Orchard Street

by Gee, Maurice

  Orchard Street

  Maurice Gee

  PUFFIN BOOKS

  Published by the Penguin Group

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  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London, WC2R 0RL, England

  Published in Puffin Books, 1998

  Copyright © Maurice Gee 1998

  The right of Maurice Gee to be identified as the author of this work in terms of section 96 of the Copyright Act 1994 is hereby asserted.

  Digital conversion by Pindar NZ

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  A catalogue record for this book is available from the National Library of New Zealand.

  www.penguin.co.nz

  ISBN 9781742288536

  Contents

  1 Jupiter

  2 Jimpy

  3 Collymores

  4 Barnsky and Hillovitch

  5 Teresa

  6 Eileen

  7 Draughts

  8 Smith and Wesson

  9 Good instincts

  10 $id Holland

  11 Poetry

  12 The raid in Orchard Street

  13 Bike makes a friend

  Chapter 1

  Jupiter

  One day last summer I was walking through the downtown square in Auckland when I saw a tall thin man with greying hair standing by the statue of the Maori chief. Something familiar about him made me pause, and it was not his face but the length and spikiness of his arms and legs that made me draw my breath and say, ‘Bike Pike.’ He turned his head and watched me approach, blinking his eyes. We hadn’t seen each other for more than 40 years but his smile hadn’t changed—that mixture of eagerness and uncertainty.

  ‘Gidday Bike,’ I said. ‘Long time no see.’

  ‘Well blow me down, it’s Dinky,’ he answered, trying for casualness in his old off-centre way.

  We shook hands. ‘The boys from Orchard Street meet again,’ he said, and the name restored a sad familiarity between us. We travelled back to a distant time, and a place existing only in our memories. For five minutes we talked in a friendly way. Then I asked him things that made him blink again and shift uneasily on his long legs.

  Since that meeting in the downtown square I’ve spent a lot of time sorting things out. Who was I, who was Bike, who was Teresa—and Eileen, Les, Mr Redknapp and the rest? Easy questions I would have thought, but they turned out to be hard. I’ve written down what I found and tried to keep it simple, not just for myself but for the ones still around from that time and place. Plain answers come closest to the truth …

  There’s no street like Orchard Street, and no year like 1951. So much happened to me and my family, and to Teresa and hers, that our lives could never be the same. If I say the police arrested her father and mine on the same morning, for different ‘crimes’, but neither of us was in the least bit ashamed, you’ll get an idea of what I mean. The Loomis sergeant drove Frank Collymore away, while Dad went in a bigger car with police from Auckland. His crime was more serious. The neighbours watched, pursing their lips, and did not know where to look when Frank saluted like a general from the back seat of the car. Mr Pike shouted ‘Commie lover’ at Dad—but things were happening in his family, in the Pikes, far worse than being arrested, things that weren’t yet plain to see. Orchard Street was a busy place in 1951, but a lot of what happened there went on in the dark.

  The world outside was busy too. It was the year of the waterfront dispute. Mum and Dad sat talking late into the night, almost as if a war had broken out—which it had as far as Dad was concerned. I even heard him say, ‘This is war.’

  What the history books call it is a lockout or a strike. You can take your pick. But I’m not going to get into the history book side of things. All I’ll say is that I sided with Dad. It was workers against shipowners, workers against Slippery Sid, but it was a family thing for me. Us against them.

  What Mum and Dad talked about over their cups of tea was the risky thing he meant to do. She urged him to get busy, she said there was no choice, but she wrung her hands and whispered, ‘What will happen if they catch you?’

  ‘Nothing bad, Lil. Nothing too bad. They won’t beat me up.’

  ‘They might. They’re allowed to. They can get away with anything now.’

  I’ll have to write a little bit of history after all. When the wharfies and the shipowners disagreed—it was over wages and hours of work—the bosses locked the men out. No doubt about that. But the government—Sid Holland’s government—pretended it was really a strike and set about destroying the Waterside Workers’ Union. It was run by communists, they claimed. (Dad never denied it.) They brought in a set of emergency regulations which said, among other things, that anyone printing a pamphlet aiding or abetting the strike was committing an offence. The police could come searching without a warrant, using force if they thought they had to, and no claim could be made for any damage or injury they caused. That was what Mum was talking about.

  Dad wasn’t a wharfie, he was a printer, but he was an ardent union man. The new regulations were like those in a fascist country, he said. Although he went to work by train in Auckland he had a little print shop under the house, at the far end of a space saved for garaging the car when we got one. He made a bit of money in his spare time by printing wedding invitations, twenty-firsts, and flyers advertising bring-and-buys and mock courts. But in 1951, when the lockout began, he started printing leaflets for the wharfies.

  ‘They won’t catch me. I’ll be too smart.’

  ‘You can get six months. You can get hard labour,’ Mum said.

  ‘Lil, we went across there fighting Hitler. We might just as well have invited him here.’

