The Auckland University Press Anthology of New Zealand Literature

by Jane Stafford

  Whose sigh crept after me.

  Now when at midnight round my doors

  The gale through sheltering branches roars,

  What is it to the might

  Of the mad gorge-wind that o’erthrew

  My camp—the first I pitched—and blew

  Our tents into the night?

  Mine is the vista where the blue

  And white-capped mountains close the view.

  Each tapering cypress there

  At planting in these hands was borne,

  Small, shivering seedlings and forlorn,

  When all the plain was bare!

  Skies without music, mute through time,

  Now hear the skylark’s rippling climb

  Challenge their loftier dome.

  And hark! A song of garden floats,

  Rills, gushes clear,—the self-same notes

  Your thrushes flute at Home.

  See, I have poured o’er plain and hill

  Gold open-handed, wealth that will

  Win children’s children’s smiles,

  —Autumnal glories, glowing leaves,

  And aureate flowers, and warmth of sheaves,

  ’Mid weary pastoral miles.

  Yonder my poplars, burning gold,

  Flare in tall rows of torches bold,

  Spire beyond kindling spire.

  Then raining gold round silver stem

  Soft birches gleam. Outflaming them

  My oaks take ruddier fire.

  And with my flowers about her spread

  (None brighter than her shining head),

  The lady of my close,

  My daughter, walks in girlhood fair.

  Friend, could I rear in England’s air

  A sweeter English rose?

  (1925)

  In Anger

  John A. Lee, from Children of the Poor

  I was born in Athol Place, between Hanover and St Andrew Streets, on Hallowe’en. My memories of the few years we lived in that place are faint. The house consisted of two rooms with a detached lavatory. There was a side approach to the backyard, where memory records a first inglorious recollection. I see myself in a procession of tiny tots, miniature guttersnipes, toddling along the lane and piddling from side to side in imitation of a street-watering cart. To the pure all things are pure. We were as innocent of evil as a set of fountain cupids. The house still exists, but I never linger when I pass. Memory of the poverty in this house chills my spine. Every brick tells of hunger and grinding poverty.

  Few other memories of Athol Place remain. Large numbers of children—grubby children—used to come from a long, two-storied, wooden tenement opposite to play in the gutters and around the kerb. I suppose I was of the most grubby. Neither my mother nor my sister made any impression that lingers in my mind from that time, yet a vivid recollection of these pinafore days exists despite the obliterating years. Every morning there came a parade of prisoners from the city jail, marching to labour on a piece of Government land at the north end of the City.

  The prison was in the heart of the City. I can shut my eyes and see that shuffling parade of men in broad-arrowed moleskins. I can hear the clinking of picks and shovels in the tool handcarts that were drawn by two harnessed humans. I can recall the faces of marching convicts, some shamed by the bold curiosity of sidewalk loiterers, some, the tough old lags, hard and defiant. The warders with rifles were grim in their dark uniforms alongside the snow-white moleskins. Maybe it was only the sombre uniform that made the warders seem severe. The parade was so impressive that even to-day those jailbirds march across my consciousness and down Athol Place as though I were witnessing the scene. Perhaps the unusual silence of the parade—for there was no sound except the creaking tool handcart, shuffling feet and clanking tools, with perhaps an occasional whisper of recognition from curious onlookers, for Athol Place probably recruited its quota of that army—gave to the parade a grim quality intimidating even to our baby minds. Who knows but that I may have seen my progenitor shuffle by in branded moleskin.

  Every morning for weeks that parade came into the Place, and my ears still seem to hear the clank-clank, chink-chink of the picks and shovels, the handcart wheels rattling against macadam, and the shuffle-shuffle of feet. And my eyes still see grim warders with batons and rifles, the averted faces of the shamed, the unashamed stare of the calloused, the gazing kerbside idlers. Athol Place pitied the moleskin-clad figures; I pitied them. Perhaps the outcast in me instinctively sensed a kinship.

