The Noon Lady of Towitta (4 page)

When Mathes was just six, his mother, Mascha, barely survived a difficult birth during which her baby died. The complications so soon after an earlier pregnancy maimed and crippled her and she never recovered. She was confined to bed and became weaker each day until her death six months later. After Grandmother Mascha's death, Grandfather Josef took to alcohol that made him wild and mad. He brewed almost pure spirit in the forest and sold some of it to those in the nearby village who knew of his still. But most of it he drank himself. Mascha and Josef had lovingly cared for and protected the young Mathes and Giscelia, but after Mascha's death the children were neglected.

One day, several years after their mother's death, their Aunt Katie-Lizzie and Uncle Herman paid an unexpected visit. News of Mascha had reached them from well-meaning family friends visiting the Zittau area in Upper Lusatia, centre of the Saxon linen trade. These family friends were passing through the district and had happened to stay at an inn in Zittau. Here dark and sinister tales about the nearby forest were told around dinner tables and winter firesides. Among these stories was the tragic but romanticised tale of the runaway girl from Cottbus who had lived on the edge of the forest with a wayward forester. After her death he went mad through grief, they said. Not only had the newborn infant died, but their eldest child was taken by a wolf. Although the event had taken place in the district four years earlier, the story was often spoken of as though it had only happened the day before.

Their friends' ears pricked up when they heard that the young girl from Cottbus was called Mascha. They guessed she could be their friend Herman Schippan's long-lost sister. My paternal grandmother's family had spent ten years trying to find her, never knowing she had already been dead four years when their friends stumbled across her family.

Herman was excited yet wracked with guilt when he heard that his cherished sister had left two small children to be brought up by a half-crazed father. Herman and Katie-Lizzie were about to migrate to South Australia with their only child, Gretel, but Herman knew he could not leave Germany with a clear conscience without first seeing what he could do for his sister's shattered family. They were kin after all. Herman and Katie-Lizzie immediately made the long journey from Cottbus to visit the family before their sea voyage to South Australia.

As they had never met Mascha's lover, they stayed at an inn when they arrived in Zittau. After finding out where Josef and his two children lived, Herman and Katie-Lizzie were driven by the innkeeper several miles out of town to the edge of a dark forbidding forest where there was a small hut in a clearing. They intended to make themselves known to Josef and perhaps help him financially, but they were so alarmed at what they found that they decided that the best way of helping the family was to give them a chance in life by taking all three of them to South Australia with them, even if it meant delaying their voyage for some weeks.

Josef thought he had been saved from Hell when he met Mascha's family and welcomed them with open arms. Mathes and Giscelia, who were never seen apart, clutched hands and cowered together when their aunt and uncle first set eyes upon them. But when they heard their aunt's soft voice and her encircling arms pulled them to her ample warm bosom they felt soothed; the cold, the fear and the hunger disappeared. They began to cry, sobbing out all the woes of their short bleak lives.

Aunt Giscelia told her aunt and uncle that before her mother died she remembered her parents being happy despite their poverty. But after her mother's death, the agonies of bereavement exacerbated by having to support two motherless children made life unbearable for Josef. The three-roomed hut was mean, with nothing worth salvaging even for the children's sake except a children's storybook bound in green leather that he gave to Giscelia for safekeeping. Giscelia was still deeply affected by the loss of her mother. Mathes, quiet and sullen, had taken on Grandfather Josef's peculiar traits and habits. Come the night, they both became fearful and agitated.

In 1854, within a month of their blessed abduction, the new Schippan family migrated to South Australia from the port of Hamburg. Forgoing their original passage when they were to travel with their friends, Herman and Katie-Lizzie were able to secure a passage in the
John Moller
that plied the same route. And the green bound book of Grimms' fairytales went too, secure in Giscelia's care, all the children owned to remind them of their mother as they travelled to the far side of the earth.

