Hunger Town

by Wendy Scarfe

  They were not mollified by her attempt to smooth over Mrs Danley’s directness and they fought a rearguard action. ‘If we don’t have the right principles, the right political ideas, if we don’t educate the workers about their plight, we cannot arouse them from their slumbers. It is the long-term goals we must bear in mind. These are just preliminary events that we must see as leading to a new socialist state.’

  Mrs Danley was now thoroughly impatient. ‘They know what their plight is. They don’t need you to tell them.’ The meeting threatened to descend into angry words and reprisals. Heavens, I thought, we all want the same thing and we can’t even get along here.

  Mrs Danley won the day by force of personality and despite the glowering disappointment of Nathan’s sisters she organised us into ways of getting the women of the Port to the meeting in the Federation Hall. My mother walked the sisters to the gangplank, aware of their humiliation, but they ignored her soothing conciliatory comments and stalked off stiff-backed.

  After they had gone Mrs Danley moved into the galley where I was making cups of tea. Mrs Thornhill who was more or less Mrs Danley’s second in charge had said nothing throughout the afternoon. She thanked me for the cup of tea and smiled. Mrs Danley plonked herself down at the table, her thighs spreading over the edges of a wooden chair, and wriggled herself comfortably into position.

  ‘Well, Eve, Judith, Ailsa, what did you make of those two ninnies? A sillier more impractical pair I’ve yet to listen to. Where did they get those highfalutin, outlandish ideas from?’

  ‘They’re communists,’ I said.

  She gave me a pained smile. ‘Is that what they are? Well, if that’s communism and they are communists, I don’t much like their chances. Why did you invite them, Eve?’

  My mother picked up her cup of tea and put her hands around the cup to warm them. The late afternoon was cool and a sharp salty wind had sprung up off the river.

  ‘They suggested a Women’s Defence Army and a women’s march after the terrible fracas in Victoria Square. Their brother is a friend of Harry’s.’

  ‘Humph,’ Mrs Danley said.

  ‘I think they have high expectations of being a part of this,’ my mother said.

  Mrs Danley guffawed. ‘Did you hear that, Ailsa?’ She assumed Mrs Thornhill would share her disgust. ‘High expectations. I don’t doubt it. We may have to put a lid on their expectations. What was it they said? “Our hardest task will be clearing the palliative-mongers off the track of revolutionary progress.”’

  I laughed and my mother grinned. ‘How do you remember it all?’

  ‘If you’d sat through as many church meetings as I have, Eve, you’d probably remember it, too. It’s a habit of concentration. And now, Judith, you’ve been very quiet this afternoon, what are you up to?’

  I smiled. She did not really want a reply. She had just made a gesture to include me rather as one would acknowledge at long last a neglected child in the room.

  It seemed that Nathan also had expectations and dealing with them, relayed to me through Harry, was irritating. Harry reproached me that I didn’t draw cartoons in the spirit of working class liberation.

  I was tart. ‘And what exactly does that mean, Harry?’

  He looked confused. ‘I suppose like Soviet Union art.’

  ‘And you’ve seen a lot of that?’

  As his opinion was parroted from Nathan, he was naturally defensive. ‘Nathan says it would be better if you drew the working man as nobly striding forward.’

  ‘Flaunting a banner, I suppose? With a black hammer and sickle on a red background?’

  ‘If you like.’ He was sulky at my jibes but so discomforted I repented.

  ‘Harry, I draw the people at the Port as I see them. Don’t you think they are noble in their suffering?’

  ‘But, Judith, they look so down-trodden and desperate.’

  ‘They are down-trodden and desperate, Harry.’

  He watched me as I worked with pen and ink. He sighed. I was using a fine nib and China ink. It was almost impossible to correct a mistake and I worked carefully. I had first made a rough pencil drawing so I had a good outline. Now I was filling in light and shade with cross-hatching. It had taken me months to learn the subtlety and control of different pen strokes.

  ‘You do such beautiful work, Judith. For me it’s enough but Nathan …’ He hesitated. ‘I don’t know why Nathan doesn’t understand, and he’s such a fearfully compelling sort of bloke.’

