Interned Page 2

  Then there was another one with a map of Australia, but the names of the cities had been crossed out and German names scrawled in their places. Brisbane became Bernhardiburg; Sydney was Nietschburg; Melbourne Zeppelinburg. The writing at the top said AUSTRALIANS ARISE! SAVE HER FROM THIS SHAME!

  There were more and more of the posters. People were stopping to look at them, shaking their heads. I thought, at first, that they were saying how dreadful the posters were, but when I got closer I could see that they were agreeing with the ideas on the posters. I heard the words Huns, Krauts, Jerries being muttered.

  Soon, those words weren’t only being muttered, they were being called out, aloud, in the street. I saw some boys shouting after Mr Braun. People stared, but no one stopped the boys or said anything to them. Changing his name to Brown hadn’t done Mr Braun any good, I thought. Those boys knew exactly who he was, and what his real name was.

  I knew those boys, they went to my school, and I didn’t like them. They were Samuel and Joseph Stanley, the sons of another baker. His shop was at the opposite end of the street to Pa’s, and I’d seen Mr Stanley looking sour when people – like Mrs Braun – walked past his shop to buy their bread and cakes from Pa.

  But Mrs Braun was buying her bread at the Stanleys’ shop now. Weren’t the boys satisfied with that? They’d taken Pa’s customer. It seemed not, because now Sam and Joe were taunting Mr Braun, calling “Hun! German!” after him. Mr Braun put his head down and walked faster. The boys saw me watching.

  “And you’re another one, Tilly Muller!” Sam and Joe shouted. “Hun! German!”

  What? What did they mean?

  “I’m Australian!” I shouted back. “Australian as you are!”

  “Your father’s not! He’s a Hun!”

  I didn’t know what to do. My first thought was to hit them, as hard as I could, but there were two of them and they were both bigger than I was. My second thought was to get Franz. Sam and Joe would still be bigger than us, but we could show them they couldn’t call us names and get away with it. I ran for home. Sam and Joe followed, calling after me.

  Pa heard the noise. He came out, glaring at Sam and Joe. “You should be ashamed! Tormenting a girl! Be off with you. Don’t come here again.”

  Sam and Joe weren’t about to take Pa on. They ran off, but they were still shouting “Hun!” as they went.

  Pa thought I was upset. He tried to comfort me. “They are ignorant boys, they do not know what they are saying.”

  But I didn’t want comfort, I wanted action. I was boiling mad. “Everyone’s saying it!” I said. “Not out loud, but they’re all saying we’re German. As if it’s an awful thing to be.” I stopped. I could hardly say it. “Huns. They say we’re Huns.”

  Pa’s face was set and angry. “Ordinary people, good people, do not say this.”

  I knew a lot of them were saying exactly this.

  “Those boys will not come back,” Pa said.

  But I thought they would. And I was right.

  Very early next morning Pa went down, as he always did, to start the baking. It was only just light when we heard him running back up the stairs.

  “This is terrible, terrible,” I heard him say to Ma. He seized a bucket and a scrubbing brush and ran down again. We all followed him through the shop and outside. We stopped in shock. Someone had daubed the words HUNS and GERMUNS onto the front of the shop in white paint. Pa was staring at it in anger. Ma looked at it and cried. “Who would do such an awful thing?” she wanted to know.

  I was sure I knew.

  “Sam and Joe Stanley,” I said.

  “Those boys?” Pa said. “How do you know it was them?”

  “Because you told them off,” I said. “And because they can’t spell, either of them. You see? They can’t even spell ‘German’!”

  Pa filled the bucket with water and scrubbed the words off. “There, all gone,” he reassured us. “All gone. It’s all right now.”

  It wasn’t all right, of course.

  Mutti and I stumbled inside to a strangely empty, silent house. Our house had always been quiet, but never totally silent. There had always been someone moving quietly about, carrying cold drinks and cups of tea, opening and closing shutters, sweeping leaves off the verandahs and trimming plants. Now there was no one. Even the little lizards that ran up the walls and across the ceilings seemed to have gone into hiding.

