After Mum’s performance at Bariloche, Dad might have been ruing the words spoken by a friend watching Mum skiing for the first time at Mt Buller: ‘Tom, one day that girl will beat you.’ Although Mum had not in any true sense beaten Dad, she was showing herself to be a very competent skier, with a useful musical talent and growing confidence and people skills of her own. She was certainly not the clingy type and had her own formidable steel. Another accolade came in December 1939 when Mum was nominated to represent Australia in the FIS (Fédération Internationale de Ski) races in Zakopane, Poland. Mum’s successes in North and South America had at least in part been due to Dad’s training – he must have been more than a little bit proud of her.
In Chauvel Country Mum wrote of a time when they were snowed in at a stone refugio in the tiny mountain village of Farellones, high above Santiago: ‘It was a night never to be forgotten: the far away grid of lights, the heavy clouds driven by the wind, the sound of that wind in the Andes, and myself, as I had stood out there alone, swept up, almost carried away by that unleashed strength of the blizzard that was raging high above us.’3 Farellones del Cerro Colorado – or Cliff of the Red Mountain – was the full name of that fledgling ski village, and Farellones (2134 metres) is now one of Chile’s main resorts. Mum and Dad felt privileged to have witnessed these resorts in their embryonic stages.
Another brilliant memory for Mum was climbing Villarrica, one of Chile’s most active volcanoes, as far as they could go without crampons. In the unfinished manuscript of her autobiography she proudly claimed, ‘I was the first white woman to climb Villarrica and ski down it!’ Yet another was seeing the Llaima volcano ‘red hot in the sky, the heat of the Llaima burning through her ice’ against the southern stars of the night sky. ‘This I remember as though it had burnt in an after-vision onto my eyes.’4
To fulfil at least part of his mother’s wish, Dad finally enrolled at Harvard. By 27 August 1938 he and Mum were on board RMS Oribita heading for New York, having changed ships in Bermuda on their way north. Dad confirmed for me that at first Mum didn’t like the idea of Boston, but he’d always thought that when they actually got there she’d have a pretty good time. From New York they went straight to Boston to arrange their accommodation in time for the autumn term, which began at the time of the Munich crisis in late September 1938. Although Dad had enrolled in international relations, more specifically he studied the German colonial question. Mum said that he’d soft-soaped his mother, saying that he ‘hoped that Harvard will put him a step nearer parliament and that there was nothing like education’.5 It was Granny M’s dream that he would go into politics. I don’t think Dad was averse to it, so long as he could ski.
Mum joined a similar course at Radcliffe and, like a loyal wife of her day, she typed the lecture notes for them both. During Dad’s first lecture the professor notably said: ‘International law has been dee-fined as being like a Swiss chee-ese: full of holes. But, gentlemen, a chee-ese, even one full of holes, is better than no chee-ese at all, so I propose we continue our study of international law in spite of what has happened and might happen abroad.’6
30
Accident and Intrigue
In December 1938 in New York, Mum and Dad boarded the ocean liner Aquitania bound for Cherbourg, France. American skiing pioneer Alice Wolfe, with whom Mum had skied in Sun Valley, was on the same ship and they became firm friends. From Paris they all travelled on the Arlberg Express, arriving on 17 December at St Anton, Austria, in time for Christmas. Their plan was to ski in the Arlberg while they waited to hear from Dad’s various contacts in Germany. He wanted to see for himself what was happening there. With the knowledge that following the Anschluss – the annexation of Austria into Germany’s Third Reich – the previous March, the Foreign and Commonwealth Office in London had advised British citizens (including Australians) to leave Austria and Germany, and the term studying international relations at Harvard fresh in his mind, Dad must have known that trouble was coming. But he also liked to be near the centre of things.
Alice would have told Mum and Dad long before they arrived in St Anton that Hannes Schneider, the renowned and beloved head of the St Anton ski school from as early as 1907, had been arrested and imprisoned in the local gaol in Landeck before being sent into exile in Garmisch-Partenkirchen, Germany. On 20 December they drove across the border with Alice Wolfe to visit Hannes. It appeared that Hannes’s problems with the Nazi authorities had been brought about by the village mayor, Herr Moser. Moser had once been a less than impressive instructor in the ski school, and the ski instructors held a meeting and got rid of him. Moser held Hannes to blame. After he was sacked, Moser went to Germany and spent three years hoarding information that could be used against Hannes. From Mum’s journal it is clear that Moser was an ardent Nazi ‘who gave the “Hitler gruss” long before Anschluss’.
