Legends of the Lost Lilies

by Jackie French

  Suddenly he sank onto the floor. A sob erupted, then another.

  ‘Danny!’ She kneeled beside him.

  ‘It’s Rose. She’s hurt. Dying. And Mum has gone and Dad is in a tree and I can’t do this alone! None of it. I’m no good at it. It’s all too much and —’

  ‘Shhh, love, shhh. You’re doing a splendid job. Everyone admires how you’ve taken charge. Shhh now, it will be all right Her arms were round him. He leaned on her, breathed in the perfume of fresh sweat, shampoo, and girl and a small hint of horse. He cried, cried for it all, held her tightly to keep her close . . .

  He sat back at last. ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘Don’t be. We all need someone, sometimes. I’m glad it was me.’

  Why had he never really noticed her before, just Rita and her staring breasts? Perhaps because Rita talked so much that Annie couldn’t.

  ‘I need to send a telegram to my mother and Aunt Lily. And . . . and . . . tell my father about Rose.’

  ‘Would you like me to come with you?’

  ‘To see Pa? Or to Sydney?’

  ‘Either or both. I’ve got my driver’s licence, and I know the roads.’

  ‘Are you sure?’ Because he didn’t want to do the long drive alone, or even alone with Pa, if he could persuade him to come, and Aunt Midge was an hour away and might be another hour’s ride beyond the homestead, and he didn’t have hours to spare, and Dr Patrick would be needed at the clinic. ‘If Pa agrees to come he . . . he might change his mind halfway. It might be . . . difficult.’

  ‘I’m going to be a doctor. Difficult will be my job. I can stay with my grandma in Sydney,’ she added.

  She held out her hand. He took it. He was no longer alone.

  Chapter 41

  Pumpkin Fruitcake

  (Can be made without eggs, butter or sugar.)

  ¼ cup butter (optional)

  1 cup brown sugar (optional)

  2 eggs (optional)

  1 cup mashed pumpkin

  2 teaspoons vanilla essence (optional) or 2 tablespoons finely grated orange zest

  2 cups sultanas, or mixed fruit

  2 cups self-raising flour

  Grease and flour a large cake tin.

  Cream butter and sugar; add eggs one by one; then pumpkin, vanilla and fruit, then the flour.

  The mixture should be quite moist, but if it seems too dry (which it may be if the pumpkin is dryish) then add a little milk or water or orange juice.

  Pour the mix into the tin; bake in a medium oven for one hour or till it’s brown on top and a skewer comes out clean.

  This cake is rich, moist, a wonderful deep golden colour and very, very good. Smaller cakes can also be made in old tin cans if you do not have a cake tin. Cut out the top and bottom of the can and rest it on a tray to make removing the cake easier and reduce the cooking time. The cake should spring back if you press it with your fingers.

  Bald Hill Progress Association Cookbook, 1944 edition, contributed by Mrs Harry Harrison (Midge)

  DANIEL

  Daniel pulled the damper from the ashes, expertly dusted it and broke off a crust, just as a man called John had once done. It steamed gently. He felt strangely close to the man named John at times like this. He was not John, of course, but Daniel Greenman, here for a holiday, which had been exactly the right thing to do. Just a few more days of hearing the soft rustle of red gum bark in the breeze, and he would be able to face . . .

  . . . the things he had no need to remember here.

  He dipped the hunk of damper into the billy of stew, made from a mutton chop Midge had given him that morning on her way in to the CWA cake stall, along with potatoes and carrots from their garden. He’d picked the native spinach himself. The best possible lunch . . .

  He looked up at the sound of a car. Danny emerged. Daniel looked at him with concern. His son seemed distressed. He had seemed so much happier lately. Mostly the two of them just sat together, gazing at the clouds or a wombat mooching out in the twilight. Danny always seemed more . . . settled . . . after they had watched together for a time.

  Daniel watched as the son held the door open for a girl with soft-looking brown hair and a cotton frock over bare brown legs. He felt he had met her, but would need to delve into the darkness of memory to find where. In a few days perhaps.

