The Paua Tower

by Coral Atkinson

  Ever since Vic Cowan’s visit several hours before Stella had been smiling to herself, remembering the fair young man, looking forward to seeing him again, imagining Friday. She thought of how hungry he must have been, and guessed at the effort he’d made to hide it. She thought of his hands on the bread and his teeth tearing into the crust. He’d mentioned running a newspaper up at the camp. Stella had never heard of anyone making their own newspaper before. It sounded clever, yet Vic wasn’t stuck up or anything — just friendly, polite; really nice.

  Stella hadn’t had a boyfriend and wondered if her parents would allow her one, but the fact that Vic had noticed her, asked to walk her home, made her glow with happiness. She felt attractive, appealing; even the fact of her old, handmade print dress, with the pattern of parasols, seemed unimportant. She took a few waltz steps, swinging around in the arms of an imaginary Rudolf Valentino as she walked along.

  Stella knew little of love or sex, or men. At five or six she had decided that babies came to women wearing wedding rings, though she couldn’t work out how such a system worked. When eleven, she asked her mother to explain. Peg Morgan’s face went the colour of pohutukawa blossom as she said, ‘Ask no questions, hear no lies. Just see you keep out of trouble, mind.’ Later Stella went to dances where various youths held her uncomfortably close, rubbing swollen flannel-encased crotches against her dress, but no one explained this strange behaviour.

  Walking home, Stella considered something daring. She would ask Vic Cowan to tea on Friday — that is, if her parents agreed and they could afford enough food. They never normally had visitors to meals but perhaps they’d make an exception this once. Stella thought of what she and her mother could make. Meat was out of the question because of cost, but macaroni cheese was always nice, with maybe a bit of silverbeet from the garden. For afters they could have fried scones with golden syrup — or, better still, she could make that eggless cake with the brown sugar and no butter that she’d seen in a magazine.

  ‘You’re looking pretty pleased with yourself,’ Doug said, as Stella came around the corner of the house.

  ‘How’s it going, Dad?’ asked Stella, ignoring her father’s remark. Watching Doug working on the leather, inexpertly fiddling about, holding his breath with strain, swearing when things went wrong, made Stella feel protective and sad.

  ‘Bloody thing,’ said Doug. ‘Can’t seem to get it straight.’ He held up the wallet for her inspection. She tried to smile encouragingly.

  ‘Still,’ said Stella, ‘it’s better than the last one. Just a matter of time and they’ll be right.’

  Tea was bread and gravy. Tuesday was two days away from Stella’s getting paid and Doug’s benefit. It was only Peg’s good management that ensured there was anything to eat at all. Doug was on relief work, doing two days a week chipping weeds off pavements. At least as a married man he could still live at home, though there was talk that this would change. Some said the government planned to force married men on relief into the work camps along with the single chaps. There were to be no initiative-sapping comforts for the unemployed.

  Stella was clearing the plates after the meal when she said, ‘Met this bloke today, Vic Cowan. He’s up at the Works camp at Punawai.’

  ‘Fancy him, do you?’ said Doug, picking up the salt and pepper shakers, which were made like a china apple and pear, and putting them on the bench.

  ‘He’s nice. Really polite, too.’ Stella knew she sounded breathless.

  ‘That’s something these days,’ said Peg, scraping gravy off a plate into the stockpot.

  ‘He’s after a bit of work at Maguire’s. I was wondering, course I know how it is, but do you think Vic could come round and have tea with us, when he comes into town on Friday?’

  ‘Tea!’ said Doug. ‘What are we supposed to put in front of this joker? He’s not even anyone we know.’

  ‘Dad’s right. It’s a bit inconsiderate of you to ask when there’s so little to go round,’ said Peg, putting a lid on the saucepan.

  ‘But Mum, we wouldn’t need much. I thought macaroni would be good.’

  ‘Your mother said no,’ said Doug.

  ‘She didn’t really. Did you, Mum?’

  ‘I’ll think about it,’ said Peg, looking at her daughter’s strained, expectant face and remembering such desperate hopefulness from her own girlhood.

  ‘Please, Mum. He’s up at the camp. It must be awful.’

  ‘Perhaps we could rustle up something — nothing flash, mind, but something — and if Stella’s taken a shine to this chap I’m sure he’s a decent enough lad.’

