Interned

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  Author’s note

  Why I wrote this book

  Bibliography

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Copyright

  There was no warning before the British soldiers marched up and took Vati away. No warning at all.

  One moment Vati and I were standing in front of the Raffles Hotel, where we had just taken afternoon tea. Vati had nodded to the doorman to have his motorcar called over. When it rolled up, only seconds later, he had told our driver, Hassan, to take Fraulein Gretta home, and to come back to his office for him at 5 o’clock.

  “Yes, Herr Kohler,” Hassan nodded.

  I tucked my violin case securely under my arm. It was Tuesday – I had violin lessons with Madam Chen in the town on Tuesdays and Fridays, and then Vati and I, as a special treat, always had afternoon tea together before I went home. Hassan passed me my dustcoat and I pulled it on over my dress. I was too hot already, but the dustcoat was not intended for comfort. It was to keep the road dust off my dress.

  My amah, I knew, hated Vati’s motorcar. She prided herself on keeping my white dresses as crisp as meringues and pristine, dazzling white. But dustcoat or not, my starched dresses never survived a drive unblemished. I climbed up into the motorcar. It was brand new; Vati had been one of the first businessmen in Singapore to have a motorcar. He was very, very proud of it.

  “Tie your hat on well now,” he told me. “Remember how fast you will go! Mutti will not be pleased if you lose your hat. Or if you get freckles on your nose.”

  I sighed. Vati could as easily have said “more freckles” because I already had a good sprinkling. Mutti despaired of them, and was forever dabbing my nose with lemon juice in an attempt to make them fade. But it was always hot in Singapore, the sun blazed down relentlessly, and it was so hard to remember to keep my hat on.

  Vati stepped back, giving the paint on the car door a quick, surreptitious polish with his handkerchief. He did not let Hassan see him. It was Hassan’s job to keep the motorcar gleaming, and he was very conscientious. But Vati was so proud of that motorcar! I grinned at him, and he grinned back as Hassan prepared to drive off. But then, suddenly, there was the sound of marching feet and the driveway was blocked by a group of British soldiers with an officer at their head. I turned to look. It was not unusual to see groups of British soldiers marching around the town, now that war had been declared between our two countries. So far, they had not really bothered us. But these soldiers were marching directly towards us.

  “V–Vati?” I said.

  Vati’s face had frozen. “Hassan!” he said. “Take Fraulein Gretta home. Go now. Go!”

  Hassan glanced at him and nodded quickly. “At once, Herr Kohler.” He twisted a lever and the engine roared.

  The British officer stopped beside Vati and said something. I could not hear the words over the noise and rattle of the engine, but I could see the officer’s face, stern and unfriendly. Vati shouted to me, over the engine, “Gretta, tell Mutti – tell Mutti–”

  I never heard what I was meant to tell Mutti. Hassan drove off with a jerk, my hat went spinning into the air, and I saw the soldiers lined up beside Vati. It looked as if – they couldn’t be – they appeared to be taking him prisoner! I forgot all about my hat. I sat rigid, clutching the edge of the seat. Vati – a prisoner!

  Our house was a little way out of the town, and I had never covered the distance so quickly. Hassan drove like something demented, dodging around cows and scattering chickens like squawking confetti as he hurtled through the kampongs. Usually, I would have been trying to catch a glimpse of monkeys swinging in the trees that lined the road. Or enjoying the flowers that bloomed scarlet and yellow and white. Today, I stared straight ahead, willing Hassan to go even faster, until the wind created by our speed made my eyes water. Hassan swung the motorcar into the wide driveway of our house with a slide of the wheels that made me catch my breath, and sped up the avenue of wide-spreading trees that led to the green lawn and the white house.

  At once I could see that it did not matter that I had not heard the message Vati wanted me to give Mutti. Because British soldiers were there already.

  It took two weeks – just two weeks – to turn us from an ordinary, respectable Australian family into something called “enemy aliens”.