Plucked from gloomy forests, bogs, snow, rain, howling wind and the immense cold, they were taken to a land of heat, dust, flies, drought and barren landscapes. Nothing prepared them for such extreme change. But although the landscape may have been strange and new, their old fears, prejudices and strange Wendish customs and folklore travelled with them.

Despite the best efforts made for the new life Josef and his two remaining children were to begin in a new land, tragedy struck on the long sea voyage to Australia. Josef had become fatigued from seasickness as the
John Moller
battled the great Southern Ocean. Perhaps he clambered onto the heaving deck that was continually awash with mountainous waves to purge his stomach to the elements. Whatever happened that night, the wind screamed through the rigging as it had done for many days, with Josef probably hanging onto the leeward railings as he retched over the side without thought for his safety. It was only with the pale dawn, when the children were unable to find their father, that the alarm was raised. The ship was travelling at too great a speed through big seas to turnabout and no one was sure when he went missing. The ship's crew and passengers were saddened and alarmed. Some passengers tried to show extra sympathy to Josef's two small children but they clung more tightly to Aunt Katie-Lizzie.

Although life was better in South Australia, Mathes remained a quiet surly child who hid the horrors of his early Wendish childhood deep within. Losing his father at sea, when it seemed a new and better life was so close at hand, made it appear there was a curse on them for trying to escape. He became obsessed and comforted by the stories in the green book that his sister and their Aunt Katie-Lizzie read to him; stories read each evening around the fire when it was cold, or out on the verandah during the warmer months. The family also carried with them a stock of Wendish folktales as frightening as the fairytales in the book.

Aunt Giscelia believed that life in Germany had been as brutal as the fairytales and that they should put the past behind them and make the best of their new South Australian home. Mathes, however, insisted she read him more stories from the book, or tell him Wendish tales they knew. Although clearly disturbed by the regular nightmares he suffered, he gained strange comfort from tales of the forests and creatures of the night such as wolves and bats, tales of changelings and heroes, kings, princes and princesses. Aunt would forbid the fairytales some mornings after his nightmares, but come the next night he would refuse to settle until told a story. And so each night Giscelia or Aunt Katie-Lizzie continued the storytelling.

I felt that by my telling the life of my father as he used to tell it, together with stories my Aunt Giscelia told me, Sister Kathleen would understand something about German–Wendish families living in a harsh and isolated South Australian environment. Sister Kathleen rarely interrupted. She sat quietly and took over my knitting so that I could give attention to storytelling. I told my stories as though reading them from a book, and Sister Kathleen listened to every word while the knitting needles clicked in time to the rhythm of my voice.

When I reached the point in my story when Father and Aunt Giscelia reached South Australia, Sister Kathleen was so relieved that she went off to find a jug of cold water. Pouring out a tumbler of water and then passing it to me she said, ‘My goodness, what a start to a new life in South Australia. I wondered who was actually going to be left alive to disembark from the ship. Are you sure you are telling me the truth, Mary?'

‘Well of course, Sister, his life gets better. But as you will hear, he still had difficulties to overcome during his schooldays. Aunt Giscelia and Katie-Lizzie – who we now referred to as our grandmother – told me the next part of Father's life when I was a teenager. It will give you an understanding of what Father had to put up with being Wendish and this may help to explain why he was the way he was. But none of what I tell you will ever excuse the way he treated our family with such brutality.'

‘Oh, Mary, no one can be that brutal.'

‘You have no idea, Sister.'

‘You can tell me the next part of the story when I come by tomorrow afternoon. I have to go now as Matron is planning to give us a talk. I won't be able to sleep tonight though. I'll be having my own nightmares of wolves and being swept overboard. As you say, Mary, it is hard to believe. But like a frightening fairytale I can't wait to hear what's next.'

3

The next part of Mathes' life was told in several sessions for Sister Kathleen was not able to spend more than ten minutes at a time with me over the next few days. I had gathered bits and pieces over the years about Father growing up. Sometimes as we sat around the table in the evening Aunt Giscelia and my grandparents and other relatives brought up incidents that had happened to Father.

The next time Sister Kathleen could stay with me for some time I asked her to tell me a little about herself.

