My Father's War Read online

  My Australian Story

  MY FATHER’S

  WAR

  Sophie Masson

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  The Diary of Annie Cliff France, 1918

  1918

  Historical Note

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Copyright

  The Diary of Annie Cliff

  France, 1918

  1918

  February 11, 1918

  Mum hardly slept a wink last night. I know because I woke up in the middle of the night and heard her moving about. I was going to get up too, and start this journal, but I was too tired. So I went back to sleep, not waking again till nearly nine o’clock when Mum brought me a cup of tea and told me it was time to get the last of my things packed. She hasn’t slept properly for days, and she looks tired and drawn, but as determined as ever. Besides, it’s too late now. It’s decided and that’s it. Our fares are paid, and the boat leaves the day after tomorrow, bright and early.

  Nan and Pop think it’s a crazy thing to do. So do Uncle Russ and Auntie Marjorie. ‘We’re Harry’s flesh and blood,’ Auntie Marjorie said the other day, ‘and we don’t think he’d want you to do this, Mary-Cloud.’ That’s what she always calls my mother, Mary-Cloud, though I’m sure she knows perfectly well how Mum’s name, Marie-Claude, is meant to be pronounced. She just says it like that to show that a) she thinks it is a silly French name, and b) she still disapproves of the fact her brother, the ‘baby’ of the family, came back from a long trip to Europe with what she called a ‘far too young and far too pretty’ French wife. (Mum was only 17 when she married Dad, 18 when she had me—he is four years older. She is very pretty, that’s true, but how can you be too pretty, it doesn’t make sense! But then a lot of things Aunt Marjorie says don’t make much sense!)

  Mind you, Mum always mispronounces Auntie Marjorie’s name too, calling her Marjoramy, and I know she does it deliberately as well. Dad always jokes about the war between his wife and his sister, and says it’s because they’re too alike. When he’s around they don’t fight much, but when he’s not it’s daggers drawn. But I don’t take sides and they don’t make me either, which is good because I love them both (Mum more of course, that is only natural). And Uncle Russ and Nan and Pop don’t take sides either. Uncle Russ just rolls his eyes when Mum and Auntie Marjorie bicker and Nan and Pop take no notice at all.

  But this time it is different because all of them think that Mum is doing the wrong thing, going to France to see if we can find Dad, because there’s been no word from him in months and she is very worried. He has been away for nearly two years now, fighting far away on the Somme battlefields in northern France—part of what the newspapers call the Western Front—and though we had letters from him at first, in the last few months there’s been nothing. We miss him so much.

  ‘Just thank your lucky stars there’s been no telegram,’ Pop said gruffly. It made me shiver when he said that. I know of more than one person at school to whom that happened—one day they came home from class and their mum was crying at the kitchen table because they’d received a telegram informing them that their dad had been killed or badly injured. So many, many people have been killed, and so many wounded too. Sometimes I’ve seen returned soldiers in the streets with limbs missing, or blind, or with this mad look in their eyes. It is really frightening. It scares me a lot sometimes, thinking of Dad out there far away in that dangerous, terrible place, wondering how he will be when he comes back, if he comes back, that is …

  ‘Don’t you think we’re worried about him too?’ Nan said. ‘We miss him a good deal as well, but there’s a war on, for goodness sake, and you’ve got to let the men get on with it.’

  Mum muttered that that was the problem, we had let men get on with it, but I don’t think Nan heard her, or she’d have got a lecture on a woman’s true duty and place.

  Pop said hurriedly that she should not worry too much, because if something had happened—if Dad was missing or sick or injured—then we’d have been told. We hadn’t heard anything of the kind, so he must be alive and well. ‘Besides,’ he went on, ‘the Somme front has been relatively quiet lately. It’s Flanders where most of the action’s happening. And last time you heard from Harry, didn’t he say that because he can speak French, he was to be transferred from infantry to an international signals post at base? He’ll be much safer there, don’t you worry.’

  Mum said, ‘Then why hasn’t he written for so long?’

  Pop said maybe he didn’t have time.

