The Year It All Ended (29 page)

Tiney reached out to help Ray Junior down from the tram. He looked shyly to either side, not sure of his strange new aunt, and then he jumped to land beside her.

Martin helped Mama step down from the tram. She had grown thinner and frailer in the years Tiney had been away.

‘He’s quite the gentleman, your Martin,’ said Nette, as they strolled towards Glenelg Beach.

Tiney smiled. Martin was walking ahead with Louis, Onkel Ludwig and Papa. As the sea came into view, they all stopped to admire the blue water of the Gulf of St Vincent. Louis had grown close to Martin on the voyage back from Europe and now he held Martin’s hand as he chatted shyly to his grandfather and great-uncle in German.

Glenelg Beach was already crowded with families. Across the white sand, small tents were sprouting. Women sat beneath black umbrellas, crowds of small children paddled in the shallows and couples wandered along the jetty hand in hand. Sunlight glittered on the surface of the sea.

While Frank and Ray set up a small striped canvas tent for shade, Nette, Minna and Thea unpacked the picnic baskets and
spread out a tartan rug on the warm beach. Minna and Frank’s baby girl sat placidly eating handfuls of sand, until Tiney picked her up and wiped her pink cheeks.

‘Do you think we can make the tent private enough for us all to change into our bathing suits or shall we hire a bathing box?’ asked Thea.

‘Oh, let’s just change in the tent,’ said Tiney.

‘That’s all right for you, Miss Flynn,’ said Nette, patting the swell of her pregnant belly. ‘ I couldn’t possibly fit in there.’

‘You’re not swimming in your condition!’ said Mama.

‘We’re taking Louis in for his first swim in the ocean,’ said Tiney, reaching one hand out to Martin.

‘Lucky that they’ve finally allowed mixed bathing,’ said Minna. ‘But you do know you can’t wear a one-piece bathing costume?’

Tiney laughed. ‘Don’t worry, I haven’t turned completely European.’

She slipped into the tent and wriggled into her blue sailor bathing costume, tugging at the skirt to make it look a little longer.

The men in their Sunday best sat in the sand, their hats tipped back. Hannah sat beside Tiney, still shy of all her newly discovered relations.

‘Are you coming in or not?’ Tiney called as she and Martin walked down to the water’s edge.

Louis looked shyly from his mother to his aunt.

‘Go on,
liebling
,’ said Hannah. ‘Tante Tiney and Onkel Martin will be with you. The ocean is not so different to rivers and lakes.’

Louis, all long white limbs, ran down to the water’s edge. Little Ray ran after him to stand in the shallows, admiring his big cousin.

Martin, Louis and Tiney walked into the clear, still water. The tide was out and even twenty yards from shore, the water was only waist deep. Martin let Louis climb onto his shoulders and leap into the air. Tiney looked up and watched as Louis jumped, suspended for a split second against the bright sky before he plunged into the sparkling water.

Tiney stretched her arms out to Louis as he rose out of the sea, laughing. He made his way towards her, catching hold of her hands, pulling her under. Martin dived in beside her. They splashed and laughed and then turned onto their backs to float on the calm blue of Holdfast Bay. Martin’s hand brushed against hers and Louis kicked a silvery spray of seawater into the air. Tiney looked up at the sky above her, like the vault of heaven, and sighed with happiness.

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to the Australia Council for its support of this project, the Wheeler Centre for its Hot Desk Fellowship and The May Gibbs Trust for its Canberra Fellowship. I am indebted to the State Library of Victoria, the State Library of South Australia, the Australian War Memorial Research Centre, the Tanunda Public Library and the Commonwealth Graves Commission in Ypres for their assistance and invaluable resources. Many people provided support, hospitality and advice from Adelaide to Berlin during the writing and researching of this novel, including Robyn Annear, Mary Hoyle, Julie Walker, Stuart Gluth, Cat Fletcher, Natta Jain, Lesley Reece, Ruby J. Murray, Ken Harper, Billy Murray, Christian von Raumer, Sarah Brenan and Susannah Chambers. Countless books and resources underpinned the writing of this novel but I’d particularly like to acknowledge the poems of Mary Gilmore; the papers of Jessie Traill; Jane Tolerton’s biography of Ettie Rout,
Ettie
; and the works of Joy Damousi, Bart Ziino, Mat McLachlan, Chris Ilert and Ken Inglis. This novel includes brief excerpts from Mary Gilmore’s poems ‘These Fellowing Men’ and ‘Inheritance’, an excerpt from Adam Lindsay Gordon’s poem ‘Ars Longa (A Song of Pilgrimage)’ and an excerpt from two works by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe,
Hermann And Dorothea – VI. Klio
and
Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre
.

Author’s Note

In February 2010, the bodies of 250 Australian soldiers were reinterred in a specially constructed Military Cemetery at Fromelles (Pheasant Wood). The mothers, sisters, wives, lovers and girlfriends of these men are all dead too. They lie in graves across Australia. They died after a lifetime of contribution to their communities. The stories of their fortitude and suffering in the face of grief are largely forgotten. Thinking of all those women and how they are so often overlooked in Australian history and fiction inspired me to write
The Year It All Ended
, to refocus the historical lens on the people who are left out of the picture.

My family, like many Australian families, was deeply affected by World War I. Although
The Year It All Ended
is a work of fiction I drew on a large body of family history to flesh out the characters of the Flynn family and their community. The youngest of my great-aunts, Agnes ‘Lit’ MacNamara, was the inspiration for Tiney Flynn. Like Tiney, she was born on the 11th of November, 1901 and was the littlest member of her family (hence her nickname ‘Lit’). Aunty Lit was an adventuress who travelled extensively, including a trip down the Amazon River on a tramp steamer. She told me many stories about growing up in Adelaide during the war years and about the death of her only brother, Louis, on the Western Front. She longed to visit his grave and did eventually get there but not as
quickly as Tiney. Unlike Tiney, Aunty Lit never found romantic love but in this novel, I wanted to give her an ending that she would have loved to have lived. One of the great pleasures in writing fiction is imaginatively resolving the suffering of your characters without distorting history.

History, as written, often focuses on violence. We read it as a sequence of interconnected acts of aggression. But history as lived is a tapestry of daily rituals; of eating, cleaning, studying, playing, nurturing, working, loving and grieving – of small pleasures and large emotional challenges. The history of living is a story of the interconnectedness of families, friends and lovers; the things that matter in the lives of every single human being.