Poor Fellow My Country

by Xavier Herbert

  Mrs Turkney said, a little stiffly, ‘As a matter of fact, we were thinking it might have been done deliberately by someone, too. I wouldn’t put it past those kids . . .’

  Alfie looked aghast: ‘What . . . the . . . the Aboriginal children?’

  Mrs Turkney smiled, a little sadly, and shook her head: ‘I don’t want to dampen your enthusiasm, dear . . . but you’ve got a job ahead of you there. It’s best you know . . .’

  Alfie turned her wide black eyes on what evidently she could handle better than the female of her species, the tubby male Turkney, who cleared his throat, saying, ‘We’ve all been through it . . . the enthusiasm, the disappointment . . . all of us, from Cobbity and Co. down.’

  ‘Cobbity and Co.?’ murmured Alfie.

  Dr Cobbity and Mr McCusky,’ said Mrs Turkney. ‘You’ll find that’s another element in the battle . . .’

  When Alfie’s dark eyes flashed as if in readiness to defend friends, her man Frank said hastily, with that easy smile of his, ‘Alfie’s a regular warhorse for a battle.’

  Mrs Turkney said, ‘Well, she’ll have to be prepared to lose this one . . . or get hurt.’

  ‘I don’t understand!’ cried Alfie.

  ‘No, my dear . . . but you will,’ said Mrs Turkney. ‘All I’m trying to do is save you from being hurt. And those across the way there,’ she nodded towards the Children’s Home, ‘will be the first to hurt you, if you’re not ready for ’em. Never trust ’em. Never trust any Aboriginal person. Start with that in your mind . . . and you can’t go wrong . . . isn’t that so, Oscar?’ She turned to Tub.

  Tub sighed: ‘I’m afraid it is, my dear. The chief thing in the Aboriginal Problem’s the Aborigines. The plain fact is that they don’t appreciate anything we do for them. All they want is what they can get out of us. They don’t want schooling. School’s alien to their minds. You’ve got to see them as they really are. They’re nomadic savages. Children are allowed to do what they like till puberty . . . just what they bloomin’ well like. At puberty they’re initiated into the tribal laws. That’s all right when there’s a tribe. But when there isn’t . . . what? Just puberty. And you’ll soon find out what that means with your charges across the way . . . Oh, I’m so sorry . . . I’m truly only trying to help you!’ Alfie’s black eyes had suddenly begun to swim, her wide lip to tremble.

  Frank laid a lean brown hand on the little-girl hand quivering on the table. She looked at him with a wobbly smile, blinked back the tears, turned to the others, sniffed and said, ‘I’m sorry. I’m silly. Yes . . . Dr Cobbity told me how hard it is, too. It’s . . . it’s just that it means so much to me. I do want to do a good job . . .’

  ‘I’m sure you will, too, dear,’ said Mrs Turkney. ‘And I’ll tell you frankly I’m glad to see you in place of that screaming bully Lilyponds, especially as you’re one of us, not Education Department stuck-ups. If the kids did put the ticks on her . . . well, she deserved it. But just watch out they don’t do it to you.’

  ‘To me?’ murmured Alfie. ‘Would they put ticks on me?’

  Turkney, who had been mopping it up as usual, chuckled, ‘Half the luck of the ticks!’

  Mrs Turkney gave him and the bottle one of those looks again, then shot a swift glance at Frank, who only smiled, as if used to such remarks as the owner of a Fairy Fay.

  ‘One for the road,’ said Turkney.

  ‘No . . . not for me,’ said Alfie. Then she smiled widely and shrewdly, adding, ‘Looks as if I’ll have to have my wits about me.’

  Tub poured generously for himself and Frank, saying, ‘You only have to call on us, dear lady . . . I’ll be at your shervish any time.’

  Mrs Turkney rose and everybody did likewise. Then she led Alfie away to go down by the inner stairs and into the conservatory. At the stairs Alfie called to her husband, standing watching her and looking so slim and tall and handsome beside boozy little goggling Tub, saying, ‘You’ll call for me this afternoon, darling.’