Alice knew Hannes from previous winters she had spent in St Anton. With Alice’s help and that of her solicitor, Dr Karl Roesen, Hannes and his family received visas in early January 1939 and were permitted to leave Germany. Virtually nobody in St Anton relaxed until they knew that Hannes was safely across the border in Switzerland and on his way to the United States. Messages about Hannes’s progress were whispered between Dad and Mum’s anti-Nazi visitors. Meanwhile, Frau Roesen confided to Dad her concerns about her neighbours suddenly vanishing and her anxiety, wondering if her family’s turn would come too.1 Mum and Dad were becoming aware that they were living in increasingly difficult times.
With the exception of Christmas 1936, Dad and Mum had spent every Christmas since they were married outside Australia, but no Christmas could have been more unusual than 1938 in St Anton. In a description of preparations for a party on Christmas Eve, Mum wrote in her travel journal: ‘There was a slight contretemps over procuring enough fresh eggs to make Russian eggs for the party. Eggs are a commodity about which apparently the hens of the Third Reich don’t know anything. They all come from Bulgaria and Holland.’
There were other anxieties. Dad told me he was surprised to hear there had been no Christmas mass in the local church, St Jacob’s, in St Anton because, it was said, ‘Joseph was away on “Militardienst” (military service), Mary was doing her […] “Arbeitsdienst” (work), the donkey had foot and mouth disease and the Morning Star was in Dachau.’2 (Foot and mouth disease had in fact broken out in Austria just after the Anschluss, delivering yet another blow to the struggling economy.) The ghastly remark about Dachau bears witness to the dawning awareness in early 1939 that Jews and other people were vanishing into concentration camps. The local people would have been concerned if Hannes Schneider hadn’t managed to get his permit to leave Germany since something more sinister than Landeck gaol and exile in Garmisch-Partenkirchen might have awaited him.
Mum’s skiing days could have finished on 29 December 1938 when she broke her leg in eleven places. It was over lunch only the day before that an American friend Kathi Ward had been joking about a chip on Mum’s ski, saying, ‘Look – Elyne went so fast that her ski went up in smoke.’ Much more than just her ski went up in smoke in that horrible fall. Six days later, Dad dislocated his shoulder while skiing. After the kind Dr Schalle had patched up Dad, they were all photographed together in Mum’s room. Mum is in bed, Dad’s arm is bandaged up and sticking straight out in a sling, and the Schwester (nurse) is looking stern on the other side of the bed. On the back of the photograph there is a caption: ‘The break-up party’. These words were to prove truer than any of them could have known.
Within days they realised that Dad’s shoulder was no simple dislocation: his left arm was partially paralysed, so the prognosis was not good. Mum’s accident meant the end of her plans to ski in the FIS the following February. She received the official notification of her selection in mail that arrived from Australia on 9 January. In her travel journal she wrote: ‘I can’t imagine anything much bloodier than getting that when I was lying in bed with a broken leg.’
Meanwhile, back at T
owong Hill, the situation was critical, but in a very different way. Black Friday, when so much of Towong Hill was burned, was only four days away on 13 January 1939. Even though Mum was able to celebrate her birthday the day after her accident with a party in her room in the Pension Bergheim (Dad bought her a chocolate cake), by 16 January she was seriously ill with an embolism.
Due to this illness and having such a badly broken leg, throughout January and February 1939 Mum became a captive audience and was visited by both Nazis and non-Nazis staying at St Anton, while others filled her room with flowers and sent their good wishes. When Mum was ill, Dr Schalle tried, often unsuccessfully, to prevent all visitors, but through them she was able at least to keep abreast of events, opinion and intrigue. Dr Schalle and the Schwester from Innsbruck who expertly nursed Mum through her illness were vehemently anti-Nazi.