  Mum said it just wasn’t like him, wasn’t in character, and reminded Pop that she’d tried to get information through the Army here, and they lost her request. Everything went so slowly, and she felt as though it was the last thing they wanted to be bothered with.

  Pop said, ‘Well, you know, my dear, that’s quite understandable, given the number of men there, he is only one among—’

  ‘Exactly,’ said Mum, ‘And that’s why I know I have to go there myself.’

  Nan said fretfully, ‘How on earth can you pay for this? We can’t afford to give you anything.’

  ‘I wasn’t planning on asking,’ said Mum coolly. ‘I’ve been saving up the money I earn teaching those French and Latin classes.’ (She knows Nan and Pop disapprove of her doing that, but she’s determined not to just rely on their generosity.) ‘I have enough for the trip and for us to get by in France. Plus there is my Aunt Irma if we are really stuck.’

  Aunt Irma is Mum’s only relative (her parents were killed in a railway accident when she was ten and her aunt brought her up). But though she worked hard to get Mum into university, in her very first year Mum met Dad. They fell in love at first sight, and because Aunt Irma would not give her consent, they ran away together and got married anyway, and then went to live in Australia.

  It is all terribly romantic, but Aunt Irma did not think so. She does not think much of men, Mum told me, and in her view an artist like Dad, even a commercial artist, could only ever be the worst of men—unreliable, unstable and above all poor. Anyway, it’s all long ago now, and Aunt Irma has forgiven Mum and so we are meant to go and see her some time after we’ve found Dad.

  Nan humphed, because of course as Dad’s mum she doesn’t think much of someone who thought even briefly that her son was a layabout, but she didn’t say anything more. It was left to Aunt Marjorie to say the really silly thing, and snap, ‘Anyway, Mary-Cloud, why can’t you be sensible, for once? You will never get permission to visit him, I am sure, no matter how much you try.’

  Mum said sharply that on the contrary, it was quite possible to get permission to go to the front, she’d heard of many French women who had done so.

  Auntie Marjorie snorted and said ‘Ha, French women, no-one with any sense or decency would go haring off like that.’

  She would have said more only Uncle Russ chipped in hurriedly, saying, ‘But Marie,’ (that’s what he always calls her) ‘what would Harry say if he knew what you were planning?’

  Mum looked at him. ‘You really don’t know your brother, Russ, if you think that Harry would think better of me for just sitting on my hands. I’ve never done that. I never will.’

  Uncle Russ looked exasperated. ‘But even if you get to the front, so what? For heaven’s sake, woman, you can hardly put on a uniform and fight at Harry’s side!’ I think he spoke sharply because he feels bad about not having been able to go to war, on account of the fact he’s too old (he’s fifteen years older than Dad) and he has bad asthma.

  Mum gave him a black look. But she said nothing, just shrugged.

  ‘What about the kiddie?’ Nan said for the umpteenth time (that’s me, even though I am eleven-and-a-h
alf and most certainly not a kiddie anymore at all). ‘Why don’t you at least leave her behind with us?’

  ‘No way,’ I said, hotly, before Mum could answer. ‘We have to find Dad. I’m going with Mum, and no-one can stop me!’

  Mum smiled. ‘You see. Annie understands.’

  ‘Chip off the old block,’ smiled Pop, giving me a wink.

  Nan glared at him. ‘For heaven’s sake, she’s just a child, what would she know?’

  ‘I’m not a child, I’m growing up, I’m nearly twelve. Besides, Dad said that I—’ but I never got to finish what I was going to say, because then Auntie Marjorie broke in.

  ‘If you ask me, I think it’s shameful for a respectable woman to be running after her husband like that. No man could possibly like it.’

  Mum, her eyes flashing, retorted, ‘One, Marjoramy, I am not asking you; and two, how would you, who have never even had a real sweetheart, possibly know what a man might like?’

  So of course then it was all on. It took a while for Pop and Nan and Uncle Russ to calm them down and force them to apologise to each other. But I don’t suppose either of them meant it!