  Danny stepped towards him. ‘Pa?’ His voice had more uncertainty than Daniel had ever heard. The girl took his hand.

  Daniel smiled at his son reassuringly. ‘Would you like some stew? Or damper? It’s fresh made.’ He pulled off hunks for each of them.

  The girl took it, nibbled. ‘It’s very good,’ she said gently.

  ‘Pa,’ said the young man again, and there was a note of anguish now, as if he had no words. Daniel knew what it was like to be in torment that words could not express. The girl quickly put a hand on Danny’s arm.

  ‘Dr Greenman,’ she said. Daniel lost his smile at the use of his name. He could be ‘Pa’ but Dr Greenman was still impossible, because that . . .

  . . . it simply couldn’t be.

  But the girl was still speaking. ‘Rose has been badly hurt. She’s possibly dying. She’s in hospital in Sydney. She needs her father. Danny shouldn’t be alone either. Please, will you come with us?’

  Daniel sat very still. He had managed to keep John at bay, here in the tree dapples. He did not know if he could manage it in the clangs and yells of Sydney. Even the smell of a hospital . . . He had become a psychiatrist because that did not involve blood. But war had demanded surgeons . . . sawn-off bone, the pile of limbs with flies buzzing, always flies, the constant scream of men and guns . . .

  Rose. Dying! Danny.

  He could not be Dr Greenman. But he was ‘Pa’. If his children needed him he could do anything. Would do anything, even if he was not sure how.

  He should say something. Do something. But all he could think of was, ‘I’ll put out the fire. Here.’ He handed the girl the damper. ‘There’s golden syrup in that tin. Sweet things are good for shock. Good with damper too. You both better have some before we go.’ It was not enough, not the right words at all. But that was why he was here, because he could no longer manage what was proper, except in the vast simplicity of the bush.

  He quickly covered the coals with soil and turned. His son was standing there, crying. Daniel took a step towards him. It felt right. He took another. He reached for Danny, and held him close. He felt his son’s warmth, his pain, his strength. When had Danny grown so tall?

  For a moment Danny didn’t move.

  Then suddenly his arms were round his father, too, and Daniel realised that his own eyes held tears, too. He was Dr Daniel Greenman, whose shoulders could carry pain again, his own and others’. He would always be Dr Greenman now, not just because his son and daughter needed him, but because they were part of him, and so he could be strong.

  Chapter 42

  What is love? An exchange of obligations? Or the highest form of empathy, where you care more for another than you do for yourself. Once you love, you become more capable of love. It is one of the most contagious of emotions, running between families and friends and those who love the world, but so much less recognised than the other contagious emotions of fear, resentment and hate.

  Miss Lily, 1938

  ROSE

  It hurt.

  She did not know what hurt. Possibly it was easier to work out what did not hurt. Possibly it was best not to think at all.

  She could remember water. She remembered a man, an incredible man, but she did not know his name. A man who had been shot in front of her, there in the water, his blood staining the water, a man whose eyes held hers, despite his pain, as if willing her to live. And so she had lived.

  But she couldn’t see that man now. She had been scared then, but she was not scared now. Water was gentle, and pain was not. When she tried to open her eyes the light was too bright. When her eyes were closed she could see a soft silver light and that was best of all. If she just let the wa
ter carry her, there would be no pain at all . . .

  ‘My name is Paul, sir.’

  She knew the voice. For the first time she reached for thought. It was that voice and now she had a name and he was not in the water, and neither was he dead.

  She managed to open her eyes for a fraction of a second, and saw him sitting by her bed, in striped pyjamas, one leg in plaster, a bandage across his chest and over his shoulder, a pad strapped to the side of his neck. Their eyes met.

  The light still hurt, but she could feel him close. She didn’t want the water to take her now.

  ‘Sir, her eyes just opened. Only briefly, but I’m sure they did. Nurse, would you mind fetching her brother? No, I am not going anywhere till Miss Higgs-Vaile is conscious. Rose? Rose, can you hear me?’

  Footsteps. Rose didn’t need to listen to footsteps. The sea washed back again, the tide carrying her out towards the sun, leaving the crash of life and waves behind. Another voice, a nurse’s.

