Home by Larissa Behrendt

Author:Larissa Behrendt
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Queensland Press

16

1943

THE STRONGEST MEMORY Bob Brecht had of his mother was a citrus scent, crisp and tart. Their family home had two large lemon trees in its back yard and his mother had used the fruit for cooking and the juice to clean bench tops and clothes. The odour from the fruit had clung to his mother, lingering in her soft recesses.

Even after she passed away, Elizabeth’s lemon scent remained in the air, ghosting her, and through the aroma, her second youngest could sense her close, as though she were about to re-enter the room.

Bob was five when his mother died. His eldest sister, Patricia, then seventeen, was working as a seamstress in a nearby shop. Thomas had left long ago to join the war and not been heard from since. At the funeral, Patricia had clutched Bob, a quiet bundle of a child, pliable in his numbness and confusion at the changes occurring around him. Danny, then four years old, clung to Daisy, a precocious eight, who was trying hard to act as guarded as the older children. William stood aloof, strangely quiet. In the thawing early spring of 1943, all around seemed lifeless and empty.

A large-boned, dark-skinned boy, William started to gather up his shirts, trousers, winter coat and boots. The other children watched him pack and leave; the determined look on his face was enough to keep them silent. They knew this mood of bottled anger all too well. His decision to leave left Patricia an acute sense of abandonment and also a feeling of betrayal. She would now be the eldest child, left to care for the three youngest. She constantly tried but was never able to reach out and connect with William, had been unable to free him from the thoughts that spiralled him into sullen moods. She had seen his tenderness, how docile he could be when he was released, but only Daisy with her smile, her cajoling and her teasing, could bring him back from his thoughts. He would lift her up to carry her on his shoulders or tickle her until she begged him to stop, and his spirits would rise.

“Don’t leave us,” Daisy pleaded with him as he zipped up his bag with finality.

“Princess, I have to go. I’m no good to you here. I need to do this,” he said, pausing to look at her. “I’ll do this and then I’ll come and get you.”

“No. No. You’re wrong.” She tried again. “I need you.”

William hesitated for the shortest moment.

“No,” he asserted again. “I must. One day, you’ll understand.”

William’s large frame assisted him in appearing a supposed eighteen years rather than his bare seventeen, and he enrolled to fight in the war. His brothers and sisters could not know that their mother’s funeral was a final farewell to their troubled brother too.

To Grigor, the children were a reminder of Elizabeth; their distant murmuring began to grow louder. They haunted his house and formed part of the modest collection of personal belongings his wife had left behind.

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