Hunger Town

by Wendy Scarfe

  My father said, ‘She’s a very pretty woman, although maybe a little flamboyant. And what’s this Froggy stuff she talks?’

  I laughed. ‘Memories, I suppose. Like you occasionally recall a phrase in Icelandic.’

  ‘Mm,’ he said. ‘I suppose so.’

  Part 3

  Political Cartoons

  HARRY AND I DECIDED to marry in the spring. We needed somewhere to live in the Port. I refused to move to Adelaide, so far away from my parents and the river. To leave my cabin on the hulk and all its memories was difficult enough for me. So we went house hunting—somewhere suitable to rent—not too costly, but not as cheap as the hovels in Timson Street, renowned for housing the destitute.

  It was easy to find available places. But although we searched together for our future home, and it should have been a joyous adventure, it was in fact sad and dispiriting. Many of the abandoned houses had stood empty for months. We saw miserable reminders of past tenants: a broken toy, a half-cleaned saucepan, a torn cushion, a tatty rag mat. More than likely the previous tenants had been evicted, forced out by lack of money. I wondered where they had gone.

  ‘I feel awful,’ I told Harry. ‘It’s as if I’m a vulture picking over the carcase of someone’s life.’

  He put his arm about me and kissed me. ‘Don’t be sad, Judith. It’s only a house. We’ll make it ours.’

  I did my best to match his cheerfulness. But there was more and more evidence that the Port community was wounded. Protests and beatings continued and the strikers and their families continued to struggle with grim-lipped determination. They had no alternative, proud people refused to crawl into holes and die. They fought not only the public battles and brawls on the streets but the petty pinpricks of government officials determined to show their power over people less fortunate and more helpless than themselves.

  Everyone knew it was coming but this didn’t relieve the anger and dismay when beef was removed from the ration cards.

  Mr Mountford, our butcher, rebelled in a small manner against the regulations. I had waited in his shop with my ration card while he dispensed the usual ration of chopped up bits of fatty mutton to the tight-lipped women in the queue ahead of me. Mostly he handed over the meat with a shamefaced apologetic murmur, but that day he singled out a woman more desperate than the rest.

  ‘Why, Mrs O’Brien,’ he said, his tone bluff and kindly, ‘how are you? And that brood of lovely kiddies you have? Seven, isn’t it?’

  She was a small haggard, anxious woman, thin to the point of emaciation. He chucked her meat on the wrapping paper and by a quick sleight-of-hand reached under the counter for something extra. Hurriedly he wrapped it all together and handed it to her.

  ‘A little something to give it extra flavour, missus. That’ll put roses in the kiddies’ cheeks.’

  He winked at me, knowingly. I smiled back. We all knew that he regularly secreted a few pieces of good gravy beef in Mrs O‘Brien’s rations.

  None of us had noted the two strangers who had entered and were standing at the back of the shop. I think I saw them first. In their dark suits they smelled of officialdom.

  ‘Quick, Mrs O’Brien,’ I said, ‘put the meat in your basket and leave.’ I gave her a little push but she was confused and still clutched the parcel in her hand.

  One of the officials shoved through the waiting women to stand in front of the counter. Before Mrs O’Brien realised his intentions he snatched the parcel from her, flung it down on the counter and proceeded to unravel the paper wrapping. All chatting in the shop ceased abruptly. All eyes were riveted on Mrs O’Brien, who, red-faced and desperate, tried to rewrap and reclaim the meat.

  He pushed her hand away and she burst into a storm of weeping. He looked her over, his eyes thin and rapacious. ‘Now, madam, that’s enough of that. You know your entitlements.’

  He poked around in the small heap of fatty mutton and discovered the few bits of gravy beef. ‘And what have we here?’

  He turned triumphantly to his companion. ‘Beef, I’ll be sure.’

  Mr Mountford remained silent but there was hatred in his eyes as he looked at his accuser and shame as he looked at the weeping Mrs O’Brien. ‘Judith,’ he appealed to me helplessly.

  ‘You’re a pair of curs.’ I glared at them. ‘A pair of rotten curs, hunting down the starving. This woman has seven children to feed. What’s it to you if she has a few pieces of gravy beef?’

