After that the shop windows began to go, first with stones and then with a long rake of the fence palings. The fight turned from the hall, no longer a fight, and the men who led it went back down the main street with their palings. They had tried to enter the hall and had been stopped. Now they no longer wanted to go inside. They were outside in the streets and had won their fight and were free from restraint. They were the swift runners and the leaders who went first and broke everything they saw without caring. To them it was the releasing of accumulated desire, a payment for the long weeks and months of monotony and weariness and poverty and anxiety that could be satisfied like this in a few moments of freedom and destruction.
Johnson went with them to the sound of glass breaking and women shrieking until he came to like it; past two men breaking a bottle of gin snatched from a hotel window over a lamp-post as they fought for it, and a woman stumbling back with her hand to her head; falling over a man who lay half on the pavement and half on the road saying ‘Christ, Christ,’ to himself, and then swearing, too, because he had to say something; turning to see whether he could stop and know what was happening and then being driven forward again, knowing that it no longer mattered what happened while the whole street moved forward with him; until suddenly it ended because the street ended. If the street had never ended, if it had gone on, instead of ending in the sea-front as it did, it seemed to Johnson as if he would still be moving with them and the plate glass would be still falling as they went. At the end of the street the wave spent itself and recoiled.
Turning back up the street they could see for the first time the damage that had been done. Shop windows were gone down both sides and the street that had been filled with marchers and onlookers was now broken into small groups of fighting, gesticulating people. What followed after the first rush was, by comparison, small and dirty. Those who fought by the windows for what they could take were not the real fighters, but the scavengers, not the front line, but the trailings and conscripts. Johnson, coming back up the street and feeling again a single man who could see and judge things for himself, saw a little jeweller who must have lived above his shop and come down to protect it, driven in by women who cursed him as they beat at him. His small, kind, Jewish little face was sweating and fearful. Then Johnson was wedged by an arcade entrance where a great gaunt man reached into a window for armfuls of cigarettes which he threw to the crowd, shouting and laughing as he did it. The man was drunk with excitement, blood streaming from a cut over his eye. Then, when he could not reach enough, he broke more glass and got inside the window and shovelled cigarettes out with his feet so that boxes and packets spilled out on to the pavement before anyone could catch them and a little bent woman, trying feverishly to gather them up, was knocked forward so that her head came on to the jagged glass and she fell face downwards with a cry that was lost in the shouting and raving of the big man inside the window.
The movement of men with him swung Johnson away from there and up the street again. It was curious to him at this moment, as the crowd rushed from place to place, to feel himself coming back again and to know what he himself was doing. He could see the same feeling grow on men’s faces as they looked at one another, and wondered suddenly who was watching them at what they did, and knew that they themselves as single men were breaking and looting and no longer all together. It was going to become important soon for them to look after themselves and then the street would begin to clear.
In one of the last rushes before this happened Johnson, pressed into a throng near the top of the street, saw that it was not loot that had brought this shouting, hooting mob of men and women together, but an attempt at an arrest. The police were re-forming and working from the head of the street down, as in a battle, to retake it. A police sergeant, who must have arrived late with reinforcements, for he was untouched, and a plain-clothes detective held one man in a shop doorway, and round them, like baying dogs who would nevertheless not come within striking distance, pressed the crowd. They were not yet willing for the return of everyday law and order and for the taking of one of their number like this. The prisoner behind in the grip of the sergeant struggled to get free and, as Johnson watched, the sergeant raised his fist and bringing it short round in a half-arm blow struck the man on the side of his face so that he stood half-dazed and would have fallen had he not been held up by the grip on his collar. He dropped forward and Johnson saw then that it was Scotty.
As Johnson pressed into the crowd struggling towards the doorway, there was a new shout from them in anger at the blow and a new surge forward. But it stopped with the detective in front of the sergeant and his prisoner, and one hand in his pocket, shouting ‘Stand back or I’ll shoot.’ The crowd dropped back again uneasily so that Johnson, still pushing his way forward, came in front facing the detective. Johnson was angry now. He was angered by the brutal blow he had seen, in all that evening’s brutality, and angered, too, to think that of the few who would be picked out and punished for all that night’s work, one of them must be Scotty, the small, the stupid, at heart the inoffensive.
A woman screamed hoarsely beside him: ‘They don’t carry guns,’ and hoping this might be so, not really caring, he went in. The detective’s hand came out of his pocket, clenched, and without a gun. Johnson going in towards Scotty went past the blow that came at him, but tripped as the detective’s foot shot out and half fell. The same rush carried him to the sergeant who had his back half turned holding Scotty. Johnson drove one fist into the small of the sergeant’s back, the other going high swung catching him on the side of his face.
