The Year It All Ended Read online

  Even as the name slipped from her lips, she knew she shouldn’t have mentioned the McCaffreys. Percy, the eldest of the three brothers, would never return. Thea looked at Tiney with her soft grey eyes and Tiney felt grief clutch at her heart, to think of smiling, laughing Percy dead and gone.

  ‘Come inside and have supper with us,’ she said, taking Thea’s hand. ‘We’ll grieve the lost boys tomorrow and every day for the rest of our lives. But tonight, just tonight, we’re going to be happy.’

  White feathers

  Tiney sat up in bed and looked out the window. Nette was gathering armfuls of blossom from the garden. Pink roses, sweet-scented and downy in the dawn light, were in bloom, and the first wisteria was budding on the side verandah. By the time Tiney joined Nette in the kitchen, every vase was full, every corner of the room bright with flowers. Tiney stood in her dressing gown and slippers and smiled.

  ‘Wouldn’t it be lovely if everything was in bloom when Louis came home? We could fill the whole house with flowers for him,’ said Nette. ‘We must start thinking of ways to make everything feel cheerful. I think we should paint the kitchen and put new curtains in his bedroom.’

  ‘No!’ said Tiney. ‘We mustn’t touch his bedroom.’

  ‘Well, I was about to ask you to help, Martina, but if you’re going to be cantankerous . . .’

  ‘It’s only that I don’t want Louis to find anything changed.’

  ‘But everything’s changed, hasn’t it?’ said Minna, coming into the room behind her. ‘Who knows what Louis will be like?’

  ‘Louis will always be our Louis,’ said Nette. ‘I’m the closest to him in age. I should know.’

  ‘You’re not his favourite,’ said Minna.

  ‘I didn’t say I was. He never played favourites.’

  Minna rolled her eyes and looked at Tiney. ‘I think Tiney was his favourite. She was always his darling. But he probably won’t even recognise you now, Tiney.’

  Tiney remembered when Louis used to measure her against the front fencepost and tease her about being like a fairy. He cut her name into the wood on her eighth birthday – Martina Agnes Flynn. Tiney felt her eyes swell with tears just thinking about it. She turned and walked away, down the hall to Louis’ room.

  As a little girl, Tiney used to hide in Louis’ room whenever she was in trouble or unhappy. It was her safe haven. Standing in the middle of his room now, she could almost imagine he’d never been away. Everything was exactly as he had left it, though perhaps a little tidier. A square of morning light on the rug highlighted a faded corner of the blue wool. She thought of opening all the windows, but perhaps Mama would be upset. Mama loved to dust and air the room. Sometimes, in the evenings Tiney would see her, sitting in Louis’ room in the dark, on the end of the bed, one hand stroking the pale blue bedcover, smoothing the fabric.

  Tiney sat down on the patch of sunlight. It was cool in Louis’ room through most of the day, so it was also her favourite place to escape the heat. She ran her finger along a line of books on the bookshelf. Tiney used to love The Australian Boy’s Book of Empire Stories. When Louis had first gone away, she would lie on the blue rug in his room and thumb through those big, fat annuals, imagining she was going on adventures in India or Africa. Now she preferred the leather-bound volumes of poetry by German, English and Australian poets; Goethe, Schiller, Hölderlin, Byron and Keats as well as Henry Lawson and Adam Lindsay Gordon. They sat alongside a collection of little books of quotes with silky-smooth covers and vellum pages that each of his sisters had given him. She took a volume of Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre by Goethe from the shelf and flipped it open to find Louis had pencilled a small star beside one line and translated it from German to English: Das Leben gehört den Lebenden an, und wer lebt, muss auf Wechsel gefasst sein. ‘Life belongs to the living, and those who live must be prepared for change.’

  Tiney rubbed her eyes. She mustn’t cry. Everything was about to change for the better.

  There was a gentle tap and Thea put her head around the doorframe. ‘Nette and Minna didn’t mean to be scratchy. You’d better come out of there now and have breakfast. Nette says you both have to get down to the Cheer-Up Hut before your eight o’clock shift. She’s got everyone’s day completely mapped out.’

  Tiney laughed.

  The table was set for breakfast, with plates of steaming hot scrambled eggs and fried sheep’s kidneys. Mama poured tea and handed around toast. Papa sat at the head of the table, reading the newspaper.