  “What has happened?” I asked. My voice seemed to echo in the empty rooms. “Where has everyone gone?”

  “They have heard the news. They are frightened of the soldiers. I think they will not be back,” Mutti said grimly.

  “Then we will have to–”

  “Yes. We will have to pack. We will need–” Mutti paused. I realised she had probably never had to pack anything for herself. Not for years, at least.

  “Suitcases,” Mutti said. “Yes. We need suitcases.”

  We looked at each other. We had no idea where such things were kept.

  “I will find them,” I said.

  I did, at last, stored in a small, airless room at the top of the house. I pulled them out carefully, checking for spiders, centipedes and snakes.

  Mutti had already begun making piles of clothing on our beds. I filled the suitcases. Dresses. Underwear. Vati’s suits. Shoes. Hats. We had no idea how much we would need; how long we would be forced to stay away from our home.

  Now, in the kitchen, Mutti was staring rather helplessly into the pantry. “What will we need? What should we take? Will they feed us? They will surely feed us!”

  “Food that will keep,” I said uncertainly. “Tins?” I thought that some foods came in tins.

  We did not have many tins. Our cook had shopped for fresh food daily, at the markets. We took what we could find: some imported German jams, biscuits. Dried sausage. Pâté. All delicacies, really. We filled another suitcase.

  It began to grow dark. We realised there was no one here to offer us cold drinks before dinner. No one to cook dinner, in fact. No one to turn down beds, light lamps, fill baths, draw mosquito nets around the beds. We looked at each other again, then did these things ourselves.

  “It will be all right.” Mutti was trying to sound reassuring. She was not succeeding.

  We found something to eat, but could not eat it, then I went to bed, but the silence of the house defeated me. Before long I made my way, barefoot and in my nightwear, to Mutti’s room. “Can I sleep with you?” I sounded like a small child.

  “Of course.” Mutti moved over to make room for me in her big bed. I curled up beside her. But we did not sleep.

  In the morning Mutti made coffee. It was hot and welcome, but still we could not eat. We sat and waited. In the middle of the morning a truck came, with British soldiers. There were already some women in the back. And suitcases.

  Mutti and I came out of the house. The British soldiers looked at us curiously, as if we were something strange and exotic. Yesterday, I thought, they would have passed us in the street without comment. Today, we were Germans. The enemy.

  The British officer was staring at our pile of suitcases in disbelief. “You have too much. You cannot take it all.”

  “Too much? How much can I take? What is allowed?”

  He seemed to be making a quick decision. “Four. You can take four suitcases.”

  Mutti closed her eyes in despair. “Four only?”

  “Yes. Four. Which ones? Quick. We must go.”

  Mutti chose the suitcase with food, then one suitcase of clothing for each of us. I was sure she had no real idea what was in them. The soldiers started to heave them up onto the back of the truck, and indicated we should climb up too.

  “We must travel in the back of the truck?” Mutti protested. The soldiers sniggered slyly at each other.

  “Yes, ma’am.” The officer had clearly had enough. “In the truck.”

  Mutti turned her back on him, ignored his proffered hand and clambered up, assisted instead by the women already in the truck. I co
uld see that some of them had been crying. I would not cry, I resolved. I would not let these horrible soldiers see me upset. I snatched up my violin from the pile of left-behind suitcases and prepared to climb on.

  “Four only.” A British soldier grinned unpleasantly and tried to stop me.

  I could not speak much English, but I understood him. I clutched my violin to me. “I will not leave my violin behind.” He made a move as if to take it, and I swung myself away. His expression changed; he scowled at me.

  “Private!” the officer barked. “Leave it! Let the girl take her violin.”

  I gave the soldier a triumphant look. That was a mistake; he heaved the last of our four suitcases roughly onto the truck. I wondered if any of our jars of German jam would survive the impact.

