Hunger Town

by Wendy Scarfe

  ‘Yes, yes.’ Admonished, he stopped. ‘And now what to tell your mother?’

  My mother spoke from the doorway. ‘Yes?’ she invited. ‘What is it that you both need to tell me?’

  She came and sat at the table. ‘Don’t leave those scones too long, Niels. They’ll dry out. Scones should go into a hot oven as soon as you’ve made them.’ Then she looked from him to me. ‘Pour me a cuppa, please, Niels. And since I suppose it’s Judith’s news I need to hear, what is it, darling?’

  She was smiling at me and I dithered. ‘I don’t want to worry you, Mum. It’s difficult. I don’t want to alarm you.’

  ‘For heaven’s sake, Judith.’ She was impatient. ‘Just tell me. All this shillyshallying is making me more anxious than your news probably will.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, a little uncertainly. ‘Imagination does make cowards of us all.’

  Briefly I remembered how Harry and I had walked home together from the hulk in the soft comfortable darkness, his arm about me. What had we discussed? I thought it must have had something to do with conscience because I had paraphrased the Shakespearean phrase Conscience doth make cowards of us all.

  Now, maybe, imagination was something I needed to be afraid of. I didn’t know what had happened to Harry and in the absence of facts imagination could destroy me.

  ‘Nathan has returned from Spain but left Harry there.’

  She looked bewildered. ‘Nathan’s home but not Harry?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  ‘But why? Didn’t he go with Harry? Why would he leave him in Spain?’

  ‘I don’t fully know. But he did.’

  ‘Then Harry must be following on a later ship.’

  I was silent.

  ‘You haven’t heard from Harry?’

  ‘No, not for many weeks.’

  ‘Oh, Judith,’ she said. ‘You must be frantic. My poor darling. Has someone spoken to Nathan?’

  ‘Yes, I have and Miss Marie.’

  She smiled slightly. ‘I suppose Marie got more out of him than you did.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And of course it has been some political issue?’

  ‘Yes.’

  I had told neither of them that Harry had gone to the Asturias where under the orders of General Franco so many of the miners had been murdered.

  But my mother was astute. ‘You’ve only told us half the story, Judith, haven’t you?’

  I was never good at lying to my mother but I was cautious in my reply. ‘I think he may have gone to a mining district in north-west Spain where a general strike was being organised.’

  My father nodded. ‘A rotten life being a miner. Good luck to them. The miners nearly starved during our depression. Mind you starvation might be quicker than coughing your lungs out with coal dust.’

  ‘But Harry was never a miner,’ my mother persisted.

  ‘No, but the anarchists were organising it and he went with an anarchist.’

  She sighed. ‘And they’re going to bring in their brand of a perfect society.’

  I gulped. ‘They tried.’

  ‘What do you mean “they tried”?’

  ‘Some of them,’ I couldn’t tell her 3000, ‘have been shot.’

  ‘My god, Judith. This gets worse and worse.’

  I was struggling not to cry and she knew it.

  My father burst in, ‘And that rotten miserable bastard Nathan knew he’d gone there.’

  ‘Where is it again?’ my mother asked.

  ‘The Asturias,’ I said.

  ‘That piece of shit ran out on him,’ my father growled.

  My mother looked shocked but strangely calm. ‘What do you plan to do, Judith?’

  I took a deep breath. ‘Miss Marie suggested that she and I go to Spain to try to find him. He may be wounded or ill, Mum. The fighting was terrible. Crack troops from northern Africa, the Moors and Legionaires, against unarmed miners.’

  My father snorted. ‘Franco’s mob. Fascism is more than a sleeping lion in Spain these days.’

  At my mother’s dismay I added hastily, ‘But we can’t go at once because I need a passport and visas. So I’ll wait and hope that I get a letter from Harry.’

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Yes, of course.’ And then quite calmly she patted my hand.

  ‘If a letter doesn’t come you must go. Can you pay for it? We have a little put by. I suppose your inheritance from Joe Pulham was spent years ago.’

  I nodded, tears in my eyes. Dear Joe, who had so enriched my young life.