  ‘Hurry up, Tiney,’ said Nette, as she topped up the teapot. ‘We have to get to the Cheer-Up Hut early if we’re going to get away in time to hear the official announcements by the Premier. I’d hate to be serving lunch and miss it.’

  ‘He’s going to announce a whole week of celebrations,’ said Minna. ‘And I’m going to go to every single event.’

  ‘Sadly, not everyone at the Cheer-Up Hut will be able to get away,’ said Nette. ‘Now that the war is over, we’ll be busier than ever with all the men coming home. It’s a shame more people in this family don’t understand that and offer to pitch in.’

  Minna didn’t take the bait. She sipped her tea and then took her plate to the sink to begin washing up. ‘What about your students, Minna?’ asked Papa.

  ‘No one’s going to want to come to music lessons today!’ said Minna. ‘I can’t imagine anyone will turn up for Latin or Greek either, Papa. We can all have a day off.’

  Papa sighed. Tiney wished her parents would come into the city as well, but she knew Mama was shy of crowds and Papa would never leave her at home alone.

  ‘Should we take flower petals to throw at the announcement?’ asked Tiney.

  ‘There’s not much left in the garden since you stripped all the larkspur and the red and white roses last week,’ said Mama.

  ‘We had to!’ said Nette. ‘If only you’d seen, Mama! We stood on the balcony in Hindley Street and flung the petals into the air as General Pauc and the French Mission passed by. The soldiers loved it. There couldn’t have been a rose bush or larkspur left in Adelaide with a single bloom. All that blue and red and white, just like the French flag.’

  ‘Well, I don’t think pink is quite the thing for victory, is it?’ Mama said. ‘So perhaps you can spare me my pink roses at least.’

  Nette kissed Mama on the cheek while Tiney and Minna fastened on their hats. Even Thea decided to join the celebrations. The sisters walked together down the middle of Arthur Street in the bright morning sunshine. Nette with her pink cheeks and fierce dark blue eyes, her long golden hair wound into a bun, strode a little ahead. Unlike dark-haired Minna and Louis, Nette, Thea and Tiney took after Mama. Their skin was pale, their hair blond, their faces echoing the features of their Prussian ancestors. But since the war, Nette never let anyone say they looked like ‘Rhine Maidens’ – no one wanted to remember the fact that Mama’s family was German.

  When they reached the city, they disembarked from the tram together but Thea headed off along North Terrace to the Society of Arts. Minna was secretive and wouldn’t say where she was going, except that she’d meet the others at the steps of Parliament House at midday, while Nette and Tiney headed to the Cheer-Up Hut.

  Nette had been a Cheer-Up girl ever since Mrs Saeger had started the organisation to help comfort and support the troops back in 1915. Too young to sign on, Tiney had worked for all the Violet Day Appeals instead, selling buttons and badges on the streets of Adelaide and then waiting for Nette outside the old Hut behind the Adelaide Railway Station. By the time she was allowed to join, a new Hut had been built in Elder Park. She’d longed to wear the crisp white uniform and the wimple that would disguise her old-fashioned plaits. Mama insisted she wasn’t allowed to put her hair up, not until Louis came home.

  Tiney was faraway in her thoughts, imagining Louis standing on the balcony of the Hut when she heard Nette call out, ‘Vera! Vera!’

  Vera Destry was in her white Cheer-Up uniform too, hurrying across the dry grass away from the Hu
t. She must have been on the dawn shift. She looked at Nette oddly and kept walking. Tiney couldn’t understand it. Only last week Vera and Nette had been best chums, resting their feet on a chair and sharing a cup of tea after a long lunchtime shift at the Hut.

  ‘Vera!’ called out Nette. ‘Whatever is the matter?’

  ‘I don’t want to talk about it,’ said Vera, thin-lipped. ‘Not with you.’

  ‘What’s wrong?’ asked Nette. ‘There’s no cause for anyone to be miserable! It’s over, Vera. The boys will be flooding home! Buck up!’

  ‘Nette,’ said Vera, closing her eyes, ‘I’ve just found out that I’ve lost my brother Tommy. He’s been dead since September but the news only just reached us.’

  ‘Oh, Vera,’ said Nette, reaching out.

  ‘Don’t touch me!’ said Vera, suddenly fierce. ‘If it wasn’t for you, girls like you, he would never have gone.’

