The first day passed off all right. There was the excitement of having Jack back, and the girl was so obviously unwell that there was a good deal of solicitous activity on Mother’s part with barley-water and soft-boiled eggs carried on trays to the bedside and the loan of a pink crocheted bed-jacket, and my desk had to be moved out and Jack’s bed brought in from the sleep-out, but even during this time I could see that Dad was under some strain he found difficult to suppress. Perhaps it was that for quite a long time he had not had a target that he could define or see in the frame of familiar prejudices. Jack, also, was abstracted at first and clearly so concerned for Sheila’s well-being that he probably did not even notice Dad’s uneasiness.
At any rate, it all blew up the following afternoon with the sudden violence of a summer thunderstorm.
I was in my room working on an article for Mr Brewster, and I heard Dad call Jack into the kitchen, and their voices came to me clearly across the narrow vestibule.
‘This here woman you’ve brought into the house,’ Dad began the argument without concession to politeness, ‘how long do you propose to keep her here?’
‘Well, she’s sick … at least she’s been sick, and she’s still pretty crook,’ I heard Jack say, in a tone that betrayed some surprise. ‘So I just thought she —’
‘You thought! Look, hasn’t it ever occurred to you that there’s a right way and a wrong way of going about a thing? There’s no by your leave, is there? … you just land her on us whether we want her here or not!’
‘Well, where else would I take her? I came home because I —’
‘Has it occurred to you that she probably needs a week or ten days in bed? That’s what your mother says she needs.’
‘I know. She was pretty sick up there and —’
‘That’s it. Who do you think has got the time to run around after her? Your mother hasn’t got a dozen pair of hands. Don’t you think she’s got enough to do in this house with —’
‘I don’t see you doing much running around!’ Jack retorted angrily. ‘Isn’t it for Mum to complain if —’
‘It’s me who runs this house, not your mother. It’s me, see! And you just put that in your pipe and smoke it, my boy! And I’m running a house, d’you understand, or trying to, and not a blasted convalescents’ home!’
‘What the hell are you getting at?’ Jack’s voice was subdued and very taut. ‘What’ve you got against her?’
‘I just don’t like her attitude, that’s all. I’ve seen these lahde-dah ones before who have to be waited on hand and foot. The way she talks, and those stuck-up airs she gives herself. Who does she think she is? Lady Muck?’
‘You don’t bloody well know what you’re talking about!’ Jack snapped.
‘Don’t I?’ (Even in the words I could see the sarcastic twist to Dad’s mouth.) ‘Then I’d better tell you what else I think, eh? I think she’s nothing but a cheap little trollop, puffing away at her damned cigarettes and sitting there with her skirts up showing all she’s got! And she’s a mick, too, isn’t she? Sheila Delaney! You’ve only got to look at that face of hers … as Irish as Paddy’s pig … and that bloody cross thing she wears on a chain round her neck … Go on, answer me, you! She’s a mick, isn’t she?’
‘She’s a mick, yes,’ Jack said in a voice that hurt, even across the distance of the vestibule. ‘What’s that got to do with it?’
‘What’s that got to do with it!’ Dad stormed. ‘Are you out of your wits? We’re Protestants in this house. Protestants, do you understand! This is a decent, Godfearing house. And I want no confounded Roman Catholics under this roof whether they’re sick or they’re not sick!’
‘What are you trying to tell me, Pop?’
‘I’m trying to tell you that no house of mine is going to be overrun by tykes, that’s all.’
There was a long, tense silence after this, and I sat on the edge of my bed in rigid trepidation, but when Jack spoke his voice seemed steady and controlled, although every one of his slow-spaced words seemed to cut like a knife.
‘Listen to me, Pop,’ he said. ‘I don’t care whether she’s a mick or a Protestant or a holy roller. She happens to be my girl, see, and if it interests you I happen to be in love with her.’
‘You in love …’ Dad began to splutter.