  ‘Miss Marie is so insistent about helping me that I know I’ll eventually agree. I have a little in savings and some money owing to me but I’m worried about leaving you, Mum.’

  She smiled gently. ‘I’m quite well now, Judith. Your father does our cooking.’ She gave him an impish smile. ‘And I’ve many friends in the Port who’ll always lend a hand. Brenda Danley would be happy to take me over entirely. And, my dear, oddly, although my heart attack gave me my first taste of mortality, it has also made me calmer about life. It would be impossible for you to envision a future without Harry. So if it becomes necessary you must go with Marie and find him.’

  A week later Harry’s letter from Spain arrived. I saw his writing and the Spanish stamp and a wave of relief swept over me. He was safe. Probably he had written about his plans for coming home. Maybe with the elapse of time he was already on board some ship. I needn’t go to Spain to find him. All was well. I gripped the letter basking in the rapture of fulfilled hope.

  Yet I hesitated to open it. I suppose, at the back of my mind, there was a frisson of anxiety that my confidence might be shattered. To hope and have hope dashed could be more terrible than not hoping at all. So I just sat there clinging to the precious letter, half-glad, half-fearful.

  At last I forced myself to search for the date of posting on the envelope but it was indecipherable. Far better to face what was inside. I tore open the envelope and unfolded two single sheets of writing paper. Harry rarely wrote lengthy letters. I was used to gleaning tidbits of news. Two sheets was unusual but the sight of his scrawling handwriting, so familiar and now so dear to me because it was all I had of him, renewed my faith that he was alive and well.

  I glanced at the date heading the letter. It couldn’t be right. The last week in September? It was now nearly November. After my first dismay I tried to reassure myself. A letter could take that long to reach me. A normal trip on a liner would take at least five weeks. How stupid I was to worry.

  Just let me read the letter. But I was apprehensive. Something was not right. I felt it almost as if the paper on which the letter was written breathed some warning of disaster.

  He had begun cheerfully. He had met a bloke in Madrid. His name was Garcia, nicknamed ‘Little Lorca’. They called him this because he wrote poetry and hoped one day to be as great a poet as his hero, the celebrated poet Garcia Lorca. Hence he was Little Lorca and not Big Lorca.

  I shook the page impatiently. ‘Get on with it, Harry,’ I said aloud. ‘You’re prevaricating as usual. What’s your real news?’

  But it was still delayed. Little Lorca had taken him to a musical evening with some of his mates. They were all playing the bagpipes.

  ‘Such a din, Jude. The squealing, moaning and whining of the bagpipes is OK outside in one of the street processions, which seem to happen everywhere and all the time. Very colourful and bright with national costumes. But inside the noise of the bagpipes is ear-splitting and unbearable. They invited me to try blowing one but I ran out of puff.

  ‘We had a jovial night because they had the traditional wine skins filled with the local booze. These wine skins have a spout and they are expert at tipping the skin so that the wine squirts from the spout directly into their mouths. Of course, I had to take part and naturally drowned myself in wine. They bellowed with laughter at my ineptness and made some pretty crude jokes about whether I always had trouble finding where to put my snout.

  ‘There were many nods and winks a
nd a lot of backslapping and hilarity at my expense. I have found that being a foreigner who makes mistakes over local customs is a source of endless fun to them but there is no malice in it.

  ‘Luckily Garcia speaks pretty good English and he interprets for me. I heard them ask him if I were a communist. I know he said yes because they all looked at me assessingly. “An Australian communist,” I said hastily. They looked relieved. “Not a Russian bastard?” “No,” I said, “Australia is a long way from Russia.” They nodded. “A very long way. You are lucky.”

  ‘It turned out they are anarchists and Garcia is from north-west Spain. An area known as the Asturias. It’s coal-mining country and has a number of political groups: communists, socialists and anarchists but most of the miners are anarchists. It would seem that what is agitating them are the plans of the Madrid Government to include three representatives of a fascist group. They are alarmed that this is a dangerous step towards further repression.

