by Wendy Scarfe
He began with references to the Russian Revolution, which happened when I was eight, and although interesting they were beyond my comprehension. I vaguely recalled excited conversations in our galley but at that time I was more interested in the swimmer searching for a crust of soggy bread. I didn’t know that Russian soldiers on the battlefront had deserted, nor that Russian peasants burned manor houses and took over the great landed estates. The only farmers I knew were the people who lived at fly-blown Piggery Park and tried to make a living rearing and selling pigs. My mother and I had gone there once to take some clothes for the children of a chronically ill man. The mother, an exhausted, harassed woman, had offered us tea, scooping a handful of flies off the milk before she poured it into our cups. My mother had said hastily that she only drank black tea and I only drank water.
Nathan said that the Russian Revolution had made capitalist society afraid of Bolshevism. He spoke of Kerensky, Lenin, Mensheviks, Petrograd and Trotsky. I didn’t know who they were. He asserted that Russian bosses would have preferred the German invasion to a workers’ revolution in Russia and that speculators had been allowed to commandeer food so that workers were starved into submission. The Russian Revolution was the end of capitalism that for too long had rolled like a juggernaut over working people destroying them, their wives and their children. History was the history of class war. The economic structure of society determined all else. Until people controlled the means of production they would never be free. The working class and the employing class had nothing in common.
That’s right, I thought resentfully. I’ve got nothing in common with my boss. When he owes me money for overtime he wriggles out of paying it and although I’m employed as a waitress I’m also a skivvy. But, on the other hand, I reflected, the rest of the working class doesn’t help me, nor does my unionist father.
My thoughts returned to Nathan. He peered at his notes, holding them close to his face. I remembered the moment he looked at me in the Chew It cafe, his eyes magnified and swimming myopically behind those dreadful glasses. Perhaps that was why he never looked at his audience. He couldn’t see us. Poor Nathan.
He found his place. World revolution was coming, he said. It was inevitable. The capitalists’ war, created through their greed for colonies to enslave poor workers in poor countries, had sown the seeds of their own destruction. It had torn apart the fabric of society and allowed people to see for themselves the evils of capitalism. There had been people’s revolts in other countries besides Russia. In Germany itself the Communist Party was growing and no wonder. The Treaty of Versailles had subjected the German worker to penury and starvation.
He spoke for over an hour. Occasionally he reached for one of the reference books heaped on the table and searched laboriously for a quotation. He was learned. But, heavens! How tediously ponderous. Most of his audience had worked a long day and I heard an occasional snore broken by a hiccup as the sleeper jerked awake. His sisters seemed oblivious of the time and the hard seats. They sat upright and nodded frequently. But as the evening drew on his speech seemed interminable. My concentration started to fail me and his words merged into a haze. I shifted restlessly. Harry, always more impatient than I was, crossed and uncrossed his legs, clasped and unclasped his hands, rubbed his thighs, played a tune on his knee with his fingers, hummed a little under his breath, and tapped in time with his toe. I poked him and he stopped. He was bored and finally so was I. Clearly Nathan didn’t know when to stop.
My thoughts wandered to Joe. I had once asked him if he believed in revolution. I had picked up a few points from Marx’s Capital. He had looked startled. ‘Do I believe in revolution, Nearly-Twelve? Wherever do you get these huge questions from?’
‘Books, Joe.’
‘Of course, where else do we get our ideas from? How silly of me to ask. Do I believe in revolution? I don’t really know. Change, certainly. But revolution? I’m too old for violence, Nearly-Twelve. After the war there doesn’t seem to be much point in it and then there’s history. I suppose at my age I take the long view. Instant results are a dream.’
‘So you don’t believe in revolution, Joe? And you think Marx ought to have taken the long view?’
‘I didn’t say that, Nearly-Twelve. Marx had some very sound ideas, better than a lot around now, but it’s best to pick and choose from what someone says or writes, not swallow it whole. I wish I knew. It’s hard to accept in old age how little one really knows and just as I think I may have got a grip on things something unexpected comes along. There’s a new book out, Nearly-Twelve. Mein Kampf. It’s in German so I can’t read it but some have and apparently it’s a thoroughly nasty book, written by a thoroughly nasty bloke—Adolph Hitler I think his name is. The world will be in a pretty pickle if he gets power.’
