by Wendy Scarfe
The years had not made me more feminine. My mother reproved me for my unrefined language and manner but there was little reality in her admonitions for apart from her I had few practical examples. I had grown up in a world of men and the women I read about in books were fantasies from another world.
I had worked my way through the library to S and was now reading Shakespeare’s plays. It had been a strange process, as if the books I read were the measurement of my growth. I wasn’t certain whether I understood more in them because I had acquired more years or whether a pool of accumulated knowledge gave me an illusion of maturity beyond my years.
I was not a pretty girl, although my mother defended my appearance by saying I had a strong face. When I complained of my appearance one day my father surprisingly said, ‘Yes, a strong face. That’s why we called you Judith. Many years ago I saw a painting of Judith slaughtering General Holofernes and I thought, with luck I’ll have a daughter like that. Strong.’
My mother laughed. ‘She won’t go slaughtering anyone. You think action can solve anything.’
In my mirror a square heavy-jawed face stared back at me. My nose was straight and so was my mouth, more sullen than serious, and un-smiling. My hazel eyes weren’t too bad, I supposed. I wore my heavy long blonde hair dragged off my face and in a plait down my back. Like ‘a brawny Norwegian peasant girl’ my father said, ‘a toiler in the vineyards not a lily of the field’.
My father’s biblical knowledge surprised me.
‘His father was a pastor,’ my mother smirked.
‘My grandfather?’
‘Yes, your grandfather.’
‘And as mean an old bastard as ever was,’ my father snorted. ‘Religion’s just another sort of tyranny. And when did it ever help the working man? I ask you that, Eve. Religion is the opium of the masses.’
He confronted my mother as if she were the defender of God, the Church and all religious belief, but she only patted him on his hand and said, ‘How cruel to send you to sea when you were a mere child.’
In one of his about-turns he said, ‘It was the making of me.’
Years later I realised he was not defending the mean old bastard of his father but his own successes. He couldn’t bear to think that neglect had in its own way defeated him. This was my father’s vulnerability.
As for myself I was growing bored with his constant references to ‘the working man’ and ‘the working class’. I was beginning to wonder if it was a belief almost as tyrannical as religion.
Usually labourers were the only customers at the cafe. So the shabbily dressed but clean young man who came regularly for a cup of tea and a bun puzzled me. I glanced at him as I hurried to and fro from the kitchen, but he ignored me. He always had a book on the table and never lifted his head from his reading. When he absently ordered the same tea and bun I amused myself with a private bet: threepence if he mumbled his thanks, sixpence if he looked up, a shilling if he did both.
The more he ignored me the more challenges I set myself. My gambling debts mounted. I would take myself to the pictures if he looked at me. The new picture house at the Port was very glamorous. Maybe I would buy myself a new dress if he spoke to me. Maybe his eyes were grey or blue or brown. If none of this happened I promised myself I would help my mother do the washing and not complain.
I continued to lose my money, didn’t go to the pictures, didn’t buy a new dress and did lots of additional housework.
Why I bothered to pay myself my self-imposed debts I don’t know. It was silly, but it all allowed me to think about him. I was far too curious about him. But to intrude on his privacy risked a humiliating set-down, far worse than years ago trying to wave to the swimmer.
Nonetheless, one day in a moment of courage and defiance I asked him what he was reading. He glanced up at me and I realised that his myopic eyes hidden behind thick glasses saw me through a haze.
‘Marx,’ he mumbled, ‘Das Kapital.’
I had come across Marx in the library and battled with Capital.
‘In German or in translation?’ I now knew what translation meant and I expected he should appreciate my learning but before he could respond someone yelled, ‘Hey, Duckie, you serving or what?’
I flounced around and shouted back, ‘What do you mean “or what?” Wait your turn.’
I turned back to the reader but his head was again bent to his book. Neither my comment nor my shouting had drawn his attention. A memory from a childhood fairytale made me smile. He was a male version of The Princess Who Couldn’t Laugh, only his fault was he couldn’t converse. I’d take no further notice of him. And why should he notice me? I was a nobody, an unbeautiful, uneducated waitress in a slop shop. Depression engulfed me. This shabbily dressed reader of books who ignored me had no idea how I boiled with a passion to escape my drudgery.
