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54 great opening lines: 43

Henry Holden decided to get an Italian prisoner-of-war after he had seen several at work on Esmond’s farm.

The Enthusiastic Prisoner, E. O. Schlunke

*****

Another short story by Schlunke, the author of The Irling which I wrote about a couple of days ago.  This line, beginning with a very Australian name, Henry Holden, caught my attention particularly when I saw it was about an Italian P.O.W.  It triggered thoughts of some photos from my father’s war album of Italians taken prisoner by Australian soldiers.  Many of the P.O.W.s were shipped to Australia and placed in camps, and their services were offered to local farmers who greatly benefited from the Italians’ excellent knowledge of food production.  There is a photo (above) of a stream of Italians heading towards their captor’s camp.  There’s also this image of a suave bunch posing for the camera:

Italian soldiers, North Africa, c1941
Italian soldiers, North Africa, c1941
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54 great opening lines: 41

While old Kronitz’s youngest son Waltie was being born without qualified assistance, the old man paced the veranda that ran around all four sides of his large, bungalow-style house, annoyed with his wife for her bad judgement after all her experience, and refusing to admit that he should have sent for the community’s wise woman sooner, even at the risk of having to pay her for a whole day while she did nothing but talk.

The Irling, E.O. Schlunke

*****

Quite a long opener of a two-sentence paragraph in a tale composed of many two-long-sentence paragraphs.  Old Kronitz dreads the irling, a mysterious twinkling light appearing on the south side of his farm during Waltie’s birth and which had appeared to his ancestors in the forests and swamps of Czestochowa in Poland.  Years later a drama develops when a fat Bavarian who considers himself an educated man arrives in Australia and buys the neighbouring property.  I was surprised by such a story about a Pole and a German, published in 1955.  It’s not hard to see where the author’s sympathies lay.