The Palais

This morning I re-discovered my very earliest appearance in print, this small clipping proudly tucked down near the bottom of the second page of my first scrapbook.

Towards the end of 1974 my eldest brother Nick, who at that date was writing for Lot’s Wife, the student newspaper at Monash University, kindly delegated to me the task of furnishing a theatrical notice of the opening night performance in the old Palais Theatre in St. Kilda of the A. V. Alexandrov Soviet Army Twice Red-Bannered and Red-Starred Song and Dance Ensemble. No doubt this heavily subsidized event was a direct consequence of well-meaning but fruitless cultural diplomacy in the last years of the Whitlam government, but the two complimentary press tickets passed along by Nick’s editor at length allowed me to accompany Aunt Anne, and to take advantage of the pair of powerful agricultural binoculars which she always took along with her to the theater. I recall I wore school uniform, and was thrilled to be allowed to stay up so late. With consummate professionalism I returned my notice to Nick first thing the following morning, and it was duly published a week later:

Our intrepid reviewer Angus Trumble (age ten) went to the premiere of the Soviet Army Song and Dance Band at the Palais last week and writes... “By ten to eight twenty-four people were in the lounge. I thought it was a very bad night for an opening. By the time of the start forty-nine people had assembled in the lounge. I thought that there was too much of the same sort of singing. In the first half of the show there was ballet which was a bit long and loud. Altogether I thought it was most enjoyable, but I don’t recommend children of my age coming.”

This now strikes me as the model of concision, a quality has through intervening decades all but disappeared from my prose style. However, I am pleased to see that the habit of at least trying to isolate the telling detail was already firmly established. (The “lounge,” incidentally, was the equivalent of the dress circle.) My point about it being a very bad night for an opening was, upon much reflection now, almost certainly Aunt Anne’s, but I am still most grateful for it. However, the mixed assessment in conclusion was obviously colored by that genetically encoded predisposition from which Trumbles appear to suffer in every generation, namely a deep reluctance to give offense, to rock boats, or, at the very least, amply to make provision of any and all benefits of the doubt. Regrettably, to be honest, I have no recollection of any particular enjoyment of that long, martial entertainment 38 years ago.

Now I wonder which of those other forty-eight audience members was a covert representative of the federal government’s counterespionage service, sent to keep a watchful eye on everyone else, on both sides of the footlights. Alas, it was definitely not my late cousin and godmother Janet.

Mrs. P.

Mrs. P. invariably signed her letters “Yours very sincerely, Mary D. Park.” That “very,” inserted so deliberately between “Yours” and “sincerely,” was a kind and thoughtful nuance that has now almost completely vanished from written correspondence, though at times I know my own grandmother certainly practiced it. The locution was, I think, a sign that the salutation extended affectionately beyond mere epistolary convention, while retaining a degree of formality that was not distant so much as careful, in the best sense, certainly stopping short of anything that might be taken to presume too great a degree of familiarity: hence the full signature with that appealing middle initial, which, incidentally, stood for Davis. There was an added inflection, too, when at length the “very” gave way to the sprightly “v.” Alas, e-mail is busily sweeping these things into the dustbin of vanished usage, but that is neither here nor there.

I have been going back over her letters and some of the photographs, jogging my memory, because I knew that there was a dimension to Mrs. P.’s surprise two-week visit to Government House for Jean and Davis’s golden wedding anniversary in September 1990 that I had completely forgotten. What on earth was it?

Writing afterwards from Moyrath House, Belmont Road, Belfast, Mrs. P. rejoiced in “how well the surprise worked.” She went on: “I think almost the best aspect of it was that no one knew who else knew!” And that’s the missing link that lifts this little story to a higher plane of exquisiteness, because with Karla-level ingenuity over many months beforehand Mrs. P. contrived to recruit willing collaborators, by airmail, both among her nieces and nephews but also scattered throughout the Office of the Governor, none of whom were aware of the role played by each and every other, or even their identity. In lesser organizations a cat might well have been let out of the bag, but at Government House, Melbourne, discretion was everything. It was as if Mary D. Park were busily planting moles, and with remarkable success. Clearly she was a missed opportunity for MI6. What I do recall, however, is for weeks beforehand being eaten up with curiosity about who knew what, and when, but Karla’s recruitment process took account of every potential foible, based on the wisdom accumulated over the course of a lifetime as the doughty widow of a Northern Irish Presbyterian minister. Fortunately on this, our secret mission nobody ever discovered the consequences of failure.