  ‘He is, Mum. He was an electrician down in Wellington, got laid off.’

  ‘Poor bugger,’ said Doug.

  ‘Language, Doug!’ said Peg.

  Stella didn’t hear either of them. She was looking at the patterned oilcloth cover on the kitchen table, her index finger an imaginary pen. ‘Vic Cowan’ she wrote over the ruddy-coloured roses. ‘Victor Cowan’, ‘Vic’. It was then she thought of it. Rupert Brooke — that’s who Vic looked like. Stella had won a book of Brooke’s poems as a prize for handwriting in her last year at primary school. She thought Brooke terribly handsome and the poem ‘The Soldier’ made her cry.

  Stella pulled the little book off the shelf in her cupboard and opened it. The photograph opposite the title page was under a film of tissue paper. Yes, there was Vic. The same rumpled, fairish hair, seemingly uncertain where to part, the steady focused eyes, the straight nose and full mouth. Stella didn’t know what colour Brooke’s eyes were but she knew Vic’s were grey. Grey like the pigeons that pecked and cooed outside the tannery windows.

  Chapter 5

  From a distance the Public Works camp at Punawai reminded Vic of an illustration of an elfin village he’d seen as a child. Crouched among the bush, the tents with their individual chimneys and ribbons of smoke had a picture-book charm. Dark vegetation encircled the flat cleared area and those wood pigeons that escaped the men’s snares and slingshots flapped overhead on heavy wings.

  Live at Punawai and you quickly learned there was nothing fairytale about it. In dry weather dust blew incessantly; when it rained the beaten earth turned to a slippery quagmire and the unfloored tents were sodden mud. In summer, Tory Street, the name the men had given the thoroughfare that ran through the camp, was a rutted track, in winter a churned morass.

  Down in Wellington at the relief office a few months ago the queue of men in weary suits and sandshoes, overcoats with missing buttons, hats, green with age and sunshine, in their hands moved slowly towards the counter. The youth in front of Vic was wearing an over-large pair of army-issue jodhpurs. The trousers, held up by braces, were intended for a much bigger man, so the boy was constantly tugging the straps back up onto his shoulders.

  Vic hated being there in the queue. He had earned his own money since boyhood; never asked for or expected a handout in his life. Now here he was at twenty-six, a qualified tradesman, reduced to begging the government for work.

  His slide into destitution had been gentle. First he had been laid off by a bankrupt contractor, but that time he found another job. Then wages and hours were cut, and finally there was no work for an electrician at all, so Vic took to fixing things — radios and gramophones — using skills he’d taught himself, but very soon there was no demand for that either.

  Life got tougher. Vic had cut the marks of rats’ teeth out of spoilt cheese and hawked it about public houses. With his cousin, Fred Chatterton, he moved furniture, shifted pianos, chopped a tree, scooped up horse dung in sacks, carrying it door to door in Wadestown and Karori, to the better off who still had roses to be cosseted. Sixpence or a shilling bought fish and chips, some soup bones, a loaf of bread, a feed to put on the kitchen table.

  Vic looked at the dented expressions and troubled eyes of those around him and felt anger and pity. He longed to climb on the counter, prise apart the little grilles, upturn ink bottles and tear files. He wanted to grab the clerk who was lecturing
the boy in the cavalry trousers about regulations and shout, ‘Shut up, you bugger. Can’t you see what’s happening to these people, what you bastards are doing?’

  Vic imagined himself yelling, swearing, bellowing over a megaphone, importing a brass band, but most of all he envisaged thumping each and every public servant, as they scurried about in their clean collars and cuffs. But he did none of those things. When his turn came, he stood at the counter and politely answered questions.

  ‘There’s a place up at the relief camp at Punawai,’ said the clerk, flicking through a ledger.

  ‘Punawai? That’s miles away, in the wops,’ said Vic. ‘I can’t go there.’

  ‘Why’s that?’ The clerk tapped a sheaf of papers together.

  ‘Live with my mother, she’s out of work. If I’m up at the camp getting bugger all, there’ll be nothing to pay her rent.’

  ‘Sorry, can’t make exceptions.’

  ‘My mother’s on her own. A single woman — she’s no benefit.’

  ‘Tough luck.’