‘As far as being a trollop, that’s for me to say. She’s a respectable girl, and nobody knows it better than me. As for being stuck-up, and Lady Muck, that’s just because she speaks nice … because she’s got a better education than you have, or than you ever damn’ well gave to me. She —’
‘You – you ungrateful swine! We’ve worked our very fingers to the bone for —’
‘Suppose you let me have a go, Pop,’ Jack cut in with terrible coldness. ‘You just stand back and let the flamin’ dog see the rabbit. You’re the one who brought this up. Well, let me say my piece now. You wanted to know why I brought her here. I brought her here because she’s sick and Mum’s a trained nurse and I thought she could take care of her for a bit while I look around and pick up another job. I thought —’
‘You and your jobs! You’ve never been able to hold down a job for two weeks in a row, you’re so —’
‘Listen, don’t give me that! I’ve been in one job for close on two years. And let me tell you something. I’ve kicked into this house from every pay I’ve ever earned. You can’t say I haven’t given my whack, can you? For the last two years you’ve been getting two quid a week from me regular as clockwork. Is that right? And I’ll tell you something else while I’m about it. Ever since I’ve been knee-high to a grasshopper, this damned house of yours has been crawling with your bloomin’ convalescents, with bloody men with their legs chopped off and their arms chopped off, with no eyes and no lungs … and when they haven’t been here there’ve been dotty old women dying all over the flamin’ house! And the place stuffed with crutches and wooden legs and enemas and bedpans and piss-bottles, and you couldn’t get a game of snooker because there was always a bloody coffin on the table! Jesus, Pop, don’t you stand there and tell me about this – this undertaker’s parlour you’ve been running for the last ten years! Do you realize that young Davy and me knew all about an artificial leg or an abdominal truss or a frigging chloroform mask before we knew what a see-saw was or a Meccano set! We —’
‘Don’t raise your voice to me, you —’
‘For Christ’s sake, your own daughter’s just over there on the other side of the street married to one of your damned convalescents! He got a bed here, didn’t he. He got looked after. Yes, while young Davy and me had to sleep on the floor in that sleep-out for donkey’s bloody years so there’d be room for the cripples and the corpses! And now – stone the crows! this is a beautiful turn-up for the books, isn’t it? – now, when I want to bring someone to my own home – someone I happen to be in love with: someone I intend to marry, this time – I’m suddenly in all the bloody strife in the world. Ah, to hell with it! Whenever you come back here you run into strife!’
‘Nobody asked you to come back.’
‘No? Well, I came back, didn’t I? And I brought my sheila with me, didn’t I? And I —’
‘You brought an RC, that’s what you brought. You brought a tyke! And I won’t have one of that sort staying under this roof.’
‘Well, you can bet your bloody life you won’t have to. As soon as she’s well enough to go we’ll be getting out of here, don’t make any mistake about that!’
‘The sooner the better then,’ said Dad. ‘And good riddance!’
They stayed for several days, though, because Mother put her foot down about Sheila being moved, and then Jack came into our room one night and took off his jacket and tie and looked around as he began to unbutton his shirt, and said, ‘You know, Davy, you’ve made this place look real nice. The shelves there, I mean, and that panelling, and the books and things. Although it was better when that desk was here instead of this old bed. You’ve done it jolly well, just the same. You’ve mad
e it into a sort of study, really. You look the real bloody old absent-minded professor, don’t you?’ He grinned at me and looked around for his pyjamas and said, rather casually, ‘Well, you can put it all back tomorrow just the way it was. We’re clearing out.’
‘But why should you?’ I spoke firmly, to ride myself over a little twinge of guilt, because his words had evoked in me an involuntary inward sigh of relief that peace of mind, the securities, the established values of my isolation might yet be restored.
‘Ah, it’s the Old Man. He goes on, needling away, finding fault with everything, trying to pick another row every time he talks to me. I’m just fed up with it, that’s all. Trouble is I’ve walked my jack off to-day, and not a flamin’ job in sight. I bought The Age this morning, Davy, and you wouldn’t believe it, but there was less than half a bloomin’ column of Situations Vacant, and seven bloomin’ columns of Situations Wanted. And a queue of about a hundred blokes at every job that was going. It’s a fair cow at the moment, I tell you straight.’
