The Last Double Sunrise

by Peter Yeldham

  “Sounds cosy. But the cost, my darling,” she reminded him.

  “I have a bank account, started by a nice woman who wanted me to paint her daughter, then her grandchild. Didn’t I tell you that in a letter? And Janet Sherman keeps recommending me to her friends, who tell other friends. People insist on paying for the paintings I do, and the money has gone into that bank account. It won’t cost you a brass razoo.”

  “What on earth does that mean?”

  “It’s Aussie slang, meaning you won’t pay a penny.”

  “Goodness!”

  “I’m shouting you,” he said buoyantly.

  “You’re what?”

  “Shouting, Mum. Another slang word, meaning I’m paying. I’ve been working too hard to have time to spend what I’ve earned. It’s all saved for one purpose—to persuade you to come and see Australia.”

  “When would we set out on this venture?”

  “Wait till we hear from Julia. She’ll get my letter, asking her to come here for a few months. She has a return flight, courtesy of the Arts Minister. You can meet her, then we’ll all make our plans together.”

  “I think I’m about to cry. I suppose you know that…”

  “Happy tears?”

  She nodded, as Carlo gave her a handkerchief.

  “I might be going to enjoy this,” Beatrice decided, after mopping her face dry. “But I’ll have to learn some of that slang or I won’t have the faintest idea what anyone’s saying.”

  Carlo’s letter to Julia arrived and she sat on back steps of the house to read it.

  My Darling,

  This is being written in the last hours of the long seven-day flight. By the time you receive it I will be in Italy, and would have had a meeting at the Villa Medici. I’m not certain I will take up the scholarship. I must go through the motions, for it is a generous offer, but I’m just not sure. It isn’t vanity; it just feels like a five year step backwards. If your Mum had not persuaded Major Morton to let me run the studio it might be different, but that has been such a great experience. What I hope is this. I hope you will come to Italy, meet my family and stay a few months while we plan the rest of our lives. I explained this to Jason Chapman, when he saw me off in Sydney. He’s a typical politician covering all the angles. He’s agreed to arrange a free flight for you and if I decide not to stay at the Villa, he will promote it by saying how I fell in love with Australia and with you. As both these statement are true, they will make a refreshing change for a politician. Just do me one favour, so I won’t have fretful dreams. Wait until it’s absolutely certain Japan has no more Kamikazes, even if it delays you a month. I know it’s stupidity, but we’ve had enough mishaps. I’ve just had my first glimpse of Italy through the window beside me and it’s exciting, but not as exciting as it will be if we explore it together. I love you, darling. I always will.

  Carlo. Xxxxx

  At the bottom of the letter there was a tiny sketch of two caricature figures standing beside a fountain and a sign with wording:

  Come and make a wish at the Trevi Fountain.

  THIRTY-TWO

  THE LAST DOUBLE SUNRISE

  Six weeks later Julia Sherman was a passenger on the last Double Sunrise flight from Perth to Ceylon. From there she flew by other aircraft and glimpsed the Italian Coast on August 15th, 1945, the day that Japan’s surrender was broadcast. The war that had spanned almost six years was finally over. To Carlo and Julia, now in their mid-twenties, it had occupied a quarter of their lives. For them and their generation it was time to embrace the days of peace and the joys of love.

  Three weeks after her arrival they exchanged marriage vows at a private family gathering beside the Trevi Fountain. She and Carlo spent the next few months exploring the country, visiting Tuscany, the Adriatic Coast, Venice, Sienna and Turin. All were places new to Carlo, his boyhood having been confined to Lombardy and the north. They spent time in Milan to stay with Gina, then to the Italian Lakes, and finally a holiday on Capri.

  That was where Carlo had an idea to create a collage of war damage in his homeland. Photographs depicting destruction of famous buildings alongside paintings displaying their replacement or restoration.

  “Think of it as an argument against another war,” he told Julia when they were lying in the sun on Capri’s Marina Piccolo, “as well as a good excuse to come back again when these ruins are replaced or rebuilt.” He ticked off places he had in mind; Palermo and Messina, Anzio, San Lorenzo, Monte Cassino, and damage in parts of Rome before it was declared an Open City.