  ‘. . . you should really follow doctor’s orders and —’

  ‘I am not under your command, nor his, nor anyone’s except my captain’s and he’s not here. Miss Higgs-Vaile is my fiancée and I have every right to be here.’

  ‘And I am her father.’ A new voice. It held love, and protectiveness too.

  Rose opened her eyes, and he was there, truly with her, and not on holiday in any way. ‘Pa?’ she whispered.

  ‘Yes, darling. Pa’s here.’

  ‘Pa,’ she said again, then tried the name. ‘Paul?’

  ‘Here, love. Danny will be back in a moment.’ Paul took her hand. She managed to squeeze his fingers, felt her father take her other hand.

  She could sleep now, she decided. And definitely not float away. Because when she woke they would be here, both of them, and Danny too. Her brother and her father and . . . and . . .

  Paul.

  Chapter 43

  Bavarian Pretzels

  1 teaspoon dry yeast or 1 cup dough from yesterday’s baking

  ⅓ cup warm water

  A pinch of salt

  4½ cups flour

  2 tablespoons bicarbonate of soda

  More water

  Heat oven to a medium temperature.

  Dissolve yeast in ⅛ cup warm water. Stir in remaining warm water, salt and flour, and leave for an hour or till it bubbles, or mix the flour and water with yesterday’s dough. Knead the dough until smooth and elastic, then leave to rise under a damp towel in a warm place till it doubles in size. Remove a cup of dough for tomorrow’s baking.

  Half fill a pan with water, and add the bicarbonate of soda. Simmer.

  Cut the dough into ten pieces. Roll each into a long snake shape with your fingers, with the middle a little thicker. Pick up the ends and bend them to the middle till they look like rabbit ears, then pull the ends back to make a loop. This sounds impossible, but if you have a picture of a pretzel in front of you, you will see how it should go. Otherwise make whatever shape you like. Leave to rise in a warm place till doubled in size. Place pretzels one at a time in the water, leave for 20 seconds, then push each pretzel under the water. Use a slotted spoon to remove the pretzel and place it on a greased baking tray. Make a slit in the thickest part of the pretzel and scatter on coarse salt. Repeat till all are done. Bake for 15 to 20 minutes till the pretzels are gold to dark brown on top. Eat with sweet mustard.

  JULY 1944

  SOPHIE

  July roses, such luxurious abundance, planted in the ’20s when Hannelore’s factories had made her wealthy once again, with Dolphie’s new wife’s inheritance to play with as well. A glory of roses, even though they had not been pruned since the beginning of the war, whites and pinks and reds, a scent that followed Sophie around the gardens. The hothouse cucumbers were ready and the strawberries. Her second summer of German strawberries, raspberries . . .

  It would be winter in Australia. The river would have that strange not-quite-brown of cold water. There’d be quilts on the beds and a fire at night in the library, Rose and Danny in their winter uniforms, their last year at school.

  Where would life take her children from here? Where were the Australian armies fighting now? Was Danny still destined for New Guinea jungles, trying to stop the unstoppable march of Japanese forces? Would Rose join the Red Cross, or even the army too? Sophie had worried all their lives, with vague motherly concern: would they break a shoulder riding a bicycle, a horse, be bitten by a snake on a picnic, be snagged by a sunken branch while swimming in the river? Polio, measles, chickenpox, whooping cough, tuberculosis, quinsy, the memory of the bullies who’d claimed they smelled corned beef in her brief time at school as they walked hand in hand through Bald Hill Central’s gates, then later took the train together to their respective boarding schools.

  There’d been no bullies, or Rose and Danny had faced them down, and anyway corned beef was quite respectable now, especially coupled with their titles, which they bore so lightly that those who might have mocked them never tried it more than once.

  They’d whooped, and had the measles and the other common childhood ailments, from nits to ringworm, but only needing plates of mashed banana sprinkled with brown sugar, or grated apple and a glass of lemonade, coupled with a few new books to read. She had never imagined this greatest torment of any parenthood: a time when there was nothing she could do . . .