‘Oh, well, something will turn up. But what about Sheila?’
He sat on the edge of the bed in his pyjama-bottoms and rubbed away at his toes.
‘Well, he don’t want her here, that’s it. He’s made that clear enough, hasn’t he? Davy, what the devil’s wrong with Pop? Mum and Sheila, they get on like a house on fire, they do, you know. And anyway, you know Mum. She’s only happy when she’s got someone to look after. She’s all right. It’s him. Davy, what is wrong with him? He just don’t want anything. Remember when we were kids? … he was always kicking Mum out. You come home here with that bloomin’ typewriter of yours, and he kicks you out. I bring my girl back here, same bloody thing. What the hell’s wrong with him? It just seems like he … well, as if he can’t stand anyone else to have anything at all.’ He kept rubbing away at his toes while he talked. ‘You know, when we were coming down in that train from Dimboola sittin’ up all night, I thought of this place as a kind of … well, you know, a sort of place of sanctuary – that’s a jaw-breaker isn’t it?’ – he chuckled self-consciously – ‘have you twigged how I slip into long words now? … being with Sheila’s done that … she’s got quite a … an extensive vocabulary’ – his head was down over his feet and his shoulders were shaking, laughing at himself – ‘and when we get here we’re treated like we’re a couple of flamin’ lepers. Why does he have to go on like that? Mum’s tickled pink. And he’s like a bear with a sore head. It beats me.’
‘Jack, he doesn’t really have anything against Sheila. He doesn’t mean this about her being a Catholic and all that. It’s just that he has to have something to rant and rave about, so he can prove he’s master of the house.’
‘I don’t think it’s just that. You know what I reckon, Davy? I think he just can’t bear that other people should be able to do what they want to do. All Mum wanted to do was nurse people and look after ’em. All you wanted to do was write. All I want to do is to get Sheila well and then get spliced to her. I suppose he feels he’s never been able to do what he’s wanted to do himself, so he has to take it out on everybody else. Mind you, in one way you can see the Old Man’s point of view … I mean, he must be sick to death of seeing his house being run as a kind of a – a sanatorium, or a charity institution ever since he landed back from the war. Although I’ll bet the old bugger was glad of their disabled soldiers’ pensions, or their old-age pensions, or the two quid a week I kept sending him all the time I was away. But if he’d only try to be human about things, that’s all.’
‘If you go away from here, what are you going to do?’ I said.
‘Oh, I’ll do something. I can look after myself.’
‘And Sheila?’
‘Don’t worry about her. She’s my responsibility. You know, that’s another thing I just don’t understand about him. He’s been at me for years about how irresponsible I am, and the first time I come back with a girl I’m tracking square with, I get hoisted! He knows she’s not just another piece of skirt I’m chasing. I’ve told him that in two months’ time I’ll be twenty-one, and I’m going to marry her, and nobody can stop me. Makes no difference at all. Jesus, you can’t win, can you?’
‘Jack,’ I said, ‘there’s a very good nursing home up in Glen Eira Road. Why don’t you take Sheila there? They’d look after her while you found yourself a job.’
He looked up at me. ‘And what do I do for money? By the end of this week I won’t have a brass razoo left.’
‘I can give you the money,’ I said. ‘I’ve been saving the money I get from those articles in the paper. I can let you have fifty pounds.’
‘Fifty quid!’ He stared at me as if I were mad. ‘Are you pulling my leg? Fifty quid’s a lot of money!’
‘I can give it to you. Honestly. It’ll take care of Sheila for a couple of weeks, and it’ll keep you going until you find some work. You can have it, Jack.’
His head was down again and his face hidden from me, and he was rubbing away at his toes. For a long time he was silent. ‘I’d pay it back, you know,’ he said at last in a low troubled voice. ‘You’d get it all back.’