He coughed. ‘I’m reminded of Matthew Arnold’s poem that we’re on a darkling plain with ignorant armies that clash by night. Sometimes writers are prophetic. It would be bad to come out of one goddamn awful war and be dragged into the next because Europeans can’t get along with each other. Them and their goddamn rivalries. Most of us came here to escape their mistakes and just brought them with us, leaving us still on a darkling plain and with plenty of ignorant armies.’
Joe always talked to me as if I was another adult and although my comprehension was limited I still felt my mind stretch and reach out to his ideas. They were wider, more expansive than my father’s and far less limited than my practical mother’s.
Finally Nathan’s speech was over. The audience gave three relieved cheers and Jock from Glasgow took over. By contrast he was belligerent and fiery. He wasn’t interested in history. As he spoke the audience, aware of his passion, came alive. It was a clarion call. Those who had lolled in their chairs listening to Nathan straightened up. There was an atmosphere of preparation and readiness. Jock raised his fist and shook it. ‘Comrades,’ his Scottish burr lengthened the word so that it rolled off his tongue and rumbled around the hall, ‘comrades, the workers of Australia are under siege and we must ready ourselves to fight. To fight, comrades.’ He punched the air. Voices from the audience cried, ‘Yes, hear, hear.’
This is what they’ve waited for, I thought, not Nathan but a man to lead them.
‘Direct action to fight the capitalist bosses is what we need, comrades, direct action to defeat the Crimes Act, direct action to fight for the right to free speech. We will fight the tyrannies of the master class, and you, comrades, will be in the vanguard of the action.’
While the loud chorus of ‘hear, hear’ strengthened I saw Bernie-Benito flick his fingers across his throat in a gesture of slitting it. I hoped it was merely bravado. Now Jock lowered his voice, as if in reverence, and his audience leaned forward, silent, listening.
‘The twelve IWWs, the twelve Industrial Workers of the World, your persecuted brothers, comrades, railroaded into jail on lies and corruption. They have a right to speak. They should be heard, not silenced by that viper, Prime Minister Bruce. Donald Grant, my fellow Scotsman, knows what poverty is. You, comrades, know what poverty is. Donald Grant, because he’s an IWW is prevented from telling you, the working man, what comes to the poor in any capitalist country. In the British Isles, he says, “If Christ came back to earth he would weep to see how women and children lived.” I’ve been there, comrades, and know it’s true. Lived? Comrades, lived isn’t the word. Barely existed would be closer. Barely existed. Shall we, too, barely exist? Our babes starve while the likes of Bruce drag down our wages and prevent us from trumpeting our protests?’
He paused. ‘Bloody Bruce!’ someone in the audience snarled. Around him sounded rumbles of agreement.
‘That’s right, comrades,’ Jock applauded. ‘The Crimes Bill strikes at the heart of democracy and strikes at your right to shout out against injustice. Oppose it, comrades. They tell us it is against atheistic communism but, comrades, it’s against anyone who protests, anyone who believes they have some rights to the sort of life the bosses lead. They’ll
fine us and jail us, comrades, that’s their Christianity. Now is the time to rise up and throw off your oppression.’ He raised both hands in the air and shook them as if casting off the weight of shackles.
The audience cheered and leaped to their feet. He sat down, smiling grimly. The audience, a little deflated after their surge of defiance, also shuffled back into their seats. It had been truly rousing stuff but I had years of defences built up against my father’s haranguing and instead of being swept away by the public emotion I felt oddly aloof. Nathan called the meeting to order and asked for those who volunteered to help organise Free Speech rallies to meet him afterwards.
To end the meeting we all rose and the sisters led everyone in singing a song I had heard before at the Working Men’s Club. It began with Arise ye workers from your slumbers, arise ye prisoners of want, and a chorus: Then comrades come rally and the last fight let us face, the Internationale unites the human race. Beside me Harry grimaced and fidgeted. ‘They’re singing flat,’ he whispered in my ear. ‘They need somebody to set the note.’ He endured it to the end, sighing heavily.