  Frank grinned at her: ‘Let’s know if you’ll be wanting the Rolls or the ambulance.’ They all laughed. ‘You’re a shport,’ said Turkney as the ladies disappeared, ‘I like shports. Have ’nother drink.’

  ‘Well, just a little one. I’ve got to go and look at the drainage in Chinatown.’

  ‘Ho, ho . . . you’ll need all your wits about you there!’

  Down below, entering the yard of the Children’s Home, Mrs Turkney was saying, ‘I do like your husband, Mrs Candlemas.’

  ‘Please call me Alfie . . . yes, he is a dear.’ Alfie’s eyes were on the children crowding into their seats in the schoolroom, but all turned to her, all staring with wide-eyed expectancy. She looked daunted, so that that rosiness left her cheeks and her drooping mouth drew lines in them. Perhaps it was in seeing the Problem in the flesh en masse for the first time, a mass of faces differing from those she was accustomed to by the evolution of a million years: primitive faces, as they would be called, simply because of different structure, the jaws, the brows, the lips, the eyes no darker than her own, but so cavernous. Oh, but one pair of eyes to save the situation, for all their deep setting — one pair of eyes of grey! She sighed, as if in relief. She smiled at the grey eyes. A moment. Then they smiled back at her. She giggled like a little girl to Mrs Turkney, saying, ‘Well . . . here I go!’

  They entered the schoolroom, stood before the rows of seats. Mrs Turkney told the children who it was and ordered them to say: How do you do, Mrs Candlemas.

  They sang it — in their own way. It made Alfie blink and twist her face slightly. She swallowed and turned to Mrs Turkney and said, ‘Thank you, Mrs Turkney . . . I think I can manage now.’

  ‘Sit down, children,’ she said, as Mrs Turkney walked away. She sat down herself, looking them over with a wobbly smile while they stared at her or dropped their heads or hid their faces in their hands, according to disposition. The grey eyes regarded her steadily from the back. As Mrs Turkney disappeared into her fernery, Alfie said, ‘Well, the first thing we’ve got to do is get to know each other. We’ll just sit and talk, eh? You can tell me about yourselves. Now, we mustn’t be shy with each other. I’d like to kiss you all.’ All the faces popped up, the eyes popped out. ‘Who’s going to let me kiss them first? What about you, young man?’ She was looking into the grey eyes. They merely blinked. She looked at Wilhelmina, beckoned. Wilhelmina wriggled like a forked goanna, but came. Alfie kissed the dusky blotchy cheek, then had Wilhemina kiss hers. Not only Wilhemina giggled. After that it was easy.

  They spent the rest of the morning playing games. Alfie had dinner with them, gobbling the stew and stuff called bread as if it weren’t choking her, while Mrs Turkney sat and watched. Miss Lilyponds had always gone home for dinner, leaving the children to sit around till she chose to return. Alfie went over to the playground with them for an hour, and let them show her games of their own invention. The afternoon was spent in singing mostly. She had no sort of voice. But when Prindy covered his ears at revelation of it, she only laughed.

  When Frank Candlemas called in the Rolls at four, the Turkneys wanted them up for a drink before they left. But Alfie asked to be excused, saying she felt exhausted. That she was not lying was evident enough when just out of sight of the Compound, after the great waving with which the children saw her off, she asked Frank to stop the car because she wanted to lean on him and cry. She did just that. He said nothing, just held her.

  Up in the Turkney residence Tub asked his spouse how she thought the girl had gone. Mrs Turkney said tersely, ‘Well, if she goes on like that for long, there won’t be any holding ’em.’

  ‘Yes? She’s a nice kid, though.’

  ‘Kid? She’s twenty-five if she’s a day.’

  ‘Well . . .’

  ‘You mean she’s a kid to you, you old fool. I saw the way you were ogling her.’

  ‘Arrrh!’ Turkney swigged off a large whisky and went back to his office.