  Harry never took umbrage at my jibes. He neither bore a grudge nor was moody. I loved him but sometimes found it difficult to understand him. When he was with Nathan he was enslaved by his fixed ideas. When he was with me he seemed to see Nathan more clearly. When I asked him if he believed in communism he quipped, ‘I’d believe in anything that paid me to dance, Judith.’

  Women are good at secrets and small deceptions and the poverty at the Port honed their skills and united them. In small groups they strolled along the street past the fruit stall and while one or two engaged the stallholder with chatter the others filled their bags with stolen vegetables or fruit. I knew that later they divided the spoils amongst themselves, allotting them in terms of need.

  On one occasion I watched this small piece of theatre. As they casually walked away talking to each other old Ben, the stallholder, looked up and saw me watching. He shrugged resignedly. ‘They think I’m too stupid to notice, Miss Judith. They’re not very skilled at thieving. I’d give them the stuff but to think that they’ve succeeded in snaffling it from under my nose gives them a small sense of triumph. I wouldn’t deprive them of that. They all have kids.’

  These women and others argued with the baker, swearing that bread baked today was really two days old and badgering him into selling it at a cheaper price. They descended on the dairyman, begging for skim milk, dressing their children in old wheat sacks to convince him that their children were starving. And, of course, they were.

  They invented imaginary members of the family in a ploy to get more ration cards. They queued at every food distribution and every charitable clothing distribution. They gritted their teeth and gave up any pretensions to pride. If somebody died in an unemployed camp he was often found dressed in his underwear. Someone had stolen his shoes and clothes.

  They foraged for fuel. Gaunt and skeletal they were old before their time. Those who suffered most had been deserted by their husbands who, unable to find work in the Port, went on the wallaby, searching for work in the labourers’ camps. Many never wrote home and simply disappeared.

  Dr Banks bustled around town as usual, going in and out of houses. His clothes got shabbier, his face thinner, greyer and more lined. I heard mothers complaining that he gave them unrealistic advice.

  One day he stopped me in the street and looked intently into my face. As he had done when I was a child he pulled down the lower lid of one of my eyes and peered into it. ‘Tell your mother to give you some iron, Judith. You’re anaemic. Some good red meat several times a week. And green vegetables,’ he instructed.

  I looked at him disbelievingly. Good red meat? Where did we get that from these days? But I didn’t argue with him. There was a vagueness in his expression that troubled me.

  ‘Rickets,’ he muttered as he left me. ‘Rickets. I tell their mothers to give their children milk and good food but they ignore me. Really, Judith, it’s quite irresponsible of them. Now you take my advice. Young women shouldn’t be anaemic.’

  I walked home thoughtfully. ‘Is Dr Banks OK?’ I asked my mother.

  She looked sad. ‘No, Judith, we don’t think so. I’ve been talking to some of the other women. He’s an old man and we think his mind is going. Everyone still requests a consultation but no one has faith in him any more.’

  I felt bereft. For as long as I could remember Dr Banks had been one of the comforts and supports of the Port. He had been the Medical Officer for years and operated out of our small casualty hospital. Dr Banks pronounced, like God, on the severity of a
n illness or accident and took the responsibility of sending serious cases to hospital in Adelaide. Well-off or poor took their turn according to the seriousness of their illness. But in addition he was a family adviser, more valuable than the local clergymen, because, as my father had once said, anyone can get a new soul but once the body has gone, pouf, that is the end. The constant changes in the Port, never for the good, were dispiriting, as one community support after another collapsed.

  So the word of the meeting in the Federation Hall spread quietly. The police might watch us but they had no power over women gossiping on corners. The soup kitchen became a hive of political activity. At the thought of actually striking back against their suffering many of the women came alive again, their faces animated, their steps firm. An excited fighting spirit replaced the drudgery of endurance. In a small room off the Salvation Army hall they made and painted placards. The more literate wrote protest pamphlets, which they planned to distribute during the march. Harry took them to Nathan who ran off handfuls of copies at the Port Beacon hand press.