  In Athol Place our prison house was our poverty. How I came to understand that our poverty separated us even from the poor I don’t know, but I sensed it very early. In such a New World Slum, our neighbours were rich by comparison. I knew we were poor more than a decade before I asked myself why we were poor. We were fed largely on left-overs. Pie dishes containing the remnants of some sweet, bones with some meat still adhering, were given to my mother, who brought them home in paper parcels or wrapped in a shawl. Stale scones, cold, mashed potatoes, odd jugs of soup all came to our bellies from the tables of the privileged. Appreciation of our dependence on charity came to us in the cradle, and an intellectual revolt against acceptance of such poverty required decades before it matured. So bare of excitements was our pitiful frugal life that all my memories incline to the sordid, or else revolve around food.

  I mention a grubby tragedy only because I met its chief actor years after in a crowded French estaminet where, before he went to his doom in Flanders mud, we uproariously recalled the event. Willie had mentioned that shells were better than pills as an aid to personal hygiene. I brought the incident to mind: Willie Gee sat in the gutter in Athol Place disconsolate because he had soiled his breeks and because his mother had a heavy hand. The warm estaminet and the Anzac shandy seemed to confer on that grubby memory a romantic tinge. Such would be the absurdity one would recall in the last moments of consciousness. Willie’s mother recalls another tragedy. Once, by some wonderful bounty, I received a yellow-fleshed apple full of sugary juice. Proud to ostentation, I crossed the road to the slum tenement where Willie lived, to eat my apple in front of an audience. Psyche as well as gullet demanded a thrill.

  ‘Where did you get it?’ stout Mrs Gee pounced.

  I answered.

  ‘You mustn’t be greedy,’ she went on.

  She grabbed my apple and cut it in four, giving her son and her wastrel husband a piece and retaining a piece herself. The quarter she returned was the one at which I had nibbled.

  ‘I believe in teaching children not to be selfish.’

  For some reason that lesson failed. I have never forgiven the brutal raid and dispossession. If I ever got a second apple, I am sure that I consumed its every fragment in our own backyard.

  Thus there are no silver spoons, nor purple patches in my early memories. Water-carts in an alley, processions of criminals, a tearful infant with uncomfortable breeks, the ruthless filching of my apple, the gathering around the parcel of scraps brought home by my mother. No recollection of the mother as clear as that of mutton bones, odd potatoes in the parcel. No memory of father or brother or sister, but the acute awareness of poverty, of neighbourly pity, a knowledge that even in the slum we were as unrespectable and outcast as the morning moleskin parade.

  Nor is the next memory more appeasing. A jump of a few months or years and we are away from Athol Place. Perhaps we could not pay the rent, and I see myself standing out in front of another house in another street, hand in hand with my sister, desirous that the passing world see the new garment I am wearing, a cast-off from some wealthier child’s back. The house we lived in was down a lane. We generally lived in obscure, worm-eaten hovels down lanes, in houses that, like their inhabitants, hesitated to parade their misery to the open road. Except in the country, we never knew what it was to face the open road. In my new cast-off pinafore I had the pride that goes before disaster. I stepped back down the lane, fell into a tub of hot water, got burned, spent the rest of the day in bed, more f
retful at my inability to expose myself in the second-hand piece of clothing than pained at the burning.

  All of which indicates that, although Dunedin was one of the most prosperous and God-fearing cities in the new and rich country of New Zealand, there was poverty in the land and that we were poor even amid poverty. There were three of us children: Rose, a sister, who was a few years older, and a younger brother, Douglas. Where the income came from at this time, I did not know. There could have been but little money, for we were deprived of bare necessities. Grandfather and grandmother and uncles and aunts were at a country village called Riversdale, where the old man had secured a job as a baker, and our mother was fending alone.

  Need you wonder I never probed the past when the chance came? Sufficient that my mother was of the stuff that endures, for she managed to keep us alive without invoking the guardianship of the law, even though her income was meagre and earned cruelly. We loved one another, and were welded together by the common bond of our unsatisfied hunger. But with us children it was merely the hunger of the stomach. With our mother there was probably the additional hunger for life. Her task was grimmer than that of the men in moleskin who had shuffled by the Athol Place. She got as little from life as they. She staked her all on her children and by the very circumstances of their life they were doomed from birth. Despite her fight for us, we brought her increasing sorrow until she must have cursed the fact of our existence.