  Julia was in favour of the idea. She was trying to decide which country she liked best, Italy or Australia, wondering if they could spend half their time in each. Italy, and the city of Rome in particular, was a perfect place for lovers, she decided in their dreamy post-war days.

  Carlo began to sketch, paint, or make notes for his venture. Julia bought a Nikon and took photographs of the destruction before restoration took place.

  They went back to Australia for Christmas on a normal flight, for the Double Sunrise service guided by the stars and using Morse code had served its wartime purpose and its weekly flights across the Indian Ocean were now a part of history. That Christmas was a twin gathering, the first of many holidays spent together. Beatrice and Luigi were there, having made the journey to Australia as hoped by Carlo. Gina persuaded her editor she should write a feature on her brother, still remembered by his wartime name, the POW Artist. Their grandparents, Professor Giovanni Farina and Sofia felt a month of summer sunshine would be good for their health and went by plane.

  Christmas was held at the Sherman’s new home in Northbridge, where Janet and Jamie had formed close friendships with Beatrice and Luigi, their houseguests. Julia’s brother Daniel came with his wife and their two children. The last guest to arrive was Great-aunt Winifred. Her attendance had been kept a secret from Carlo, who greeted her with a shout of joy. She declared she hadn’t been hugged like that since she was a twenty-year-old, and would he please oblige her and do it again.

  On New Year’s Eve, Carlo and Julia took a small party—Beatrice, Luigi, and Gina to the Cowra camp. The Italian compounds were beginning to empty, but there was still a crowd to watch the fireworks display for the new year of 1946, just as Carlo had first seen it two years earlier. Standing amid the crowd, remembering how he had been dreaming of painting that sky, then recalling the dismal last occasion without Julia, he thought of all that had happened in the past twelve months. Their plans for a June reunion disrupted by the offer of a return to Italy and after that, the joyous months of shared love and seeing so much of his own country with her.

  “What are you thinking about so seriously?” came a soft whisper beside his ear. He slipped an arm around her waist.

  “Mostly about you,” he smiled. “A lot of my thoughts are about you.”

  “Nice ones?”

  “What else? Except for a year ago, when an accordion and a mandolin played White Christmas while I was thinking of you driving some bloody air force bigwig around, remembering us dancing to the music of Glen Miller.”

  “Moonlight Serenade…”

  “That’s the one. Then I was wishing I’d picked you up in my arms and carried you off to a bed somewhere so you could never go to Queensland.”

  “So why didn’t you?”

  “Because we had this damned agreement about just being friends.”

  “Stupid, hopeless agreement. I often wished you’d do just that.”

  “Do just what?”

  “Pick me up and carry me off to a bed somewhere.”

  “Now she tells me!”

  “Never mind, my darling. You were worth the wait. I hope I was.”

  “That was my serious thought. You were most certainly worth it.”

  “Then it’s just as well we’re not staying tonight at Aunty Win’s where the walls are less than soundproof. We’re at this posh new hotel.”

  “That was the focus of my thoughts about you. Tonight at the posh hotel
.”

  “Keep it for later, or people will guess. Meanwhile the news. I think my mum has persuaded your mum to come and live here.”

  “Your mum is a genius. I’ve always said that. What about Luigi?”

  “My dad is going to start this new firm. There’s a job if he wants it.”

  “I bet Janet arranged that, too.”

  “She did.”

  “Do you know something, darling? The smartest day of my life was when I reported to your father, the Major in charge at Griffith. If I’d gone the opposite way, towards the town of Leeton…”

  “If you’d gone to Leeton, you might have ended up with Tiffany Watson, and been rich.”

  “I’d much rather be going to the posh hotel with you.”

  “I’m not sure if it is such a posh hotel. That’s just what the advertisement says. We’ll see what we think.”

  “I don’t care if it’s a shack or a shithouse. As long as you’re there, that’s what matters.”