In the red, angry face that turned to meet Johnson’s attack, looking down at him, for the sergeant was a big man and heavily built, the main emotion was incredulity and surprise that anyone could hit him. It must have been a long time since anyone had hit this officer. His left hand still held Scotty by the collar. As he swung round Scotty was pulled between them and flung against the other side of the doorway. The sergeant’s right hand coming low drove into Johnson, winding him. The sergeant dropped Scotty, who fell half forward and then was held by the crowd, and the sergeant with his face pressed close to Johnson hit with both fists into his body again; and Johnson, feeling behind him a blow from the detective that only grazed the side of his head, struck upwards and hit the sergeant below his chin. There was no longer surprise in the sergeant’s face, but only anger, and as they stood, jammed now with the press as the crowd closed in, their faces almost touching so that for the moment neither of them could move, he said to Johnson: ‘I’ll get you for this.’
Then the crowd, pressing and shrieking, swung them together out of the doorway. Scotty disappeared. In the mêlée of the pavement the sergeant still had one arm holding Johnson by the right shoulder of his coat and, as Johnson tugged to pull away, the sergeant’s fist came over in a last blow that caught him just above his eyes and knocked him back into the crowd on the street. Then the sergeant was back again against the wall, his helmet gone, his lip bleeding, waiting for what would happen while the crowd turned away down the street.
There was a new movement downwards again, driven by the pressure of new forces at the top, and the streets at the head were beginning to clear. The stream turned again towards the sea-front and Johnson went with it, half-dazed, shambling where before he had run, his breath gone, his stomach sick, and blood from the blow over his left eye running down his face. The rush of men and women, feeling fears of arrest for the first time, some of them stopping to snatch from windows as they went, but the main body going down the centre of the street, carried him with it until at last he came to the dark and comparative peace of the deserted wharf-head, and there he clung to the iron railings to support himself and was violently sick.
(1939)
The Anti-Puritans
Jane Mander, from ‘New Zealand Novels: The Struggle Against Environment’
Heaven preserve this country from the nauseating revelation-mongers of other places! There has recently, as everyo
ne knows, been a surfeit of ‘frankness’, a reaction against the hypocritical mawkishness of the last century. But such frankness has hardly impinged upon New Zealand fiction. Our writers still proceed on the theory that we are some special sort of race that never has an indecent thought; and our insides might be made of plaster of paris for all the notice that is taken of them. And yet we all know that our insides have a tremendous effect on our thoughts, our motives and our actions, our strugglers, our achievements, and our failures. It is the everlasting battle between the mind and the body that makes great drama. I am not suggesting that we try to imitate D.H. Lawrence; but great writers see the […] occasional act of patronage on the part of some kindly person, often more kindly than art-loving. For people who deviate from the herd mentality there is no escape within New Zealand, no centre where they may be spiritually free. Writers are lucky to know one house in which there is a fearless speculation about life. Unfortunately the one who needs it most seldom has access to such a house. Is it any wonder that such pioneers as we have flee at the first opportunity to London where thought is as free as air? But if the exodus goes on we shall become, in an even greater degree than we are now, one of the backward peoples of the earth.
The community does not realise that great writing is produced by men who are above the prejudices of the mob, but that, curiously enough, while thus mentally and spiritually detached, the artist is at the same time cruelly at the mercies of the prejudices of the herd, and that in a place so isolated as this he is slowly murdered by stupidity and kindness.
(1934)
Douglas Stewart, ‘The Girl in the Bus’
From left and right huge matrons on huge haunches
Surge and converge with the swaying of the bus;
A thin man shrinks into the evening news
As if it were his shell; and two discuss
The latest devilry against the Jews.
The girl across the aisle is isled as I
Between a thigh and creaking, obstinate thigh
And while in secret outrage I make remote
My body in a cube of steel disdain
With wild desire I note
Her lithe live limbs, her honey-golden throat.
It may be she, it may be she who holds
The clue to my lost lake, the green, the blinding sky
The shaking cool lost leaves. And we will age!
Now while I dare, though she’s remote as I
In a cold cube of silence and great rage
I’ll lean across, and clutch her hand, and say
‘That green incredible lake! You know the way?’
But she is walled so deep in steel disgust
From the huge pressure of her huge companions
That at my glorious lust
The most she’ll do is start, and stare nonplussed.
(1936)
Jean Devanny, from Point of Departure
I was barely seventeen when Hal Devanny and I were settled down as man and wife in the two-roomed batch formerly occupied by my father. Set back at some distance from the tramline, and the main road of the settlement which ran alongside it, the shack was surrounded by manuka through which a path had been hacked out. Our water we got from a small creek that burbled along merrily out back. Stepping from stone to stone out to the deepest part of it, I hauled out the water by bucket.
Three shifts were worked in the mines: dayshift, afternoon or back shift, and the ‘dogwatch’, from midnight to eight a.m. Hal, a hewer at the coal face, took his turn at these. The miner’s wage was twelve shillings the shift. A small wage, by latter-day inflationary standards but, in our case, because of the plainness and sobriety of our ways, allowing for the accumulation of a bank balance.
My husband had not always been given to sober habits. During the early days of our association I had several times seen him drunk. And his capacity for carrying liquor was phenomenal; to arrive at the stage of inebriation, he was obliged to consume three times the quantity essential in like process to his mates.