He continued to come for his tea and bun. I continued to plonk it in front of him with a terse, ‘Will that be all?’ and I stopped making bets with myself. If he didn’t care to look at me then it was his business and I tried to shrug off my disappointment.
As most of the lunchtime diners were regulars a new visitor rather better dressed than most and with a disdainful air took my notice. We had only a fixed menu and as I put his soup in front of him he picked up a corner of the newspaper-tablecloth on his table and said, ‘What’s this?’
I didn’t like his tone. ‘A newspaper?’ I was tart.
‘Yes, I can see that it’s a newspaper, girlie, but what’s it doing here? Don’t you throw newspapers in the bin?’
The patronising ‘girlie’ angered me. ‘Yes, after you’ve made a mess on it.’
He looked at me coldly with his thin eyes set too close to his nose.
‘Take it off,’ he said.
‘No.’
‘Take it off! I won’t eat my meal on newspaper. I don’t make a …’ he hesitated, as if spitting out an unappetising word, ‘mess.’
‘Then there is no need to take it off.’
I dumped his soup in front of him. Some spilled over the edges of the plate onto the paper.
‘Oops,’ I said, ‘so sorry,’ clearly not meaning it. He froze an instant and then before I realised his intent he threw the bowl of soup at me. It was hot. My thick woollen skirt saved me from being burned but I felt the heat of it on my thighs. The blood drained from my face and then rushed back so that my face as well as my legs felt on fire.
‘You bastard!’ I shouted. ‘You bloody bastard!’
A moment of abrupt silence fell on the room. Then, as one, every man in the room, except for the Das Kapital reader, was on his feet. Chairs scraped back or crashed over as they surged towards me. The soup thrower was hauled to his feet and in a circle of angry threatening labourers shrank miserably. His disdain had gone and his face had the quality of a hunted rabbit.
‘I’ve seen him about,’ someone growled. ‘ He’s a boss’s man.’
‘Organising scab labour, are you? A dirty scab yourself?’ And they pushed him around the circle.
He pleaded piteously. ‘No, fellows, no, just eating lunch.’
‘Then you’re a spy?’
‘No,’ he bleated.
‘Listening to our talk were you?’
‘No.’
‘Insulting our Judith?’ For the first time I heard them speak the dignity of my name.
‘Didn’t mean anything.’
‘Not mean anything when you threw your soup at her?’
He was silent and wary. The shifty feral silence of a hunted animal. He cringed.
‘Apologise and call her “lady”.’
‘Apologies, ma’am,’ he whined.
‘Louder! And she’s not the Queen.’ Someone prodded him.
‘Apologies, lady,’ he screeched.
‘Oh, let him go.’ The Das Kapital reader had, unbeknown to me, approached the melee. ‘Let him go,’ he repeated, ‘we have other things to worry about beside a single bloody blackleg.’
They hesitated and
I was surprised they accepted his authority.
The soup thrower was hustled out the door and given a hearty shove that sent him tumbling. As he scuttled away they shouted with laughter and slapped each other on the back as if triumphant.
Meanwhile the reader had returned to his book.
I stood hesitating in the middle of the room but finally approached him. ‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘If there had been a fight I might have lost my job.’
‘Yes,’ he said and looked up. ‘Better change that skirt. So you understood bits and pieces of Das Kapital?’
Surprised, I stared at him. He had actually heard me earlier and remembered what I had said. At my obvious astonishment a slight smile lifted the corners of his mouth.
‘Amazing,’ he said. ‘She understands some Marx. Quite amazing.’ He returned to his reading.
And now I knew his eyes were grey. Jubilantly I remembered my challenge to myself. I would take myself to the pictures and see a new Mary Pickford film and maybe buy a new dress.