  Enemy.

  Aliens.

  Us!

  Two weeks to get Pa locked up in jail – it was a jail, even if they called it an internment camp – leaving Ma and me and my brother Franz at home, our bakery shop vandalised and closed, wondering how we were ever going to manage. Or really, how Franz and I were going to manage. Because Ma wasn’t managing at all.

  The war had been going for several months before it happened. Pa had been concerned and unhappy, of course. After all, we were at war with the country he’d been born in – Germany. He’d lived for fifteen years in Australia, though, and he’d been naturalised. He was a real Australian. But his parents, my grandparents, were still in Germany, and so were his two younger brothers. And now, in 1914, because Britain had declared war on Germany, Australia had been drawn into the war too. Pa was worried about his brothers, my young uncles, Werner and Heinz. Would they have to join the army? Would they have to fight the British, maybe even Australians?

  That seemed very strange to me, that my uncles might be fighting my own country. Even though I’d never met them, they were still my family. I’d written letters to them, and received presents from them. My letters were always in English – no one in my family spoke German except Pa, and even he had said rather sadly that he was forgetting it. Sometimes he had to puzzle over the letters from Germany for a bit before he could translate them for us. The only German words I knew, in fact, were the little pet names Pa called us. I was his little mouse, his mäuschen, Franz was his little bear, his bärchen, and sometimes the pair of us were his little treasures, his schatzis. My mother was his sunshine, his sonnenschein.

  And Ma was Pa’s sunshine. His face lit up when he closed the door to his shop every evening and came upstairs to our flat. Covered in flour as he was, she always ran to hug him. “My sunshine,” he’d say. She’d tell him about all the things that had happened that day, and about any little thing that had gone wrong with complete confidence that Pa could fix it for her. And he always did. Anything from a broken clothesline to a mouse in the pantry, or the fact that the iceman had come late that day and that just wouldn’t do, because if there was no ice in the ice chest, the food might go off, mightn’t it? And Pa would fix the clothesline (even though I’d told Ma it was easy to knot the broken ends together, and I’d do it, and it was no problem, Ma would always say “We’ll wait for your father to take care of it”). And he’d deal with the mouse, and promise to have a word with the iceman, and Ma would be happy again, and Pa would hug her again. “My sunshine.”

  Pa would take off his floury apron and help Franz and me with our homework, while Ma bustled about cooking our tea, singing as she went. Ma was a great singer. There were always songs in our house, solemn ones like hymns that told about sweet chariots swinging low, or the old rugged cross on the hill; happy ones about little glow-worms shining and glimmering, and someone asking his girl if she’d let him call her sweetheart; traditional Australian songs about bein
g bound for South Australia, and walking by Brisbane waters and hearing convicts bewailing their fate; even absolutely frivolous ones about girls who looked sweet upon the seat of bicycles built for two, and an invitation to someone called Bill Bailey to please come home. Ma loved to learn a new song, and nearly every Sunday afternoon we went to the Botanic Gardens by the river in the middle of town, to hear the bands that played there each week.

  After tea, as it grew dark, we’d sit on the back verandah of our little house in Red Hill until the mosquitoes drove us inside, and sometimes Ma would sing some more, or Ma and Pa would talk about how the day had gone in the bakery shop. Pa baked ordinary breads, white and brown, big fat double loaves, but he also baked some of the things he’d learned from his own father, who was a baker too. German breads like dark, heavy rye bread, little wheat rolls called brötchen, sweet pumpernickel, twisted brezels, and sometimes he made crisp, spicy apfelstrudel or linzer torte, oozing with jam. At Christmas he made stollen, coated in powdered sugar and stuffed with dried fruit and almonds. German people came from all over Brisbane for Pa’s stollen.

  All those delicious things that Pa made were exactly where the trouble began.

  We had not always lived in Singapore. My older sister and brother sometimes talked of what they remembered of Germany, of villages in pine forests, deep blue lakes, houses built with roofs so steep that snow would just slide off them. I thought I remembered some of these things, but it was as if I had read about them long ago, in a book of fairytales.