‘Well, we needn’t worry about that now. But Sheila would have proper attention, and you’d feel independent about things.’
‘Thanks, nipper,’ he said, but he kept rubbing at his toes and he didn’t look at me.
They left next morning and I returned to my work as if nothing had happened, and to this day I do not know whether I did it out of generosity and my love for Jack, or whether it was just the price I paid to have the house peaceful again and my own life free from invasion.
It was like a great river flooding or changing its course, the way the Depression came – the insidious creeping movement of dark, strong, unpredictable forces, the flow of hidden currents, a clod falling and dissolving, a slide of earth, the cave-in of an entire bank, a sudden eddy swirling around a snag, tilting it over, sweeping it off into a black oblivion.
Even when the disaster had spread everywhere and its destructive menace was understood, something unfeasible remained. The work trains, to me, going to my job at the same hour on the same days, seemed just as crowded, the same people pushed at the ticket barriers with the same impatient roughness, the shops were as full as ever of their desperate enticements. It was out in the suburbs mostly that one gradually came to see it.
They brought in the dole, and then the dole became ‘the sustenance’, and around this time they unlocked the Defence Department warehouses and out of the mothballs they took the old surplus greatcoats and tunics and they dyed them a dull black – all that brave khaki of 1914–18 – and against the contingency of a Melbourne winter issued them out as a charity to keep the workless warm. So that as the unemployed grew in number the black army coats became a kind of badge of adversity, a stigma of suffering.
One would see the shabby figures shambling along the suburban streets, carrying a loaf of bread and in a cloth bicycle-bag their meagre handout from the Sustenance Depot of tea and sugar and flour and potatoes, and a wisp of tobacco. Or there would be a queue of men the length of a block, most of them in the ill-fitting, shameful black, in apathetic competition for half a dozen casual jobs. As the situation grew worse desperate attempts were made towards alleviation, and the ‘black coats’ moved then in the more regimented bands of the ‘sustenance-workers’ and you would see them with their brooms and picks and shovels and council tip-drays working in slovenly unison on pointless municipal projects. Every now and then one would recognize a familiar figure among them – Dud Bennett, the one-time leader of the Grey Caps gang, driving a council dray laden with gravel, looking small and shrunken now: and Snowy Bretherton in a black greatcoat top-dressing the strip of lawn outside the local town hall. It was a time of a sad and terrible human degradation for which there seemed to be no remedy.
This was the time, too, of the first trickle in from Europe of that other human flotsam, Jews mostly and refugees from a new malignancy, and this, also, was misleading at fi
rst for the trickle had become a flood almost before one realized what was happening. Even the language of suffering, of course, had to be Australianized. The refugees became the ‘Reffos’, just as the sustenance-workers had by this time become the ‘Sussos’.
Dad by now was depot foreman so he kept his job at the tramways running-shed, but Bert, who had been ‘retrenched’ from the Repatriation Department, put on his uniform again, although this time the tunic and the greatcoat were dyed a dull black, so he must have had a different feeling about it from the time, fourteen years before, when as a hayseed kid from Corindhap he had gone away with an assumed name and bright badges and a sense of glorious adventure to have his leg blown off in France. He went back to casual snobbing to eke out the sustenance. By this time he had three children to keep.
In our suburb there was a constant, unnerving movement of these pathetic and yet somehow oddly sinister figures in their black tunics and greatcoats. Sometimes they would come to the door asking for an hour’s work to cut the hedge or to mow the lawn or to stack firewood or even to run errands … or sometimes more bluntly just to ask for a handout of food or money. A few of the more resourceful among them had made themselves crude little hand trucks which they would push clatteringly around the streets, collecting old newspapers or scrap-metal or unwanted clothes, or with coal or kindling-wood to sell.
I remember the evening when Dad came into my room and said: ‘I want you to print me up a sign. You do printing at Klebendorf’s, don’t you?’
My Brother Jack Page 18