  The truck set off. This was very different from riding in Vati’s motorcar. The truck rattled and thumped over every bump in the road. We passed through kampongs where people stopped and stared, incredulous at seeing European women in the back of an open truck. We came to the outskirts of the city, drove down Orchard Road, kept driving. Where were we going? To the docks? Were we to be put on a ship?

  We were going, we found, to Tanglin. There were British army barracks there, large ones. “They are going to put us in the British army camp,” one of the women said.

  The truck drove up to large, closed gates. Soldiers came out, glancing at us curiously, and spoke to the officer. All around the camp were fences, strong wire fences with barbed wire coiled on the top. The gates opened, and as the truck drove through, I looked back. The gates were closing behind us.

  “We are prisoners,” one of the women said.

  But no. We were not prisoners, not prisoners of war, we were told, because we were not soldiers. Instead, we were enemy aliens. We had not been imprisoned, we had been interned. Which was apparently a different thing. This was all explained to us later, after we had been driven to a set of long, low buildings with thatched attap roofs and verandahs along the fronts – the sort of buildings that our servants had lived in, in the grounds of our houses. Inside, there was one small room at one end, and the rest of the building was one long room filled with narrow cot-style beds. There was a bathroom block not far away, and fences all around. Being interned felt little different to being imprisoned to me.

  But we paid little attention to the buildings at first, because a group of men was waiting for us – and one of them was Vati.

  I was so relieved – I had thought I might never see him again. I rushed to him and threw my arms around him. Now, at last, we were together, even if we were in a very strange place.

  It did not take the ladies long to assess that the place was not only strange, it was entirely unsuitable.

  “We are all huddled in together,” they said. “No separate accommodation for families. Not enough bathrooms. Where must we eat? How long will we be here? It will not do.”

  The men had already been here overnight, and had been spoken to by the British officers. They tried to explain. “We have no choice. We have to stay here. We do not know for how long – for as long as the war lasts, maybe.”

  They explained to us the difference between being prisoners of war and being interned. There were a few real prisoners of war here – seventeen of them. They had been the officers and crew of the Emden, a German navy ship that had been attacking British ships in the Indian Ocean until it had been sunk off the coast of Australia, and much of its crew lost. The remaining officers and crew had been sent here. The rest of us were enemy aliens. Some of the families we knew, but others were strangers to us; they had been sent from the island of Penang and other places in Malaya.

  For a while, we were objects of curiosity. Off-duty British soldiers regarded us curiously through the fences. Some laughed. Some jeered. Our men told us to ignore them, to stay away from the fences. They would soon lose interest if we did not react, they said.

  The ladies turned their energies to sorting out how three hundred of us, more or less, were to fit into the attap-roofed buildings. It was too much for some; they sat on the narrow beds in despair. Some cried. One family was in total distress, and Mutti tried to comfort them. “It is not so bad,” she told them. “We will not be here long, I am sure.”

  But the family had real reason for distress. They had lived on the nearby small island of Palau Ubin, on their coffee plantation. The British soldiers had come for them, just as they had for us. But their eighteen-year-old daughter, terrified, had panicked and run into the jungle. They had called and called, the soldiers had searched, but she could not be found. In the end, the soldiers had insisted that they leave without her. No one knew where she was. Her mother was distraught, and could not be comforted.

  Two days later a British officer appeared at the fence, and was conducted to the anxious family. Everyone could tell, from his expression, that it was unlikely to be good news.

  It was not. The girl’s body had been found at the foot of a cliff on the island. Whether she had fallen by accident or had thrown herself over in despair, no one knew. The local natives had discovered her body and had already buried her. It was what her family had feared.

  In those first days, we tried to establish a system and a routine. Beds were moved, pushed together in some places and apart in others, and sheets hung up to divide family areas. Our belongings were kept in our suitcases under our beds. There was nowhere else to put anything, and besides, we had no idea if we might be moved again, with little or no notice.