  She kissed him. “We’d better stop this conversation. People will talk.”

  She turned and started threading her way through the crowd to where Janet and Beatrice were standing, the Italians giving her a smile or an admiring look as her slim figure went past them.

  Carlo watched her and thought, The third amore in my life and the one that I was always was waiting for. Silvana was youthful excitement, most of all when she had no clothes on. Tiffany, as I once said to Janet, was a fond memory. A sexy fond memory might’ve been more accurate, but it would never have lasted. Whereas Julia and I are both best friends and deeply passionate lovers. Not a day goes by without me realising that. I go to sleep each night with the warmth of her body against mine. I wake each morning to feel I’m the luckiest man alive.

  EPILOGUE

  Carlo and Julia spent six months in Italy and six in Australia for the next few years. His series of war destruction and peace time replacement in the cities of Italy was published and led to similar books about Britain, Germany and France, in addition to his Australian landscapes and portraits. It enabled them to pursue their love of travelling until the birth of their first child. The birth of the second meant making a choice on where to settle. They chose Sydney, but continued to make frequent visits to Italy, so their children would enjoy seeing the rest of the world as much as they did. They bought a house in Balmoral overlooking the twin headlands of Sydney harbour that Carlo had always loved since the day he saw them from the foredeck of the Royal Star.

  It became something of a colony and well placed for baby-sitting when Beatrice and Luigi also settled in that part of Sydney. Sofia and Giovanni were regular visitors, Sofia selling her half-share in the bookshop to fund these trips. Gina came every summer to cover the tennis championships at White City. She met and married a tennis coach and reported the glory days when Australians like Lew Hoad, Ken Rosewall, Rod Laver, Margaret Court and Evonne Cawley were the top players in the world.

  Gianni and Alice had five children. Gianni inherited the farm after the death of his mother-in-law. He became an Australian citizen and a local councillor.

  Great Aunt Winifred lived to be 98, by which time she was a Great-Great Aunt to Carlo and Julia’s two children, Roberto and Gemma.

  When Tiffany Watson heard Tommo Thompson was due to be released she moved to Scotland and married a penniless Highland Earl. It was said she married him for the title, while he married her for the money. Rumour has it they were both happy.

  Tommo Thompson served only four years with time off for good behaviour. He set out to make himself respectable, starting a fund for impoverished people. However it was discovered donations were achieved by blackmail, with the funds paid into his own bank account. When last heard of, he was still in prison.

  Little is known about Salvatore, who left Italy hurriedly along with fugitives from Hitler’s Third Reich. He was sighted in Argentina, but after the capture of Adolf Eichmann there it was then rumoured he’d headed for Brazil. The flight was unnecessary, for apparently no one was pursuing him.

  It took almost three years before the last of the Italian POWs were returned to Italy in 1948, and many came back to spend their lives in Australia.

  Carlo and Julia and their children were guests in 1979 at Cowra when the spectacular Japanese Garden was opened.

  ABOUT THIS BOOK

  I was eighteen when I first saw Italian prisoners-of-war who’d been captured in North Africa and sent to Australia. Until then I’d enjoyed nearly two years as a teenage writer in wartime Sydney, surviving those polite but lethal letters that said “The Editor regrets,” until receiving the inevitable letter that was an army call-up. We recruits trained at Cowra not far from the Italian POW camp, and it was there I first became aware of the camaraderie between Italians and their Aussie guards. Many POWs who worked on local farms were trusted to return unescorted each day, a privilege never given to Japanese or German captives.

  The Italian sector was a surprising place. It had an orchestra and a choir as well as workshops where sculptors crafted miniature sculptures of Roman icons, like the Coliseum and Pantheon. There were also painters, some of whose work is still in local galleries, and in my research for this book over the past two years I kept meeting people who recalled the friendly Italians of those days.