On Sundays I put on my best dress, hat and gloves and went to the Botanic Gardens to stroll with my closest friend Winifred, secretly nicknamed ‘Weepy Winnie’ because in bursts of sentimentality she would dissolve into tears. Just about anything set her off: a lost kitten mewing under a bush; a ragged child begging for a penny. Her feelings were utterly indiscriminate so she was mocked, but gently so. I was certain that if Winnie had not been pretty her outbursts would have appeared incongruous and feeble-minded.
She had no doubt about her attractions. Sometimes I thought unkindly that she cultivated me because by comparison she shone more brilliantly. Her pansy-brown eyes were large and soulful. Her mouth was what romantic novelists called a rosebud, her skin a glorious pink and white, her face a delicious heart-shape. She had the knack of filling her eyes with tears when she wanted to seem affected and the tears would drown the pansies, overflow and run down her cheeks but never did her eyes or nose redden and she never sniffed.
Her art amazed me. She only had to glance at a boy or a man for them to liquefy. They blushed, gushed, stammered, took her hand, then, overcome with embarrassment at their private infatuation, released it and blushed, gushed and stammered again. Even older women pronounced that she was a sweet girl and in many ways she was. There was no malice in her.
I thought her feather-brained but liked her and enjoyed her bright company. She tried to take me in hand and improve my dress sense but I was plain and didn’t see the point of dressing myself up. My clothes were clean, neat but unimaginative. They didn’t attract anyone’s eyes and for that I was grateful. I always felt that I would look rather silly flirting and consequently was more awkward and self-conscious than I needed to be.
Weepy Winnie flirted outrageously.
We had wandered along North Terrace and passing through the elegant cast-iron portals entered a green oasis bright with spring flowers. It was a mild day, pleasant before the summer heat and there was a mixture of the stylishly dressed and those shabby in ragged coats and shoes with broken soles that flapped as they walked. Those dressed well walked with confidence and chatted and laughed with ease and ignored the ill clad who, unable to compete and aware of their difference, often hurried by with bent heads as if shamed by their misfortune. I had the impression that rather like the shadowy wharf rats in my dreams they were there and yet not there.
We strolled along the paths, passed the statues of two white dogs that children had polished from constant patting, and loitered before the goddess Amazon astride her rearing steed and defending herself against a tiger. I wondered briefly about this mythical world that meant so little to me. We peeked in the windows of the Palm House with its mellow creamy stone work and grand glass dome. Still chatting we meandered across the finely trimmed grass and as we emerged from behind some trees I saw a man with a starved expression bend swiftly and surreptitiously to snatch at a cigarette butt. He had first glanced about him, like some hunted animal that sees a tid-bit but can’t gather enough courage to steal it, then, having cautiously assured itself of its safety, makes a quick grab. A sweet statue of Diana gazed down on this moment of humiliation with marble indifference.
I halted, shocked by his misery. Winnie tugged at my arm. ‘Don’t look,’ she whispered. ‘Come away.’
I shook her off. ‘Why not?’
The ubiquitous tears filled her eyes. ‘He’s embarrassed. Poor man. He’s ashamed. He doesn’t want us to see.’
She was right but her tears irritated me. ‘Stop crying, Winnie. It’s ridiculous.’
This time she actually sniffed. ‘Seeing things like this spoils my afternoon.’
It had certainly spoiled mine.
It was this Sunday afternoon, even more than slavery at the Chew It and Spew It, which gave me a sharp sense of class division.
Winnie, in her pretty clothes and her parents who owned a men’s clothing store in the city, clearly belonged in the upper strata of society. My father was a labourer and I slung hash in a cheap eating place to other labourers. So I supposed that I was working class. Several rungs below Winnie.
Something in society divided us and without offering us a choice placed us where we were. But I wasn’t knowledgeable enough to understand how this had come about. I fretted over this.
When we tired of strolling, and when Winnie grew bored with commenting on the clothes people were wearing, we made our way to ‘The Stump’. This part of the gardens was the domain of spruikers, religious ratbags, political theorists, tin-pot messiahs. It always promised to be entertaining.