  ‘Garcia is full of enthusiasm that I should see how the working people of Spain organise themselves to resist. “We do not have your education,” he said to me, “or your knowledge of democratic government. The English have had so much practice at governing themselves. But we know what we want.” It’s useless for me to protest that I’m not English. Australia is unknown and unknowable to them. They continually tell me that I am lucky to live in a green country with boundless supplies of rain and water. Once I corrected them and said that much of Australia is dry like Spain but they just scoffed at me and assured me that I needn’t save them from being envious. They knew England was a much pleasanter country to live in than Spain.

  ‘I’ve had many conversations with Garcia and, Jude, it’s not that I want to become an anarchist but that their ideas have made me see some of the weaknesses in communism. People do need to manage their own affairs. And in the Asturias the workers aim to set up their own committees to run the place, Garcia says. Like the men in Mildura told Nathan, although of course he wouldn’t listen. But I’m prepared to listen, Jude, and I’m coming to the realisation that there is not just one answer for social change and a better fairer community.

  ‘It will be very interesting to see whether these people succeed in launching a general strike. The communists in the Port talked so much about a general strike to overthrow the government but we never got it off the ground. Here it’s treated as a real possibility and they discuss having arms to defend themselves. Remember how we always said, rather blithely, that without arms we would always be defeated? But now, here, I don’t know whether I’m sold on the idea of arming people. I get the feeling that politics here is much more serious, more bitter and more dangerous than in Australia, that behind the miners’ strike is a nasty history of repression and violence and probably a poverty incomprehensible to us. As I said in my earlier letters I’ve been appalled at the level of destitution in some ports, some countries.

  ‘But then, maybe, an effective revolution can’t take place without violence. Who knows, Jude? I spoke of this to Nathan and he turned white, called me a fool and said if I got myself mixed up in an armed skirmish in Spain he couldn’t be responsible for me. I was annoyed and told him that I needed neither him nor anyone else to watch over me and as he had always preached the need for the violent overthrow of the state he was being a bloody hypocrite.

  ‘I simply wanted to know as an observer how the Spaniards went about things. Wasn’t that why we had come here? Of course, he dished out the usual, that we had come to get advice from our communist brothers. Anyway we settled that I would be back in Madrid in a week.

  ‘I suppose you got my other letters from France and the previous one I sent from Spain.’

  Of course, I hadn’t. And it had been useless for me to attempt to contact him with no fixed forwarding address.

  He went on: ‘It’s such an incredibly old country, Jude, with ancient castles, churches and monasteries dotted everywhere. People like Garcia (who comes from a village called Sama) seem to consider themselves citizens of their town or province. It’s a bit like you or I thinking of ourselves as citizens of Port Adelaide rather than Australia. Garcia says no one likes being controlled by a central government and all the anarchists are federalists.

  ‘All this new experience has sent my mind running in different directions and when I come home I think you’ll find my attitudes changed. I’m still searching for some new political answer to the horror of the depression but I think I’ll be more patient and more contented to keep searching and questioning. Altogether, a great eye-opener, Jude, darling.

  ‘In a week I’ll leave here with Nathan. I can hardly contain myself at the thought of seeing you again and holding you in my arms. As I go to sleep at night I dream of the blissful privacy of our little house and of lying beside you and feeling the warm silkiness of your skin against mine.’

  I placed the letter on the table carefully, almost as if I might injure it. I would read it again later. Now I needed to cope with the realisation that Harry had not returned from the Asturias, that he could well have ‘got involved in an armed skirmish’. I grimaced at Nathan’s understatement and shuddered. Three thousand dead was rather more than a skirmish. And the news from Spain had continued to filter through into our newspapers. The cruel repression continued. Franco’s Moors and Legionaires occupied the cities of Oviedo and Gijon and inexorably rounded up and shot the miners.

  I knew Miss Marie had already begun my application for a passport and visas and that a P&O liner was due at the Outer Harbor in a few days. I would need her magic to get my papers and book a cabin for both of us in time. But we must go. My decision was made. Harry, alive or dead, was somewhere lost in the Asturias and I needed to find him.