  Yes. We were poor. I believe that I was even proud, although mother had all that nonsense trampled out of her. For very early, I knew the pride that goes with a poorly lined stomach and I learned to dissemble my feelings when hungry witness to other children sitting in the gutter biting semi-circles out of pieces of cake or slices of bread well buttered and crowned lavishly with jam. Children love to triumph and gloat over the less fortunate. They eat cake like public performers. I learned not only to dissemble but to lie.

  ‘I don’t care for cake.’

  ‘I don’t like jam and butter together on bread.’

  So were we outcasts in the city of steepled kirks. Richard John Seddon, New Zealand’s Premier, called New Zealand ‘God’s Own Country’ and told of the plenty there could be for all. But we were always poor.

  (1934)

  John Mulgan, from Man Alone

  Going in on the lorry to the meeting, Johnson began to be sorry that he had promised to come. In the halflight after sunset the air was cold and as the lorry swayed round corners he hunched his coat up over his ears and tried not to listen to the Cockney, Roach, who talked endlessly, volubly. They had had an argument in the tent before they started, when Robertson refused to come. Sitting on the edge of his bunk he had watched them get ready.

  ‘The demonstrator-rs,’ he said ironically, and Roach turned to him bustling and eager.

  ‘You’d better come, Mac,’ he had said, his little eyes full of excitement, his voice squeaking indignantly. ‘This’ll be the best thing we’ve done. They’ll see they can’t treat us like dirt, they will.’

  ‘That’s what ye are,’ Robertson said, rolling a cigarette. He ran his eye over Roach with melancholy humour. ‘That’s all ye are. Just dirt.’

  And Johnson had smiled, bending over the tent’s one mirror to do his hair.

  ‘You ought to come, Mac,’ he said, not turning round. ‘This is your chance to do something. You wanted something done.’

  ‘I never marched in a procession yet, man. I don’t intend it now.’

  Roach spoke up again.

  ‘We’ve got to hold together, mate,’ he said.

  ‘That’s right.’ It was Scotty. He wasn’t feeling well. He stood thin and ill by the tent door, dressed in his only suit, ready to go.

  ‘You oughtn’t to go, Scotty,’ Johnson said. ‘You’d best turn in,’ but he grinned, shaking his head.

  ‘I don’t hold together,’ Robertson said. ‘I’m too old for that. And as for you, Roach, I’ll be sleeping quietly here while they’re breaking your head open.’

  ‘There’ll be no head-breaking.’

  ‘Ay, there’ll be head-br-reaking, all right. There’s police in there waiting for every one of ye.’

  ‘It’s a free country,’ Roach said. ‘We’ve a right to march in the streets.’

  ‘It’s no sae free.’

  ‘We’ve a right to march in the streets to show the crying shame of what they’ve done to us, the way they’re treating us.’

  Robertson finished rolling his cigarette and licked the gummed edge carefully.

  ‘It’s a fine, free country,’ he said. ‘Ye couldn’t get a job so ye took relief. Now they cut your pay, so ye have a processi-on. Verra fine. Verra fine, na doubt. What d’ye think ye’re getting, Roach man, walking the streets? Is it Douglas credit? Is it socialism. It is not. Ye’ll get a thick head and no sleep and be back at work to-morrow two chains up the road with yer feet in the clay.’

  Johnson remembering this agreed with Robertson as they made the journey in. The men about him were half interested, looking for a night in town, a little excitement, a chance to walk the streets. They were angry about the way their wages had been cut, their ‘starvation rates’ of pay. They were angry, but they did not yet really care. The men who really cared were the married men and they for the most part had stayed in camp. Johnson himself had not stayed in camp, but he did not care.