Here we are, a few days later, Mrs. P. and I, consoling each other in defeat following another epic struggle against Jean and Davis on the croquet lawn at Government House—the dream team, Irish rules this time, and not Moscow.

Bond

I loved the little film that was made by the BBC and slotted into the beginning of last evening’s opening ceremony for the Games of London, celebrating the thirtieth Olympiad of the modern era. The conceit is simple enough, and therein, I suppose, lies its charm—two British icons, one fictitious and the other real, brought together in a flight of whimsy, yet at the same time with a measure of inherent logic. Of course, in an ideal world, Ian Fleming’s unassailable Bond, James Bond, would be entrusted with the task of escorting The Queen from Her Majesty’s Private Audience Room at Buckingham Palace to a waiting helicopter, and delivering the sovereign safely to that massive event, she who for longer than any other person has received and read weekly reports prepared for successive governments in Whitehall by the once secret British intelligence services. The exquisite note is one of slight tension, even a hint of urgency, on the part of Bond, as the clock strikes half past eight, and a corresponding determination on the part of Her Majesty not to be hurried (but, equally, not to delay). “Good evening, Mr. Bond,” says The Queen, with a suggestion of sprightliness, and, incidentally, effortless authority—and not the sort to which clever actors resort. “Good evening...Your Majesty,” replies Bond, who then follows The Queen out of the room, past Thomas Gainsborough’s magnificent 1777 full-length portrait of Anne, Duchess of Cumberland. Surely it must have been a glitch in the editing suite, but am I the only person who noticed the unfortunate exclusion of that moment in which Commander Bond surely bowed—correctly, and immediately upon entering the room: a clean, crisp motion of the head and neck only, and not the flamboyant deep waist-and/or-shoulders version that one occasionally observes among ill-briefed ambassadors, middle-European royalty, and on stage for curtain calls?

Dad in Budapest

P. C. Trumble (front row, far right) attends a murder trial in Budapest.

Shortly before Hamish took up residence at Jesus College, Cambridge, Dad took him on the old Orient Express to Vienna and Budapest, where for some reason he had arranged to attend a law conference, along with several other Australian delegates, including, I fancy, Diane Baker. This must have been in the early fall of 1974. I must have inherited my interest in espionage from Dad, because on this brief excursion to the eastern bloc, he was thrilled by the prospect of being subject to covert surveillance, and certainly alert to the possibility that everyone from concierge to putzfrau was a covert Soviet functionary. I am sure he knew that this was almost certainly not true, but part of him would have regretted it. Some people are disturbed by the thought that all is not as it seems, but Dad was simply delighted, and I must admit that I usually am too. He loved the thought of hidden microphones, agents provocateuses lurking on every street corner, intrigue aboard the steamer on Lac Balaton or being followed across the Heroes’ Square. Certainly, part of the entertainment provided to the conference delegates was the opportunity to attend a public murder trial, of which this photograph is the slightly sinister record. There he is, seated in the front row on the far right, wearing headphones, and looking wholly absorbed. I suppose it is rather depressing to think that for some poor wretch in that court room the only thing worse than being tried for murder was being tried before an audience of well-fed lawyers mostly from the other side of the iron curtain. In any case, the more some foreign capital resembled the setting of a spy novel, the happier Dad was. He loved spy novels. And in his hotel room, late at night, he poured his delight into ridiculous verses, written in longhand with his fountain pen, and posted them home to us in envelopes decorated with cartoons, almost always harnessed to the PAR AVION portion at the top left hand corner of an airmail envelope. Incidentally, does anyone under 50 remember air-mail envelopes, or the frisson of pleasure caused by receiving one, and devouring the onion-skin contents? If the attention of the Hungarian authorities was ever drawn to these, one can only imagine what perplexity they must have caused. Such was the pointlessness of Cold War paranoia. Certainly Dad’s gleeful presumption that Budapest was a seething nest of Russian spies went hand in hand with the certain knowledge that there was nothing much that they could gain by ensnaring a Melbourne city solicitor who was also, at that time, director of the Housing Loans Insurance Corporation, honorary treasurer of the Medico-Legal Society of Victoria, and a member of the board of management of the Royal Melbourne Hospital, etc. etc., except general confusion, and a lot of wasted time and effort. Safely back in the free world, and coinciding there with Kenneth and Sylvia Aitken, of all people, Dad and Hamish attended the Staatsoper in Vienna. In the audience that night, in other words the night of Monday, September 16, 1974 (Parkett, Reihe 8, Sitzen 3 und 4), only a few places away and in the same Reihe, were seated Dame Joan Sutherland and Richard Bonynge. Was it The Tales of Hoffmann, I wonder? I must remember to ask Hamish.