  It was something of a miracle, I thought, that the police had not closed down the Port Beacon. It incited revolutionary activity but it was a very small operation and I supposed that the police were fully occupied in protecting the scabs.

  Groups of wharf-labourers had regular running battles with the police. At the news that scabs were loading cargo onto a liner at the Outer Harbor, my father marched eight miles there to help confront them. The usual fights occurred; the usual police attacks and baton charges. My father had stopped counting the bruises on his arms, shoulders and back. My mother stoically applied iodine to the new ones and made him a cup of tea. The skirmishes and police beatings were becoming routine. As the scabs, protected by a contingent of police, marched daily to and from the wharves, the Port women and children in pathetic defiance threw stones at them. We no longer thought all of this was unusual. But to have accepted it as a way of life was frightening.

  Harry and a flying squad of men from the Unemployed Workers’ Union picketed houses where women, unable to pay the rent, were threatened with eviction. Sometimes he said they tried to persuade the bailiffs to leave. ‘But really, Judith,’ he was bitter, ‘I don’t know why we bother. They’re crueller and more mindless than a pack of rodents. They take everything, even the children’s toys. However, sometimes we outwit them. As they load furniture into the truck we have blokes stationed there and they simply unload it again. It’s strange, you know, nobody says anything. It’s all done silently. They pack stuff, we unpack it. A sort of war of attrition.’

  He smiled grimly. Not Harry’s usual bright cheerful smile. ‘Sometimes we reach an unspoken compromise. We win a bed, a table, a chair, a toy for each of the children, they take the rest. That keeps them happy. When we fight them for everything we know they’ll return, like all vermin do.’

  Heavy-hearted, I took his arm to comfort him. I had seen children at the soup kitchen clutching a doll or top. Once Herbie had asked, in his kindly way, if he could see a little boy’s train. To his dismay the child clutched it, darted behind his mother, and shouted, ‘No, it’s mine. You can’t have it.’ Herbie had stood helplessly, distressed and finally comprehending. He poured the child a particularly large glass of milk.

  Quite often we had homeless women and children camped on our deck under canvas awnings my father erected. They were transient, staying for a few days until other family members heard of their plight and either sent for or came for them. On cold nights they moved into the saloon. I offered my cabin but my father refused. ‘No, Judith. Where will you sleep? You are the only one in our family who has work. You must have some private place to do it. We are all dependent on the extra money your cartoons bring in.’

  He looked bleak. ‘To throw you out of your cabin, my dear, would be like killing the goose that laid the golden egg.’ He patted my arm. Adversity had drawn us closer, tightening our bonds as a family.

  But it was hard to concentrate on my work. Babies cried, children shouted at each other, mothers yelled at their children to be quiet or belted them, only increasing the level of noise and screaming. There was constant chaos and confusion. Try as I might I was haunted by the distress outside my closed door. Less nobly, I was exasperated and impatient and discovered to my shame that poverty remote from me was a cause for pity but up close it had all the annoyances of fallible humans.

  I confessed to my mother that I felt guilty for not wanting to nurse the babies or cuddle the children and that I was only reluctantly inveigled into playing games. She kissed me on the top of my head and smiled sympathetically. ‘You’re a good girl, Judith. You haven’t grown up in a big family. Of course you like your privacy. We all do. Just try to get on with your work. We depend on you. I can’t offer these families help if you don’t sell your cartoons.’

  So I stuffed cotton wool in my ears and went to work as best I could but my mother’s well-meant assurances had only made me more anxious. Each cartoon I did was an act of faith. What if I failed to have ideas? Or my ideas didn’t sell? That others were so dependent on me was a terrible burden.

  I was working on a larger cartoon with more complex and subtle figures. I drew a picket line of poverty-stricken men. Breaking through the line was a terrible skeleton riding a horse. I labelled him HUNGER. In pursuit, but halted by the picketers, were three other riders, their faces ravaged and predatory, their horses rearing threateningly in protest at opposition. One bloke on the picket line is saying to his mate, ‘The first one got through but, by God, we’ll stop the others.’

