Around Christmas in 2002 a truly unique book was launched in Hobart. Titled Ordinary Women, it featured a bleak cover photograph of a bombed German city, Dresden, and on its back flap a drawing of author Edward Kynaston by the legendary cartoonist Michael Leunig.
As a lifelong haunter of bookshops I should have known about it, but it never registered on my radar. Then a few weeks ago, scanning shelves at a family member’s home I came across this 489-page volume about three generations of a German family.
The book’s Tasmanian connection is intriguing. It was written on Bruny Island by Edward Kynaston, previously literary editor of the “lean and nosy” 1970s newspaper Nation Review, where he met and befriended Leunig. The publisher was Dover-based Esperance Press.
The “ordinary women” of the book are a family of Dresden residents. They’re ordinary in the sense that they once lived normal lives, but the oppression and cruelty of the Hitler regime and the terror and deprivation of total war bring out the extraordinary in them.
There is a disconcerting parallel between those times and now. Leading today’s rise of populism and autocracy is the United States, the country that for 80 years gave weight and energy to the causes of human rights, democracy, world order and the rule of law. Those causes are now being upended by the Trump regime.
For all the war memorials and Anzac Days in this country, most of us see territorial war as a scourge suffered by others. That’s certainly true for me, born just after the last big one ended and a lucky loser in the dreaded 1960s Vietnam conscription lottery.
As the author says at the outset, Ordinary Woman is a real-life story – “only the characters are fictitious”. As such it’s an exceptional social history of an advanced industrial economy under a totalitarian dictatorship. Well-informed by his direct connections with the family in question, Kynaston’s elegant, uncluttered writing draws the reader into the ugliness of fascism and war.
The book includes a hilarious put-down of the Hitler salute at a Berlin cabaret in late 1943, when the Nazis were starting to look like losers. A family friend recalls a man standing silently on stage and raising his right arm in the familiar pose. After a pause one audience member – “some party member I should think” – stood and raised his arm. Others in the audience followed one by one, in awkward silence.
Among the few hold-outs left sitting was the storyteller, who recalls that finally the man on stage beamed at the audience and said, “That’s how high my dog jumped today” at which “everyone collapsed roaring with laughter, and with relief I shouldn’t wonder.”
Horrifying as it is, the territorial warfare of today has not yet sunk to the awful depths of the Nazi holocaust and World War II. Dresden, a jewel of medieval Europe, had escaped the war virtually intact until British and US aerial fire-bombing in February 1945 killed around 25,000 inhabitants.
The Dresden story was brought into sharp focus in the classic 1969 novel Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut, a prisoner of war in the city when the bombs fell. Ordinary Women tells of the even more immersive experiences of families living there long before, during and after the bombing.
It was no accident that Ordinary Women emerged as a book on this side of the world. The last of those three Dresden generations, represented by the character Anita Brook, emigrates with her remarkable mother, Erna, from Germany to Australia in 1948, grateful, as the story says, “that the long shadows that still live over Europe do not reach this far.”
The real-life name of the fictional Erna was Lida Richards-Segar. Anita was her daughter Petra, and as the book says they emigrated to Melbourne, where Petra met and married Welsh-born Harvey Williams, a.k.a. Edward Kynaston. The pair moved to South Bruny where the book was written in a house looking west over a tranquil Channel. Both died on the island, Edward in 2000 and Petra in 2004.
“An epic in the true sense of the word… a story of such overwhelming power that it lodges permanently in the reader’s mind” was how Penguin Australia editor Sophie Hamley described Kynaston’s text in a 2001 reader’s report for her employers. But they passed up the challenge to publish.
Ordinary Women may not be a book for everyone, but it’s an outstanding primer for understanding today’s world. Esperance Press is still publishing Tasmanian literature, and your favourite bookshop can still obtain copies. Or you can order direct by clicking on this link.