by Wendy Scarfe
I settled myself more comfortably in my chair. To both fore and aft of the hulk a row of tugboats and steamers nose-to-stern groaned and sighed against their moorings. In the gentle swell they sidled against their ropes and rubbed against each other, creaking. An occasional gasp of black smoke from a steamer funnel ballooned into the air and dispersed with a filmy greyness. Early sunlight glittered on the warehouse walls but sent long shadows across the wharf.
On our banana boat—I smiled as I remembered Harry and the dead marines—three cormorants sat upright, immobile as pieces of charred wood. Two silver gulls swooped and squarked in a dog fight above me. They settled themselves on the deck, but apparently too close for comfort one lowered himself aggressively, jutted his beak and darted wrathfully at the other. His unwanted companion took off with a rebellious squawk, circled low over the hulk and then returned to a safer perch further along the deck. The first aggressor resumed a jaunty pose, strutted and muttered his winner’s satisfaction and then fell into a quiet dream, resting on one leg. What it had all been about, goodness knows.
I returned to my cabin, collected my drawing pad and pencils and sat again to happily occupy myself drawing the scenes around me. The next hour I spent working and my worries fell away. What a joy my life would be if I could do this every day, even perhaps make some money out of it to justify enjoying myself.
At last I put on my work clothes and wandered along the wharf peering at some of the unfamiliar names of the trading ships. The Milora was being loaded with wheat but the usually busy wharf was ominously quiet. I crossed the Port Road into Lipson Street and passed ‘Poverty Corner’, but there was no one there. I went on by a couple of the hotels.
Men standing outside talked loudly in groups. They gesticulated angrily. I caught the word ‘Beeby’ and someone spat disgustedly. Someone added, ‘Justice Beeby’ to a ribald round of contemptuous comments. ‘Justice? What a fuckin’ joke that is. And he’s a Labor man, mates. So he tells us. On the side of the workers. My fat arse.’
They did not see me as I strolled, taking the long way round to my job. Their anger lay like a scar on my previous enjoyment of the bright morning. At the Labour Exchange I saw more men, hundreds of them, patiently queuing.
My boss greeted me with effusive pleasure. The experiences of my walk had chastened me. We were all in this together. I made no excuses for my lateness but immediately got to work to help him with preparations for lunch. He fussed anxiously over how much we should prepare. He didn’t suppose that he’d have a lot of customers. He didn’t want to waste food but on the other hand he didn’t want to run out. I did what he instructed me to do and didn’t give him any lip.
Lunchtime was very quiet. There wouldn’t have been a dozen customers, far quieter than my boss had expected.
‘Perhaps tomorrow,’ he said, ‘tomorrow things will have settled down. They’re angry today. Tomorrow they’ll be calmer.’
I didn’t have the heart to tell him that it was not a matter of calmness but of money. Besides, when he stopped deceiving himself, he would know this.
Nathan’s arrival startled me. I hadn’t seen him for weeks. He had never come for free meals. He looked neat, his shabby clothes clean and pressed, his hair cut, his chin shaved. His shoes had been shined but I had no way of knowing whether he, too, put cardboard in their thinning soles. Clearly Miss Abigail and Miss Adelaide were devoted to his appearance.
When I had asked Harry about his whereabouts he said that Nathan and Jock were busy organising a local branch of the Communist Party. Soon it would be a real political party with membership books and membership fees. He expected that he would join.
‘Will there be many others?’ I had asked.
‘About thirty, I think.’ Harry’s casual response failed to conceal his excited anticipation.
I was sceptical. ‘I suppose it will grow.’
‘Certainly. Look about you, Judith. It’s bound to grow.’
But I knew the waterside workers my father worked alongside. They scoffed at the Bolshies. A lot of hot air was the usual derisive and dismissive comment. All talk. Intellectuals they call themselves. Like to see them down here lumping a hundred and eighty pound bag of wheat or coal. And they want to tell us what our lives are all about.
Now I said cheerfully, ‘Hello, Nathan. Should I get you a bun and a cup of tea?’ I grinned at him, recalling his earlier visits to the Chew It.
