that, making beautiful fabrics and hand sewing white tablecloths with decorative red thread in swirling patterns. She thought of when she and her mother had been interned in a different labour camp in the days before being herded onto a train and deported to Germany. Did her mother still live that agony, of being separated from her husband, of being alone with her child, the indignity and uncertainty and sheer terror of
it?

  They hadn’t known where they were going when they were put on that train. It had seemed a miracle when Elizabeta’s father had jumped on board. A kind Hungarian guard at his internment camp looked the other way when her father implored him to let him go to his wife and child.

  Elizabeta shivered and she knew it wasn’t from the Bonegilla cold.

  There were so many just-in-time stories from the war.

  Elizabeta tried not to remember her life before the Fair- sea, before she’d packed her suitcase with her best things and the few mementoes she had: a Bible with an ivory cover she’d been given for her Holy Communion; a small wooden box; her new brown shoes; some dresses and a thick woollen skirt and jumpers. It seemed that she had already lived a hundred lifetimes. And that was too many for someone who was just sixteen.

  Her parents told her she should feel special because they had all been chosen by the Australian government to work in the jobs that would help build Australia. If Elizabeta’s parents, at forty years of age, had been brave enough to leave all they knew behind for a better life for themselves and their children, then she could be brave too.

  Elizabeta had crossed the camp while she’d been thinking about her new life and her old, and finally turned a corner at the end of the building that included her family’s hut. There was a loud voice she recognised. She stilled. Something shrunk inside her, gripped at her stomach until it pinched and she wrapped her arms around herself. She automatically glanced left and right to see if anyone was nearby, listening, judging. The walls were so thin between the huts that their neighbours would know what was going on, even if they didn’t understand the language. She scurried to the front door, reached for the door handle, but stopped. She let go. She sat on the steps instead, covering her cold legs with her thick woollen skirt, and listened.

  ‘We have to get out of here. For God’s sake, can’t they get you a job already?’

  Her mother’s voice was brittle and fierce. Her father’s soothing response was unintelligible; he had reverted to Hungarian. The little of it Elizabeta had learned as a very young child had been lost after they’d moved to Germany and she’d enrolled in a German school. Her parents knew both languages and had realised it was better not to speak German at Bonegilla if they wanted some semblance of privacy in their conversation. Too many people understood it.

  Elizabeta’s chin dropped to her chest. She let her thoughts drift. She didn’t want to hear her mother this way. She didn’t want to hear that her dream of a new and happier life in Australia might not be real. That it might disappear on a freight train into nothingness. The quieter her parents’ voices became, the more concerned Elizabeta grew. Secrets were whispered that way, in the dark, around corners, in hushed voices. Her parents had many secrets.

  The door opened and Elizabeta’s father stepped out, stumbling over her. He stepped down on to the path below and she tumbled sideways onto the grass, her knee scraping on the step. Her father was quickly at her side, speaking softly to her in German. ‘I’m sorry, Elizabeta. Are you all right?’ His hand was on her shoulder, firm, reassuring.

  ‘I’m okay, Vati.’ He reached out a hand to her and she held it, pulling herself up to stand.

  He glanced to the door. Someone pushed it from inside and it slammed shut. ‘Your Mutti is upset. Luisa is playing with the Walkenhorst children. Perhaps you should go for a walk. Leave her alone for a little while longer.’

  He turned, strode into the distance, his stocky arms swinging fiercely as he turned a corner after a row of huts and disappeared.

  Elizabeta obeyed her father. As she walked in the opposite direction, one step for each of her mother’s wrenching sobs, her vision blurred with tears.

  ‘You going to the mess for lunch?’

  Massimo stopped, smiled, and ruffled his sister’s hair. ‘Si. Where have you been this morning?’

  Everywhere, Iliana wanted to say. The playground with Vasiliki and the German girl Elizabeta. The director’s house to see Frances. And now, on her way back to her family, she’d run into her brother as he was returning to their hut too. He always seemed to be on the move, like an engine that couldn’t turn itself off.

  He jogged at a walking pace and she fell into a stroll alongside him. ‘You should be thanking me for what I’ve done for you this morning.’

  ‘What did you do?’

  Iliana lifted a finger to scold him. ‘I went to see the girl you almost killed with your stupid soccer ball.’

  Massimo stopped jogging. Iliana noted the sudden attentiveness on her older brother’s face.

  ‘Is she okay?’

  ‘Oh, she was barely alive,’ Iliana said, narrowing her eyes. ‘She has a lump this big—’ she held her hands up to her own head and made the shape of a bowler hat above her hair ‘—on her forehead. As big as la anguria.’ A watermelon.