To me, with my conditioned hatred and horror of drunkenness, his drinking had been cause for anguish—but once apprised of my feeling and principle in the matter, without argument or fuss, he turned teetotal. He liked beer, but he could ‘take it or leave it’; and I remember that with a quiet glance at me he added: ‘And anything else I chose.’
Now, by inclination and my changed domestic status combined, I was drawn to a closer interest in the conditions of the miner’s working life, and in the social intercourse offering in the settlement. Most of the group of Australian miners were drifting away, their places being filled by English migrants. We New Zealanders were far from sympathetic to these English, calling them Pommies. For one thing, their speech repelled us. The speech of the average New Zealand worker was little removed, in a grammatical sense, from that of the moneyed class, and the general standard of culture was very high. And, used as we were to the musical cadences of the large proportion of Scots and Scots’ descendants among us, the dialects of the English seemed harsh and dissonant.
Especially we disliked the Geordies, the immigrants from Durham. Further to that their dialect was unintelligible, too many of them were given to deplorably dirty habits. First thing on arriving home from work, the native miners bathed themselves thoroughly (they were agitating now for the installation of hot showers at the mine mouth), but some of the Geordies were content to wash hands and face only during the week, and take a full bath at the weekend. We hated to have them come near us, for the dank, musty smell of body and clothes.
And the Geordies were terribly mean. Two brothers, deeply religious, confined their diet as far as possible to food they did not like, in order to save the more. Having acquired four hundred pounds they set out on a trip to England—but Collingwood put a full stop to their plans. There, the money was stolen out of a suitcase. It was never recovered. And since theft was practically unknown in that district, the general surmise was that the venture was engineered more as a joke than anything, out of contempt for the meanness of the couple.
Amazing to us, the Geordies were given to playing golf! All their leisure time, the tide being suitable, was spent down on the mudflats playing golf.
Worst of all, the Durham miners, with rare exception, lacked that spirit of militant trade unionism which, with the majority of New Zealand miners, was basic principle. All other shortcomings would have been forgiven them, if they had only come up to scratch in this. The generality of New Zealand workers, in this period, were going over to a tremendous upsurge of trade union activity and closer organisation, accompanied by an awakening to the need for political representation in Parliament—and in this upsurge the coal miners played a predominant part. The top leadership was thrown up by a cluster of large mines on the west coast of the South Island (a leadership destined to play an important role in the development of my own career), but Puponga kept well in line with the nationwide forward drive for higher wages and better conditions, and the influx of migrants hostile to the spirit of progress was not welcomed.
My husband, I might here state, with my whole-hearted concurrence was ever in the front rank of the most advanced group.
At first, too, the womenfolk of the English migrants were thought by the native women to be of an inferior type. Chiefly because of their addiction to beer. Where we drank tea they drank, if they could get it, beer; and the consumption of alcohol of any kind by women, except for medicinal purposes was, to us, ‘bad’. (In time, with the coming of more and more migrants—assisted immigration from England was in full flood—we realised that the habits of the Englishwomen were neither worse nor better than our own, only different.)
In one respect, no distinction could be made between the migrant and the native women: all were open and discursive about the intimate details of domestic and family life. The favourite and constant topic, over tea or beer, was sex; and especially those aspects of it having to do with procreation. Methods of birth control, their success or failur
e, and the procuration of abortion, was ever under review.
My own interest in these matters was, so far, abstract: for somehow, I had become possessed of a smug, pseudo-virtuous notion regarding artificial means of prevention. Never, I would snobbishly state, would I ‘degrade’ myself by using these methods of family limitation. The older women would laugh derisively. ‘Wait till you’ve had a few kids! Then you’ll change your tune.’
More often than not, the means employed were unsuccessful. Men of those days were curiously disinclined toward the use of the french letter. There was a belief extant that it harmed a man, by preventing him from making contact with what the women euphemistically termed his wife’s ‘juices’. Various tablets and jellies were used, and the rubber cap; but the favourite method was interrupted coitus.
An unwanted pregnancy would mean fearful darting in and out of the homes of friends, in search of ways and means of getting rid of it. Women made themselves ill by drinking turpentine, dosing themselves with Epsom salts. One woman took nineteen packets of Epsom salts, one after the other, in addition to a succession of steaming hot baths. She achieved her object, but she never fully recovered from the effects upon her general health.
Once, near-tragedy resulted from an ‘accident’. Driven beyond endurance by his wife’s abuse at finding herself for the fourth time pregnant, a husband walked out with the threat that she would never see him again. She laughed in his face. But when darkness fell and he had not returned, she began to think that he had meant it. Night-long, she paced the floor. At daybreak she appealed to neighbours, who went in search. Late in the afternoon, the husband was found on the outer coastline, sitting on top of a sandhill, disconsolately gazing at the sea to which he had vainly tried to consign himself.
The Auckland University Press Anthology of New Zealand Literature Page 45