  ‘None of our business, girlie. It’s regulations and we’re here to uphold them.’

  Incensed by the ‘girlie’, their contempt and heartlessness, I raged at them. ‘Give her back her meat right now. Can’t you see that these women go home to starving children?’

  They both shrugged. ‘None of our business, girlie, and none of yours. And any more lip from you and we’ll close down this establishment, pronto. This parcel of meat is evidence. What do you all expect on the susso? Tell your husbands to get a job and pay for your keep and all your brats’.’

  They turned to leave the shop but the silent women now blocked their way.

  ‘Move aside, ladies.’

  No one budged. Someone hissed, a soft sibilance that escalated and then crescendoed into a sinister threat that filled the shop.

  ‘Let us pass, ladies.’

  But now their strident command held a note of panic.

  ‘Not likely’, Mrs Rawlings said.

  ‘We’ll take that meat,’ Mrs Pole said, and reached for the package.

  They tried to back away but were trapped by the press of bodies.

  ‘It’s evidence!’ They tried belligerence.

  ‘Evidence?’ Mrs Rawlings snarled. ‘We’ll evidence you. Hand it over and now or we’ll take it.’

  The two of them shrank. Their belligerence had turned to squeaking. ‘You’ll be sorry for this, all of you. The police’ll be here. Threats to government officers.’

  ‘Oh, shut up,’ Mrs Pole said. ‘We’ll tell you what threats are. Come here again and we’ll tar and feather both of you. There’s plenty of tar down the timber yards and plenty of local chooks we can pluck. You leave Mr Mountford alone, because if he closes we’ll come for you and your kind. You pass the word around.’

  They stuttered. ‘Threats won’t g-g-get you anywhere, ladies.’

  With a jeering laugh the women half carried, half-shoved the two officials out the door and flung them onto the roadway. They lined the footpath, watching their victims scramble to their feet and then, as they made a last effort to stand their ground, Mrs Rawlings grabbed a broom leaning against the doorway and rushed at them.

  They fled before her down the street. She returned breathless but triumphant. Of course, when it was over, they feared reprisals but no government officials came again to Mr Mountford’s shop and his right to dispense rations in exchange for ration cards continued. It was a small victory, much talked about and it cheered everyone. But it was only local. As for the bigger picture, the beef marches and the hunger marches began.

  I penned my cartoons as a response to the incident: two dogs, wearing hats of government officials, sniffing around a butcher’s shop and one saying to the other, Can you smell beef? I’m certain I can. And a second one, more vulgar: two dogs with official hats on their heads outside a butcher’s shop, one with his leg cocked against the doorway and the caption, How many now have we had to mark for giving out this beef? I’m running out of pee.

  My father chortled at this, but my mother was a little shocked. ‘Judith, do you have to be vulgar?’

  I was tart. ‘Not half as vulgar as starvation, Mum.’

  ‘Leave her alone, Eve,’ my father said. ‘The blokes will love that one.’

  Harry and I found a suitable house. It was a small working-man’s cottage in Divett Street with a central hallway, a bedroom and living room, and a small kitchen and bathroom at the rear. The bathroom had a chip heater but there was a newer gas water heater above the kitchen sink. When I turned on the hot water tap the pilot light ignit
ed the gas and there was a delightful popping sound. I turned it on and off a couple of times just to amuse myself.

  ‘Listen to this, Harry,’ I said.

  He grinned and hugged me.

  There was a small enclosed veranda, which might have been a child’s bedroom. In a lean-to shed out the back there was a copper and a trough and clothes mangle. The backyard was a narrow ribbon of unkempt grass and weeds.

  The house had served as a shop as well as a home and had been extended at the front to include a small room with shelves and a counter. It seemed to have been used for serving fruit and vegetables, for in a corner were a few old crates labelled SOUTH AUSTRALIAN TOMATOES. I recalled Nathan’s stump in the Botanic Gardens. What an awkward green girl I had been—so shy, so clumsy.

  ‘Does Nathan still speak at The Stump?’ I asked Harry.

  He was roaming about the room, inspecting and prodding the woodwork for borers.