  ‘I’ve seen the relief teams up there on Mount Victoria and other places around the town. Why can’t I stay here in Wellington?’ said Vic, gripping the bars of the grille as if it were a cage.

  ‘Instructions are to send new single applicants to Punawai. Nothing I can do about it,’ said the clerk, tossing the sheaf of papers he’d been tidying onto a nearby cabinet.

  ‘I bloody well won’t go,’ said Vic. ‘It’s inhuman.’

  ‘Suit yourself,’ said the clerk, shutting the ledger. ‘But don’t expect help from us.’

  It was wet on Vic’s first morning at Punawai. Misty clouds like sodden gauze floated low on the hills.

  ‘Here, have this,’ a bloke called Joe Gilchrist said, tossing him a sack as they bumped their way up the gorge to the work site in the back of the lorry. ‘Rip the side a bit and put it over your head. It’s not much but it’s something in this weather.’

  Gilchrist, who was in his late twenties, had curly dark hair that reminded Vic of fur on a wet dog, and wore glasses with wire rims. There was a piece of sticking plaster over a crack on one lens. No one had an overcoat or oilskins; few had boots and, like Vic’s, those were barely hanging together.

  The lorry walloped about on increasingly rough ground and finally stopped where the track gave out. The men climbed down, hands in pockets. They were on the side of a hill and the work site was covered in gingery-yellow mud. It looked as if someone had once attempted to clear the surrounding bush but abandoned the effort, and now a jumble of native trees bordered with bracken and Old Man’s Beard surrounded the half-built road.

  The foreman gave Vic a pick and told him to get rid of the earth along a bank. Vic looked about to see what other equipment the men were using. Picks and shovels, that was it: not a scoop or even a horse and cart. Surely, he thought, the government could afford to supply such things to make the work quicker and easier, or was this some deliberate policy to spin out relief so it would last as long as possible?

  Vic, more adept at tinkering with fuse boxes than navvying, was quickly stiff and winded, and his hands were blistered. He straightened up for a rest.

  ‘Hey, piker!’ the foreman shouted. ‘It’s piece-work, you know. Do nothing and get bloody nothing. No skin off my nose.’

  Gilchrist, who was passing with a wheelbarrow, winked at Vic. ‘Ignore the bastard. Take it slow. You’ll get the hang of it.’

  By smoko time Vic thought he would never stand straight again. His back ached, his hands were on fire, his arms felt like four by twos.

  The day wore on. The rain grew heavier, the mud worse. Earth clung to boots and shoes in thick gobs and encrusted trouser legs. Everyone was soaked.

  ‘Want a drag?’ Gilchrist said to Vic, taking the stub of a cigarette out of his mouth and holding it out as the lorry jolted back to camp.

  ‘Thanks,’ said Vic. ‘Any chance of a bath when we get there?’

  Gilchrist laughed. ‘There’s even a choice.’

  ‘Choice?’ said Vic.

  ‘Take your pick,’ said Gilchrist. ‘The horse troughs or the drain.’

  ‘Seriously?’ said Vic, handing the cigarette back.

  ‘Yeah,’ said Gilchrist. ‘That’s how it is. There’s nowhere to dry clothes either, so in weather like this you’re always damp. The men are forever going down with rheumatism and pneumonia. Still, at least we’re not down in Central Otago. Blokes get frostbite there. Heard one lost a leg.’

  The two became friends. Gilchrist came from New Plymouth. He’d had a fiancée, but when he’d lost his job as a glazier and started going to Communist Party meetings she’d left him.

  ‘Irene wasn’t too keen on getting hitched to a Red Fed,’ said Gilchrist. ‘Good thing she buggered off, really. I was pretty cut up at the time, but it gave me a chance for more reading and thinking.’

  ‘So you might join the CP?’ said Vic.

  ‘Maybe. Seems it’s where I belong,’ said Gilchrist, trying to construct a roll-your-own out of a bus ticket and a couple of scraps of tobacco he’d found in his pocket.

  ‘I want improvements in employment and more jobs and all that, but I feel it’s never going to go far enough. I’d like to see us taking a leaf out of the Soviet Union’s book and ditch capitalism altogether. Let the proletariat have a chance for a change. What about you?’