  Anyway, all their opposition did was make Mum even more stubborn. There is no way she would ever back down now, even if she wanted to. And she doesn’t. She loves Dad madly and she is worried about his silence. Like she said herself, she is not someone who can sit on her hands, even if it means trouble and danger. She can’t wait. She has to act. She is not ‘sensible’, at least not the kind of sensible Auntie Marjorie means. She doesn’t like people telling her what to do. But she is so very brave and determined, once she’s made up her mind! Nothing and no-one can budge her.

  I think it’s great. I think she’s just like the heroine in this story I love, an old French story set way back in the time of Louis XIV, the Sun King. There’s this girl who has a sweetheart and he goes off to war far away, in a regiment called the Green Dragoons. She doesn’t hear from him for a long time, so she dresses up as a soldier in the uniform of the Green Dragoons and she goes after him. She has lots of adventures on the way and has to fight people and get out of scrapes, but she finally catches up with him, and it all ends happily.

  PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE, God, let this end happily too!

  What I didn’t get to tell them (because of Auntie Marjorie interrupting) was that the day Dad left he took me aside and said, ‘Clogs,’ (that’s his nickname for me—it comes from ‘clever clogs’, which he’s always saying I am!) ‘I want you to promise something. I want you to promise that you’ll be the very best you can possibly be for your mum. It’s going to be hard for her. You have to look after her. Make sure she doesn’t get too sad.’

  I was so proud he asked me that. Just as if I wasn’t just a no-account ‘kiddie’ like the others think, but a real proper person! Of course I nodded and hugged him and said I would, and I’ve tried my hardest to live up to it. I’ve tried hard not to get into trouble at school. I’ve tried to help at home and to be as good as I can, though sometimes it’s hard because things get on my goat and I feel like I want to lash out. But mostly I manage to stop myself. Mum says I’ve been a great help to her and she tells that to Dad too, in her letters, so he knows I am keeping my promise. But she doesn’t know what he said to me. I’ve never told her or anyone else, but I nearly let it out today when I thought they were going to try and stop me from going with Mum. I’m glad in a way that I didn’t say it!

  February 12

  I have all my bags packed and I’m sitting around waiting to go, looking at my very favourite sketch of Dad’s that he sent me in a letter last year. It’s of a Red Cross ambulance driver nursing a wounded soldier. I’m going to bring it with me. Dad writes that the Red Cross people are incredible, ‘brave as lions and gentle as lambs’, as he put it. There are many women—nurses—as well as men in the Red Cross, and though they don’t fight they are often right in the line of danger, and risk their lives to retrieve the wounded from the battlefield. Not only are they at risk of being accidentally killed, but sometimes they can even be murdered, like poor Nurse Cavell who was shot as a spy by the Germans. They are so brave and so kind. I think that if I was a grown-up that’s what I would want to do!

  February 13

  On the boat! It was so exciting to set off, with everyone on the quay waving at us! Nan cried a little, and that made me feel a bit bad, but nobody else did. Auntie Marjorie came and looked sour, but she didn’t say a word. Pop and Uncle Russ were very hearty, and said over and over that we had to take care, and that we had to write as soon as we got there.

  Once we had pulled away from the quay, I didn’t really think of what we were leaving behind, I was just so excited we were going!

  It was fun to discover our cabin—we are in second class, our cabin is small but quite private—and to take our first walk on the deck. As we went out of the Heads, Mum was looking green. Soon she began to feel very sick, and she has spent most of the day in the cabin. But I don’t feel sick at all and I have begun to explore the ship. I’m hoping to find some people my age that I can talk to and play with. There are bound to be some!

  February 19

  Well, there weren’t. There’s no-one my age on the boat, at least not in our class (we aren’t allowed up in first class, and Mum won’t let me go down to third class). There are a couple of small, noisy and annoying children, who I keep well clear of.

  We have been on the boat nearly a week now and I hate it. There is nothing to see but the deadly dull, boring sea that goes on and on and on, and nothing to do but walk up and down the boring smelly corridors (or gangways, or whatever they are called on the boat), walk around on the deck, and read the same books over and over. I brought my favourites—Little Women, What Katy Did, and What Katy Did at School. I do love them, but I have read them about eight times each already! Oh, there is one other thing to do—wait for meals. But the food is very dull, just potatoes and stew all the time. I am missing Mum’s good cooking badly.