  ‘Sometimes, I think, but his main job now is to educate the comrades.’

  ‘He always had a book in his hand at the Chew It.’

  ‘Still has. And expects us all to do the same. Could you believe it, Judith? But I’m now struggling with Lenin’s The State and Revolution and Jack London’s The Iron Heel. There’s not much humour in either.’ He chuckled. ‘But I tell Nathan that I prefer Jack London. At least he makes some pretence of writing a story.’

  ‘I read Jack London years ago. Joe Pulham introduced me to his White Fang and Call of the Wild. They weren’t political but they were marvellous tales. He killed himself, Harry.’

  ‘Not Joe. I never heard that.’

  ‘No, Jack London.’

  ‘I don’t think there are borers in this counter, Jude, but we’ll get rid of it just in case.’

  I smiled lovingly at him. Harry lived in the present. It was rare that memories from the past saddened him with any sense of time passing. Once he said to me that he liked the communists because they concentrated on the future and it was such a hopeful future.

  ‘When you’ll be paid to dance,’ I had gently teased him.

  ‘Of course,’ he replied. ‘You know that’s my chief motivation.’

  But I wasn’t certain that Harry really understood himself. Sometimes he seemed to be seeking something, rather like now, with head down and eyes peering for the tiny telltale holes left by borers.

  To my amazement and consternation the Workers’ Weekly rejected my cartoon of the two government officials dressed as dogs urinating on the butcher’s wall. I had been certain that they would share my sense that its nastiness aptly matched and countered the beastliness I had witnessed in the butcher’s shop. Those officials had shown a personal and vindictive malevolence and deserved nothing better than the way I had portrayed them.

  The reason for rejecting my cartoon was brief and abrupt. It was in bad taste. Too vulgar for their readers. It would lower the tone of the paper that aimed to be uplifting.

  I read and re-read these cold comments. Had they come from the editor or some office boy? I was angry but also discomforted, finding it hard to shake off an uncomfortable feeling that somehow I had committed an indiscretion. I showed the rejected cartoon to Miss Marie. I was in class practising my pen strokes. I still had much to learn about hatching and scribbled strokes. Sometimes I found it hard to create the decisive but fluid strokes so telling and so necessary.

  Miss Marie constantly admonished me, ‘You are too tense, Judith. Relax. Feel the stroke flow first in this direction then in another.’

  I liked working in pen and ink and had a collection of various nibs, some fine, some coarser, and occasionally I collected a dropped feather from the deck of the hulk and fashioned it into a quill. It was easy to carry several pens, a pad and a small bottle of ink in a bag and make quick sketches outside. As well as my cartoons I had a collection of drawings of people and scenes from the Port. One day I would develop them into larger more complete works.

  But at the minute I found myself obsessed with not only my disappointment but also a sense that what I had assumed I knew and understood had no reality. I had discounted Harry’s comments that the Workers’ Weekly wanted my cartoons to reflect more nobility, believing it a piece of nonsense. Now I could see that my view of what was true didn’t suit the party line.

  ‘What do you think of it, Miss Marie?’ I asked while I drew a line so wobbly that I threw the paper aside.

  She read it and laughed. ‘Ma pauvre Judith, and what did you expect?’

  ‘Respect for my work. It’s a good cartoon. Good cartoons should offend.’

  ‘But you didn’t expect it to offend the comrades?’

  ‘No, of course not.’

  ‘Ma pauvre Judith,’ she repeated. ‘You perhaps haven’t realised how straight-laced the comrades are. They are not, you know, so different from everybody else. Little things can discomfort and offend them and they’ll make the most of it.’

  I put my pen aside. It was useless to continue to grapple with graceful fluid lines. I was too incensed. ‘And what price, then, their passion for revolution to change society?’

  She smiled wryly. ‘That’s an entirely different matter, Judith. That is in the head, not in the sensibilities. You should not expect people to be consistent. It’s at odds with your cartoons, which are built on a clever awareness of the inconsistencies, banalities and even venality of people. The comrades are puritans, mon amie, modern Cromwellian Roundheads.’

