Fourteen
CANBERRA, 1920
We had stopped overnight near the town of Bungendore and I slept soundly until I heard a kookaburra just before dawn. When the train started to move forward, I wiped icy mist from the window and looked out as we chugged up next to a redbrick building festooned with blue and white streamers.
The first kookaburra was joined by a chorus, laughing at the world for a few moments, stopping abruptly when a band of sulfur-crested cockatoos wheeled by above the station, their own wails more like an alarm than a laugh.
There were no houses I could see, and so much bush surrounding the station building that even though it was dressed up, it felt lonely. The grass was yellow now in winter and the scraggly gums a silver-gray green, with just the occasional boulder or dark shrub to break up the monotony. It was a sad landscape, I thought.
I rose and saw that Helen was already up, her bed made. I dressed quickly, made my own bunk, and went to the office.
Helen soon came in from the prince’s quarters. “Halsey’s in with him,” she whispered. “There’s trouble. Maybe you should go and find Rup—”
I was about to ask what she meant when she put a finger to her lips to shush me. She was looking beyond me. I turned around and there was one of the newspapermen Helen had pointed out the day before, Mr. Murdoch from The Times. She didn’t introduce me then, but she did say he was her favorite among the pressmen. “At least he has a brain,” she said. “The others are so easily fooled. If I’d known it was this easy, I’d have become a turncoat years ago.”
“Morning, Keith,” Helen said now, walking toward Mr. Murdoch, a bright smile on her face. “Are you coming out for breakfast?”
“I-i-i-s he c-c-coming out, m-m-more to the p-p-p-point?” Mr. Murdoch said. “Th-th-there’s no one in your office.” Helen had mentioned his stutter, and said that in print, he was razor sharp. He refused to toe the line like the other newspapermen. Helen admired him, I could tell.
“Of course he is,” Helen said. “You’ll be happy, Keith: there’s bacon from the pigs he shot yesterday.”
Keith Murdoch smiled. He was tall and imposing. The day before, he’d had his hat pulled low over his face, but I saw now his eyes were dark and perceptive. He looked from Helen to me.
“This is Maddie,” Helen told him. “She’s our new correspondence secretary. And a very good one too. Her father is Thomas Bright.”
“The poet?” He spent considerable time on the p.
“Yes, the poet himself. And Maddie has decided to give up her own writing to help us. You might think of such service one day, Keith.”
“Not on your life,” he said, smiling again.
Suddenly, I heard a raised voice from within the prince’s private chamber. Mr. Murdoch heard it too, looked inquisitive. I didn’t know whose voice it was, but it was not Mr. Waters or the prince, I was fairly sure. “He’s not in there,” Helen said loudly to cover. “He’s up the front with the admiral. Let’s go and see who else is up.”
She walked forward, forcing Keith Murdoch back through the train. She turned to me as she left. “Just stay there in case you’re needed to jolly him along,” she said.
I nodded, although I didn’t even know who she meant me to jolly—hopefully not the prince because all I could imagine was falling through the floor with embarrassment about how stupid I’d been the day before when I met him.
Ten minutes passed uneventfully and so I went back to work on the letters and soon dropped into the world of the people who looked to their prince for help. I kept hearing voices through the door to the prince’s chamber, low and soothing, a little more excited, occasional outbursts. I couldn’t make out words.
I noticed people had begun to arrive at the station and the scene became brighter because of them. Music started, quietly at first, growing louder as more band members arrived. By the time the sun was high in the sky, there was an enormous buzz outside the train. I’d been on my own in the office for an hour, every now and then hearing raised voices in the chamber beyond. No one emerged.
I heard the band play “God Bless the Prince of Wales” and so I assumed the prince had gone out the back of the carriage and down to join the party.
Helen came back and told me to come down to breakfast. She looked toward the closed door of the prince’s quarters and frowned.
“Where is he?” one of the newspapermen asked when we came out.
“Sleeping,” Helen said. “He was up so late reading your stories that he’s having to catch up on his sleep. Come, let’s have breakfast.”
We had eggs on fried bread at tables set up in the station building.
“Are they all here to see him?” I asked Helen. There must have been two hundred people around the station now. I had no idea where they’d come from. But not one of them had seen the prince. I thought of my poor mother, how terribly disappointed she’d been.
“Yes, of course,” Helen said, a smile at the corners of her lips. She turned to Mr. Waters, who had come over to our table.