He had arrived in a hurry, hotfoot with impatience, but now, as he met me, he hesitated, awkward and diffident. Something was afoot and I waited expectantly. From experience I knew that nothing stirred Nathan except some political event so shortly, when he relaxed, I would hear the momentous news. Behind his thick spectacles his eyes shone and he clutched a newspaper in nervous hands. Had some disaster occurred?
Frightened, I looked from the newspaper to his face and back again to the newspaper. Whatever I didn’t want to read about was there in it. I took a deep breath. ‘You’d better tell me, Nathan.’ I tried a little joke. ‘The Bank of England’s gone bust? Australia’s bankrupt? The army has taken over the government? Tell me if there’s anything worse than that.’
He flushed. ‘No, of course not. Not bad news at all. In fact …’ he thrust the paper at me, ‘see for yourself.’
I took it gingerly. Sometimes news can bite; sometimes I didn’t want to read it. I looked down at the open page and through a miasma of anxiety saw my cartoon of Harry in Victoria Square looking back at me.
It was a copy of the Barrier Daily Truth Nathan had brought me. They had published my cartoon on the second page alongside an article headed POLICE BASH UNEMPLOYED. Stunned I reached for a chair and sat down. I seemed unable to shift my eyes from it. It was mine but publicly displayed. I felt it was the work of a stranger.
‘It’s good, Judith.’ Nathan had at last relaxed onto a chair beside me. ‘I didn’t know you could do this sort of thing. On the way here I passed Harry at the Labour Exchange and showed it to him. He said you had always done drawings and had a lot of them.’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘What’s Harry doing at the Labour Exchange?’
‘The foundry has reduced his hours. He only gets work now for one week in two. It’s only a matter of time.’
‘Did he say anything about my cartoon?’
Nathan hesitated and looked embarrassed. I knew that Harry had said nothing. Now I was irritated that Nathan had shown my work to Harry pre-empting my triumph. I was also hurt that Nathan, not Harry, had told me about his job worries. Recently I had felt that the sad afternoon tea had erected a barrier between us. He didn’t want our pity. He felt humiliated by it. The bright face he showed us was at times a mask to hide his misery and discontent. Now presumably he couldn’t bear having to tell me that he might be jobless.
I sighed to myself. We’d all be jobless soon. We couldn’t afford the niceties of hurt pride that Harry had learned from his mother. Maybe he needed the Communist Party to give him an outlet.
Nathan interrupted my thoughts. He was saying earnestly, ‘I work on the Despatch you know, Judith. I’m their chief compositor. They should take some of your work.’
‘The Despatch? Not likely, Nathan. With your political views I don’t know how you can work for them; why they employ you.’
The Despatch was an imposing Gothic blue-stone building in Lipson Street and I was always cynically amused to read the Latin insignia over the entrance. Inscribed in a semi-circle from which radiated fake sunrays was the masthead inscription Tantum eruditi sunt liberi. I knew that this meant ‘only the educated are free’. Joe Pulham had told me it came from the Greek philosopher Epictetus. I regularly jibed at Nathan that it peddled propaganda, not education.
‘Why do you put up with its hypocrisy?’ I asked.
He shrugged. ‘Why do they employ me? Best man for the job. They put up with my politics and I put up with theirs. I guess that’s how a good society should be run.’ He tapped my cartoon. ‘Not like this, with police bashing people fo
r their opinions. When you do some more cartoons let me have them and I’ll use my influence. Generally newspapers like controversial cartoons. They help sales. Look at Will Dyson. Even Punch took his cartoons.’
I thanked him. I couldn’t make him out. While talking about his work he was assertive and confident. A few minutes earlier he had looked as if his body, and there wasn’t much of it, was some sort of heavy encumbrance he didn’t know where to put down.
When he had gone I still sat marvelling at my cartoon, now actually printed in a newspaper. Eventually I returned to the kitchen. No matter how jubilant I felt, the dishes would have to be washed and dried.
‘That your Bolshie friend?’ my boss asked.
‘Yes, I suppose.’
‘He was in here some years back.’
‘Yes.’
‘Been seeing a lot of him?’
‘Some.’
‘He’s got tickets on you, has he?’