  What was real, to me, was the dark tangle of jungle at the back of our house, and the wide green lawns in front of it that had to be mowed every few days because the grass grew so quickly.

  Real was having to be watchful when I went out into the garden, in case there were snakes. The kind that could kill you very, very quickly. Cobras. Kraits. Real was the high ceilings in our house, and the fans that turned lazily, stirring heavy, sluggish afternoon air. The little, almost-transparent lizards that ran upside-down across the ceilings, hunting insects, crying Chik! Chak! Chik! Chak! as they ran. The afternoons that grew hotter and hotter, until the sky seemed to be pressing down on the top of my head as black clouds rolled in, then the crash and boom of thunder as water poured from the sky as if thrown from a bucket, in sheets I could not see through. Then, in half an hour, it would all be over. The sun would come out and the land would steam, white mist rising from the ground.

  I was spoiled, of course. We had servants, plenty of them. I knew I could drop my clothes on my bedroom floor and would find them washed, starched and hanging back in the wardrobe a day later. I took it for granted that I had an amah whose job it was to look after me, and only me. If I glanced out the window I would see gardeners trimming bushes, cutting lawns, gathering flowers. We had a servant to drive our car, and another to look after my father’s horse, and my pony. We spent our spare time at the lovely German Club, a beautiful, specially built white house with wide verandahs where we met friends, dined, and attended musical concerts and stage performances. It was a very special, privileged way of life. It was the only life I had ever known.

  I had known a change was coming, even before the war began. My sister and my brother, in turn, had been sent back to Germany to attend high school and then university, while living with my grandparents. We had not attended a school in Singapore. Our parents felt that none were suitable – certainly there were none that taught in German – so our mother had taught us when we were younger, and then we had had tutors until we reached high-school age. Now my turn was approaching. I was not unhappy about it – I knew it was what was right, and I was looking forward to continuing my music studies. My violin teacher in Singapore, Madam Chen, agreed it was time for me to go. She had little more to teach me, she said with a smile.

  If anyone was unhappy it was my mother. All three of her chicks would be gone. She was pressing my father to return to Germany permanently. He was not happy about that – he liked his life here, so he had not set about making the enquiries Mutti had asked of him with any great enthusiasm. Or at all, actually.

  Now, he had left it too late. Far too late.

  I leapt from the motorcar and ran to my mother, who pushed me behind her as if she needed to defend me.

  A British officer looked down at me. “And this is?”

  “My daughter.”

  He glanced at a paper in his hand. “Ah, yes. I see there is a child.”

  I didn’t consider myself a child, not at twelve years of age, but I was not going to argue with a British officer. Especially one whose men carried guns.

  I watched my mother’s face as the officer explained what was going to happen to us. My father had already been arrested, he said. In this British colony, he was considered the enemy. Vati had been placed in a detention barracks. Now, we would have to follow him.

  “Now?” my mother said. She put her hand up to her throat. “We must go now? Leave our home?” She looked around the house, and the group of servants hovering in the doorway rustled and whispered urgently to each other.

  “You have a little time,” the British officer said. He stood stiffly, looking thoroughly uncomfortable. Perhaps he was uncomfortable, arresting one frightened woman and a girl. “You are allowed to pack some things. Clothes . . .” It was clear he had no idea what essentials a woman and a girl might need.

  “We will be in this – detention barracks – for how long?” my mother said.

  “I really couldn’t say, ma’am. Possibly until the war is over. I will come back tomorrow. You must be ready then.” He turned to go, then stopped. “It would be of no use thinking of leaving Singapore, ma’am. All German ships have been confiscated.”

  It was clear that the thought of escaping had never crossed my mother’s mind. “Leave? Without my husband? Where would we go?” Then the officer’s words hit home. “Our ships? All confiscated?” There was a long pause. “And our house?” Mutti said.