  Nette stepped back. ‘What an extraordinary thing to say! He enlisted of his own free will. You showed me his photo. He was a strapping young man.’

  ‘He wasn’t a man. He lied about his age. He was only sixteen years old when he signed up and barely seventeen when he was slaughtered. I never wanted him to go. But after you gave him the white feather . . .’

  ‘Me?’

  ‘Yes, you. You told me yourself, last week, that you and that wretch Sylvie Pilkington would stand on the steps of the railway station handing white feathers out to every “strapping” young man you saw. Tommy was given three. Three feathers to a little boy of fifteen!’

  ‘We wouldn’t have known he wasn’t of age,’ said Nette, turning pale.

  ‘I couldn’t stop him,’ said Vera, starting to sob. ‘I told him he was too young. The first time he tried, they refused him, but then he ran away to Melbourne and signed up there. He would never have gone if he hadn’t been made to feel ashamed.’

  Tiney thought about Tommy Destry, a boy she might have passed on the street and looked at shyly, or sat beside in a schoolroom when she was small. A boy who would never be a man.

  Vera’s sobs convulsed her body. ‘I raised him from when he was only eight years old. He was my little boy.’

  ‘Vera, you must try to pull yourself together,’ said Nette. ‘You’re not alone. Look at Mrs Saeger. She lost her son and she soldiers on. Don’t let this spoil things.’

  Vera looked at Nette with blazing eyes, her face suddenly contorted. ‘Spoil things?’ she said. ‘Nette Flynn. Everyone knows you’re half-Hun. You’ve spent the whole war trying to cover up your shame, trying to convince everyone of your patriotism. But you don’t convince me.’

  She shoved Nette in the chest and then turned and dashed through the park, tearing off her white wimple as she ran.

  Nette put one hand to her cheek, as if she’d been slapped.

  ‘She talks as if I killed Tommy! If I did give him a feather, it would have been because he looked like a great hulk of a man. How was I to know?’

  Tiney slipped one arm around Nette’s waist and gave her a quick hug. Secretly, she had never felt comfortable about Nette’s white-feather campaign but she loved her sister too much to criticise her. ‘Vera’s upset,’ she said. ‘We can’t imagine how awful it must be to lose a brother.’

  Nette didn’t reply. It was as if the day had grown overcast, though the sun still shone on the Torrens. They trudged towards the Cheer-Up Hut in silence.

  The Cheer-Up Society

  Inside the Cheer-Up Hut, hundreds of soldiers in the dining hall were joking and calling to each other along the length of the tables, but Nette kept her head down. Tiney felt a flicker of worry for her. It wasn’t like brash, bright Nette to be so silent.

  While Nette disappeared into the storerooms, Tiney donned rubber gloves, tied on a heavy apron and placed an upturned fruit box in front of one of the sinks as a makeshift step. Hundreds of plates, teacups and saucers from the breakfast service were piled high in crates. Tiney plunged her hands into the hot, soapy water and began to scrub. She only paused to look around when the back door was thrown open and a warm breath of spring air wafted into the steamy kitchen.

  Ida Alston breezed in and flung her arms around Tiney as she stood at the sink. She kissed Tiney on the top of her head and laughed right into her ear, a bright metallic laugh that always made Tiney’s head ring. Although Ida was Nette and Thea’s best friend, Tiney always thought of her as the fifth Flynn sister. Tall, slim, long-limbed and impossibly glamorous, she was a regular guest at Larksrest.

  ‘Oh, isn’t it grand!’ said Ida. ‘I feel as if my whole world has turned on a sixpence.’

  ‘It’s wonderful, isn’t it?’

  ‘And what’s more, Tiney darling, Mummy says we’re going Home! We’re going to England! And we’ll go to France, too, to find our Charlie.’

  Tiney knew how much it meant to Ida to see where her brother was buried. Charlie had fought with the 27th Battalion and had died in the April Spring Offensive earlier in the year.

  ‘Oh, and darling Martina! I didn’t forget your birthday,’ said Ida, reaching into her bag and pulling out a small parcel. ‘Take off those ghastly gloves and open your present.’

  Tiney stepped off the box, peeled off her gloves. With a flourish, Ida placed the gift in Tiney’s hands.