  He nailed blocks of firewood along the bottom of the workshop door and fitted others on top so it looked like part of the woodpile. He cut a shorter piece to hide the handle. When he went inside someone had to put it back in place. The whole thing was shaky, it tumbled down, but Dad got more determined and fixed every block with a nail in the end. It wasn’t the best disguise in the world because he had to leave a gap so the door would open without getting jammed. The cops would soon see that. Still, he was pleased. He blacked out the little window facing the street and got to work.

  ‘Don’t you boys get involved,’ Mum said. ‘This is me and Dad.’

  ‘Nuts,’ said Les, my older brother.

  For him too it was a family thing and although the political side made him yawn he wanted to be part of any action that was going.

  ‘There’s nothing you can do,’ Mum said. ‘Except keep quiet.’

  ‘I can deliver.’

  ‘Me too,’ I
said.

  ‘No,’ Mum said, looking desperate.

  ‘Lil,’ Dad said, ‘let the boys help. It’s part of their education.’

  ‘Lesley will get fired if he’s caught.’

  ‘There’s other jobs.’

  We heard Dad busy under our feet late into the night. He went to work in the morning in the usual way but his Gladstone bag carried more than his lunch. Mum had stuffed in bundles of leaflets held in rubber bands. He learned to carry the heavy bag as though it was light. I don’t know who he gave the leaflets to—he was careful to keep that to himself.

  They saved a bundle for Loomis. Les borrowed my bike and rode out putting them in letter-boxes. Once when he was taking Eileen Collymore to the pictures I went myself, on foot not on the bike—I reckoned you could hide quicker and cut across paddocks to escape. I had told Les not to deliver with our house in the centre or the police would work it out.

  ‘Hey, Ossie, you’re not so dumb.’

  ‘But always put some in our street. And one in our letter-box as well.’

  ‘Oh, Austin,’ Mum said, worried at my cleverness.

  ‘It’s like spies in the war, with the Gestapo after them.’

  But when I went out delivering I knew it was more than a movie or a game. I was afraid. I wanted to be at home reading Zane Grey—reading about Buck Duane facing up to Poggin outside the bank in Val Verde—although I must say that the ending of The Lone Star Ranger confused me, because Poggin beats Buck to the draw; and I started seeing the enemy, Dad’s enemy and mine, as a man who looked like Poggin, with rippling muscles and yellow eyes and a mane of red-gold hair. I stopped under a street lamp and read: ‘The Holland government is starving our families.’ I read about shipowners sucking fat cigars: ‘Work 59 hours a week or you are dumped.’ But I saw Poggin and knew I would never escape over the paddocks if he came after me. The dark night, pressing all around, and the brick of leaflets in my hand, played tricks on my mind. Even Mum started seeming strange. She liked people who spoke well and remembered their manners. She told Dad not to roll his shirt sleeves into his armpits. A gentleman wore his shirts buttoned at the wrist. So how could she be on the workers’ side. It didn’t add up. Yet she was passionate. She hated Slippery Sid and his government and said that all he wanted was to make the fat shipowners fatter still.

  I scuttled through the light and into the dark and slid along, hearing doors open and dogs bark and bits of conversation from lighted rooms. I heard Mr Raffills blowing his nose. I heard Mrs Cooper say, ‘If you hit me one more time I’m going to the police.’ ‘They’ll laugh at you,’ her husband said. I left a leaflet in the Redknapps’ box, and Mr Worley’s, but none in Frank Collymore’s, thinking that it might get Teresa in trouble. An hour later, circling back, I put one in the convent box.

  I climbed the gate into the school and ran across the football field beside the church. I crossed the gravel path into the pine grove, but stopped and hid when I heard footsteps scrunching towards me. Two nuns went by, walking from the church to the convent. I was used to nuns, I’d been spying on them since I was five and they didn’t scare me, but I hadn’t seen them in the night before. The starched white frames around their faces gleamed like teeth. Their beads and crosses caught bits of light. I pressed against a pine trunk and tried to stop my bones from creaking, tried to stop my breath. It seemed to me that Teresa must know all sorts of weird stuff, taught by them.

  When they’d gone I climbed the bank into the bottom paddock of Flynns’ farm and went along by the leaning hedge at the back of Redknapps’.

  ‘Hello. Who’s there?’ a voice cried. A beam of torchlight hit my face. ‘Ah, young Austin. I hope you’re not spying on me again.’

  ‘No, Mr Redknapp.’

  ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘Going home.’

  ‘It’s a funny way to go. You’re up to something.’

  ‘No I’m not. I’ve just been to the pictures.’

  ‘Liar,’ he said. I could tell that he was grinning as he spoke.

  ‘Your torch is hurting my eyes,’ I said.

  ‘Sorry.’ He turned it off.

  ‘Anyway,’ I said, ‘it’s Flynns’ paddock, not yours. I’m allowed to come in here.’

  ‘Of course you are. I come out to look at the stars.’

