The cover is reminiscent of a scene from Hansel and Gretel featuring an innocent little girl and her brother but bears the title ‘Flight from the Brothers Grimm’ to match.
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By her own admission, Bunyah resident Valerie Murray’s recently published memoirs reflect the brutality of Grimm’s fairy tales in her recollections of a journey from war-torn Hungary to Australia in 1950. But they are stories dotted with moments of sweetness – similar to Hansel and Gretel – throughout.
“I remember some horrible scenes,” Valerie said, referring to a bomb zone across what was once a scenic landscape.
She was three when her parents put her under the supervision of two nuns on a Red Cross train fleeing war-torn Hungary to Switzerland. Her brother was one and a half.
“Sometimes there was bombing around us and the train would stop and they would turn off all the lights. I remember the two nuns sat opposite us with their white wimples. My brother was screaming.”
It would be a year until the siblings were reunited with their mother in Zurich, and longer for their father who was off “flogging forged American dollars on the black market” to make ends meet.
In publishing her story, Valerie has achieved what many talk about but few manage to do. She has seen her personal project documenting memories into print through to the end, following what she refers to as a strong compulsion to tell her story.
“I saw my parents fading rapidly, they weren’t going to last much longer, and I wanted to write about what their lives had been before it was too late,” she said, adding her whole life had been an emotional journey.
“I really wanted to make sure it was on record, for myself and my family and for anyone else who wants to read it.”
Picking up her pen and notebook in 2005 it took her two years to write, one anecdote at a time, then she retyped it out.
“I didn’t trust the neat clean look of computers,” she said, reflecting a similar distrust to technology as her husband, respected international poet Les Murray.
“It hides the little faults.”
Self-published this year, she said writing memoirs needs a strong compulsion to tell the story.
“… and you’re telling the story to yourself first of all. You want the people in your life to see where you’ve come from.”
Her story in print stops soon after she and husband Les moved their family back to the family farm in Bunyah in 1985 to look after Cecil, Les’ father. With the focus of this memoir on journeys - from the Old World of Europe to the New, Australia; from life as a migrant child into an Australian adult; from single and teaching into married with children to one of Australia’s foremost poets – it’s easy to understand why the book arrived at this natural conclusion. Now predominantly home-bound despite recent successive knee surgeries compounded by hospital staph, Valerie’s biggest milestone travels are over.
“My big lesson is to find gratitude in things that have gone well and not give into despair. It has to be a conscious effort. I have to think, ‘I'm all right from the knees up.’”
It’s a lesson well learnt, with poet Peter Skrzynecki describing her memoirs as a “triumph of hope over loss and dispossession.”
Flight from the Brothers Grimm is available for $20 including postage, on 02) 6559 1550.
