by Mark O'Flynn
Fisher was babbling, ‘This is the work of devils. This is the agency of Satan. This is the Sabbath, the Lord’s day of rest.’
No one paid him any mind. Ossie Farnell elbowed him aside. ‘Stand back, Presbo.’ There was more important business at hand.
Ossie called everyone inside. Pipes were upended and the ashes extinguished underfoot. Boots clumped across the floorboards. The pews scraped as the men spread them further apart to accommodate their legs. Slants of sun angled down through the windows, catching the dust in the air. There was a buzz of conversation, all the men, unused to being indoors, behaving like they were back in the schoolhouse. Harv Selby even picked some mud from the sole of his boot and flicked it at Baldy Baldock’s head. Fisher’s squeaky preaching was drowned out when the doors closed.
When Ossie took to the stage there were ironic cheers. Someone called out, ‘Two schooners thanks, love.’
Ossie held up his palms for peace. He raised his voice. ‘There is nothing I would like more than to spend my Sunday afternoon imbibing roziners with you. It is all onkus when, instead of spending my own time as I please, I must spend it asking you why: why are we not worth more oodle?’
A cheer burst up from the crowd. Clancy was picking scabs from his knee. Douglas lightly smacked his fingers and motioned him to pay attention. Clancy scowled.
Ossie went on, ‘No one is arguing that the Australian Kerosene Oil and Mineral Company shouldn’t be in this business to turn a profit. Fair play to them. But we are their lifeblood. They are about to introduce a night shift, so we will be working around the clock. Some of us will never see daylight.’ Groans. ‘Surely it is not unreasonable that some of that profit be funnelled the way of the workers?’ Another cheer.
My father rose to his feet. ‘I have a question.’
‘Yes, Douglas.’
My father looked suddenly abashed with everybody’s eyes on him. ‘What about Finbar Lyohon? His hand was crushed in a fall last month and he still cannot throw a pick properly. Who is going to feed his family apart from our own wives cooking up a little extra?’
Faces turned towards Finbar Lyohon, whose arm was nestled in a sling across his chest. He waved his good hand sheepishly. While the attention was off him my father sat down. He hadn’t mentioned it, but he also knew about the situation firsthand on account of his foot. He owed the wives of his neighbours for feeding us when he had been off work.
‘What about safety?’ a voice cried out.
‘Why are we working a twelve-hour day?’ came another. ‘Must we work a twelve-hour night as well?’
‘These questions I cannot answer,’ said Ossie, ‘but I have brought you someone who can.’ A man wearing a long overcoat and a weskit underneath it stepped up from the front row. Ossie continued, ‘Clyde Dundas works for the Finger Wharf Torbanite Shipping Company in Sydney and he has a few words for you.’
There was some desultory clapping while the men tried to work out who this Clyde Dundas was. He was clean-shaven, which did not immediately endear him to them. His hands were clean and white. Beneath his overcoat he was shaped like a pear, perhaps a soggy pear. When Ossie moved aside, Dundas stepped up to the podium and waited for silence. He took out his spectacles and huffed on them, polishing them with a handkerchief. ‘Working men of Katoomba,’ he began, ‘how many of you who have worked as spraggers have lost a finger in the course of your work?’
Eleven men, including Douglas, put up a hand.
‘Working men of the Australian Kerosene Oil and Mineral Company, I ask you why any man injured in the line of his work should not be compensated for the wages he loses through no fault of his own?’
‘Enough with the jawing tacks,’ Clancy muttered to himself. Douglas elbowed him. He had an attentive expression on his face.
‘It’s high time the company realises that without their workers – yes, you – they would have no profit. Their existence on the stock exchange would cease.’
‘Hear, hear,’ called Farnell. I could tell that, apart from Clancy, who was restless with boredom, everyone was interested in what Dundas had to say. He seemed to have a little blarney in him.
‘I have recently returned,’ Dundas went on, ‘from the Greater Lithgow Colliery and I can tell you that the workers there are organised. Never would they hold a meeting such as this on their own time. If the Australian Kerosene Oil and Mineral Company wants a fair day’s work then they must be prepared to pay a fair day’s wages. One pound per week is not a fair remuneration. Why does Mr John B. North, the so-called father of Katoomba, sit in his comfortable chair up at the Carrington Hotel sipping his Champagne, while you are scraping to buy shoes for your children? It is a sad state of affairs.’
Clancy and I both looked down at our raggedy boots with the sudden realisation that they were too small. The leather curled in them like a panting dog’s tongue.
Someone called out from the back of the hall, ‘North won’t listen to the likes of us.’
Dundas roared, ‘Then he should be made to listen. There needs to be some system of compulsory arbitration where both sides can state their case and he will be forced to hear what you have to say. Why does he appear to have no interest in that? All of your questions should be put to him. As one of you good gentlemen has noted – and this is one of our primary concerns – why do you work such long hours? Twelve hours a day is tantamount to slavery. I say the sweat of an eight-hour day is enough for them.’
There was a loud cheer from the crowd. This was one of our big gripes. Eight hours, now there was something to think about.
