by Wendy Scarfe
In the occasional spare moment when I wasn’t serving or cleaning I sat down with my sketchpad and, remembering Joe’s encouragement, drew from memory the faces I had seen that day.
I had wanted to attend Joe’s funeral but both my parents were against it. ‘Only men will be there,’ they said. ‘It’s no place for a girl.’
A month after Joe’s death Winnie and Harry came to afternoon tea. My mother was delighted that Winnie and I were friends. Winnie’s pretty ways comforted her with a dream that I might learn to be more feminine. In her realistic moments she doubted this possibility, even blaming herself for this not happening. I jokingly teased her, ‘What sort of imbecile would you want me to be? A weepy?’ I grinned and put my arm about her and she laughed with me.
As Winnie teetered up the gangplank my father looked askance. She looked gorgeous in a tangerine dress and a wide-brimmed cream hat. Harry offered his hand to help her balance and she giggled, first at him and then appraisingly at my father. He was still a handsome Nordic man with eyes the sapphire blue of ice caves and as she fluttered her absurdly long eyelashes at him his skin flushed a dark mahogany.
Later he subjected us to his outrage. ‘She tried to flirt with me, at my age. Her no older than Judith. The little minx. I don’t know what young people are coming to these days. Absolutely no respect.’
His strictures amused my mother. ‘You want her to regard you as an old man, Niels?’
‘No, no, of course not.’ And again he blushed like a boy. ‘Just some respect,’ he mumbled, discomforted by her amusement.
But she was having fun. ‘I’m sure next time she’ll find lots of respect for you, Niels, when she notices all those grey hairs.’ She put out her hand and ruffled searchingly in his mane of blond hair. ‘Here’s one,’ she laughed, plucking it out.
He shrugged her off. ‘I haven’t any grey hairs. My hair’s always been blond. It’s the sun here. It bleaches everything. I get tired of the endless bloody sun. I could do with a northern winter and the cleanness of cold snow.’
‘The coldness of cold snow you mean,’ she sighed. ‘People go crazy in places where the sun shines feebly for only half a year. What are you talking about?—all that nostalgia nonsense.’ Then she sighed again as she always did when my father dug up memories of his youth.
However, when Winnie had stepped on to the deck he had been full of gallantry and courtesy like a king receiving some foreign empress to his court, I thought, with a mixture of jealousy and resentment.
‘Just in case,’ he said, ‘you stumble over a rope. Ships are unpredictable places, but then they are adventurers on the high seas and they ride the wild winds.’
She opened her eyes wide at this burst of poetic language that amazed me.
She thanked him sweetly and clung to the support of his arm a fraction too long. My mother appeared, broke the spell, and took charge.
He was less gallant and more wary with Harry. I could see he was struggling to categorise him. Harry did not look the typical foundry worker. His body carried little heavy muscle, yet he was not puny. An athlete, I thought. Harry is a runner, he has the lithe fluid movements of a greyhound or a dancer. Brawn wouldn’t get Harry out of trouble but speed and flexibility might.
Harry held out his hand to my father with a frank engaging smile. ‘How do you do, sir?’
My mother slipped her hand over her mouth to hide a smile and my father, startled, had a moment of suspicion, but Harry’s openness convinced him that no mockery was intended. Relieved, he shook Harry’s hand, and soon they were deep in conversation about the foundry.
Mostly occupied by Winnie’s chatter, but deeply curious, I garnered only slivers of their conversation. My father mentioned the machines and Harry nodded. In fact, he nodded a lot, as my father did most of the talking.
‘Poorly paid … no compensation.’ Harry looked sober.
‘Came to the foundry begging for help?’
They were speaking about the mother of the boy who had been killed. Harry’s voice was quiet: ‘Four other children.’
‘Bloody disgrace.’ My father’s voice was loud and strident, as it always was when he was angry. ‘Bosses for you. Did she get anything?’
Harry shook his head. ‘The boss reminded her she was only entitled to the award.’
My father snarled. ‘The award. A starvation award. You watch yourself in that place, Harry.’ He placed a protective hand on Harry’s shoulder. ‘You watch yourself, my boy.’