  The war ended while I was at Cowra and I returned to civilian life and scripts for radio, until television began in 1956. The TV moguls imported shows from overseas at first, so my wife and I sold everything we owned and, with our two children, ages five and two, tried our luck in England. We planned on a visit of two years, but stayed 20. London was a great place in the sixties. I wrote for British and American television, as well as stage plays and feature films.

  One of the films, The Liquidator was directed by renowned cinematographer Jack Cardiff, and we became close friends. Jack and his wife had lived in Rome, and on one of our visits there we spent a day in the Villa Medici, the French-owned galleria. By the time we left that artistic treasure trove near the Spanish Steps I had the start of an idea about a young Italian painter, and how Rome’s most famous gallery changed his life. That visit to the Villa Medici triggered the long ago memory of Cowra’s wartime POW camp, becoming this novel some 70 years later.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  My thanks are due to Cowra historian, Lawrance Ryan. From the day we met and ever since then his help has been invaluable. Lawrence led me to Graham Apthorpe, author of A Town At War who provided details of Italian artists who worked in the camp. If there are errors in the freedom I allowed the Italians during their confinement, those errors are mine. I may have been swayed by the rapport that existed at the time when we trainees met the Italian POWs, but the war with Italy was over by then, and my memory of those days in that pleasant country town are very fond ones.

  My daughter Lyn Cawthorne accompanied me to Cowra on a research trip, and spent hours taking photographs in the local war museum. These were of great value, revealing the relaxed lives of prisoners and the amenities that were provided for them in the two Italian compounds.

  I’m indebted to close friends: Philippa Davern for Italian words and phrases, artist David Voigt for the solitary moments of a painter at work, and Maria Simmons, who translated an earlier book of mine, and this time provided details of locations in Italy. My grandson Pete provided legal advice for the court case. He also gave enthusiastic help with the storyline and often fixed my erratic computer when necessary. I’m obliged to Wikipedia for details of the Catalina flights from Perth to Ceylon, an amazing feat during World War Two.

  Once again, my thanks to the select and hard-working group at For Pity Sake Publishing: Anna Blackie, Candace Chidiac, John Cozzi, and especially Jennifer McDonald, who was not only my publisher but a very creative editor.

  Peter Yeldham

  pyeldham@bigpond.net.au

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Peter Yeldham OAM has been a writer since the age of seventeen when he wrote short stories and radio scripts. He went to En
gland, intending to stay a year and stayed nearly twenty, writing for British television, then feature films and stage plays, including the highly successful Birds on the Wing (in 1972 it was the top grossing play in Europe) and Fringe Benefits which ran for two years in Paris. He has written another six plays for the theatre and collaborated on the musical Seven Little Australians.

  His Australian work includes numerous mini-series, among them 1915, Captain James Cook, The Alien Years, All the Rivers Run, The Heroes, The Far Country, Run from the Morning, The Timeless Land, Ride on Stranger and The Battlers. His adaptation of Bryce Courtenay’s novel Jessica earned Peter a Logie award in 2005.

  He is the author of nine previous historical novels — A Bitter Harvest, The Currency Lads, Against the Tide, The Murrumbidgee Kid, A Distant Shore, Glory Girl, Barbed Wire and Roses, Above the Fold and Dragons in the Forest.

  In 1991 he received an Order of Australia Medal for achievement in film and television, and a Centenary Medal in 2003. Industry honours include six Australian Awards, a British Writers Guild Award, a Ned Kelly Award nomination for his thriller Without Warning, and an Emmy Award nomination for his television drama, Captain James Cook.

  For more information please visit www.peteryeldham.com

  More from Peter Yeldham

  ABOVE THE FOLD

  Luke Elliott and Claudia Marsden have fallen in love at a perilous time. The Second World War is raging in the Pacific, barbed wire and gun emplacements are strung along the northern beaches in preparation for invasion. As the war moves closer, their sextet of loyal school friends is splintering as individual career dreams are pursued. Luke yearns to be a journalist but a start in newspapers is proving challenging. The war’s end unexpectedly provides Luke’s big break, but the pursuit of his dream will keep him away from Australia and Claudia, with surprising consequences for them both.