“Maddie does have a point, Rupert. It’s happening again. You told Ned once we’d had a week off—”
“It’s hard to understand the pressure on him,” Mr. Waters said.
“But all these people have come to see him, and he’s not here. They couldn’t care a fig for the Australian government. They want their prince!”
“Helen,” Mr. Waters said. “Please.” The look on his face was pained, as if he himself wondered how he’d got here.
The prince did not emerge at Bungendore and we finished what had become a subdued breakfast and entrained to make the short journey to the railhead nearest the capital site.
After we stopped again, Helen came through from the front carriages, looked to the closed door, and said quietly, “Ned talked to the admiral. David kicked up a stink about what to wear.”
“What to wear?”
“He wouldn’t put on his uniform.”
I didn’t say anything.
“Apparently, the admiral was insisting the prince put on his dress uniform and he refused. The King hates it when the prince doesn’t dress properly, and the prince hates dressing properly. The poor old admiral is in the middle. So there you have it. Rupert can normally soothe him, but he was somewhere else, and I had to deal with Mr. Murdoch. The admiral of the fleet was trying to dress the group captain and it was a total disaster.”
The admiral’s must have been the other voice I could hear in the prince’s quarters that morning.
“After the Bahamas,” Helen said, “we had a wire from the King, marked urgent, that came in a diplomatic pouch, about the creases in their trousers, the prince and Dickie. They’d had sharp creases fore and aft when we went ashore, which I assume is front and back. The King said it was raffish. I’m not joking.”
“Where were the creases supposed to be?”
“On the sides? How would I know?”
At Queanbeyan, the closest town to the capital site, we stopped again and the prince emerged from the train to attend an official reception with the councilors of the shire. He was wearing a suit of dark brown and a hat, the same brown shoes I’d seen the day before. I couldn’t make out whether there were fore and aft creases in his trousers or not, but he’d had his way on the uniform.
Admiral Halsey was with him, and Mr. Waters and the colonel. I hadn’t been introduced to the admiral, but he was easily recognizable in his formal naval uniform, dress sword, and cocked hat. He was probably only a little taller than the prince, although the hat gave him an advantage today.
Colonel Grigg was on the other side of the admiral. His face wore a bit of a smirk, I realized now, or perhaps a slightly bemused look, one eyebrow higher than the other, a small smile.
“It’s a symbol, sir,” I heard the admiral say.
The prince looked at him coldly. “You think I don’t know that, Admiral? It’s the fucking symbol I can’t abide, man.”
“Yes, sir,” the admiral said. “I think the doctor said to use the left hand again today. Give the right a bit more rest.”
Again, it looked as if an entire town had turned out to see the prince, along with the mayor and officials. His staff kept trying to get him to move to greet the officials, but I noticed the prince spent most of his time talking with the returned soldiers who had started in a loose parade outside the station. He bestowed the warmest of smiles on them, tilting his head to listen to their stories.
One poor chap made me think of my father. He didn’t look like Daddy, who was taller and more solid of build, but there was something in his manner that was the same. His hands were at his sides and held slightly out from his body, not in fists but not relaxed either. He was wearing the Australian hat, turned up on one side, medals pinned to his chest. He was very thin and about the prince’s height or a few inches taller. They leaned in to each other, as if they were in a private conversation and the crowds around them didn’t exist. I watched the man for a long moment after the prince shook his hand and moved on. The prince had brought comfort in some way. The man’s shoulders were more relaxed, his breathing more easy. The image stayed with me.
“What a shoddy bunch,” I heard Dickie say as they walked away from the men finally.
“You’d be shoddy too if you’d seen what they have,” hissed the prince, clearly annoyed at his younger cousin.
“I’m sorry, David. I was just trying to lighten the load.”
“Well, don’t,” he said curtly.
Following the reception, the prince returned to the train, emerging not long after in uniform, khaki breeches, long leather boots to the knees, and a coat with an officer’s hat; his chest was lined with medals. Although the uniform fit him very well, he looked more like a boy in his father’s clothes than an officer. It reminded me of the pictures in the newspaper of the day he’d arrived at Farm Cove, when he’d worn the big hat like the admiral’s and the dress sword of a naval officer. Unless you knew it was a uniform, you’d have said he was a child playing dress-up.
