War Is Not Suitable For Children: and other stories

By Judith O'Connor

Stories of laughter and tears. A jealous young woman is trapped in remote bushland. Should she save her husband or let him die? A man travelling on top of a train during the Depression hurtles towards a tunnel not knowing if his head will be chopped off. Wartime prime minister, Ben Chifley, spins the chocolate wheel in a country town. An Irish w

• Language: English
• Publisher: Debbie Lee
• Release date: Nov 16, 2023
• ISBN: 9781761096464

Book preview

WAR IS NOT SUITABLE FOR CHILDREN

Stefan and I are driving up a shallow riverbed in the backblocks of the wilderness of New Zealand. Sharp rocks, pebbles and stained driftwood everywhere. Fetid smell of rotting timber and dank mud. The river is narrow and the kauri forest entwined with climbing vines reaches down on either side. I feel extremely uneasy. It’s eerily quiet except for the crackling sound of the uneven crunches of the tyres as they slip and slide over the gravel and stones of the slippery water course. Fortunately, the river is not running high, reaching mid-tyre in some places and a trickle in others. I’d agreed to the trip in the hope it might work a miracle and make me want to stay married.

The going is slow and it’s clear we are in a tricky situation, especially as the car is, ridiculously, a low-slung sports Mercedes, built for the autobahns and cafés of Germany, not this riverbed in the backblocks of the South Island. It’s one of Stefan’s few indulgences, buying himself a car he loves, from the country of his birth, Germany. He was seven years old when war broke out in 1939, living in what was later called Yugoslavia, a country with a range of ethnic groups hostile to the Germans. His father joined the German army.

‘It was compulsory, and we lost touch. They told us he’d been shot but he turned up after the war when I was about sixteen years old. He was a stranger.’ Any emotion had been wrung out of Stefan long ago. He could have been talking about a train timetable.

At first, things weren’t too bad (I’ve checked the histories) but when the tide turned and the Russians took over, he and his mother, sister and grandmother were rounded up and shoved into an internment camp.

‘We were Germans in an allied country, the Russians were fighting with the British.’

As a young woman, I was ignorant of the impact the war had on his life. I’d grown up in a sheltered backwater in suburban Sydney. I knew that two of my uncles had been in the army and I had a vague idea they’d been in New Guinea. But we’d been on the winning side and it seemed to me that was all I needed to know.

Things were bad (again, I’ve read the stories; he doesn’t talk about it). Deaths, hunger and finally escape by walking at night overland to Germany, sleeping during the day and travelling by night. Stefan’s grandmother didn’t make it; she died of typhoid in one of the camps and Stefan, who was barely eight years old, had to haul her body to the front of the barracks when the death cart came round. It was the start of his hatred of the British and the prejudices and defences he was to carry all his life. He forever hated gypsies, communists, Serbs and Hungarians. Not to mention the Jews.

Schooling had been out of the question for all but a few lame years. ‘Most of the teachers were fighting the war. I was fourteen years old before I could write my name,’ he told me in a rare moment of closeness.

His expression had been impossible to fathom. I didn’t know what to say so I said nothing, although the shock and sadness has stayed with me to this day. He put his determination to never have to hang his head again and the raw skills that got him through the war to good use. By the time we met in New Zealand decades later, he had built up a prosperous electrical business and, along with property investments, was a wealthy man. The irony was bitter sweet. Now he signs cheques for many thousands of dollars, I thought.

As we rattled and bumped our way up the waterway that Stefan would not allow to beat him, my mind flew back to our first encounter many years before. I was working for a major bank in Wellington with an American woman, Veronica. We were secretaries. To my eyes, she was a sophisticated redhead with a twangy accent and fashionable habits and tastes. I loved the way she opened her burnished silver cigarette case, pulled out a Rothman’s, flashed her faux-jewelled lighter, and tilted her head ever so slightly to puff out just the right amount of smoke. We were in our early twenties, she on a working holiday. And me, a sheltered Australian who couldn’t afford the fare to England, but who had scraped enough together to cross the Tasman.

It was through my friendship with Veronica that I met Stefan. One evening, as we were covering our typewriters and gathering our things, she suggested we go to the local YMCA weekly indoor badminton game in a church hall at the end of Molesworth Street. You have to remember this was the 1960s and in a backwater like Wellington the pickings for socialising were slim.

My first sight of him was under harsh neon lights, a slim, good looking man, dashing around with as much energy and bounce as the white-feathered shuttlecock. The room was sparsely furnished. Peeling paint, two cracked windows. A table with a check tablecloth holding a steaming tea urn, cups, saucers and plate of mixed biscuits. Looking down with a steely eye was a photo of Queen Elizabeth II sitting side-saddle on a black horse. Stefan was thirty-two years old and I was twenty-two. I don’t think he even noticed me that night. His eyes were all for Veronica.

The next day at our typewriters with nothing much to do and after Veronica had touched up her nails and lipstick, we started talking about the coming Easter holiday and the trip she’d suggested we take. There was still snow on the Rimutaka mountains surrounding Wellington and the office was chilly, despite the single-bar radiator at our feet. She was wearing a stylish mohair cardigan with large round buttons with tiny pearls in the centre to match her earrings. The idea was to catch the Greyhound bus to the holiday town of Taupo in the centre of the north island with its expansive freshwater lake, boating activities and strolls around the town. We’d stay in a cheap cabin, and hopefully find some fun and social activity.

‘Guess what?’ She swivelled her chair to face me.

I looked up, feeling in good spirits at the thought of our few days away.

‘Stefan is going the same way as us at Easter. He’s driving to a holiday hut he’s got nearby and he said he’d give us a lift. So we won’t have to bother with the Greyhound.’ She turned back to her desk, picking up a folder marked ‘outgoing correspondence’.

She’d flicked me off as casually as the ash on her cigarette and her focus had shifted without a thought from a few days’ away with me, to (hopefully) a romantic adventure with this new man, Stefan. I was furious and disappointed, dreading the days ahead. A threesome was not what we’d agreed.

When Stefan picked us up, she made sure she got into the front seat, leaving me to struggle with the luggage in the back. The wind rushing past the windows stopped me hearing their conversation. After a while, I gave up and concentrated on the rapidly changing scenery. From high-rise buildings to farmland and peaked mountains. Sheep and grass. The black clouds that had been stealing across the sky about an hour after we’d left Wellington burst and great fistfuls of rain pounded the windscreen.

Stefan, intent on watching the blurry shapes and shadows through the windscreen, shot a quick glance at Veronica. ‘I’ve got an idea. Let’s get out of this. There’s a hunter’s forestry hut not far from here. We can stay the night and still be in Taupo early tomorrow.’

Without waiting for an answer, he made a sharp swing to the left and before Veronica had time to think (I was not consulted), we were slipping and sliding along a narrow dirt track.

After about an hour, the rain eased and we came to a muddy stop at the front of a crude wooden hut not far from snow-capped Mount Ruapehu. Stefan jumped out and strode towards the hut and, with a hefty push with his shoulder, opened the door. The hut was as you’d expect for emergency accommodation for forestry workers. Cramped and dirty, cobwebs, mice droppings. Double bunks. Mouldy mattresses. Stumps of candles and a bucket to collect water from the river.

Stefan got a fire going and produced some dehydrated food from his rucksack. I’d never tasted dried meat but, with long and deliberate chewing, managed to swallow enough to keep the hunger away. Veronica