Above the Fold
Page 37
Those few words, Stephanie thought, were what she’d been hoping to hear all her life. The network had offered her a contract but she thought she’d save that and tell them all about it later.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This is a work of fiction that took place during and after the Second World War, but some of the early chapters are similar to my own experience of those years. Like Luke Elliott I took a job as a messenger boy at 2GB, because it produced so much drama. I wrote radio scripts until the editor, perhaps in self-defence, began to accept them. Also like Luke I went to Japan, seeing Hiroshima just after the bomb. It was indeed like ‘a graveyard with not a tombstone in sight’.
The decision to bomb Japanese cities rather than demonstrate the power of the atomic bomb on uninhabited land was widely debated and reported. In my research I found that targets included Kyoto; many listed Hiroshima but after the event. I found no mention of Nagasaki.
The character of Kaito is based on a true event, a young child damaged by radiation whom we tried to help. I wrote about him in an article published in Australia by the Financial Review and in England by The Guardian. During my time in Kure we reported the fights that caused deaths between the group of Japanese ex-soldiers (IPRU) and occupation troops.
The conflict over tactics in the Korean War between MacArthur and President Truman is listed in the Truman Library Museum, and was reported almost daily at the time. The fatal letter MacArthur wrote to the Republican Leader in the House of Representatives was reproduced in most accounts of his sacking by the President. All of these incidents were a part of my life in the period while I was learning to be a writer from 1944 to 1951. If it seems to others a long time ago, imagine how long ago it feels to me.
Thanks are due to those who read the manuscript during the two-and-a-half years I spent writing and rewriting this book. In England my thanks to Robert Banks Stewart, in Australia to Vincent Ball, Pia Voigt and Ali Watts. It seems longer since I lunched with Ron Haddrick, a volunteer at the Sydney Olympics, who told me of his experiences that I was able to use here.
I am very grateful to a number of family members for their help. From my brother Richard who served in Korea, I learned of the heat, cold, and danger of that ill-conceived war. Research on polio from the internet was enhanced by my daughter-in-law, Mary Anne, herself a nurse who also helped with Claudia’s first nursing experience and contributed a vivid description of how her matron might have looked, which still makes me laugh.
Many thanks to my son, Perry, who did the first edit, and carefully corrected all my errors. And in particular to my grandson Peter Yeldham, who discovered in the All England Law Reports how the claim for compensation from suffering at Maralinga was defeated in the High Court. By a split of four to three, the Law Lords decided the veterans’ claim for radiation injury was out of time, dismissing the case. His discovery led to a search of reports embracing the 1984 Royal Commission, which opened up the whole sorry saga of Maralinga and the ‘dirty games’, John Keane’s words to describe how his father and other soldiers were treated there. His article in The Age entitled ‘Maralinga’s afterlife’ (11 May 2003) mentioned the weird names under which the so-called secret trials were carried out. Reporting for the Sydney Morning Herald on the High Court hearings in London, Belinda Tasker said Australian, New Zealand and Fiji veterans claimed they were ‘used as guinea pigs’ and how Australia was led by Britain on the atomic tests (‘Britain blasted over Maralinga tests’, 23 January 2009).
I found additional confirmation of the way Australian soldiers were used for experiments, and Aboriginal people were treated in my collection of newspapers, particularly an article in a British broadsheet written nearly 40 years ago. I’d often been told such old newspapers were a pain in the backside when moving house, but I had an odd feeling they’d come in handy one day.
And finally my thanks to the small and dedicated group who have been involved in this venture — Anna Blackie, Karl Castan, and John Cozzi. Most of all, my sincere and deepest thanks to Jennifer McDonald, who has worked so hard despite illness, to produce her vision of a new publishing company. There would be no book without her.
Peter Yeldham
Sydney, Australia
ALSO BY PETER YELDHAM
Barbed Wire and Roses
The First World War, everyone said in 1914, would be over by Christmas, and Stephen Conway rushes to enlist. Leaving behind a new wife and a baby on the way, he soon finds himself in the trenches of Gallipoli. Four horrific years later, Stephen is the only survivor of his platoon. Shell-shocked and disillusioned, and during the heat of battle on the blood-stained fields of France, he mysteriously disappears.
More than eighty years later, Stephen’s grandson Patrick finds a diary that leads him to Britain and France on a journey to discover what really happened. It is a journey during which he unexpectedly finds love and the truth about his grandfather’s fate that is even stranger and more shocking than he imagined.
Based on true events, this is an unforgettable novel of courage and survival from a master storyteller.