Ghosts of the Past

CHAPTER 4

31 CHAPTER 4

North Sydney, Australia, the present dayThe afternoon had dragged painfully and Nick left work at a quarter to five.

He didn’t care. He no longer had a job.

Susan Vidler, the South African woman who had emailed him, had returned his call soon after he had left his message. She told him it would be no problem to meet him at the Commodore Hotel in North Sydney, some time after five fifteen. He figured it would be better to make small talk with a stranger, and maybe learn something about an ancestor of his, than to get drunk by himself and go back to the flat and look through old photos of Jill until he passed out.

The Commodore was a popular pub and he had left early to be sure of getting a table before the usual after-work crowd descended. When he arrived he walked upstairs from Blues Point Road to the outdoor verandah area, then ordered himself a schooner of beer.

Nick found a seat, took out his phone and checked f******k and his emails.

‘Nick?’

32He looked up and saw a pretty face – very pretty, in fact – framed by straight blonde hair. ‘Yes, Susan, is it?’

‘Howzit?’ She extended a hand.

Nick stood. ‘Hi.’

‘I took a lucky guess,’ she said.

‘Can I get you a drink?’

‘That would be lekker, lovely, thanks. Sauvignon blanc?’

‘Coming right up.’ Nick went to the bar, thinking that at least one thing hadn’t turned ugly today.

He returned to the table. Susan sat with her chair pushed back and her legs crossed below a short black skirt. ‘Thanks.’

‘Nice to meet you,’ he said, and sipped his beer.

‘You as well. I’m so glad you agreed to meet me. I have to tell you it was quite an effort to track you down.’

‘Well, I don’t think I’ve ever heard anything about this relative you’re interested in. What was his name again?’

‘Blake,’ she said. ‘Sergeant Cyril Blake. He gets a mention in a book about the history of Namibia, or rather, his alias, Edward Prestwich, appears in the book.’

‘Now I’m really confused. You said something about this guy serving in German South West Africa? That’s modern Namibia, right?’

‘Yes.’

‘Australians never fought there, as far as I know.’

Susan leaned forward a little, elbows on the table. Her face became animated and he noticed her eyes for the first time, an almost translucent blue. ‘You’re right, but Cyril Blake ended up in German South West Africa in 1906, fighting with the indigenous Nama people who, with the Herero, rose up against the German colonial government.’

‘Why did Blake join them?’

‘That’s one of the things I’m trying to find out. It could be that he was sympathetic to their cause, or had some reason to dislike the Germans. It certainly wasn’t Blake’s war. However, he also seems to have had a business interest in all this.’

33‘Business?’

She sipped her wine and nodded. ‘Blake was a horse trader. Horses were in very short supply on both sides, and there’s evidence Blake sold horses to the Nama people. There was apparently a lot of cross-border trade going on between the British-controlled Cape Colony, part of what’s now known as South Africa, and German South West Africa.’

Nick was mildly intrigued, both by the story and by Susan. She was maybe ten years younger than him so she was not some wide-eyed cadet reporter straight out of university chasing her first feature story. He glanced at her left hand; there was no wedding ring. Nick had a vision of Jill in her floral headscarf, forcing a smile, and telling him he should find someone new when she was gone. She had tried to make a joke out of it, telling him to wait at least a year, and had laughed. Still he felt guilty, checking Susan out.

He cleared his throat. ‘So, how did you find me – searching online?’

‘Yes and no. I knew the name of your great-great-uncle through some other historical research and was able to find his enlistment papers for the Boer War, via the Australian national archives online. His papers listed his mother as his next of kin. I looked her up and later found birth certificates for your great-great-uncle’s two brothers through her.’

‘I do remember my aunt once telling me about three brothers on her side of the family – my mother’s side – who had gone to war. One died in France in the First World War and the other’s my great-grandfather, who served in Palestine with the light horse. The third one must have been Cyril.’

Susan nodded. ‘I found the marriage record for your great-grandfather and great-grandmother through the New South Wales Registry of Births, Deaths and Marriages, online. I then found the birth record for your grandmother and her marriage certificate.’

‘Impressive,’ Nick said.

34Susan smiled and took a sip of her wine, then held up a palm. ‘It gets better – well, harder, after that. Because of privacy laws you can’t find birth records online for people born in New South Wales less than a hundred years ago or marriage records within the last fifty years. So, I searched Trove, which is in the process of scanning old Australian newspapers using optical character recognition. I found a mention there of your grandparents, a marriage notice that listed them as the parents of the bride, your mother, Ruth.’