In the space of a few moments Harry had wheedled himself into my father’s affection. Yet I had seen other instances of my father’s kindness to young workers.
‘We took up a collection for her,’ Harry said, ‘me and the other boys. It’s too late to bury him but it might help.’
My father snorted: ‘And those Holier-Than-Thous doubtless prayed over him and swindled his mother that there would be joy for him in the After Life. Religion,’ he snorted again and spat into the sea, as if relieving himself of a nasty taste. ‘A big lie to stop the working man from complaining.
‘Complaining!’ he was caustic. ‘That’s their word for what we want. We don’t complain, we fight the bastards. Has anyone told you about the waterside strike in Perth in 1919? A wake-up call to us all. The ship-owners tried to bring in scab labour to work the Dimboola. The lumpers showed them. They threw the scabs into the Swan River. Mounted police charged the protesting women with bayonets. Let them try their tricks here. Our river is as good as the Swan. We’ll show them.’
My mother interrupted them to call them to afternoon tea but my father continued to dominate the conversation until she put a hand on his arm. ‘Give the boy a break, Niels. I’m sure he’ll come again and there’ll be time to tell him more of your stories.’
‘Yes, yes, of course. I didn’t mean to bore you, Harry. But you youngsters need to know what is what. Get the right ideas now and you won’t go wrong in the future.’ He laughed a little self-consciously and in a rare moment I saw him not as a virile young man enduring the hardships of Iceland and windjammers but as a man approaching middle age. He had married late and was now in his late forties. Physical work had taken its toll and his arms had begun to develop an aged skinniness.The backs of his hands, once fair-skinned, had sunspots. He wanted to impress and I was grateful to Harry for his patience.
Harry assured him that he wouldn’t go wrong in the future. Then, turning to me, said, ‘By the way, Judith, your friend Nathan often comes around at the foundry.’
‘He’s not my friend, Harry.’
Winnie poked me in the ribs, rolled her eyes at my mother, and shook her head, denying my denial.
‘Stop it, Winnie,’ I said, ‘my mother will think …’
‘And what should I think?’ My mother was quick.
‘Resigned,’ I said. ‘I met him at the Chew It and Spew It. I told you about the soup incident.’
‘Oh, that.’ She dismissed any suspicion she might have had and I threw a warning look at Winnie, who grinned naughtily at me and said, ‘Her hero, Mrs Larsen.’
I was growing tired of Winnie aligning herself with others to embarrass me but I was curious and asked Harry, ‘Why does Nathan come around the foundry?’
‘He talks to us when he can and gives us leaflets on workers’ rights and about the Free Speech meetings. The boss always shouts that he’ll have him for trespass but can’t because he joins us when we have a smoke-o and that’s usually off the premises.’
My father looked thoughtful. ‘This Nathan’s a smallish chap with a quiet manner and spectacles? A communist, I think. They’re not a bad lot. Just too fixed in their ideas.’
‘And that coming from you, Niels?’ My mother laughed.
‘Well,’ he said, caught off-guard, ‘well, there are lots of groups in the labour movement.’
‘All with fixed ideas.’ She was caustic. ‘All disagreeing with each other.’
She got up and cleared the table. ‘Now, for heaven’s sake, let’s have a rest f
rom politics.
‘We have a piano, Harry. Perhaps you’d like to give us a tune.’
We had been sitting in the galley but now my mother led the way into a larger cabin converted to a sort of sitting room. Harry approached the piano as if it were some religious icon. His face glowed. He ran his fingers lightly and lovingly over the woodwork. ‘May I?’ he asked, but before anyone could reply he lifted the lid and struck a few notes. ‘It’s well tuned,’ he said, and, comfortably confident, pulled out the piano stool and sat down.
My mother hovered beside him. ‘Do you need some music?’
‘Can’t read it,’ he laughed. ‘Never learned. But here is,’ and he launched into ‘If you knew Susie like I know Susie, Oh, oh, oh what a girl’.