Helen had lent me an outfit for the official function and I’d changed before leaving the train too. It was terribly kind of her to realize I’d have nothing to wear and not make a fuss. She probably knew I didn’t have the money for fine clothes, but all she said was, “You’ll have been expecting to wear a uniform like poor David so you won’t have brought anything fine.” It was a navy skirt and jacket and a cream silk blouse, and she said it suited my auburn hair better than her blond.
At the top of the hill, the prince was to deliver remarks to the government of Australia and people on behalf of his father the King. It was the speech that had caused all the trouble the day before, Helen explained. The admiral had told the prince that all he had to do was to lay a foundation stone, that there was no need for a speech if he didn’t want to speak, but Helen had prepared remarks and the colonel had rewritten them and then the prince and Helen had rewritten them again and then the prince had decided he wouldn’t speak, as the admiral had suggested.
“Who knows what will happen?” Helen said. “Sure to be splendid, if only in the newspapers tomorrow.” She smiled and winked at me.
The prince soon arrived and emerged from the car. Again, he largely ignored the official party—government ministers for the new national government, and the New South Wales premier—and went instead to the small group of women all in black who’d come out to see him.
“H.R.H. always stops for them and offers his family’s condolences,” Mr. Waters said to me. “It’s the part Colonel Grigg doesn’t really understand.”
Although the prince hadn’t noticed me since introducing himself the day before, I felt I was now a member of the team of people who supported him, with Mr. Waters and Helen including me in everything. I’d read so many of the letters written to the prince and I saw now what those letter writers saw: hope after so many hopeless years in which everyone experienced loss. Now I’d seen for myself how decent he was toward those he met, especially the ex-servicemen and families.
I thought of my father. Daddy would be so proud of me now, writing as a prince and attending an important speech. I reminded myself to note it all in my book. If you’re going to be a writer, you write down everything. Daddy had drilled that into me from an early age. I was already behind on the events of the day before. I didn’t want to miss anything.
Running more than an hour late now, the prince joined the official party on the top of the hill, where a tent had been set up for lunch. They’d constructed a wooden stand and the foundation stone was an enormous thing, held in place by chains the prince would release.
Several ministers of the federal government spoke about the remarkable progress that had been made in constructing the new capital. I had seen the cartoons in the newspaper about the capital site, for a first foundation stone was laid in 1913, but seven years had passed and nothing more had happened. The ministers spoke at length. The prince looked bored.
Finally, it was the prince’s turn to speak. He stood at the dais and it somehow grew him. He took a good long moment to look around him, as if conjuring the capital in his own mind. He’d visited Canada the year before, he said, where Ottawa was already built. “Canberra is to be built as a capital from the very first, and offers a splendid opportunity to Australian architects. I hope they will be proud of what they do here.”
“It’s always like this,” Helen said to me. “He knows he has to do a speech but he doesn’t want to, then he’s forced to make it up on the spot. You never know what will come out.” She was smiling. “That’s what Ned hates. He wants a seamless empire, and he’s got never-know-what-will-happen-next David. I’m just glad I got something ready now because today, for once, he’s following my script!”
The prince was standing in front of the gathered dignitaries, wearing that smile once again, full of youthful joy but tinged with sadness. Perhaps it was the weight of the responsibility on him, the throne that sat immutable as his destiny, but it was the sadness under his smile that made him beautiful.
People had moved to the surrounding hillside to get a view. There were hundreds now, a sea of hats and coats, to listen to the prince.
“I consider,” he said, “that it is a very great privilege to be asked to lay the foundation stone.”
“Uh-oh,” Helen said. “We’re veering off script again.”
He paused for a long moment. “In fact, I understand that, at the present moment, Canberra consists chiefly of foundation stones.”
He paused, the crowd laughing and applauding.
The prince nodded and waved.
Just then, Colonel Grigg walked up behind us. “Was that yours?” I heard him say to Helen.
“Nope,” she said. “That’s him, Ned, all him. So if you have a problem, I suggest you take it up with your future king.”
Colonel Grigg snorted. “All him? All Halsey, more like.”
“Halsey doesn’t do humor,” Helen said. “He does what he’s told.”
“By David?”
She shook her head. “Anyway, I suspect Halsey thinks this is all nonsense. He’d prefer we sail around Australia with guns at the ready, and not actually stop anywhere.”
“The admiral is from a world that’s gone,” the colonel said. “The reality is, this country is at risk.”
Helen turned to regard him. “From those koalas?”