‘Amazing.’

‘It seemed you, or some other descendent of Blake’s, were getting harder to find. I searched for other clues and found a website called the Ryerson Index, set up by the Sydney Dead Person’s Society …’

‘You’re not serious.’

Susan nodded. ‘I am. They list death notices from the Daily Telegraph and the Sydney Morning Herald, going way back. I found a death notice for your father, Denis Eatwell. I’m sorry for your loss.’

‘He had a good long life.’ Unlike Jill. He couldn’t shake the feeling of guilt, being in a pub with Susan, but he was impressed with the lengths she had gone to in order to find him. ‘So that’s how you found me, all via the internet?’

She shook her head. ‘Actually, no. This is where fate lent a hand. The Ryerson Index just lists the name and date of the notice, not the text, and Trove hasn’t got up to scanning the newspapers from the time your father died. I had to actually go in person to the State Library of New South Wales and look up the Sydney Morning Herald edition with your father’s death notice on microfilm.’

He leaned back in his chair. ‘You flew to Sydney just to do that?’

She laughed. ‘No, but I had been meaning to come over to visit friends, and as my queries were leading me to Sydney it seemed like it was, I don’t know, pre-ordained or something. The death 35notice, when I found it a couple of days ago, listed you as Denis’s sole survivor and after that the sleuthing was less intriguing – I turned to good old f******k. There aren’t many Australian Nick Eatwells, and when I worked out you weren’t a guy in Western Australia, I emailed you, and here we are.’

‘That’s quite a story in itself, but, forgive me, do you really think it was worth all the effort you went to – given I still don’t know much about this guy? And is anyone actually going to run an historical feature about all of this?’

‘The story’s got more currency than you probably think,’ she said. ‘Even though the uprising happened more than a hundred years ago it still has implications for Africa and Germany today. For a long time there have been calls from Namibia for the German government to pay compensation. As well as defeating the Herero and the Nama in battle, the Germans set up a network of concentration camps where tens of thousands of people died through overwork, starvation and disease. The worst camp was at Shark Island, on the Atlantic Coast, where terrible things were done. Inmates from the island were also used to build a railway line from the port of Lüderitz to the town of Keetmanshoop and they were literally worked to death. The Germans have gone part of the way, issuing an expression of regret – not quite an apology – but they’ve stopped short of promising compensation.’

‘What do you think?’

Susan shrugged. ‘I don’t necessarily believe that people today from a progressive, liberal country like Germany should be held accountable for the actions of the Kaiser’s regime a century ago, but I can see the local people’s point. In either case, a hard-hitting story that shows how abominably the Germans acted will be of interest in both countries, and it’ll be newsy as well as a feature.’

‘Hmm,’ Nick said, not quite convinced. ‘The fact that an Aussie fought in this war is hardly going to cause any great ructions in Germany.’

36‘It might if people here in Australia and in Germany found out that Cyril Blake was murdered on the orders of the German government in 1906.’

Nick felt it. His fingertips twitched the way they sometimes did – not for a good many years now – when he was on to a good story. By good he meant one that sold papers, that got people talking in the streets and pissed off politicians and big businesses. He saw the sparkle in those blue eyes across the table from him and he knew that Susan felt it as well, and it was what had brought her here to a pub in North Sydney.

‘The Germans must have been threatened by this bloke.’

Susan nodded. ‘There’s precious little about him in the archives. Trust me, I’ve looked in Cape Town, online in Berlin, and even here in Australia. There’s not a lot, on paper, that tells us much about who Cyril Blake was and why he did what he did. We know more about his death than we do his life.’

‘Really?’ Nick said.

‘The German military entrapped him. That book on the history of Namibia mentions he was set up by a couple of Afrikaner spies who lured your great-great-uncle into German South West Africa on the promise of a cattle deal. They ambushed him, wounded him, and left him to die in the desert. That’s how much they hated the idea of this foreign white man riding with the rebels.’

Nick exhaled. ‘Bloody hell.’

‘The Germans sent out a military patrol the next day to check on him. Reports from the time suggest your ancestor was still alive, having survived a night in the desert, but he was then executed in cold blood by a German officer.’