  The officer looked even more uncomfortable. “The businesses and property of the enemy in British colonies have also been confiscated,” he said. He touched his hat in a curt salute. “Tomorrow,” he reminded us.

  Mutti and I stood in the doorway and watched him join his men. They marched away down our driveway.

  “What are we going to do?” I whispered.

  Mutti pulled herself together. “We must pack some things. Clothes. Food? Yes, I think food. We do not know what will be in these – barracks.” She said the word as if it left a very unpleasant taste in her mouth. “So – we must start. Hassan, Maryam–”

  Mutti turned to issue orders to the servants, who had been clustered in the doorway, watching. Now, as we turned around, we saw that every one of them was gone. Melted away like the mist after the monsoons. The doorway was empty.

  I was in the shop with Pa one afternoon when Mrs Braun walked in – or crept in, really. She half-hid behind the door, and she was watching the street outside.

  Pa and I glanced at each other. Mrs Braun was a good customer. She came in almost every day for bread, walking from her nearby home to do her daily shopping. She always had a hearty “Good morning!” for us. It wasn’t like her to creep.

  “Is everything all right, Mrs Braun?” Pa asked.

  Silence. Pa tried again.

  “And what can I get for you today? Your usual rye bread? And I have some fresh brötchen, just baked–”

  Mrs Braun put up her hand to stop him. She didn’t come out from behind the door.

  “Nothing, thank you,” she whispered. She seemed afraid that someone outside might be listening. “I just, well, I just came, I thought I should come to say – well, goodbye.”

  Pa stared at her. “Goodbye? You are going away?”

  Mrs Braun swallowed nervously. “No, no, nothing like that. And, and, it’s not Braun any more, it’s Brown now. My husband, and the boys, they think it’s best if we have an Australian name, you see, and he says, my husband says, I shouldn’t go to a German baker, I should go to an Austra
lian one. But I’ve been coming here so long, Mr Muller, that I just had to come and say goodbye–”

  She peered out into the street again. Her hands plucked at the handle of her shopping basket.

  Pa’s face darkened. “I’m sorry you should feel like that,” he said.

  Mrs Braun – Brown – looked at him, and her eyes dropped. Then she scuttled out from behind the door, faster than a mouse running from a storeroom when the door is opened suddenly, and disappeared into the street.

  Mrs Braun was not the only customer Pa lost, though she was the only one who came to say goodbye. The others just stopped coming. The rye bread and brezels and apfelstrudel sat on the counter, growing stale.

  “Perhaps I should stop making the German breads and cakes,” Pa said to Ma. “For a while, anyway. I’ll just bake ordinary bread.”

  But the customers didn’t come back.

  Then the posters went up. They were ugly, frightening. Franz and I saw the first one on our way home from school. The words at the top read, MUST IT COME TO THIS? ENLIST! And there was a picture of a horrible, leering soldier with his hand outstretched, grasping with hooked, greedy, grabbing fingers. The shadow of his hand fell over a map of Australia.

  “What does it mean?” Franz asked.

  “It’s meant to be a German soldier,” I said. I was having trouble believing it. “They want men to join the army to keep the Germans out of Australia.”

  Franz’s eyes grew wide. “Are the Germans going to come to Australia?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “They’re a long way away.”

  “But the soldier is horrible,” Franz said. His eyes grew even wider. He wrinkled his forehead. “Are Germans all horrible?”

  I thought about that. “Pa isn’t,” I said. “Our friends aren’t. Our uncles and our grandparents in Germany aren’t. You know that.”

  Franz nodded slowly. “Yes. But German soldiers are?”

  I was as confused as Franz was. “I don’t know,” I said.

  We didn’t tell Pa about the poster. I think we hoped it would just be the one, and that Pa wouldn’t see it. But soon more posters appeared. One had a drawing of a creature like an ogre, all fangs and claws. It was threatening a globe of the world, and it was wearing a German army uniform.