  V

  Mrs Turkney’s frankly expressed gladness over the r
eplacement of Miss Lilyponds by someone of more amiable disposition, not a Screaming Bully, and especially by One Of Us, that is to say of the Aborigines Department rather than of Education, was quite short lived. It had little to do with her husband’s undisguised admiration for this Alfie person. She herself too frankly despised old Tub. She had shown how she felt about him during that first week or so while she and Alfie were still speaking, one day when all four of them had been having the after-school drink that Tub had tried to make a ritual of, and Alfie had said she believed success in marriage was based on having something in common outside the couple’s own personal interests, and Mrs Turkney, or Vi as her old man called her, turned to him and asked, ‘What’ve we got in common?’ and when he only blinked blearily, she gave the answer herself: ‘Just being common, eh?’ Besides, Tub’s love of the lassie was so undangerous that he was obviously just as pleased to have all the other fellows who had fallen for her, or as Vi put it crudely to Tub, Done Their Dangles on her, hanging about her with him, and even more so, judging by his guffaws to be heard at the residence from the office when she was in there with him along with either McCusky, Cobbity, McQuegg, or all three, whereas alone with her his breathless gabbling showed he was as much in conflict as an adolescent boy with a pretty girl. Nor could it be blamed on ordinary female jealousy, because even while Vi in speaking of the matter to her couple of close friends referred to the general male interest in Alfie as being like dogs running after a bitch, she always conceded the girl’s attractiveness, and use of the word bitch was literal and not spiteful, as evident in Vi’s always adding that it was Alfie’s sheer childishly innocent enthusiasm that was responsible for the muck-up being made of things.

  It would seem then that the trouble was simply that Alfie was doing something with ease that poor old Vi, for all her manner of a poor-house keeper, had wanted, as a childless woman and a nurse by dedication, to do, truly take care of these waifs given into her care, but had been frustrated by so many things that she herself, through training, disposition, experience of the wicked world, was incapable of beating, the antagonism of the Master Race, the interference of bureaucracy, the stinginess of Government spending, the resistence to care of the very people to be cared for because their instinct was that they were the children of Nature, the Ol’Goomun-Ol’Goomun, whose bounty might vary but could never fail.

  The trouble began on the third or fourth day, when Mrs Turkney, remarking on Alfie’s persistent unnecessary attendance at the midday dinner table, said that she might as well leave full superintendence of the meal to Alfie and free herself for other duties. Quite failing to grasp the irony patent in the remark, Alfie replied eagerly, ‘Yes . . . leave it all to me.’ Vi did just that, immediately, and by so doing put into her enemy’s hands the very weapon she needed to start waging the battle for which the husband had given warning that she was a Regular Warhorse. Turkney was short with Vi when she complained to him, saying she ought to be only too glad to be relieved of the job. That stung her to saying that if she was going to be relieved of it for the one meal she might as well hand the feeding of the children over completely. Tub told her not to be silly. For that, perhaps, she put the proposition with a smile to Alfie over the whisky. Alfie looked the silly one by jumping at it. Without the smile, Vi reminded her of the implications, having to be on the job at 7 a.m. instead of 9, and until 5 or 6 p.m. instead of 4. Alfie, like a cheerful idiot, said she didn’t mind what the hours were. Tub looked at her as if he thought she was just that. When Vi, with a smirk of one about to deliver the KO to such an easy opponent asked What about Weekends, and Alfie took it on the chin as if she were punchy, Frank, her husband, looked at her as Tub had. Vi went red. But it wasn’t the flush of victory, as betrayed when later she insisted in private to her husband, as Superintendent, to make the arrangement official so that there would be no backing out When She Gets Sick Of It. Tub tried to get out of that. But Vi forced him to put it to McCusky and Dr Cobbity, who’d already begun to hang about the place instead of coming to it with grumpy reluctance only when repeatedly requested; and they, getting Alfie’s quick bright nod, because it was a sort of official gathering, said, Why not?

  One of the last remarks that Mrs Violet Turkney made to Mrs Alfie Candlemas, except in the way of official necessity, was: ‘You’ll be sorry!’