Each speaker had his box, usually an old soap box or vegetable crate, and mounted thereon shouted his message to a crowd that drifted from speaker to speaker. The audience contributed to the fun with witty interventions or ribald mimicry. There were no women speakers and it often seemed we were the only two women in the audience.
Winnie looked about with bright eyes. ‘It’s such fun.’
The first time we had come here I had asked, ‘Are all these people just allowed to get up and shout whatever they like?’
She had giggled. ‘Usually. But my father says the City Council has had just about enough of free speech and they are thinking of introducing permits. He doesn’t mind the religious nuts but he thinks that there are too many political speakers and they may be causing unrest. Anyway, I prefer the religious ones. The political ones are so earnest.’
This Sunday she dragged me over to a small group standing in front of a red-faced bellicose man with sparse hair and a large wart on the end of his nose. His box still bore the label SOUTH AUSTRALIAN TOMATOES.
Winnie whispered to me, ‘Give him a minute, he’ll see us and begin to talk about Jezebel. I think he hates women. I suppose plenty have rejected him. It’ll be that wart.’
True to her prediction he brayed about the evils of Jezebel, then went on to trumpet the evil of dissenters and non-conformists. In a stentorian voice he condemned our adulterous generation, the evils of false worship, paganism, Marxism, rationalism. In hushed tones he breathed the beauty of redemption, salvation and the flight of the anointed who winged unerringly into a new heaven.
‘What do you think happened to the old heaven?’ Winnie giggled, and as he turned his wrathful eyes upon her she poked out her tongue at him and, openly laughing, pulled me away.
I went with her, irritated by his puerility. ‘Do they all spout such drivel? Are they of sound mind?’
‘Probably not. But if they weren’t so mad we couldn’t laugh at him.’
I chewed this one over. The mad, like the poor, are to be pitied my mother had told me but I didn’t feel pity for the man with the wart on his nose and he didn’t amuse me. He had held the crowd in the palm of his hand. Whether devotees or mockers they were all mesmerised, listening and responding in their own ways. His sort of madness disturbed me. He was a bully and I hated bullies.
I followed Winnie reluctantly. There were several other orators, all perched on their boxes, like birds come to rest. Some
had megaphones and they drowned out their neighbours. Away on his own and addressing a small group was a thin man of medium height. He had an English cap on his head and wore a well-used tweed jacket. I recognised him as the reader in my cafe. Winnie was looking elsewhere for entertainment but I gripped her arm. ‘I know him,’ I whispered.
Immediately arrested, she peered at him. ‘It’s a bit hard to recognise him under that cap. Are you sure?’
‘Yes.’
‘Where did you meet him?’
‘At the Chew It and Spew It. He’s the reader.’
‘Ooooh.’ Winnie’s attention was now fully focussed. ‘Glasses and all?’
‘Yes. Glasses and all.’
‘Let’s go closer. Maybe he’ll recognise you. You look much nicer in your Sunday clothes.’
‘I don’t want him to do that.’
‘Why?’
‘Don’t know. Just don’t.’
‘You are a silly old thing.’
I didn’t tell her that I was ashamed to work in that cafe; ashamed that I was not better educated; and mortified that he had seen the soup thrown at me. However I was curious and stood at the back of the group with Winnie. Perhaps, I thought, he’s so short-sighted he won’t recognise me.
He was speaking: ‘All history is the story of class struggle. The economic exploitation and political domination of class by class has always existed. The poor man gets less than his due. The rich man lives by exploiting the poor.
‘The state is an executive committee for managing the affairs of the governing class. The poor are excluded from any active part in the state or the law. We have one law for the rich and quite another for the poor.
‘But, comrades, we are in the last stage of humanity’s march towards a classless society. The proletariat will overcome capitalism and bring in a new classless society. You are all part of this historical evolution …’
‘Oh gawd,’ Winnie rolled her eyes. ‘And my father thinks he’s dangerous.’
She was kind. His audience pilloried him.
‘Get a real job, Professor.’
‘Swallowed a book, have you?’