‘Why did you become a nurse?' I asked her.

‘I thought you might ask that question. My mother's sister, my Auntie Vera, married into a German family. My uncle's grandfather was a well-known doctor in the Barossa Valley. When I was a little girl, my uncle used to tell me and my brother and sister tales about his grandfather who mended bones or cut them off, or made limbs to replace them. Gory really, but we loved to hear them. Uncle's grandfather was quite famous in his day.'

‘You're a quiet one. Tell me more.' I was curious to know the story of this kind woman who had taken an interest in my life.

‘I will, I promise I will, but I'm not here for long today and I'd really like to hear about your father.'

‘All right, but you're not going to have it all your own way, you know, Sister.' And I began the story of how my father was turned into a bully, the way Grandpa Herman had told me.

After such harrowing early years, life settled down somewhat for Mathes in Blumberg, South Australia. But it was not always easy for Mathes. Aunt Katie-Lizzie was kind and loving but Uncle Herman could be overly stern. He was extra hard on Mathes because he didn't want to be seen to raise a weak boy. Perhaps it was also because Mathes was not his son. Already haunted by experiences in his early life, this austere treatment made Mathes forever on his guard, stern, secretive and possessive. Aunt Giscelia recalled that Mathes also suffered at school. Being bigger and older, Giscelia walked him home to protect him from the bullying of the older boys. Small for his age and with a heavy German accent, he was fair game to the Australian lads who lay in wait for him as he made his way home from school.

Until Aunt Giscelia offered protection, the local non-German lads made his life a misery by calling him ‘sissy', ‘cry-baby', ‘midget' and, like many Germans, ‘kraut' after sauerkraut, the cabbage dish and staple diet of German families. Aunt Giscelia believed he should have made friends with other German lads, but as he hadn't he eventually fought his own battles.

Uncle Herman thought it was unhealthy for a boy to have few or no friends to play with. No one realised that as Mathes was required to work each day after school and on Saturday mornings for Herman in the family general store, it left Mathes not only overworked but with little time to form friendships. Herman made sure that Mathes was involved in the local Lutheran church, not just as part of the congregation, but doing odd jobs for the pastor. This responsibility gave him confidence and respect from the pastor and his little band of helpers, the handymen, the cleaners and the women who did the flowers. Mathes took pride in his role of caring for the church. All may have continued smoothly but for the night a gang of bully-boys broke into the church, smashing vases and violating the sacred place. The fourteen-year-old Mathes was blamed for not locking the main door and lost his voluntary role at the church, bringing him shame and humiliation. Herman knew how particular Mathes was about locking up the church and he didn't like to see him suffer from the cowardly act of others. He devised a plan, telling Mathes, ‘Don't worry, lad, we'll catch them at their own game. It's the harvest festival next week and I believe those hooligans will be back to pinch the offerings. You and I will spread about town the kind of offerings that will be on show in the church, and make it the best display yet. They won't be able to resist, and we'll be ready for them.'

Herman told Mathes that he was going to arrange a special surprise for the boys. He arranged a display of wheat sheaves around the base of a large circular table which had a cane basket filled with hundreds of brightly painted boiled eggs as a centrepiece. He believed these boys who liked to make as much mess as possible would head first to the highly decorated eggs and have fun throwing them about the church.

Herman told no one of the plan other than Mathes. The pastor would never allow the use of a cruel trap in his church. Herman made sure he was last to leave church that Friday evening when members of the congregation met to arrange the harvest festival display. When the display was completed and they began leaving the church, Herman lingered. As the little group of helpers passed through the door Herman slipped a large dingo trap from his sack. He quickly set the murderous trap and shoved it beneath a thick layer of straw under the display table, believing that catching the vandals was worth the risk.

When Herman and Mathes returned early in the morning before the others they were alarmed at what they found. The door had been left open but fortunately the display was intact and no damage had been done in the church. But many of the wheat stalks were soaked in blood and had to be replaced. Herman was worried about the degree of injury.