Nathan had seen me and clearly intended to speak to me before we left but I was swift in dragging Harry to the door. A quick look back and I saw Nathan surrounded by admirers. Harry had forgotten his boredom at Nathan’s speech. ‘Isn’t he marvellous?’ he said. ‘They call him “The Professor”. He knows everything about history. He’s a back-room boy.’
‘What on earth does that mean, Harry?’
‘He educates people but doesn’t do any of the action stuff like Jock.’
‘That must be comfortable.’ I was cynical. ‘Maybe he’s no good at the action stuff.’ And I remembered his botched speech in the gardens. Jock was certainly superior as a crowd rouser.
But Harry wasn’t listening to me. With dreamy eyes he recalled that Nathan had told him that in the Soviet Union he could be a musician or a dancer and the state would pay for him to have tap-dancing lessons and support him while he was learning. ‘Nathan,’ he said, ‘maintains that in the Soviet Union society is run from each according to his ability, to each according to their needs. Isn’t that a grand idea, Judith?’
Caught up by his enthusiasm, I said, ‘I could be paid to draw and not have to work at the Chew It and Spew It.’
He was a little hesitant at that. ‘To draw? I don’t know about that.’
‘Yes, Harry, to draw.’
‘Well, if that’s your ability, I suppose it would be all right.’
Remembering Joe’s advice to me, I retorted, ‘Yes, that’s my ability. You haven’t seen any of my drawings and they’re not there for some pie-in-the-sky state to make judgement.’
He was contrite. ‘I didn’t mean that, Judith. Truly I didn’t mean that.’
‘No,’ I was surly, not quite forgiving. ‘I haven’t shown them to many people, only Joe at the Club.’ I wanted to say that Joe had remarked they were very good but I was suddenly shy. ‘Dear Joe,’ I said sadly. ‘He was my friend for many years. Will you come to the cemetery with me, Harry? I’d like to put flowers on his grave.’
He looked solemn, nodded and took my arm.
We were alone in the cemetery. Warm spring days had brought out the wild freesias. Their sweet scent followed us as we searched for Joe’s grave and eventually found it. There was no headstone, only a small wooden cross, painted white, with ‘RIP Joe Pulham’ in black. I laid a small bunch of flowers on the raised earth of the grave.
‘Didn’t he have any family?’ I asked Harry.
‘I don’t know, Judith. I never knew him. Was he English by birth?’
‘I don’t know.’ Suddenly it seemed a fault in me that I had never known anything about Joe’s private life. ‘He was a compositor on the Argus and later worked on some socialist paper, I think. He was leaded, Harry.’
‘Poor bloke. Lead’s a terrible poison.’
‘Yes, he told me that industry is a grand killer. Whenever I read the newspaper I think of him. I don’t know why it is that when we benefit from something new in society it always seems to have been bought with someone else’s sufferings. Look at your job now, Harry.’
He was subdued. ‘You know, Judith, I’d like to learn to tap dance.’ He laughed self-consciously. ‘I don’t suppose there’s any money in that, unless, of course, I become some great Hollywood movie star.’
He did a few dance steps on the path. I felt sad but laughed with him. Joe would not have minded his dancing.
Some weeks later a parcel arrived for me, and a letter bearing the name of a legal firm. Inside the parcel were three books: an anthology of poems and two novels by Charles Dickens—Great Expectations and The Old Curiosity Shop. They were inscribed ‘To my dear friend Nearly-Twelve with whom I had wonderful discussions about books and life. May your future be bright and your talents recognised. Best regards, Joe Pulham’. In the envelope was a brief letter from the lawyer saying Joe had left the contents of his flat to be sold and the proceeds given to me. They were forwarding the money and would I please send a return letter of acknowledgement.
Shocked and overwhelmed with sadness for a lonely man who had only me to whom to leave his meagre bequest, I sat down, clutched the books against my body as if they had some human warmth and wept. Memories of Joe merged with my visit to the cemetery and the lonely white cross and for some reason I also recalled Harry, his hair bright in the sunlight, his body young and flexible, dancing on the path, and what had made me laugh briefly now made me weep bitterly for futile dreams.