  Part 5

  The Search

  OUR ARRANGEMENTS FOR LEAVING Adelaide were so hurried that I had little time to dwell on the miseries of parting. Miss Marie said my clothes were inadequate for the European winter. I must have a new coat. Winnie concealed her unhappiness in the ecstasy of taking me shopping. The price of new wool coats appalled me. ‘I’ll wear it for only a few short weeks and never again, Winnie,’ I protested. ‘I can’t afford one.’ Finally I yielded to her advice to do the rounds of second-hand shops. She took over gleefully and I let her search the racks until she found one that might suit me. It was a little frayed on the cuffs and had a moth hole or two but it was heavy and warm, in fact, so suffocatingly hot on that early November day in Adelaide that I couldn’t imagine ever wearing it.

  My passport and visas for France and Spain arrived and our bookings on the SS liner Orsova. My father rudely called it the Arse Over. It was a sister ship of the Oronsay on which Harry had sailed.

  I had a last evening meal with my parents. My mother was very quiet but as she bustled around the galley I was comforted to see the return of healthy colour in her face. My father smoked his pipe on deck. The doctor had warned him not to smoke near my mother and while she finished preparing the meal I joined him. Night was settling and the lights from the shore gleamed in the water.

  ‘It’s many years since I left Europe, Judith,’ he reflected. ‘Before you were born. Many years. I’ve never really wanted to go back. My home’s here with your mother and you and my mates at the Port. It’s strange to think of you, my daughter, travelling the route I took in a sailing ship. Makes you wonder about time and what it means to any of us. Looking back I can remember years of my life in a few brief minutes, sometimes even seconds. How odd that the time it takes me to recall them is so brief in comparison with the years I took to live them.’

  He put his hand on mine. I looked down on it. The sinews and veins were sharp ridges, the skin fallen away between them was dry and pockmarked with liver spots. I curled my fingers so that I clasped his. ‘Mum will be waiting,’ I said.

  ‘Yes, we’d better go in.’ He knocked out his pipe. ‘You’ll find Harry, you know, Judith.’

  ‘Yes.’ I said. ‘I’m sure I will.’

  My mother wanted me to
spend that night on the hulk but I insisted on going home. I knew that it was an effort on her part to let me go and that she wanted to cling to every final moment with me but I needed to be where Harry was.

  My father walked me home and I held his hand as I had done as a child although I was no longer fearful of the shadows that loomed over the wharf from the enormous warehouses. He kissed me at the front door and I hugged him.

  ‘See you tomorrow at the wharf, daughter.’

  I gulped. ‘Yes, Dad, of course. Thank you.’

  It was a long time before I fell asleep. Memories of Harry wouldn’t leave me. Before going to Spain he had told me excitedly, ‘I feel a little like John Reed, going in to Russia at the time of the revolution to write his Ten Days That Shook the World. Such an adventure, Jude. Perhaps I, too, might see the birth of a new society.’

  Dear Harry, I thought, the incurable romantic, hooked on the fantasy of a glorious new world and always, as I now knew from his letter, always searching. John Reed had died in Russia and that had been the end of his idealism. It wouldn’t, I determined, be the end of Harry’s. I would find him and he would have his future life to go on dreaming and searching. Strangely, the lines from Robert Browning’s poem ‘Andrea del Sarto’ came in to my head: Ah, but a man’s reach should exceed his grasp or what’s a heaven for? These words, so hauntingly beautiful in their truth, reassured me and I slept.

  I believed that we had all faced and overcome the pain of departure until next day when the ship actually pulled away from the wharf at the Outer Harbor. As the faces of my mother and father, Winnie, Jock and Frank receded to miniscule indecipherable blurs, and as the ship turned and they finally disappeared completely, a sense of loss overpowered me. My eyes dimmed with tears. I couldn’t see them but the shore was still visible and I clung to the rail straining for a last glimpse of even that.

  Our cabin on the Orsova was well above the waterline. Miss Marie stated that she had no intention of being buried in the bowels of the ship and we should be comfortable. Harry’s cabin, I recalled, had been on a level with the sea and the porthole would have been impossible to open except in very calm weather. He had written with amazement that a flying fish had landed on their cabin floor, flip flapping frantically. He had flung it back into the water. ‘I think I would have gone to hell, Jude, if I had destroyed something so beautiful that wanted to fly.’