  She peered out of the glasshouse at the first sound of an engine, the basket of raspberries in her hand. At first she thought the noise was just another distant aircraft, for it had been so long since she had heard a car. The black vehicle rumbled up the driveway and parked around the back, near the servants’ courtyard, not out the front, so it was only when she ran to meet it that she knew for certain it was Dolphie.

  Hannelore emerged. Grünberg and Simons peered from the kitchen windows.

  ‘Dolphie?’ began Hannelore, as he opened the driver’s door and stepped out, boots gleaming. He almost seemed to glow in the afternoon sunlight. He gazed around, as if drinking in the garden’s beauty, then smiled and kissed Hannelore’s forehead. ‘It is over,’ he said simply.

  The sun danced, the birds became an orchestra. Even the air turned gold. The war was over! Or nearly so. Finally, incredibly. ‘Hitler is dead?’ Sophie managed.

  Dolphie turned to her, still with that serene smile. ‘No. The plot failed. The bomb exploded but he survived. I am associated with the plotters. They know us, now.’ Dolphie looked at Hannelore, then Sophie, then back to Hannelore. ‘We have all been given a choice,’ he added calmly. ‘To be arrested and executed, or take our own lives. I chose the latter.’

  Sophie stared at him in horror, and a burning anguish, for him, herself and for the world. ‘Dolphie! It . . . it can’t be true.’

  ‘Of course it can be true,’ said Hannelore gently. ‘So many have tried to kill the Führer, for nearly twenty years. Liebe Sophie, I’m sorry your hopes were carried by a three-legged horse. But any plot had only a slim chance. You did not realise?’

  Sophie shook her head numbly. She had assumed . . . James had told her . . . Bob had told her . . . not, they had not said a plot would succeed. They had spoken of a chance, ‘any slim chance’. She was the one who had dreamed that war could end so easily, with the death of just one man.

  ‘The condemned man ate a good lunch, and dinner too. I have until midnight. In return for dying neatly and with no publicity they have agreed my family will not be harmed, nor my possessions confiscated.’ Dolphie shrugged. ‘It would be embarrassing to have too many prominent officers like Field Marshal Rommel on trial or executed as enemies of the Reich.’

  Sophie stood motionless, still trying to absorb this new view of the world. Field Marshal Rommel, the famous ‘Desert Fox’, and Germany’s greatest hero, had been one of the plotters too? The rebellion then had reached the highest possible level of German military — and had still failed.

  Dolphie moved towards the kitchen door. Hannelore laid her hand on his arm. ‘We have a choice. Escape
.’

  ‘To where?’

  ‘To Switzerland. If we leave now . . .’

  He looked at her patiently. ‘The roads from the Lodge will be watched.’

  ‘We can row across the lake.’

  He gestured. Sophie saw a flash that might be binoculars. ‘This is the new Germany, my niece. One does not even meet death without informers checking all is as the Führer wants. Besides, when Germany loses the war — and I think we will certainly lose it now — I will be a war criminal, executed by the victors, or, at the least, imprisoned all my life.’ He smiled. ‘Hanneleine, my darling, come inside.’

  Sophie had never heard him use the diminutive before. Here was a man who knew he had only hours of life, and he would drink each second in.

  He had till midnight. Whatever would happen to her and Hannelore after that — and without Dolphie’s oversight they might just possibly escape — this time must be for him. She suddenly wished she was wearing silk, not the old cotton dress perfect for weeding the onions. Her hands smelled of onions too. They must dress for dinner tonight . . .

  Yet Hitler was alive, would stay alive most probably, till the war’s end. Dolphie must spare them some seconds to prepare. ‘Dolphie,’ she said urgently. ‘What is happening? Please? We hear nothing!’

  ‘Germany is slowly losing. Quite slowly, so with the Führer gone we still might have negotiated good terms. But now?’ Dolphie shrugged. ‘It will be up to the victors to dispose of us again. I hope the English, Russians and Americans have more sense than to let France overrule them this time, so revenge does not lead us to yet another false peace and then to yet another war. But it is almost a relief to know I will not be there to fight for justice.’