  Poor Mum would not even have wanted to think of food for the first few days, she was sick sick sick and could hardly even lift her head from the pillow, I had to fetch her cups of tea and things like that. Now she is better and sits up on the deck when it is sunny and spends her time reading or chatting.

  Like I said, most of the passengers are grown-ups. Some of them are quite old too, much much older than Mum. For instance, grey-haired Miss Eveleigh, who often sits with us at meal-times, and who is going to Brighton in England to help run her war-invalid nephew’s boarding-house; and a big pipe-smoking lady called Mrs Hope who is going to help her widowed daughter look after her two young sons, also in England. There’s also Miss Jeffries, who’s a few years older than Mum and is going to join the Red Cross in Flanders! She’s a nurse and has had experience of war already—she was in a Red Cross unit at Gallipoli three years ago. (I showed her the picture that Dad had done of the Red Cross man—she said it was really beautiful, and so special.)

  Then there’s Mr Van Delden, who I thought at first was a German because of his accent. But he is actually a Belgian refugee, from the region called Flanders where there have been lots of battles. He is going to Paris where his elderly mother, who had to flee from her home, is sick in hospital.

  There’s also Mr Townsend, who occasionally sits at our table. He should really be in first class, because he’s quite rich, but he says no-one stayed rich who just wasted money and second class is good enough for him. He owns a small factory that tins meat and such. He was boasting the other day about how business is booming because of the army needing lots of extra food. Mrs Hope (when he was out of earshot) said fiercely that it was disgusting, talking of profits when men are dying in the mud every second of every day, and scores more injured, and millions of families are left in agony wondering what has become of their loved ones.

  The war has been going on for four years. It is so long that sometimes I can hardly even remember what it was like in peacetime. The actual battles might be far away from
us in Australia, but they touch just about everyone. One of my friends, Alice Best, lost her dad in France a year ago, and a boy in my class called Kevin Myers has lost his big brother, and the son of our next-door neighbours, the Shields, was killed at that terrible battle at Gallipoli three years ago, and another neighbour, Mr Toohey, has just been invalided back with terrible scars from the burning and blistering of mustard gas, and he’s not quite right in the head now and shouts at people in the street.

  Sometimes you see crippled returned soldiers standing on street corners trying to make a living selling bits and bobs, or just straight-out begging. And lots and lots of families, not just us, have had to do without dads or brothers or sons or husbands for ages.

  No-one likes the war. In fact, everyone hates it. It wasn’t like that at first. People were enthusiastic. I remember going down to Circular Quay to see soldiers setting off, and everyone waving and cheering! It was like they were all going to a great adventure. Besides, just about everyone thought it would be over quickly, that the enemy would soon be beaten. I remember Dad telling us that it would be over by Christmas. Then by Easter. Then he stopped talking about the end of the war and one day, just after Anzac Day 1916—I remember it exactly!—he came home and announced he’d joined up. I remember the look on Mum’s face. She just stood there and looked at him with tears in her eyes and then she put her arms around him and said softly, ‘Oh, Harry, oh my dear, dear love …’

  And that was it. She did not cry or scream or try to stop him. That’s not her way. It’s not that she wanted him to go. Quite the opposite. From the beginning she’s hated the war. She wouldn’t come with us that time we went to Circular Quay to see the boatloads of soldiers setting off. She said she couldn’t bear it. But when it came to the sticking point, she understood. She knew Dad had to do it. She knew he couldn’t look himself in the eye if he didn’t go. She doesn’t complain. She doesn’t weep and wail. She just gets on with things. Dad’s family thinks she has no patience, but that’s not true. She’s put up with Dad being away for ages. She’s tried so hard. She writes bright and happy letters to him. She’s comforted me when I’ve been missing Dad too much and I can’t keep up my resolve. It’s only since we haven’t heard from him for so long that things have changed.