The Dressmaker's Daughter by Kate Llewellyn Read Free Book Online

Something sticks in my throat.
    Sometimes we would go blackberrying at Yallunda Flat. We gathered the berries from enormous bushes that grew along the side of the road. My father would hurl a stepladder into the middle of the blackberry bush and climb up with a can in hand. This struck me as the height of invention and was one more illustration of his cleverness. He’d pass down the full can and one of us would hand him up an empty can. We gathered the berries that hung lower down on the bushes. When wehad taken all we could find or had room enough for in our containers, we’d drive home. We ate the blackberries with cream because in those days we rarely had ice-cream, except in cones from a shop. We did, though, have custard. In her lifetime, our mother must have made enough custard to fill a ten-thousand-gallon water tank. The rest of the berries were made into blackberry jam, which we also ate with cream.
    Our childhood was filled with fighting, cream and custard.

CHAPTER TEN
War
    T here was a matter that our family never spoke of but it was one that affected the women deeply. And that matter was that our father’s mother, Isabel, had been unhinged by the First World War. Her husband had taken a camera to war. He went to Gallipoli as a captain. Many years later, at the Australian War Memorial, I was shown some of his photographs. The curator said that it was unusual to take a camera to war at that time. There, too, are Nanna Brinkworth’s pleading letters in her large, elegant hand.
No. 80, 1st Avenue,
    St. Peters, Nov. 20th, 1917.
    Base Records, Melbourne.
    Dear Sir,
    You wrote me on Oct. 31st stating my husband Major T.A. Siekmann, 9th Light Horse, 3rd L.H. Brigade, Egypt, was wounded. Have you any wordon any 9th Light Horse arriving in Hospital? I have done all I can to locate my husband and failed. The Red Cross sent a cable to their office in Cairo, reply paid, and not having received a reply, they are to understand that so far they have not been successful in tracing him.
    I am left to suppose his name has got onto the wrong list. Can you help to ascertain if this is so?
    I also find some of my friends have had private cables from their sons from the 9th Regiment saying they have arrived at the Ismalia Hospital.
    I do beg of you to find out what is wrong and send me a wire to be paid on delivery.
    Trusting to you to get me further news.
    Yours truly,
    Isabel Siekmann
    I might add I have spent three pounds, five shillings, on cables with no result.
    Grandfather Thomas Anglesey Siekmann enlisted on 18 March 1914. He had continuous service in the field until April 1918. Along the way, he had become Colonel T.A. Brinkworth, replacing his German name with his mother’s maiden name.
    (Their daughter-in-law Beck, who is now over a hundred years old, remembers her father discussing with another man that we were at war. He was worried, shesays, because their name was Beckmann, which has German connotations.)
    This letter from my grandmother searching for her husband was not the first she wrote. Earlier she had received a message that he had been evacuated sick from 11th Light Horse at Gallipoli in October 1915. He was, it says, transferred to 9th Light Horse in January 1916.
    She declares in a letter dated 7 November 1915:
I have had a cable saying my husband Capt. T.A. Siekmann of C. Squadron, 11th Regiment, 4th Light Horse Brigade is sick and would be grateful if you can give me any particulars. My husband was sent from S.A. and joined the Queenslanders.
    Knowing her husband was missing began, I think, to loosen her mind.
    After the war, Grandfather gave talks to groups of people about his experiences, showing his photographic slides from the war. There is a letter in the war memorial from him reporting on the interest that people showed in his talks and how successful they were.
    Nanna Brinkworth would have nothing to do with memorialising the war and when Grandfather went to march on Anzac Day she called it showing