My mother found me sobbing and put her arms about me. I showed her the cheque. ‘You and father should have it,’ I hiccuped. ‘You never have much.’
‘Rubbish,’ she said briskly. ‘It’s yours. You keep it for the future. Maybe that night class at the School of Mines or perhaps some proper drawing paper and good pencils.’ I was surprised. ‘I thought about your drawings,’ she said, ‘afterwards. You should do more of them. Maybe it’s your talent.’
I hugged her.
That summer was a scorcher. We took our mattresses onto the deck and slept under canvas awnings set up by my father. When we were docked he pulled up the gangplank; when we were anchored in the Outer Harbor he considered us safe. Winnie now visited with Harry on most Sundays. We drooped in deck chairs, hoping for a cool breeze off the sea. Towards evening it usually came but there was never much strength in it.
Harry looked longingly at the water. ‘A dip would be nice.’
‘There’s been a shark seen in the area,’ my father warned.
Winnie squealed. ‘A shark! Good heavens! Are we safe?’
Harry was impatient. ‘Don’t be an idiot, Winnie.’
She pouted. ‘Oh, you, Harry.’
Winnie’s life was so comfortable that she needed to assert her sensitivities. I thought, if Winnie ever has a personal problem she’ll make it her life’s work.
Curiously the mention of the shark pricked Harry’s interest. He got up, wandered over to the railings, and looked into the water. ‘What are all those bottles doing floating about?’
‘Empty beer bottles,’ my father said. ‘They’re a damn nuisance.’
My mother was half asleep. ‘Anyone who collects them will make a bit of pocket money.’
‘Ah,’ Harry said, and I recognised the birth of one of his adventurous ideas.
‘No, Harry,’ I said automatically.
He grinned at me. Winnie looked from one to the other of us. ‘What does she mean, no, Harry? What have you got in mind now?’
‘We could take the little boat out and collect them.’ He was eager. ‘I could do with a little extra cash. My dancing pumps have holes in them.’
‘Our banana boat,’ I laughed.
‘Why do you call it that?’ Winnie asked.
‘We don’t really know,’ my mother said sleepily.
‘Yes, we do,’ my father asserted. ‘I’ve been to the West Indies and it reminds me of the boats that carry bananas there.’
‘Well,
’ Harry said, ‘now it could carry empty beer bottles.’
‘Dead marines,’ I corrected.
‘Dead marines?’ He was puzzled.
‘Yes,’ I grinned, ‘our banana boat and dead marines and I’ll bet my father doesn’t know why they’re called that.’
He grunted.
‘What about it, Mr Larsen?’ Harry pleaded.
‘No, Harry,’ my mother said, ‘don’t be tiresome. You can’t manage to row and collect bottles on your own.’
‘Judith could come with me, or Winnie.’ He threw her a wicked look.
On cue she squealed again. ‘No, Harry, there’s a shark out there.’
‘Oh, for heaven’s sake,’ now I was impatient, ‘a shark won’t hurt us in a boat. Besides, it’s days since it was seen and it’s probably gone out to sea.’
‘You’re very tiresome, Judith, and you, too, Harry,’ my mother repeated. ‘Both of you always so restless.’
‘Oh, let them try it,’ my father said. ’Judith is often in the boat anyway and it will fill in their afternoon.’
I changed into more suitable clothes, leaving Winnie bleating that we were leaving her out and it would serve us right if a shark ate us. Harry said, ‘Shut up, Winnie.’ We scrambled down the Jacob’s ladder and untied the small rowing boat.
‘Let me row,’ I advised. ‘I’ve been doing it for years.’
‘No, Harry asserted. ‘I’m just as good at it.’ I sighed. He was always so over-confident. He rowed towards a flotilla of bobbing bottles. ‘You lean over, Judith, and collect them while I ship the oars and keep things steady.’
I leaned out as far as I could but the bottles remained out of my reach. ‘You’ll have to row a little closer, Harry.’ He tried but the bottles kept bobbing away from our pursuit.
‘The rowing creates a wash that pushes them away,’ I complained.