Winnie had said that he had rhythm in his bones and she was right. In the zest and joy of his playing I felt the real Harry was revealed and wondered if he was the same man who had listened so earnestly to my father. Now he was playing ‘When my Sugar walks down the street’ and this morphed into ‘Nothing could be finer than to be in Carolina’. Finally he finished with a soulful rendition of ‘We’ll build a dear little, cute little love nest’.
‘Oh, Harry, that was beautiful,’ my mother breathed. ‘You and the piano talk to each other.’
‘Yes,’ my father grunted, ‘very nice, most enjoyable.’
But now Harry had eyes only for my mother and they smiled at each other like two pieces of chocolate that melt together. My father was forgotten. I pitied him. With Harry my father’s strident tones had quietened. He had been gentle, almost tender. I had watched this transformation puzzled and a little suspicious. Even at seventeen I sensed an emotional simplicity about my father that left him vulnerable to the more sophisticated.
Harry was a natural sophisticate. A charmer. Maybe a manipulator. Did he genuinely respect my father or was it only a game, played by someone who thrived on being liked?
Work continued at the Chew It and Spew It from eight in the morning until six at night. When I wasn’t waitressing I cut up vegetables, washed dishes, mopped floors, washed cleaning cloths and tea towels. I complained to my father that I hadn’t been hired for this extra work and ought to be paid for it.
He said, ‘Thank your lucky stars you’ve got a job. A bit of extra work won’t hurt you. It’s only a bit of domestic labour.’
My mother stiffened and looked daggers at him. ‘Only domestic labour,’ she said in her tone that meant ‘don’t say anything more’. He mumbled.
When he had gone she said to me quietly, ‘You don’t want to lose your job, Judith. You’ll just have to grin and bear it. Maybe,’ she added as a sop to my anger, ‘we could find some way to help you get training at night school, perhaps in shorthand and typing at the Adelaide School of Mines. Office work is nice for a girl. We wouldn’t want you to end up in a factory, working on a conveyor belt.’
Harry fell into the habit of visiting us on Sunday afternoons. At first he had come with Winnie but then he began to drop in on his own to chat with my father, charm my mother and beg an invitation to play our piano. He confided to me childhood memories of Winnie and often mentioned Nathan, who still lectured the foundry workers. I got the impression that Winnie had convinced him Nathan and I were friends and that my denials were some sort of maidenly reticence.
I was irritated and disabused him sharply. He looked so hurt that I hastily reassured him that, although I didn’t care for Nathan personally, I was interested in his ideas. This pleased Harry and he began to talk enthusiastically about communism. Occasionally I caught my mother glance from his eager face to mine and she would smile indulgently as if she had some secret knowledge.
Some weeks later Harry came on board for his usual Sunday afternoon tea,. He was still full of his usual enthusiasm and mad keen for me to accompany him to a Communist Party meeting.
‘I don’t know, Harry,’ my mother demurred.
Challenged by her doubtfulness over a political matter, my father instantly asserted that I should go, that it would be educational for me.
My mother continued to object. It wasn’t that she was directly influenced by the anti-Bolshevik sentiment around us but indirectly it made her suspicious and careful. Besides, she hated being pushed by my father.
Harry wheedled, ‘I’ll look after her, Mrs L. You know that with me she’s in the greatest care. I’ll be like a father to her.’
This preposterous statement and Harry’s mock solemnity made her laugh and once she laughed at Harry she was defeated. My father, aware that Harry’s persuasive tricks were better than his, kept quiet.
The meeting hall we entered was cold and characterless. It was a space and nothing more. It had been a mild day but the evening closed in with a sharp wind off the sea and the dank smell of impending rain. Our footsteps on the bare wooden floor echoed eerily and chairs pulled back screeched a protest. We were the first there and found ourselves tiptoeing to seats in the middle of the room. ‘Let’s go up front,’ Harry said, but I shook my head. I could see Nathan seated at a table at the front of the hall and after the incident in the gardens I had determined to keep my distance. He shuffled through a heap of papers, diligently taking notes, only occasionally looking up to comment to a man who leaned over his shoulder. The other man was Jock from Glasgow. There was no mistaking his squat pugilistic stance. There was no sign of Bernie-Benito.
‘How many come?’ I whispered to Harry. It seemed irreverent to speak out loud.