Alice Wolfe was responsible for much of Mum and Dad’s social life, and despite her championing of Hannes Schneider she introduced Herr Bergmann to Mum who, Mum remarked in her typed journal, ‘is a former lieutenant of Goering and is reputed to be the only 100% Nazi there is’. The specialist who came to see Mum on 18 January must have been almost one hundred per cent Nazi too. Mum wrote a vivid account in a journal extract: ‘He came in, gave his heels a resounding click together and said, “Heil Hitler!” Then he sort of marched to the bedside. If he had done the goose step, I don’t think my eyes could have popped out any further. Every movement he made was sharp, in fact snappy and I was expecting after every quick action that he would say Heil Hitler.’ She admitted that ‘if it wouldn’t have been terribly painful I think I would have probably howled with laughter’.
Local man Guido Schmidt was another of ‘Goering’s lieutenants’ who visited Mum. In her journal she described one of his visits towards the end of January 1939 when he had ‘landed himself a good job with Goering’:
‘Aach,’ he said throwing himself in a chair. ‘Goering is wonderful!’, then he beamed round at us. ‘He is not like the others, he is not just a man he is a… Herr [lord].’ His eyes were restless and snappy. ‘The weather was terrible but when you have been there a few days, Berlin, it is wonderful, you wonder why you love St Anton so. In Berlin there is so much happening.’ He then produced a magazine about the ‘Kolonial Frage’ (Colonial Question) [for Dad].
Guido Schmidt was Austrian Chancellor Kurt von Schuschnigg’s last Secretary of State before the Anschluss. It is quite possible he was not the one hundred per cent Nazi he made himself out to be. Later he explained to Dad and Mum that one of the worst days of his career was when he accompanied the Chancellor to Berchtesgaden and he could hear ‘the Führer roarıng at poor Schuschnigg behind the closed door of the study’. Even Guido Schmidt did not know what became of Schuschnigg. Soon after the war ended, Dad and Mum heard rumours that Schuschnigg had been seen in Dachau. In fact he was liberated in 1945 by the Americans.
According to Mum’s journal, Otto Petzold’s visit contributed more interesting details about Goering:
Otto Petzold came in later with stacks of photographs of Goering and his new and enormous hunting lodge Carinhall. The lodge is a wonderful place in its own forest and with its own lake. There were photos too of the furnishings of the vast rooms and several entertainments there. Tables set with miles of wonderful glass and silver. There were also many of [Goering’s] lion cub. We couldn’t help wondering how the poor people of Germany found it compatible to hear Goering, the owner of all this (and of an extremely well-covered figure too), saying that guns were preferable to butter.
Biji De Wardner, head of a department at fashion house Mainbocher in Paris, who had for some years dressed Mrs Simpson – by then the Duchess of Windsor – was also one of Mum’s regular visitors. Mum remarked in her journal:
She was very interesting about the Windsors. She had been in the Riviera during the September Crisis staying where they were and had been with them a good deal. Her main impression of the Duke was that he was incredibly like a boy, a schoolboy’s mentality. It was a new line to me.
Almost at the end of her Austrian journal, on 21 March 1939, Mum wrote rather tellingly, ‘All the Austrians were furious with Hitler over the Czech business. Everyone had said it was too much, that soon war would come and who wanted war? There was something bitter and sad about Austria with her lost identity being rushed unwillingly forward into the European maelstrom.’ Having annexed the Sudetenland following the Munich Agreement on 29 September 1938, Hitler had seized the rest of Czechoslovakia on 15 March 1939. Despite his fascination with being almost in the epicentre of the maelstrom, even Dad knew that it was time to leave.
Three months after breaking her leg, Mum was finally fit enough to catch the Arlberg Express back to Paris in late March 1939. It was years before either Mum or Dad had news of many of the friends from the village who saw them off at the railway station. Some they never saw again.
31
Moths in the Lamplight
With the benefit of hindsight, it is easy for me to question why my parents set off on a trip to Europe so close to the outbreak of war there. It seems that when they boarded the Aquitania to Cherbourg in late 1938, they were like moths being drawn towards a treacherous lamplight. Their maverick genes had leapt to the forefront once more. When Dad told me how in 1933 he had seen fire hoses being turned on the Nazis in the streets of Innsbruck, he remarked, ‘How grand we thought it would be to see Oswald Mosley hosed down the Strand – and at the time I only half wondered how deep the Nazi river ran below the smooth snow surface of the Austrian valleys.’1 By the time Mum and Dad left St Anton in the European spring of 1939, Dad must have felt that his experience had provided part of the answer to his question. Sometimes he spoke of Austria during this era as being the last dying flame of freedom.