  ‘Not sure,’ said Vic, frowning slightly. ‘Joined the Sallies when I was a kid but nowadays I’m not too sweet on God talk. I feel too bloody riled about what’s happening. I’m one hundred per cent behind the workers — adequate pay, decent conditions, a fair go for the ordinary bloke. And something has to be done about relief and these blasted camps.’

  ‘Sounds like the making of a CP member to me!’ said Gilchrist.

  ‘I dunno,’ said Vic. ‘Think I’m more of a Labour man.’

  Vic and Gilchrist sat in the hut, one on the bunk, the other on the tiny table, feeding the stove with the pinecones they’d collected. Gilchrist lent Vic his copy of Karl Marx’s Das Kapital but Vic found it heavy going. Ideas of a class struggle and theories about capital were all very well but he wanted things done and done now. He hated injustice — it made him angry, desperate almost.

  When Vic was a boy of eight or nine he’d sold newspapers on a corner of Lambton Quay, rain or shine. Along with several other lads, he’d worked for Sticky Mason, an older youth much given to ear-boxes and rabbit punches. Mason had a rule: the boys were fined from their wages for any discrepancies in their cash at the end of the day. Short a bob and they had to make it up; half a crown extra and Mason pocketed it himself. On this occasion Vic had an extra two shillings in his total, which Mason forfeited from his pay.

  ‘You’ve no right,’ Vic blurted out.

  ‘Right?’ said Mason, staring menacingly at the younger boy.

  Vic could feel himself starting to tremble and his stomach turn.

  ‘Who else thinks I’ve no right?’ said Mason, staring around at the other youngsters gathered at the vacant street bench waiting to be paid.

  No one said anything.

  ‘So you’re the only little Bolshie bastard. Well, Cowan, have this on me,’ said Mason, giving Vic a heavy crack across the ear, which bit and stung and made the world sway and stagger. ‘And,’ said Mason, ‘you can clear off. No more newspapers for you, sonny boy.’

  ‘My pay?’ said Vic. ‘What about my pay?’

  ‘Bloody forget it,’ said Mason. ‘Confiscated, gone, kaput.’

  Vic never forgot the incident, or the impotent fury and sense of injustice he felt. Thinking back to it in the Public Works tent years later brought him an idea.

  ‘What about a camp newspaper?’ he said, opening the door of the stove and prodding the burning cones with a bent piece of wire.

  ‘You mean, us doing one here at Punawai?’ said Gilchrist.

  Vic nodded.

  ‘Holy shit,’ said Gilchrist, ‘you’re a proper beaut.’

  ‘We’d need help, though
,’ said Vic. ‘Couldn’t do it all on our own.’

  ‘What about asking those two new blokes, Miller and Legatt, to give a hand? They look the sort that could string a few words together,’ said Gilchrist.

  George Miller and Bob Legatt had arrived at Punawai together. They were both in their early twenties, and since they’d come had been observed reading books, which was unusual in the camp. Legatt, a small, mousy-looking chap who seemed keen on the funny-money policies of Social Credit, didn’t provoke much attention, unlike his friend Miller, who, with his well-clipped moustache and classy accent, was initially regarded as stuck up. At first the other men avoided Miller, but this changed after it got about that he’d spent a couple of years at medical school in Dunedin. There was no first aider at the camp, so Miller, with the help of a couple of medical books he had with him and torn-up old shirts and long-johns, did his best giving advice and improvising slings and bandages.

  ‘I really shouldn’t be doing it,’ Miller told Vic one day as the two men were grubbing weeds together. ‘I’m not even halfway through my training.’

  ‘You’re doing a corker job,’ said Vic, ‘so for God’s sake don’t give up. What happened to the doctoring training, anyway? Why didn’t you finish?’

  ‘Long story,’ said Miller, kicking at a poroporo plant he was trying to remove. ‘Dad’s importing firm went under and suddenly there was no money coming from home, not a bean, and here I was, a spoilt young kid, private school and all, not knowing my head from my arse. After the business collapsed I went on at varsity for a couple of terms, working as a caretaker, living in cellars and under boilers. But in the end even that sort of work was hard to get and by then I was failing the course. It’s not easy trying to cram for an exam in a bugger-awful cellar with hardly any light and a couple of rats running around. Met Legatt in Wellington when we were pasting up posters and he and I have been bumming about ever since. Legatt was training to be a primary teacher when he got the shove.’