“Yes,” Grigg said. “Koalas and the Bolshies. We’re here to fix it.”
Helen laughed. “Then God help the empire,” she said. “If it’s you doing the fixing, I mean.”
“Do you know, if you didn’t write so brilliantly, I wouldn’t put up with you?” Colonel Grigg said.
“If you didn’t put up with me, I’d be reporting directly to David, my dear,” Helen said.
“Is that right?”
“It most certainly is,” Helen said. “And we’d probably all be just a little happier.”
Colonel Grigg smiled widely, but he looked just like a big circus bear trying to smile and it was anything but friendly.
The prince was finished now. The crowd roared approval. He had taken them all away, including the newspapermen, and no one but Colonel Grigg seemed to mind his little impromptu joke about foundation stones.
“That was fair enough,” Helen said. “This is the seventh one that’s been laid. Anyway,” she added, “they love him.”
“Yes, but at home, they won’t love this. They won’t love this in any way,” Colonel Grigg said. “I wish I could just make him do the right thing.”
“Maybe a puppet would help,” Helen said.
He laughed. “That, my dear girl, is an excellent suggestion.”
After the ceremony was completed, they showed the prince the sites for various buildings, the parliament, the war memorial. I didn’t accompany them. I excused myself to Mr. Waters and returned to the train to keep drafting replies to the letters. Helen told me later it was all just bushland, so it was hard to get a sense of how the place might look. But the crowd seemed to have swelled during the day so that, when they were leaving, in every direction there were just hats like mushrooms that grew from the ground wherever the prince had walked.
Helen and I ate dinner together in the staff dining car—roast beef with mash and peas—and then the train left to return to Sydney. I didn’t see the prince again. I don’t know where we pulled up for the night. I worked my way through more than two hundred letters, and I could probably still tell you exactly what I did with each one, by subject if not by name.
Helen told me we could do whatever we wanted, within reason, and so I made a note, clipped to each draft reply, for that first boy to receive a train ticket to see the speech, another family to have a set of commemorative cups (for they’d missed out), still others to have a personalized letter about their personal experience of loss. I suppose, looking back, each time I helped one of these families broken by the war, I helped my own family broken by the war, or thought I did.
I hardly noticed the return journey on the train. According to Helen, we made a stop at Bungendore so that the prince could meet the people he’d missed in the morning. We then stopped at two other small towns where people had driven for miles to catch sight of him. He spent more time in these places than he had at the capital site.
“Did you not notice the fires?” Helen asked when she came in with tea. In many places along the route there were enormous bonfires lit in his honor.
“I’ve been trying to get these finished,” I said. I was feeling the weight of responsibility, for I only had a few hours left. If I could at least catch up, they might be able to manage from there.
I drafted replies and suggested action on all the most difficult letters. Most of the remaining ones really only needed some variation of the agreed form letter. I also had a list of instructions for the staff at Government House: this one to be refunded a train fare to Sydney because he’d come to see the prince but the visit was canceled when the schedule changed; that one to be included in the meeting with charities organized for later in the week in Sydney as they’d missed out on shaking the prince’s hand when he visited Jervis Bay and they had run a canteen during the fighting in France.
Mr. Waters could assign a typist at Government House to the form letters and focus on making sure that the things the prince had said would happen actually transpired. I hadn’t finished the job, I knew, but I would leave them in much better shape than where they started.
The next morning I ate a quick breakfast in the staff dining car—porridge with brown sugar and cream—and returned to my desk to keep going with the letters. I’d noticed Ruby Rivers going back and forth from the prince’s private dining room with trays. I was glad I was doing this other job; a more important job, I knew.
Helen came in from her office. “Did you sleep well?” she asked.
“Like a log,” I said. “The rocking.” We’d gone to bed while the train was still moving. It didn’t stop until the prince was ready to retire.
“Yes, it works for people our size.”
Without waiting for my response, she said, “There’s something I really should have mentioned yesterday, and it’s rather delicate. Actually, it woke me in the middle of the night with terror and I nearly woke you then.”
She had a letter in her hand that she’d taken from the pile. “You see these letters with the spider seal?”
I nodded. I’d noticed the seal the day before but hadn’t got to the letter yet. She handed it to me.
“Thank God,” she said. “We don’t open those. He opens them himself. I shouldn’t have left that one there.”
“Who are they from?” I said, looking at the pretty handwriting.