  Massimo tugged sharply at her arm. ‘You’re joking with me.’

  Iliana pulled herself free, laughed and ran ahead, snaking her way through the crowds of people emerging from their huts.

  ‘Come back!’ He caught up with her with no effort at all. ‘Tell me that’s not true.’

  ‘It’s true. She was in hospital.’

  He huffed. ‘I know that. I carried her there myself.’

  Iliana laughed. ‘All by yourself? With those big strong muscles of yours? I think you had some help.’

  ‘Tell me, Iliana. Is she okay?’

  She’d never seen Massimo so earnest. ‘I am teasing you, brother. She looked healthy. But she was laying down. We gave her some flowers. We found a German girl, Elizabeta, to come with us, to translate. I wish my English was better.’

  ‘A German girl?’ Massimo stopped.

  ‘Yes. Well, she speaks German at least. I didn’t ask her where she was born.’

  Massimo harrumphed.

  ‘We needed someone to translate. Her English is better than mine,’ Iliana explained.

  ‘Probably better than mine, too,’ Massimo lamented.

  ‘What do you expect? All you do is play soccer with other Italians.’

  He laughed. ‘There are Greeks, too. And Yugoslavs.’

  Iliana tutted. ‘The Australian girl, Frances. She was nice. I would like to make friends with her.’

  Massimo turned, looking across to the other side of the camp. ‘There is no point in making friends here, Iliana.’

  ‘Why not?’

  He slipped an arm around her shoulder. ‘You cried for two weeks on the boat because you had to say goodbye to your friends back in the village. Wait until we settle somewhere, and we meet some other Italian families. You can make friends with their daughters. I couldn’t stand to hear you crying like a baby for another two weeks.’

  ‘I’m not a baby.’ She elbowed Massimo in the ribs.

  ‘You’ll always be my baby sister. Always.’

  She didn’t mind always being Massimo’s baby sister, but Iliana thought she should be allowed to make friends with whoever she liked, no matter where they came from.

  Chapter Nine

  Frances had a new mission: not only was she going to become real friends with Elizabeta, Iliana and Vasiliki, but she was going to become their English teacher.

  She had convinced herself that they would surely all become friends if only they were able to understand one another better. Part of her motivation was selfish, she had to admit. She wanted to be able to laugh and to crack silly jokes and make friends, to ask them about their lives before Bonegilla. But she also truly did want to live up to her responsibilities as the daughter of the camp director, and she hoped to impress her father by helping the three girls adapt to their new country. She was sixteen already and she could represent her family, in a way that would make both her parents proud of the young woman she was becoming. And anyway, she was lonely at home. Tom had returned to university in Melbourne and despite his teasing, she missed him. Whatever she could do to hasten her friends’ language skills would set them in good stead for their futures
when they left, she was certain of it.

  Her mother seemed as excited about the idea as Frances was.

  ‘How marvellous,’ Mavis had said. ‘Some of the young people are just lovely. So long as this tutoring doesn’t interfere with your school work.’

  ‘It won’t, Mum. We’ll do lessons every day after dinner. I’ve asked and it’s fine if we go to the mess hall in the accommodation block where the girls live. They’ve checked with their parents and they all think it’s a terrific idea for them to learn English better.’

  ‘It’s a good thing if someone in the family can speak the language,’ Mavis told her daughter. ‘Life will be so much easier for them when they assimilate.’

  The next day, after Frances had stepped off the school bus and walked across Bonegilla to the house, she’d gone into her room to put her school case next to her desk and found a pile of books on the watermelon pink chenille bedspread in her bedroom. There were four copies each of Blackie’s Easy to Read Book Three Bad Pups, with three naughty but very sweet dogs on the cover playing next to a tin of black paint. Enid Blyton’s Bright Story Book featured a dog pulling a cart rather like a draught horse, and there were copies of I Can Read English, a booklet featuring a man lying on the cover reading. Frances picked up the Enid Blyton and skimmed the stories inside. She nodded, excited about having these tools of instruction. Stories like Forgetful Fanny, The Little Brown Bear and The Little Girl Who Was Shy would be just the ticket.

  Elizabeta reached over the atlas and the map of Africa and pointed to the top of the continent. The four friends were crowded around the open book, sitting at a table in the mess. At the next table, six young boys were hovering over a Ludo game, squabbling over whose turn it was to roll the dice. On the other side, a group of young girls were drawing pictures on butcher’s paper with coloured pencils.

  ‘This is Egypt.’ Elizabeta pointed it out on the map.