  They got off the lorry by the wharves west of the town and formed up to march to the post office. The organisers from their camp had a banner, an old sheet, and daubed on it in black ink the slogan, ‘West River Unemployed Camp. More pay. Real Work. No Slave Camps.’ Two men marched at the head carrying this and Johnson fell in behind, keeping on the inside. The arrangement was that they should join with a procession of post and telegraph workers and march with them through the town to the town hall. No one from Johnson’s camp had very clear ideas as to what would happen then. They fell into line and marched off along the water-front.

  In the crowded space before the post office it became clear that the meeting and the procession had some meaning, at least in the numbers of people that it had drawn together. The streets were thick with people and the pavements lined. Trams had stopped running and there was no traffic going through. The head of the procession had already started on its way through the main street to the town hall. The West River contingent fought their way through the crowds to the centre of the square and joined the marchers, who were more than four abreast; they filled the street as they went forward. The West River standard disappeared to reappear again a few yards ahead of them. Johnson found himself with Roach and Scotty and some others, going slowly forward up the street.

  In the grimness and tenseness of that mass of men a new spirit came over them. It was a very silent procession that marched, without bands or songs or shouting. Johnson going with them felt this change. He lost the sense of waste and frustration that had been with him. Instead he felt that he had a part in something. What it was he could not have said, but only that he was with men who shared his lack of fortune, who were the same as he was and had the same purpose; that they were going forward together, where, he could not say, but only that they were going somewhere and would be together. The same feeling had changed even Roach who marched beside him so that he no longer talked and joked and grumbled, but marched silently with his head up looking forward, and Scotty was no longer ill, but well-looking.

  The onlookers who filled the pavements were silent, too, while they went by. At street corners, and here and there along the route, there seemed to be a great many policemen, occasionally mounted, their horses turning restlessly. When the marchers came to the open space by the town hall, the advance guard of post and telegraph workers had gone inside. The unemployed who followed them were being held up at the door. As more and more marching men pressed up behind them, the square became packed, and the silence that had been with them seemed to break ominously. There was a kind of murmured shouting and excitement that ran down the street and through the wa
tching crowds as if they felt, not that anything was happening, but that something must. After the march, which had been a beginning, to be held in check like this made men angry: they shared between them an anger that was overwhelming.

  Johnson fighting for a place in this press saw a mounted policeman on a great white horse trying to hold his ground at the head of the street. Not far from him, in the centre of the crowd where the street lamps were shining, he could see a man addressing the unemployed marchers, held up on their shoulders, his cap pulled up and waving in the air, the light shining on his sweating face. Johnson could see him, his mouth moving and his face working but could not hear what he said. The crowd moved round and round him like a broken tide-rip. Sometimes Johnson was carried in with it and at others thrown back again. There was no longer for him any moving where he wanted to go but only where everyone else was going, and there was still the feeling that it would be somewhere and that everyone would go.

  The whole picture stayed like that for several minutes. Some men were still going into the hall, but the police were holding the unemployed back and the little man held up on their shoulders was still talking. Then two policemen went in towards him to try and stop him and there was a surge just as if the wave had spilled over and was rolling up the shore. Johnson saw a baton go up and an arm raised and the little man go down with a blow on the side of the head, and then at once men seemed to know where they were going. He was knocked aside and lost Roach and Scotty and the others that he knew. It was a wild business, like a dream in which no one seemed real any longer. Across the road men were stripping palings from the fence of a church to fight with and from the side streets they were gathering stones. The white horse of the mounted policeman reared up as it was struck, unseating him so that he fell into the mob and was lost to sight. Johnson saw the police go back or down; two that were near him were driven back and one fell against a shop wall, hit with a stone that drew blood. Men were left where they fell and stopped fighting. Violence was new to these people so that they wanted results and not mob murder, but Johnson saw a woman kick someone as he fell, screaming in her anger all the time, and a man near him, his face all running with blood, shouting: ‘Get them—get them.’ He saw one of the police, red-faced and angry, driving in at a man who collapsed in front of him, while somebody else tried to catch the policeman’s arm.