Flight from the Brothers Grimm review: Valerie Murray on fleeing Hungary

Flight from the Brothers Grimm

Valerie Murray

Books Unleashed, $20

As her parents' memories faded with dementia, Valerie Murray felt a great need to put her past on the page. Written with refreshing directness, this is a memoir full of glimmering nuggets that belie the author's fears of the losing of the plot. In Nazi-occupied Hungary, the two-year-old Murray started singing the opening bars of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony, the motif of the prohibited BBC shortwave broadcast, while everyone in the tram pretended not to hear. With touching symmetry, this motif returns at the end of her tale as she sits by the hospital bedside of her husband, Les Murray, while he is in a coma, keeping an eye on a monitor that plays those famous first four notes from Beethoven. From the high drama of her family's escape from Hungary and the pressures of being an immigrant in post-war Australia, to married life with one of the great "masters of words", this a testament to a life well-lived and remembered.