  I knew it was powerful and well drawn but would it sell? Would readers make the connection with the four horsemen of the Apocalypse? Hopefully the Workers’ Weekly might take it, even if the Sun News Pictorial refused. It had a Biblical theme but I doubted whether the Despatch would accept it.

  The Weekly couldn’t pay as much but they were usually a good bet. I had to bring something into the house. But then I worried. The figures of the men were not nobly transfigured by suffering. They weren’t striding gloriously into the future as Nathan, and presumably other communists, wanted. They were dogged, only courageous in their determination to keep struggling against almost impossible odds.

  Miss Marie consoled me when I complained that I didn’t seem to fit the mould and that I was always anxious about whether my work would please. She patted my arm. ‘Never mind, Judith. You are an instinctive radical but an individual thinker.’

  I went to the Port Adelaide Institute to read the daily newspapers. We could no longer afford to buy them. There were regular and disturbing articles about events in Europe. The Workers’ Weekly in particular warned of a resurgent militaristic Germany under the leadership of a fascist named Adolf Hitler. His party, the National Socialists, was gaining in popularity. I recalled Joe Pulham, who had talked to me about Hitler’s book. Mein Kampf. It was a particularly nasty book, he commented, written by a particularly nasty bloke and if he ever got power the world would be in a fine pickle.

  The Weekly now quoted Hitler’s ominous assertion that all German people of the same blood would be united under the Reich in a Greater Germany and that ‘the tears of war’ would ‘produce the daily bread of generations to come’. I didn’t know much about Germany and I didn’t know what the Reich was but the stories of Hitler’s stormtroopers shooting people at political meetings frightened me. It was time, the Workers’ Weekly trumpeted, that working people all over the world united, took notice, and were fearful. It was a long way away but I was beginning to feel its shadow looming over us.

  The Federation Hall was packed. We had arrived early and found our seats, hard-backed wooden chairs near the front. Rows of these chairs filled half the hall. Behind them stretched a space for standing. The seats were quickly taken and dozens of women jammed this space behind. Prams cluttered the central aisle. Women nursed babies or held toddlers between their knees. Children who had been seated on a chair were pushed off for women arriving late. Everyone was cr
ammed in. The hullabaloo was deafening. The noise swept across the room in surges booming off the bare walls and from the wooden floor.

  Miss Marie had joined us, thrilled, she said, to at last face the barricades. Her exhilaration was catching. I had never asked her what the Paris barricades had been or why she always dramatised them. But tonight the very sound of them had the inflaming quality of glorious and righteous martyrdom. Somewhere at some time there had been people like us who took a stand against injustice and their passion lived on in Miss Marie’s memory and fiery expectations.

  Mrs Danley was already seated at a table on the dais. My mother, who had agreed to keep the minutes of the meeting, sat beside her. Like all the other women in the hall they were decked with hats and dressed soberly in the dark clothes they wore for all formal occasions—church on Sundays, dinners with friends, funerals, baptisms.

  Only Miss Marie looked a butterfly, scintillating in a room of ravens. Although shorter dresses were now the fashion, she wore a full-length gown of some green shimmering material, a velvet cloak of carmine embossed with emerald flowers, and a matching emerald cloche. She had floated down the aisle on a cloud of Coty’s Lily of the Valley perfume when we had made our early entry. Her steps were light and confident, her eyes sparkled over those already seated. Gasps of admiration and wonder followed us, and an occasional childish chirp, ‘Who’s that pretty lady?’ followed by the sound of a slap and a yelp.

  Feeling like a handmaiden trailing the entrance of the Queen of Sheba, I had been hard put not to giggle. If Miss Marie had indeed been born a true Aussie daughter of a South Australian grazier, then some mighty transfiguration had taken place, unless it was simply her delight in theatre.

  She whispered in my ear, ‘Judith, I am completely intoxicated. Just look at all these wonderful women who have come out. Aren’t they marvellous?’ and she beamed about her with such open inviting friendliness that her smiles were returned. ‘I love them all,’ she cried, waving her arms expansively to include everyone. On another occasion I might have felt embarrassed to be accompanied by someone who drew so much attention, but tonight was different.