PREFACE

In 1985 my mother's last remaining sibling, Ethel, died. Ethel never married and had lived alone for many years in the home previously occupied by her parents and sisters in Magill, near Adelaide in South Australia.

We travelled from Melbourne to Adelaide for the funeral and to finalise the estate. The job of sorting through more than half a century of personal belongings and family memorablilia began. Faded sepia portraits of grandparents, aunts and cousins and a small child who died before the year was out. Boxes containing musty clothing, starched shirts as stiff as cardboard, and shoes far too small to fit anyone but a child. The kitchen smelled of burnt food, the wardrobes of camphor. There were the dried flower arrangements, the brown paper bags neatly folded and stored within other brown paper bags, the carefully bound bunches of string of all kinds and dozens of matchboxes filled with used matches... just in case! The kitchen cupboards contained preserving jars and a variety of hand operated appliances. In the washroom was an old crank handle laundry wringer next to the wood fired hotwater system. Finally the old shed at rear of the Murray Avenue property revealed, amongst the piles of newspapers and boxes, a tin trunk. Stenciled on its lid in fading paint were the words...

"R.M. Goode, 407499, R.A.A.F."

The old Air Force trunk had rarely been opened during the past forty years. There is little doubt that the contents were far too painful for my late grandmother, Hilda, to have dealt with. Inside were dozens of letters, each one beginning with the words "Dear Everybody", a diary, a logbook, many photographs, several small personal belongings and contained within a small carved wooden box, a tarnished silver medal with the Greek Goddess of victory, Athena Nike, shown seated on an aeroplane, a hawk rising from her right arm above the words 'For Courage'.

There was one other thing. An old tobacco tin containing a safety razor with a rusting blade. The traces of facial whiskers were testament to the last time it was used... sometime on, or just prior to, Friday the 13th of August, 1943.

Over time I read the letters and diary, scoured the photographs and newspaper cuttings and began to get to know a little of an uncle I had never met. I asked my mother, Margaret, what her brother was like...

"Ray was never really confident or outgoing. You could thank mother for that."

He joined the Airforce in 1940 and returned home after graduating to say goodbye before embarking for England in September of 1941. Margaret was 20 years old and ill in bed with the German Measles...

He came to the bedroom door and went to come in but I said...
"No Ray! I'm contagious!"
So he just stood at the door in his blue airforce uniform with a grin on his face and his kitbag.
"Goodbye old measley" he said.
I couldn't even hug him...

Twenty three months later Margaret was taking a bath when the hand delivered telegram arrived at the Henley Beach home. It was 9:30PM, Monday August 16th, 1943. She heard the knock at the door and froze. She knew then, even before she heard her own mother's screams that her brother was never coming home.

As a small child I had vague recollections of discussions concerning a relative who went away to war and never returned. At the time I was simply too young to understand what that meant. My grandmother never allowed herself to accept that Ray was gone. He had survived two incidents during 1943. In fact on June 2nd 1943 he and his crew had been given up for dead. While on anti-submarine patrol over the Bay of Biscay, the crew were asked to lookout for survivors of a KLM civil airliner that had been shot down by the Luftwaffe the previous day. Amongst those who had been aboard was the British film star, Leslie Howard.

Early on the evening of June 2nd they entered the search area. Then at 7PM an urgent radio message was received by Coastal Command headquarters reporting their Sunderland Flying Boat was under attack from eight Junkers JU88 heavy fighters. Shortly afterwards all communication suddenly ceased.

Later that same evening, after an unsuccessful search, an impromptu wake was held for the crew in the anteroom at Pembroke Dock in South Wales. Just before midnight, a phonecall came through with the news they had brought their bullet ridden Sunderland home, ditching just off the coast of Cornwall on dark. Maybe it was this miraculous survival that kept Hilda believing that her son would one day return. Hilda never got over the loss of Ray until the day she died. It was something that was rarely discussed, and only then never in her presence, for it was Hilda, and Hilda alone, who was the only one in the family that was allowed to grieve openly.

Ray's story has taken me on my own journey, from Melbourne to Canberra, to Brisbane, Sydney, Perth and Adelaide, and from Australia to the small coastal village of Praa Sands in the south of Cornwall, England. I have met many people on this journey, some are in their twilight years and graciously gave me both their time, and their memories. This website is the result.

The handwritten words, 'Dear Everybody', that appear at the top of each page are Ray's. The maple leaves he sent from Canada in 1941, though dry and brittle, still reside in their original envelope. Occasional ink blotches leave their mark on the pages of his letters and diary. Then there is the letter from a young woman in England, written to his mother a week after he was posted missing in action... a woman he had never mentioned. Finally his voice, though nervous and awkward from reading a prepared script in front of the microphone at the BBC, is both immediate and haunting as it is the voice of a man that was silenced along with many others three score years ago... and the voice of a man who's final resting place lies somewhere unknown beneath the waves of the Bay of Biscay... and the voice of a brother that, for the first time in nearly sixty years my mother, who is nearly blind, heard once again.

Rowan Matthews
April 2003

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