  I thought he was batty. A grown man looking at the stars. I’d lived over his boundary hedge all my life and never spoken a single word to him. I knew he was sick from being gassed in the war—the First World War—and that he and his wife sewed tents and knapsacks for a living in a workshop built on the side of their house. They had been very busy in Hitler’s war (when Dad was away); we heard their machines rattling deep into the night—but Mum said they were snobs (as though she wasn’t one herself).

  ‘They think they’re too good for us. Ignore them, Austin.’

  Which I couldn’t do. I climbed on the roof and hid behind the chimney and watched them making tents in their workroom. Sometimes he had trouble lifting the canvas and she ran to help, shouldering the heavy stuff like a wharfie. Once he had a coughing fit and she held his head on her huge breast until it was done. They walked in their garden hand in hand—and I lay under the hedge that nobody ever cut, spying on them. He took her a sprig of daphne as she sat reading on the porch and when she looked up he kissed her on the mouth. And once when she stood in the roses, crying silently, he came out of the house and dried her eyes with his handkerchief. ‘Come on Winnie love, no more tears.’ It seemed all wrong to me that people as old as the Redknapps, and fat and thin, and sick as well, should behave like that. It made them ridiculous, and it troubled me.

  I was spying one day under the hedge while Mr Redknapp watered his garden. The radio was playing classical music in the house and he shouted, ‘Turn it up,’ to his wife. The music grew louder and Mr Redknapp started conducting with the hose. Water sprayed everywhere. I heard his wife singing through the window. When the piece ended Mr Redknapp bent to turn off the tap. At least, that’s what I thought he was doing. Instead he turned it on as hard as it would go and jammed his thumb on the nozzle to increase the pressure. He ran at me, shooting water that rattled like hailstones on my face. I yelled and backed away. He soaked me from my head down to my waist. I had water in my nose and ears and scratches from the hedge on my back.

  ‘Got you, young Dye. Let that be a lesson.’

  He turned off the tap and I heard him laughing and coughing all the way into the house. And soon I heard her laughing too, great whooping shouts.

  I stayed away from the Redknapps after that, all through my boyhood.

  Now here he was in the Flynns’ paddock, being friendly.

  I said, ‘There’s lots tonight’—meaning the stars. My eyes were getting used to the dark after his torch and I saw a shape beside him, like a woman, short and thin.

  ‘This is my telescope,’ he said, patting it. ‘I like to get away from the street lights. Are you interested in astronomy?’

  ‘I’ve never done it.’

  ‘Come and have a look.’

  ‘Yeah. All right.’ I still didn’t trust him. I thought I might get close and he’d play a trick on me. He turned on his torch again and lit my way to the telescope.

  ‘It’s a good clear night. I’ve been looking at Jupiter.’

  ‘A planet,’ I said.

  ‘Do you know the rest?’

  I named them.

  ‘Good boy.’

  ‘Jupiter’s got moons.’

  He fiddled with the telescope. ‘Do you want to have a look?’

  ‘Sure. OK.’ I squinted through the magic tube—saw nothing for a moment. Then my eyes came right and the planet was there, filling the lens—invading me. Jupiter. At first I gasped, then I held my breath. To tell the truth, I felt like crying. I’d never seen anything so beautiful before.

  ‘All right?’ Mr Redknapp said.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘How many moons?’

  ‘Two, I think. I thought there we
re four.’

  ‘Actually there are sixteen. But only four you can see with this sort of telescope. Galileo was the man who discovered them. Have you heard of him?’

  ‘He dropped weights from the Leaning Tower of Pisa.’

  Mr Redknapp laughed. ‘So they say.’ He went on to talk about Galileo—but I didn’t listen. All I wanted was Jupiter, huge and impossible up there, with zebra stripes on its surface and little white moons circling round. I watched until my neck grew sore.

  ‘It’s made of gas, did you know that?’

  I shook my head and lost the planet—found it again.

  ‘A gas giant. It’s bigger than a thousand Earths. Saturn is another. Mars is solid, like us. I’ll show you him another night.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Please.’

  ‘And a globular cluster. Now that’s a sight. Like the crown jewels, Austin. You won’t believe it. And there, see there, the Southern Cross. That bright star in the pointers is Alpha Centauri. But it’s not just one, it’s three, going round each other. Proxima Centauri is in that system too. It’s the closest star to Earth … after our sun.’

  He gave me my first lesson in astronomy, on a night that changed my life.

  ‘Can I see?’

  ‘Not now.’ He was wheezing. ‘I’ve had enough for one night. It’s time I was home with my cup of cocoa. But when you see me out here you can come on out.’

  I held the torch for him while he packed up. I was longing for another look through the telescope. Globular cluster, I thought. I asked him how much telescopes cost.

  ‘Quite a lot. You’d better start saving up.’

  At the gap in the hedge I handed him the torch. ‘Thanks for Jupiter,’ I said.

  He laughed, but it was painful from whatever went on in his chest. ‘That’s all right, Austin. He’s not mine. Oh, by the way, tell your brother not to leave any more leaflets in my box.’