  ‘Hurry up! Open it! Open it!’ said Ida, clapping her hands.

  Tiney undid the silk bow and folded back green and gold wrapping paper. Inside was an extravagant black-and-green velvet scarf. Nestled amid the folds of the scarf was a framed picture.

  ‘I drew it for you, specially. It’s all my lovely Flynn sisters. I hope you don’t think I’m silly but it’s exactly how I envision your wonderful futures.’

  Tiney studied the delicate pen-and-ink drawing, which was divided into four separate scenes. Ida put her arm around Tiney’s shoulder and pointed to each of the scenes, naming the sisters. In the top left-hand corner was an image of Nette standing outside a grand house with a line of neatly dressed children. Beside her, dressed in a captain’s uniform, was a tall, handsome soldier. In the opposite corner was Minna in a beautiful gown, whirling across a dance floor with a man in a tuxedo while a pretty little girl covered in ribbons and bows stood watching. Thea was shown sitting on a camp stool with an easel before her, painting a seascape; beside her, a man with a long, elegant face was also painting intently, and behind him was a large perambulator where, presumably, the artists’ baby lay conveniently sleeping.

  The fourth image was of an impossibly beautiful, gypsy-like character sitting at a small writing desk, her pen poised above a sheet of paper. A darkly handsome man in a beret lay stretched on a chaise longue nearby, reading a book to a small child nestled in his arms.

  ‘That’s you in your poetic future with your poetic-poet husband and exotic little baby. You’re writing your magnum opus, of course.’

  Tiney laughed. ‘It’s a lovely thought, Ida, and a beautiful present. I must show it to Nette. She’ll be very flattered you think her Ray is so dashing, though he’s not really a captain. She needs a bit of cheering-up.’

  ‘How can anyone need cheering on a day like today!’ said Ida.

  A voice from the next servery called out, ‘Ida, Mrs Wilson wants you to help with the flower arrangements.’ Ida flew out through the swing door and Tiney plunged her hands back into the sink.

  Trays of filthy plates mounted up beside the sink and when Tiney finished her allotted dishwashing, she hurried upstairs to help bring stores from the pantry for the soldiers’ luncheon. The Hut was more crowded than Tiney had ever seen it. Only fifty soldiers slept in the hostel next door but hundreds of men had come from all over the city to discuss the armistice. Though it was still early in the day, the billiard room was crowded and the writing room was full of men talking and smoking. Outside on the balconies, soldiers sat in cane lounges, or stood in groups, taking up every inch of space. The scent of tobacco drifted into the gallery as Tiney loaded up a basket with stores from the pantry. She smiled at the thought of
Louis standing beneath the jacaranda tree at Larksrest on a warm spring evening, the glow of his cigarette bright in the darkness. Soon, so soon, he’d be with them again.

  A fresh batch of donated food had arrived from the country and Mrs Yemm was busy sorting what should be used immediately and what could be stored. Tiney and several other girls were sent down to the storeroom beneath the Hut, where dried fruit from Renmark, pickles, bottles of tomato sauce and tins of produce lined the shelves while dozens of legs of ham hung from twine looped across the ceiling. Tiney climbed a stepladder and cut down two hams to be served with lunch, lowering them carefully to the girl waiting below.

  At 11.45 Tiney was given permission to join a group of Cheer-Ups who were heading to the steps of Parliament to see Governor Sir Henry Galway formally announce the peace. Nette wasn’t in the group, but Tiney found Ida and they walked through the park, arms linked. Soldiers swarmed around them, hooting and calling out, jostling each other.

  When they reached North Terrace, Ida took Tiney’s hand and they broke away from the other girls, weaving their way through the crowd to find a place near where the speeches would be made. Beside a table positioned on the first marble landing on the steps outside Parliament stood the Governor, his wife, the Premier, the Mayor and members of the French Mission. It was hot and tightly packed near the steps and when a woman fainted from heat exhaustion the crush of people held her upright until she could be carried away.

  Tiney wanted to cover her ears, the noise of bands, whistles, drums and shouts was so overwhelming. Very faintly, she could make out the sound of cannons firing in the distance, a signal that the announcements were about to begin.

  The Governor began his speech and the crowd cheered at the end of nearly every statement. When he announced that at five o’clock the day before the Germans had signed the armistice, the shouts and cries were deafening.