Espionage

According to the brief but lively memoir she wrote towards the end of her life, Granny described the thrill of sailing to England for the first time at the end of 1912. Prior to their departure:

A sewing woman came for a week and made dresses for us all, the day nursery was full of materials and some of us doing the finishings off. In those days the idea was to wear old clothes on the ship and put them through the porthole at our journey’s end. We had masses of luggage, there certainly were six of us, but I think about 50 cases! When we left Sale by train, the station master had some detonators put on the rails which went off with a tremendous bang! I remember catching the boat and Dad being very worried that we would miss it as we went down by train with some friends—the O’Hara Woods and Hal Maudsley among them—and Dad and Mother by train…

The trip was wonderful then as it still is. I shall never forget the night before we got to Colombo, and smelling those lovely scents which came out over the ocean. And then seeing Colombo and the East for the first time. One felt it just could not be true. We had a whole day there and drove to many places including the Galle Face Hotel [above]. There was great excitement after we left Colombo. Two Germans who had joined onto our party, together with the sister of some girls we were at school with, and whom Mother was asked to look after, left the ship, and after a few days a cable came from them to this girl asking her to look in the drawer of a writing desk for papers they had left behind. They were taken, of course, straight to the captain. I don’t know what happened to them, but we were all sure the men were spies!

In her boisterous and deliciously patriotic novel From Billabong to London (1914) Mary Grant Bruce borrowed this thrilling episode from Mongie, her niece, and embellished it.

David Linton, his son Jim, daughter Norah and their childhood friend and companion Wally Meadows, sail from Melbourne to Tilbury aboard the Perseus, by the long route via South Africa. War has by this date broken out, and to guard against enemy shipping, the Perseus observes a nightly black-out. However, a few days out of Durban, Norah notices sinister flashing lights coming from a nearby cabin. She, Jim and Wally go straight to Captain Garth. At first two Swedish crewmen come under suspicion, but after an ingenious trap is successfully laid, the German spy turns out to be none other than innocuous Mr. Smith, a businessman who had almost missed the boat in Melbourne :

He broke off, with a shout. “Watch him!”

Mr. Smith had sprung towards the port-hole, a dark object in his hand. Jim was just too quick for him. He caught the up-raised arm. The little man fought fiercely and silently for a moent; then he gave in, yielding what he held with a little sigh.
“Pocket-book,” said Jim, examining it…

Beyond the bulky pocket-book which had so narrowly escaped a watery grave, there was little of an incriminating nature to be found on the prisoner. Dixon took charge of any papers in his pockets, and of his keys; and in a corner of the cabin Wally picked up an electric torch—a powerful one, of new and elaborate design.

“Signalling apparatus,” said Dixon, glancing at it. His anger suddenly blazed out.
“What do you mean by it, you cowardly hound? Who paid you to sell your own people to the enemy?!”

“The enemy?” said Mr. Smith. “My own people?” He glanced round with sudden pride. “My people are your enemies, and I am one of them. I am a German!”…

According to Captain Garth, recapping with the Lintons post hoc,

“Schmidt is his name—Hans Schmidt. There’s any amount of evidence against him in the papers; the pocket-book he tried to throw out of the port contains much full and true information about our [troop] transports, a complete cipher code of signals, and translations of various other codes. It’s evident that the police were on his heels in Melbourne—that’s why he joined so hurriedly. He covered his tracks well too; made them think he had gone to Brisbane.”