The Noon Lady of Towitta Read Online Free PDF Page A

in labour giving birth to Giscelia, her firstborn son, barely able to walk, tottered off into the forest and was lost. Only after the dramas of the birth did they miss him. Weeks later when they found his remains they deduced he was killed by a wolf. This tragedy put the young couple on their guard and made the long black nights fearful and menacing for their two surviving children, my Aunt Giscelia and Mathes, my father. They were forever wary of marauding wolves, creatures of the night and other threatening shadows of the forest.
    When Mathes was just six, his mother, Mascha, barely survived a difficult birth during which her baby died. The complications so soon after an earlier pregnancy maimed and crippled her and she never recovered. She was confined to bed and became weaker each day until her death six months later. After Grandmother Mascha’s death, Grandfather Josef took to alcohol that made him wild and mad. He brewed almost pure spirit in the forest and sold some of it to those in the nearby village who knew of his still. But most of it he drank himself. Mascha and Josef had lovingly cared for and protected the young Mathes and Giscelia, but after Mascha’s death the children were neglected.
    One day, several years after their mother’s death, their Aunt Katie-Lizzie and Uncle Herman paid an unexpected visit. News of Mascha had reached them from well-meaning family friends visiting the Zittau area in Upper Lusatia, centre of the Saxon linen trade. These family friends were passing through the district and had happened to stay at an inn in Zittau. Here dark and sinister tales about the nearby forest were told around dinner tables and winter firesides. Among these stories was the tragic but romanticised tale of the runaway girl from Cottbus who had lived on the edge of the forest with a wayward forester. After her death he went mad through grief, they said. Not only had the newborn infant died, but their eldest child was taken by a wolf. Although the event had taken place in the district four years earlier, the story was often spoken of as though it had only happened the day before.
    Their friends’ ears pricked up when they heard that the young girl from Cottbus was called Mascha. They guessed she could be their friend Herman Schippan’s long-lost sister. My paternal grandmother’s family had spent ten years trying to find her, never knowing she had already been dead four years when their friends stumbled across her family.
    Herman was excited yet wracked with guilt when he heard that his cherished sister had left two small children to be brought up by a half-crazed father. Herman and Katie-Lizzie were about to migrate to South Australia with their only child, Gretel, but Herman knew he could not leave Germany with a clear conscience without first seeing what he could do for his sister’s shattered family. They were kin after all. Herman and Katie-Lizzie immediately made the long journey from Cottbus to visit the family before their sea voyage to South Australia.
    As they had never met Mascha’s lover, they stayed at an inn when they arrived in Zittau. After finding out where Josef and his two children lived, Herman and Katie-Lizzie were driven by the innkeeper several miles out of town to the edge of a dark forbidding forest where there was a small hut in a clearing. They intended to make themselves known to Josef and perhaps help him financially, but they were so alarmed at what they found that they decided that the best way of helping the family was to give them a chance in life by taking all three of them to South Australia with them, even if it meant delaying their voyage for some weeks.
    Josef thought he had been saved from Hell when he met Mascha’s family and welcomed them with open arms. Mathes and Giscelia, who were never seen apart, clutched hands and cowered together when their aunt and uncle first set eyes upon them. But when they heard their aunt’s soft voice and