She put a finger to her lips, widened her eyes, plucked the letter from my hands.
Then she said, “H.R.H. writes back and uses the same seal. He and his . . . friend each have one. We post them and receive them. We don’t even record them. They don’t exist.” She smiled. “And his letters go back with the diplomatic pouch. That’s the one that goes straight to London, using every ship and train at His Majesty’s disposal to be quick about it.”
I looked at the back of the envelope. “They must be very important,” I said. “So, can you tell me who F.D.W. is?” These were the initials on the back, with an address in London.
She put her finger to her lips again. “Sometimes there are a lot of letters,” she said. “But if there are none, make yourself scarce.” She grinned.
I sniffed the envelope. It was perfumed.
“Exactly,” Helen said. “I didn’t say mistress.”
Just then the prince came in from his private compartments. “Here are the busy bees,” he said. “What are you girls doing?” He was wearing a cream cardigan over a light blue shirt and the brown slacks today, with slippers on his feet.
“We’re just talking about the mail, sir,” Helen said, taking the envelope with the spider seal from me and tucking it under the rest so he wouldn’t see it. “We can’t believe the number of letters. You have quite a following, Maddie tells me.”
“Is that right?” he said to me. “Fools. They have no idea who they’re writing to.” He made a noise, not quite a laugh.
I blushed, found myself tongue-tied once more. I longed for Helen’s confidence.
“Well?” he said, still looking at me. “You think they know their prince?” He looked more calm this morning, I thought. Helen had said the night before that the stunts stressed him and then he had to take a few days to get ready for the next one. But the trouble was there were no gaps in the schedule in which he might actually do that.
“I do,” I managed to say. He had such beauty, those light blue eyes, that blond hair and a glow to his skin as if he were lit from within, the sadness of that countenance at rest.
Mr. Waters came in behind him then and rescued me. “It’s Maddie who writes all the replies, so she should know, sir.”
“How very splendid,” he said. “You know, I noticed last night that the letters were more modern than they used to be. Rupert is such a stick-in-the-mud when it comes to how things are done. I like very much that we are friendly as far as possible. Is that you?”
I nodded, still dumb.
Helen laughed. “Her father is the poet,” she said. “Thomas Bright. I know his work. It’s uplifting in a time of sorrow, although you might not know she’s related to him to talk to her in person right now.” She elbowed me subtly. “Maddie seems to have lost contact with her normally vivacious self.”
“Well, it’s wonderful to have the daughter of the poet among us,” the prince said. He smiled so warmly I felt the honor of it. I felt he must be used to people being tongue-tied in the royal presence and he was making it as easy as he could for me.
“Sir, thank you,” I said. “I am so pleased to serve.”
“So am I,” he said. “So am I.”
He stood very erect, I noticed, and his hands kept going to the front of his trousers as if to smooth the creases, or perhaps correct them to keep his father happy.
His gaze remained on me, his expression turning quizzical. “I’m sorry to be staring, but do I know you?” he asked.
“I don’t think so, no, sir,” I said. “I came to see you with my family when you arrived, but I doubt you saw me as we were several miles away. I may have spotted your hand waving from a carriage.”
He laughed then. “I knew I knew you. You were one of the twenty thousand. I have a memory for faces.”
I must have looked shocked.
“A little joke,” he said, grinning now. He regarded me a moment longer and then turned behind him to Mr. Waters.
“Have you seen the telegram? It seems I was right about His Majesty on this occasion.” I could hear from his voice that he was not smiling now. “He’s got Bertie going to see my friends, man. I assume it wasn’t your doing?”
“Of course not, sir,” Rupert said quietly. “On the other hand, he agreed we might postpone India, and that’s been positive.” Mr. Waters attempted a smile but it quickly faded.
“Quite,” the prince said, nodding tightly. “I understand Mr. George is still pushing. Perhaps you might speak with Ned.” He turned back to me. “Maddie, isn’t it?”
I nodded again.
“Well, Maddie, it’s wonderful to know I have such a talented correspondent with me. It will come to me, how I know you. I’m sure it will.
“And now, Helen, perhaps you and I could take some time to work on my remarks for tomorrow.”
“Certainly,” she said.
He opened the door to his study and she walked through. He followed and closed the door behind them.
I looked at Mr. Waters, his eyes fixed on the closed door. He looked back at me. “Nothing,” he said, although I hadn’t asked a question.