‘I don’t know. This is the first time I’ve been. Nathan invited me. He asked me to bring you along. He said he knew you, that you’d met at The Chew It and Spew It.’
‘Yes,’ I said, non-committal.
‘Then you do know him?’
‘Sort of.’
I wouldn’t be dragged into any relationship with Nathan. He was more unpredictable than Harry, and that was saying a lot.
‘He admires you. He says you’re a true proletarian.’ Harry was not to be put off. ‘Come on, Jude, tell me what’s between you two.’
‘Mind your own business, Harry. There’s nothing between us.’ I was annoyed.
‘Wow,’ he said, putting up his hands in mock self-protection. ‘Sorry. Didn’t know you felt like that. Tell Uncle Harry all about it.’
‘Shut up, Harry. Don’t try to wheedle me as you do my mother. I’m up to your tricks.’
He put a careless arm about me and gave me a squeeze. ‘OK, Miss Larsen, I’ll be good.’
More people had drifted in, about three dozen in all. They looked ordinary, cleanly but poorly dressed, tired and subdued. Winnie would have called them earnest but I felt they were there to fulfil a duty. Bernie-Benito was amongst them. With his loose frame and ungainly gait he looked like a benign rag doll. He drooped into a chair in the front row and, like one who speaks English as a foreign language and feels the need to shout, yelled, ‘Good evening, comrades.’
Jock replied cheerfully, ‘Shut up, you little fascist bastard. Can’t you see we’re working?’
Bernie-Benito doffed his cap, grinned and lolled back in his chair, rocking it precariously on two back legs. ‘Avanti popolo,’ he hummed under his breath.
I felt that Bernie-Benito would carry a knife and smile charmingly while he used it.
There were no women present, except myself, so when two other women entered I took particular notice of them. Harry with over-done gallantry jumped up to welcome them. His greeting interrupted their conversation and their glance of dismissal was a hurtful rebuff. He returned flushed and embarrassed. ‘I suppose it’s our first night here and I shouldn’t have intruded.’ I looked at him with pity and he blushed again.
‘You should recognise when people are downright rude to you, Harry.’ I was going to add, not everyone will like you, and thought better of it. After all, I knew what it was to be mortified.
I studied the two women. They were dressed in sombre clothes: black skirts and coats, with matching cloche hats. One wore a fake fur tippet about her neck.
Thin sandy hair escaped in wisps from under their hats and their complexions were colourless, unaided by rouge or lipstick. They looked like a pair of unpleasantly self-sacrificing acolytes.
‘I’d say, Harry, they lacked moderation and probably lead a thoroughly unhappy life. I hope all the comrades are not like that.’
Harry did not appreciate my reference to Aristotle and now, recovered from his moment of embarrassment, was looking about him with bright expectant eyes. My eyes followed the two women as they walked to the table. Nathan jumped up and kissed each on the cheek.
‘They must be family,’ I commented to Harry. ‘Is he married?’
‘No. Sisters, I think. He said they were coming to support him.’
I giggled. ‘Revolution’s a family affair, then?’
‘Shush, Judith.’
‘Shush yourself, Harry.’ He grinned at me. ‘Stuck up bitches,’ I said.
He sucked his breath on a laugh and squeezed my hand.
We had expected to be part of the evening but now felt like aliens. Harry was clearly disappointed. I supposed Nathan’s interest in him made him believe he was special and would be included. I was peeved because, although I did not want to be claimed by Nathan, neither did I want to be ignored. So, naturally, I was prepared to be antagonistic to whatever followed.
I can’t say I was pleasantly surprised by Nathan’s speech but I found myself becoming interested in what he had to say. After his botched address at the gardens I had expected the worst but here there was no need for him to be an inspirational orator.
He began quietly and with conviction. Much of what he said confused me. My knowledge of history and political theory was limited. I felt I had acquired some education in untidy snatches. I was rather like a cloth on which a number of patches of different colours and shapes had been sewn to fill in holes. But no patch matched or related to another. There was no overall design. I recognised that Nathan had a pattern of thinking; a set of ideas that fitted together and this was orderly and pleasing.