  We queued to use the ablutions blocks – the bathrooms. We queued for the very unsatisfactory food that was provided, and for a place to do washing and hang it to dry. We found that it was up to us to keep the barracks clean, there were no servants here to wash and iron and sweep. It was not at all what we were used to.

  And it was boring – so boring! There was nothing to do, nowhere to go, only the same few faces to see again and again and again. Most of the conversation was complaints, and grumbles, and small, petty disputes. I had no tutors. Mutti tried to teach me, but we had not packed books. We had not thought of books. I had my violin, but I had not thought to pack music. And every day was the same, day after day after endless day. We began to think we might indeed be kept here until the end of the war, whenever that might be. We had no news from outside.

  The weeks went on. Christmas came. It was 1915. January, February. In February, a whisper went through the camp that some of our men had been contacted furtively by Indian soldiers in the British army, and asked if they would join a planned mutiny against the British. The Indian soldiers were unhappy with their conditions, it seemed. Our men considered it. It would be a chance, perhaps, to escape. The men gathered in discreet groups and discussed it, but most – peaceful civilians – refused to take part.

  One afternoon we heard gunfire. It was far away in the camp, but we did not know if it would come nearer, or what was happening. We sheltered in the ablutions blocks. The gunfire went on, at intervals, for a few days, then ceased. Later, we heard that the mutiny by the Indian soldiers had been put down, but that one of the crew of the Emden had escaped in the confusion. We hoped he would succeed in getting far away, and perhaps even return to Germany.

  The days went endlessly on until May, when word went around that we were to be moved. Not just moved to another camp in Singapore, but sent overseas. Germany? Could we be being sent back to Germany? We were so hopeful. It would surely be too good to be true!

  It was. We soon found out where we were going. Not to Germany. We were being sent to Australia.

  Not long after those horrible words were painted on our shop, a policeman came to see Pa. We knew him, he was Constable Harvey – we often saw him in the street and he had always seemed perfectly friendly. Now he didn’t look friendly at all.

  “You are Wilhelm Muller?” he demanded.

  Pa looked at him in surprise. “You know I am.”

  “You are German?”

  “By birth, yes. But I am now a naturalised citizen. I
am Australian.”

  Constable Harvey looked at a list he held in his hand. “But born German. You must report to the police station and register your address.”

  “I must report? But you know where I live! You are here.”

  “No matter. All Germans must report and register.”

  Pa tried to argue, but Constable Harvey was determined. Pa must register himself as what Constable Harvey called an “enemy alien”, and he should come and do it right away. Now.

  Pa was forced to walk down the street to the police station beside Constable Harvey, looking just as if he was being arrested. Pa was ashamed. Mortified. He had never been in trouble with the police in his life. Now he was an enemy. An alien.

  Pa came home soon after, no longer accompanied by Constable Harvey. He was upset. “People in the street were looking at me,” he said. “They knew where I had been. To the police station! As if I was a criminal. A criminal! As if I had done something wrong. It is a disgrace!”

  He was so upset that he had to go upstairs for the rest of the afternoon. Ma went to look after him. “You and Franz can look after the shop, can’t you?” she asked me anxiously. Of course we could. But there was no need. There were no customers.

  And this was the way things continued. There were fewer customers each day. Franz and I knew where they were going. The Stanleys’ bakery had never been so busy. Sam and Joe were even doing deliveries, carrying large baskets with fresh loaves in them, and taking them right to people’s homes. They shouted when they saw us. “Good Australian bread we’re making! None of your nasty rubbishy Hun stuff!”

  “You wouldn’t know a good loaf of bread if it bit you!” Franz shouted back. “Your bread’s full of holes!” That was an insult, and as bakers’ children, we all knew it. Franz meant Mr Stanley was a lazy baker, he didn’t knead his bread enough. Kneading was hard work, but if you didn’t do it properly, the finished bread had holes all through it. Pa’s bread never had holes. The Stanley boys didn’t like Franz’s comment, not one bit.