Mum recalled discussions concerning German foreign policy when Lord Huntingfield, the Governor of Victoria, stayed at Towong Hill for the Back to Corryong events in March 1936. As Inspector-General of the Australian army in the 1920s, one of Grandfather Chauvel’s main concerns then, and later during his retirement from active service in the 1930s, was attempting to prevent successive governments cutting the defence budget and troop numbers because he feared Australia would be involved in further conflict. I don’t know if Grandfather ever attempted to dissuade Dad and Mum from their travel plans. He wrote to farewell them, explaining that he was unable to do so in person as he was very taken up with board meetings.
On 14 December 1937, at the start of their journey, Mum and Dad visited Pearl Harbor. They were not to know then that this would be the site of a devastating Japanese aerial attack on the US navy on 7 December 1941. In her journal for 1937, Mum wrote:
It is an enormous naval base, very well laid out and in the beautiful surroundings of rich volcanic lands and the Waisnai [Waianae] hills not very far off. There are enormous docks there and it must be a very good harbour. There seems to be terrific quantities of oil stored in tanks […] One is certainly unable to stay more than a few hours in Honolulu without having it forcibly brought to one’s notice that there is a very large fighting force there. Aeroplanes fly over at all hours of the day and night, bugles go, there are forts all over the place and the army always seems to be out on manoeuvres and the destroyers and submarines quite frequently too. Incidentally a great many people in the States, particularly in the Services, seem to be enraged over Japan.
Presumably Mum was referring to disquiet about the Japanese military action in Manchuria and the capture of the Chinese city Nanking.
Of their arrival on 28 December 1937 in Wilmington Harbor about three kilometres from the centre of Los Angeles, Mum remarked in her journal, ‘There was a lovely sunrise – red across the waters and, looming out of the misty light were the U.S.A. battle ships and two destroyers in the distance.’
Within days of Mum and Dad’s arrival in Sun Valley they were aware that Count Felix Schaffgotsch had Nazi sympathies and only employed ski instructors who were Nazis. Mum and Dad noticed tha
t one member of the German ski team (competing in the Harriman Cup at Sun Valley) ensured that all of the team said ‘Heil Hitler’ when appropriate, although most of the other members were good friends with them.2 Returning on 10 March 1938 to Sun Valley for the Harriman Cup, Dad and Mum witnessed the elation of some members of the team when in March 1938 Austria’s Anschluss, or union with Germany, was announced. Interestingly, Dad wrote that he wondered if ‘this was not the beginning of the end? Or did the now already half-forgotten fairytale happiness in the world spin itself out, goldenly, till the following September?’ Dad described how the prize-giving after the races ‘was excellent fun and yet something of a Mad Hatter’s Tea Party, as we sat singing German ski songs and wondering, sometimes, at the back of our minds, whether we wouldn’t all be at each other’s throats within a very short time.’3
Not long after that, when they were staying at Sunshine, above Banff in the Rockies, they heard a wireless announcement ‘in which all British subjects were told to leave Austria’.4 A few months later, Mum must have mentioned to her mother that they found the fortnight after the Munich Agreement on 29 September 1938 difficult, uncertain whether it was sensible to continue with their plans to travel to Europe. Years later Granny told Mum that she hadn’t said very much about the crisis in her letters because she felt sure that there was going to be war and she was so bothered that she could hardly bear to mention it. Indeed she must have been afraid that her daughter and son-in-law would be caught in it.
Dad and Mum must have become even more aware of the perilous state of world affairs while they were studying international relations. While at Harvard and Radcliffe, Dad and Mum met Heinrich Bruning, the former Chancellor of Germany, who explained in detail the reasons for Hitler’s rise to power and also what lay behind his own departure from Germany. Despite a clearly worsening international situation, nothing could deter them from their plans to ski in Europe; it was almost as if they heard but didn’t want to heed the warning signals.