‘No, of course not.’ His interrogation irritated me.
He sniggered. ‘No, of course not,’ he mimicked me. ‘I’d know that panting eager look anywhere.’
‘It’s not like that.’ I was annoyed. ‘He brought me this.’ And on an impulse I showed him my cartoon.
‘Jesus,’ he said, ‘you have got hidden talents. Who’d have thought? You could knock me down with a feather. A second Will Dyson.’
I showed my surprise. His knowledge was unexpected.
‘Think I’m an ignorant bastard, just because I run the Chew It? And I know you all call it the Chew It and Spew It. Doesn’t worry me. Not stupid, Judith. Just uneducated. But I know a thing or two you mightn’t for all that. Don’t know how much longer we’ll be able to stay open. Got any other prospects?’
I shook my head and clutched the newspaper.
He grimaced. ‘You hang on to it. You may have a future there.’
Part 2
Waterside Warfare
IN THE END it wasn’t a difficult decision to make. Shortly I would be unemployed. There were no work prospects for me. Clearly I had some talent and it was sensible to develop it.
I had not apologised to my father for my harsh abuse and he hadn’t indicated in any way that he blamed me for it. But he was more affectionate and considerate with my mother and she was tenderer with him. He gave me his blessing and a rare kiss.
I dressed in my one good dress, a chemise that came below my knees. It was factory made. Waistless, it looked like a nightie but it was the fashion. Amongst other women I might look unattractive but not odd.
I took the train into the city and made my way along North Terrace to the imposing three-storey Exhibition Building with its ivy-clad walls and square turreted tower. It was the School of Design and Painting. I searched nervously for the entrance. My appointment with the principal was at two o’clock and in my anxiety I had arrived half an hour early. I found the office, was shown a hard-backed wooden chair, and instructed to wait.
The entrance hall was high ceilinged, painted an off-white colour, cavernous and smelt cold. I was used to the luminosity of light on the hulk. There were paintings on the walls but they looked rather old and faded.
At two o’clock a door to my right opened and a middle-aged woman, in a dress to her ankles, bustled out. She wore spectacles on the end of her nose and peered over them at me. ‘Miss Larsen?’ she questioned in a deep musical voice.
I nodded and got up.
‘Then come in, my dear. So sorry to have kept you waiting. Have you eaten?’
I nodded again.
‘Of course you haven’t. You’ve come from the Port, haven’t you? My assent didn’t seem necessary.
‘Ella,’ she called over her shoulder to the young woman typing in the office, ‘Ella, please make us a cup of tea and some biscuits would be nice.’
She urged me ahead of her into her room. Unlike the corridor it was bright from light flowing through the window that overlooked North Terrace. It was an untidy attractive room. Papers lay higgledy-piggledy on a large desk; on the walls were pinned dozens of unframed drawings and small bright jewels of paintings. She drew forward a chair so that I sat opposite her at the desk. Carelessly she shoved the papers to one side. A few fell on the floor. Instinctively I bent to retrieve them for her.
‘Leave them,’ she said. ‘Not important. I’ll pick them up later. We are all at sixes and sevens at the minute because Miss Armitage has retired.’
I looked blank.
‘Miss Letitia Armitage. She has been our painting mistress for twenty-six years, an inspiration to us all, particularly the students. We have just held a farewell function for her and must now get down to the very difficult task of running the place without her.’ She looked quizzically at me over her glasses. Her eyes were large, a little protuberant but exceptionally kind.
‘They say no one is indispensable, but as we try to sort out who will follow her, and that’s a daunting task, I wonder.’
The tea arrived and a plate of biscuits. She poured me a cup and handed me the biscuits. ‘Things are bad at the Port?’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Very bad.’
‘Have you work?’
‘No. I had work but the cafe is closing.’
‘So much closed,’ she said, shaking her head. ‘So much. Some of our students arrive looking so pale and washed out that we have to ask if they have eaten. Please help yourself to the biscuits.’
I wondered if I, too, looked pale and washed out.
‘So you want to enrol here, Miss Larsen?’
I nodded and she looked amused.
‘You can speak to me, Miss Larsen.’