‘That’s a lot to take in.’ Nick took a moment to process the shocking revelation. It was one thing to learn of an ancestor who had died in war, in combat, but another altogether to think of someone being murdered. He could see how the German government might not want such a deed resurrected, even today. ‘So what do you want from me?’

37Susan shrugged. ‘I was wondering if there was anything you or your family might have, some sort of papers or letters from or about him?’

Nick frowned. ‘I’d never heard of him until just now.’ He thought about what he knew of his own ancestry. It didn’t take him more than half a minute to work out it was not very much.

Susan reached down to the large brown leather handbag she had brought with her. She pulled out a manila folder, which she slid across the table. ‘How about I get us another drink while you have a look through this stuff, Nick.’

‘OK.’ He took the folder. The journalist in him was interested, but he couldn’t help but feel a little weird that a stranger had been picking through his family tree and possibly knew more about where he came from than he did. ‘Thanks.’

Susan got up and went to the bar, and Nick opened the folder. There were family trees and printouts from online genealogical research sites, more than one by the look of it. She had obviously spent some time piecing all this together. Stapled to the inside front cover of the folder was a printout of a document which seemed to summarise her findings.

This Cyril Blake, it seemed, was his maternal great-grandfather’s brother, his great-great-uncle. Blake had never married and that side of the family had produced very few offspring. Nick himself had no siblings and no cousins from his mother’s side of the family. His mother, who had passed away three years earlier, had one sister, his aunt. He looked up from the piece of paper.

‘What are you thinking?’ Susan set a beer down in front of him and another glass of wine for herself and took her seat again.

The pub was filling up and getting noisier. ‘I have an aunt who is really into all this family history stuff, possibly because there are so few of us on her side of the family.’

‘I noticed that,’ Susan said. ‘Do you think your aunt might know something about Cyril?’

Nick exhaled. ‘Well, if anyone did it would be her. She’s obsessed by our history.’

38Susan looked at her watch. ‘I don’t want to keep you, Nick, if you have to get home to the family or whatever.’

He leaned back in his seat. ‘There’s no one at home waiting for me. My wife died of cancer eight months ago.’

Susan’s face fell and she reached out and put her hand on his. ‘Oh, no, Nick, I’m so sorry.’

He nodded. At least he didn’t cry any more when he said the words. He looked up at her. ‘I’ll call my aunt for you.’

‘Thank you, I really appreciate it.’

‘What about you?’

‘What about me?’ she asked back.

‘Does anyone have dinner in the oven waiting for you, here or in South Africa?’

‘No.’ She sipped her wine. ‘I’m travelling solo and I’m divorced.’

‘Sorry,’ Nick said.

‘Don’t be. I’m not,’ Susan said. ‘Are you hungry? Maybe we can get something together?’

‘Sure.’ After the day he’d had, Nick couldn’t think of anywhere else he would rather be than across the table from a pretty, slightly intriguing woman. All he had waiting for him was an empty apartment and a television and he felt sure Jill wouldn’t mind him having dinner with someone, even if it hadn’t been a year yet. ‘Sounds like a great idea. If you like Spanish food, there’s a nice tapas place down Blues Point Road.’

‘Love it. I can tell you more about what I’m writing. I think there might even be a book in it. There’s even a leading lady in this story, I think.’

‘You think?’

‘I’m not sure of what exactly happened between them, but there’s a half-German, half-Irish woman whose name has popped up a few times in my research, Claire Martin. She was born in Germany, but moved to German South West Africa in the late 1890s. Looks like she and Cyril crossed paths.’

‘Sounds like there might even be a movie in it.’

She smiled. ‘If you have a look in the folder there’s a photocopy 39of a report from a British Army intelligence officer, a Captain Llewellyn Walters, who served with your ancestor during the Boer War. They were on a raid that was aimed at capturing a Boer leader, an American.’

Nick leafed through the pages until he found the report, written in a neat copperplate. It had been prepared by Captain The Honourable Llewellyn Walters in 1902.

Sergeant Blake and I took up position on a hill overlooking the trading post on the Sabie River where the Boer colonel, Nathaniel Belvedere, and the German spy, Claire Martin, were believed to have conducted their rendezvous. Our intention was to mount a pre-dawn raid while the occupants were asleep. Sergeant Blake seemed unsettled and nervous, his attitude bordering on insubordinate …