  I recalled Nathan’s extreme embarrassment at finding me dishevelled in Victoria Square after the ‘riot’. ‘Mmn,’ I said. ‘That fits.’

  She gave me an odd look but I didn’t explain.

  ‘Send your cartoon to Spearhead,’ she chuckled. ‘Tell the editor …’ She scrummaged around in her handbag. ‘I have his address here somewhere. Tell the editor that I recommend you. And,’ she threw me a naughty look, ‘that the Workers’ Weekly has rejected it. That should tickle their fancy. I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised.’

  ‘They’re anarchists,’ I said.

  She was off hand. ‘Of course. Naturellement.’

  ‘Are you an anarchist, Miss Marie?’

  She avoided my eyes. ‘There are many paths to a perfect state, Judith. I jump in and out of ideas. Now take my advice and send your vulgar cartoon to Spearhead. I can guarantee your instant acceptance.’

  She was right, of course. I sent the cartoon and a letter came back post haste with acceptance and effusive thanks. They had seen my cartoons in the Workers’ Weekly and the Sun News Pictorial and admired them for some time. They had even hoped that I might offer them an occasional cartoon. But now I was so well-known, so acclaimed, they had hesitated to ask me because they could not pay me as much as the daily papers or the Workers’ Weekly. They hoped humbly that I would accept a smaller payment. The letter ended with an enthusiastic comment that it was a jolly good cartoon and they had all split their sides laughing over it, despite its serious intent.

  So, it was a letter from a young person, like me, and its enthusiasm warmed me. I had not realised that my work was so widely known and it was delightful to have it sought after even if I was not so well paid for it.

  When Harry arrived at the hulk waving a copy of Spearhead at me he looked agitated and distressed. ‘Judith, I’ve seen your cartoon. It’s here.’ It was almost an accusation.

  ‘Yes.’ I was non-committal.

  ‘Judith, it’s in Spearhead.’

  ‘Yes. They accepted it and paid me. Not a lot but they’ve contracted me for a weekly cartoon. It’s regular money and they like my work.’

  ‘But, Judith,’ he protested.

  In the face of my cool response to his agitation, he looked at a loss. ‘Judith, they’re on the other side. They’re anarchists.’

  I sighed. ‘Harry, they’re on the left. We all agree society needs to be better. We all look at things that are wrong. How can they be on the other side? The Despatch is on the other side and the Register.’

  He looked nonpluss
ed. ‘They hate the communists.’

  I grinned. ‘And vice-versa it would appear. What a waste of time.’

  He looked unhappy. I stood up and kissed him. ‘Come on, we’ll make a pot of tea. Are you out tonight?’

  Harry’s work was mostly at night. His small band continued to play regularly at the Semaphore and he rode his bicycle there and back to save us money.

  He still looked uncertain as he followed me into the galley. I took down the teapot, cups and saucers, and found some biscuits, filled the kettle with water and put it on to heat. Then I sat down opposite him. ‘Harry,’ I said, ‘these newspapers, whether they’re communist, anarchist or capitalist, buy my cartoons. They do not buy me. They are free to accept or reject my work and I am equally free to send it to whoever I choose. Whatever the newspaper, my work doesn’t change.’

  ‘You’re so determined, Judith. So strong,’ he said miserably and I felt that unfortunately his comment was not praise but a sort of reproach.

  My mother made us curtains for the windows of our house. They were blue-check gingham, cheap but bright and clean. She had tried to make a seamstress of me but I had always preferred to draw. Sometimes with a new piece of cloth in my hand I imagined myself making something beautiful but usually after this first flush of pleasurable anticipation the long haul of cutting, stitching and hemming bored me and my mother would reproach, ‘Judith, you never finish anything.’ Eventually she gave up expecting me to sew.

  ‘Do you like these?’ she asked, holding up the neatly hemmed oblongs of cloth. I think they’ll brighten your rooms and they’ll be easy to launder and won’t require a lot of ironing.’

  I looked at them, speculating on how long it would be before I had to do either of these tasks. Washing and ironing didn’t appeal to me any more than sewing. My mother understood and laughed. ‘You’ll have to do a little housework, Judith, if you have a house. You can’t live in a pig sty.’