One Sunday by Joy Dettman Read Free Book Online Page B

him had he built it from local timber, roofed it with corrugated iron.
    Eight or ten families of German origin had settled in Molliston around the turn of the century. They’d formed their own community, built their own church, wed their own kind. There had been no real trouble – not until the war, when it had become patriotic to hate your neighbour if he had a German name.
    Rudolf Schmidt, who’d owned the boot shop, had seven Australian-born offspring. They’d seen the way the wind was going to blow and early on obtained references of their father’s good character from Rob and the parson. Overnight the name above the boot shop was painted out, and Smith painted there in its place. The C of E parson, whose house was situated next door to their business, accompanied them to his church the following Sunday, and every Sunday thereafter until the war ended.
    Other Germanic families followed Smith’s lead. The Rheinmanns dropped a few letters to become Renman, and their eldest son was one of the first boys in town to volunteer. The Buehlers had no double N to drop and only a slow-witted son who was unfit to prove their loyalty. And Johan Schultz, too fond of beer, women and his own voice, had never wed, and would not change his name. Those two, Buehler and Schultz, very vocal about the persecution, learned too late it was better for a German to keep his mouth shut. They’d been taken one night and interned at Langwarrin for the duration of the war.
    If half of the well-to-do folk in town hadn’t owned pieces of Joseph Reichenberg’s furniture, with the other half waiting for their piece, and if he hadn’t bred such fine horses, his mouth may have seen the entire Reichenberg family interned, if not stood before a firing squad. Close to seventy at the time, Joseph, along with three other elderly men of German origin, had been registered as aliens and required to report each week to the police station.
    Elsa Reichenberg, Joseph’s second wife, was Australian born. A big-boned woman, thickset and strong as a man, she’d worked alongside Rob and Joan during the Spanish influenza plague, when their wards had been full of the sick and dying. Over three and a half thousand were taken by it in Victoria, but worldwide the Spanish influenza claimed more lives than the war. Black days, those, and while folk dropped like flies, those army boys kept coming home, bringing more of the killer disease in with them.
    Molliston had given its sons willingly to the war, thinking to welcome them home again in a few months’ time. Too many hadn’t returned. Len Larkin had, but he left one hand and his younger brother over there. Bluey Wilson came home, one trouser leg pinned high. Tige Johnson returned a raving drunk, Ned Walker with his lungs ruined by German gas. Norm Macdonald came through it intact, the sole survivor of four Macdonald brothers who’d gone over together. Dave Kennedy, one of the first to volunteer, returned on crutches. Arthur Squire, the last to volunteer, returned two years after the war ended, so badly disfigured that the only time he left the property was to return to hospital in Melbourne. Freddy Squire hadn’t come home.
    So many gaps had been left in this town, so many girls made widows before they’d been wives. And who did the town blame? German hatred may have gone underground when the war ended, but it hadn’t died. It was still alive and doing well in Molliston. And it had to be one of Joe Reichenberg’s lads who’d found the wife of heroic Lieutenant Dave Kennedy. Few hated the Germans more than he, or had more cause to hate them, though Nicholas Squire may have given him a run for his money.
    The two men turned to watch three bony cows being driven to water, two half-grown kids walking slowly behind them on the hill, the girl carrying a kerosene tin bucket, the boy holding a stick. That bucket would be carried home between them, full of