  But it wasn’t Alfie who became the sorry one. Nor was it only Vi.

  The weapon that Vi had handed Alfie was the matter of the children’s food; not merely that of feeding them, but of the food they were given to eat, which was bad by anybody’s standards, even those of the black Coburg Islanders who ran the kitchen and dished it out as the worst of the Rubbitch they turned out generally, for the reason that it was Rubbitch they were given with which to cook.

  Alfie the warhorse began her battle in the kitchen. Instead of leaving it to the kids to get their food, she went along too, and seeing the difference in what was about to be dished out to them from that in other pots, demanded of Big Butcher, the Boss Cook, that they be given the other. It was still bad. Big Butcher whined that he didn’t put the maggots in the meat or the weevils in the flour, the oatmeal, and the rice. That’s how he got it from the town butcher every morning and from Mist’ Turk’ey’s store. She took the battle to Mist’ Turk’ey, who gave in at once about the meat, the moment he’d smelt it. He blamed the town butcher who had the Compound contract, said he was putting it over. Alfie stood over him while he dealt with the butcher on the phone. The butcher tried to be funny about it; but Turkney said, ‘You’d better be careful, mate. Mrs Candlemas’s husband’s the new Health Inspector. No more meat like that . . . if you don’t mind!’

  Tub blamed the Wet Season for the condition of the cereals. She demanded to see his stocks. There was enough to take them through the next Wet Season. She demanded to see samples of it all. He complied without resistance, only babbling, ‘Everything goes mouldy here during the Wet. You’ve got to expect it.’

  ‘But you don’t expect the children to go on eating that?’ she asked.

  He shrugged: ‘What can we do?’

  ‘Chuck it out!’

  ‘You can’t do that . . . it’s Government Stores!’

  ‘Why . . . are Government Stores holy, or something?’ For that’s the way his horrified exclamation had made it sound.

  ‘Well . . . they’re Government property, and can’t be disposed of except in the proper manner.’

  ‘What’s that . . . with Bell, Book, and Candle?’

  He guffawed: ‘No doubt about you . . . you’re a . . . you’re a wag!’ By the look of him he was going to say something nicer than that.

  She certainly looked nice enough to kiss out of hand, so was she glowing and sparkling in her indignation. She demanded, ‘How would you go about getting rid of the rubbish?’

  ‘Well . . . I’d have to notify McCusky . . . and he Cobbity . . . who’d have to get in touch with the Auditor. Then there’d be an inspection. It has to be officially condemned as not fit for human consumption.’

  ‘Does it happen often?’

  ‘Well . . . no . . . only a couple of times to my knowledge . . . when we had some pretty bad stuff.’

  ‘Worse than this?’

  ‘Oh . . . lots worse . . . just a couple of bags of stuff.’

  ‘Do you consider this fit for human consumption?’

  He guffawed nervously: ‘Well, I’m no judge.’

  ‘Would you eat it yourself?’

  ‘If I was very hungry, I suppose.’

  ‘Like those children of mine?’

  He was silent. She went on. ‘Oscar . . . I’m sure you’re a good-hearted man . . . and that you wouldn’t give children stuff to eat that you wouldn’t eat yourself. What about doing something about it, eh?’

  He giggled nervously. ‘What can I do?’

  ‘Start the process rolling to get this officially condemned.’

  He hesitated a moment, then said, ‘Okay.’

  ‘At once . . . to ple
ase me?’

  He swallowed. ‘Okay.’ He got on the phone to McCusky.

  McCusky was out in ten minutes. He put on a great performance . . . at poor Tub’s expense. ‘Certainly the stuff will be condemned,’ he declared. ‘It should never have been kept so long. Its condition should’ve been reported long ago.’ In vain did Tub say that it had arrived like that.

  Dr Cobbity came out in the afternoon, inclined to make a joke of it, to say, ‘Now, weevils aren’t classed as noxious. You might even say that the larvae add protein to the diet.’ Then he argued: ‘What’s the good of good flour if you have bad cooks? We’ve never been able to get anyone to make good bread here.’