I blushed and she laughed. ‘This is not an interrogation. I have here some of your work.’
‘Yes. You requested it with my application.’
‘It shows a lot of promise, Miss Larsen, but it is of a particular style. What is it you want to achieve here?’
‘I want to be a political cartoonist.’
She raised her eyebrows.
‘Like Goya and Will Dyson,’ I said.
‘Goya,’ she said sharply, ‘was a lot more than a political cartoonist and Dyson, our home grown genius he may be, and champion of the down-trodden, but he has always had to struggle with his draughtsmanship, the outcome I would think of having no formal art training.
‘Some critics have accused him of not being a natural draughtsman.’ She grimaced. ‘Who is? These things have to be learned. It’s only sloppy to assume that natural will do. It rarely does. The great artists base their work on solid learned principles and that is what we teach here.’
I was humbled by the certainty with which she spoke of my two heroes. ‘Then, can you teach me?’
‘No.’ She smiled kindly at me. ‘I can’t. My forte is china painting and I’m quite certain that won’t interest you.’
I said nothing, for to agree with her would sound rude and to falsely praise china painting would appear to be currying favour. I think she understood my silence.
‘Most of our classes are combination lessons in drawing and painting and you’ll benefit from broadening your skills.
‘You’ll notice that most of our teachers are women. We’re very proud of that. And,’ she added, assessing my plain factory-made clothes, ‘we don’t just cater for rich bored young ladies who like to dabble. You’ll find most of our students are as dedicated and hard working as our teachers.’
Once again she thumbed through my work, then looked at me thoughtfully. ‘I think Miss Taylor will suit you. Her name is Stella Mary Taylor but she likes to be called Marie and if you manage to give it a French intonation she’ll be tickled pink. She spent several years in Paris before the war and has exhibited at the Salon de la Societe des Artistes Francais. In her life classes she insists on nude models. You won’t mind that will you?’
I shook my head.
‘She’s a very skilled and dedicated artist. She has kept herself alive for years working in a flower shop. She has imbibed a revolutionary bent, presuma
bly from her French experiences. I think you’ll do well together. Her father is a wealthy grazier but she likes her independence. I fear that her work in the florist’s may finish soon. People can’t afford flowers in a depression. However,’ she sighed a little sadly and then smiled at me, ‘flowers will still grow despite what we humans do to each other and whether we are able to sell or buy them doesn’t matter to them. They will always be there to delight us and that’s a great comfort, Miss Larsen.’
My classes were only on a Tuesday and Thursday so when I was not there I helped my mother in the soup kitchen. I grew used to the queues of women and children and some men waiting quietly both in and outside the Salvation Army hall.
Mrs Danley and I would fill the boilers with hot soup from iron cauldrons bubbling on the antique wood-burning stove in the Salvos’ kitchen. We would carry them panting into the hall. Then we would struggle to lift them onto the tables. We had found that if we put them on the floor the constant bending to fill the ladles and then the receptacles hurt our backs. So did the lifting, so we were between Scylla and Charybdis. The boilers had handles but the heat and weight made our task arduous. Because I was young and Mrs Danley was a massive muscular woman the task was allotted to us. Until Herbie arrived.
Herbie had started to come every day for his meagre midday meal of soup and bread. He was a beanpole of a man with thin greying hair that hung over his frayed collar and baggy pants held up by a length of string. His age was indeterminate but I had noticed that with many of the unemployed men it was difficult to judge how old they might be. It was as if poverty had interrupted the normal timeline of their lives. He might have been thirty or he might have been fifty.
He watched Mrs Danley and I struggle with the boiler. ‘Too heavy for you, missus,’ he said, ‘and for you, girlie.
‘Hey, Perce,’ he yelled down the queue, ‘give us a hand here. Need some help for the ladies.’
Perce lumbered out. He was a good-natured but slow-witted hunk of a man with arms like legs of mutton. Herbie and Perce took over the job of lifting the boilers. As they heaved them onto the tables three cheers often went up from the waiting queue and there was the occasional ‘Good on yer, mates’. Perce flushed with pleasure at this praise and Herbie looked satisfied.