Mr Dundas continued in this fashion for a while longer, asking questions to which it seemed he already had the answers, because he then went on and answered them. There was a lot of mumbled agreement. His opinions were strong and well put, but there were a number of men, family men for the most part, shuffling their feet uncomfortably. There was bewilderment in the room. A feeling of men being conscripted for a stoush they did not quite believe in. I could see the logic of his words but was not convinced of them myself. Not yet.
Eventually Dundas stopped talking and Ossie called the meeting to a close. We stepped outside. The day had changed its aspect. Purple clouds were now rolling in from the west. A handful of yellow-tailed black cockatoos, the largest birds of the parrot family, drifted across the grey sky, confirming, as the first drops began to fall, rain.
‘See North’s henchmen over there,’ my father muttered as we stepped from the hall. Fisher had gone, but across the muddy street two men stood under the awning of Harris’s haberdashers. They were Crusher Edwards and Buggery Clout, the mine overseer and the constable sheltering under the one umbrella. Clout was writing in a little notebook, presumably noting the name of each man as it was whispered in his ear by Edwards. When the last of us had filed from the hall, Crusher Edwards took the umbrella and ambled off down the hill beneath the shelter of the store awnings. Ossie Farnell and Clyde Dundas marched across the street to confront Buggery Clout.
‘Come on, boys,’ said Douglas, ‘let’s watch the fireworks.’ He dragged me across the road, but Clancy wouldn’t follow. He was too fearful.
‘Why are you spying on us for North, Barnaby?’ Ossie asked. ‘This is a private meeting.’
Buggery looked from Farnell to Dundas like an owl with a mouse in its craw. There was a rip in the lapel of his uniform, and a button had disappeared in the course of its duty. ‘I’m not spying, Ossie.’
‘What are you writing in the book then?’
‘My shopping list.’
Dundas made a point of scratching his arse. ‘If North is so interested in what we’ve got to say,’ he said, ‘then why didn’t he come down here for himself?’
‘Because,’ said Clout calmly, ‘you didn’t invite him.’
‘You’re a disgrace.’ Dundas raised his voice and we all saw he had a short wick. ‘Undermining the rights of the workers.’ Clout was ignoring him, playing with the hole in his uniform. Dundas spat, ‘Why don’t you g
o home and let your little wife repair that and leave the real men to discuss what we have to discuss?’
Clout looked up slowly from the frayed fabric and studied Dundas, then pocketed his notebook. The weather was closing in. Clout raised his constable’s collar and strolled away from us, up the hill towards the station, beyond the site of the old railway crushers. As he walked he spat a goob of gollion onto the boardwalk to show what he thought of Clyde Dundas and the rights of the workers.
Water dripped from the shop eaves. The men from the meeting opted to adjourn to a sly grog tent where they knew they’d be sure to get a drop of roziner on a Sunday. After their mizzling they were thirsty, and there was still the long walk back into the valley. The holiday atmosphere was still alive and a schooner or ten would be just the ticket. Douglas told Clancy and me to go to Ann’s house and wait for him there. Of course, this gave us the best part of the afternoon unleashed in the town.
The men traipsed off happily.
‘Come on,’ I said to Clancy. I wanted to see where Clout was going. His tall figure stood out even halfway up the hill.
Ambling on his long legs, Clout paused at Wei Sing’s vegetable cart and ruffled the Chinaman’s hair. Wei Sing looked as though he had a spider on his head. He had no Christian scruples about trading on a Sunday. Clout moved on. When we came by, Wei Sing waggled his finger at us, pointing at Clout. A warning, clear as day, not to go too close.
‘Hello, boys,’ said Miss Husband, who was there buying prunes.
‘Hello,’ I replied.
Clancy said, ‘We’re not boys.’
Wei Sing said, ‘You like prunes, missy, you like prunes?’
‘Yes, yes, I like prunes,’ she said, haughtily.
After we had left the cart Clancy said, ‘I don’t like it that my ma has to work for that man.’
‘Wei Sing? I’d rather work for him than for Buggery Clout,’ I said truthfully.
‘I suppose so, but he smells funny.’
‘Clancy, you smell funny. All he’s doing is trying to earn a zack.’
‘I suppose.’
‘He’s looked out for you in the past.’
‘Has he?’
From the main street the great curving driveway rose towards the verandah and balustrade of the Carrington Hotel. The tennis court out the front was lush and unoccupied. This was not a watering hole for miners, but a luxurious Eden for the likes of North and his cronies. Now we watched Clout disappear inside.
The drizzle began to get heavier. A couple of chambermaids were leaving from their afternoon shift. One of them was Violet Kefford. I almost didn’t recognise her with her long hair coiled up under her bonnet. Clancy’s face brightened. We followed at a furtive distance until her companion, a girl called Matilda Sherman, turned off into Lurline Street. Then we caught up with Violet and offered to escort her home. At first she wouldn’t talk to us. She was playing Miss High-and-Mighty, until we suggested that perhaps she had caught a dose of Miss Husband’s Scarlatti fever. Maybe she would like some prunes. ‘You like prunes, missy?’ I mimicked Wei Sing. That, at last, made her laugh. It’s a lovely sound to hear a girl laughing at something you have said. This dissipated the fear I had that Mr Kefford might jump out of the bushes.
‘You boys,’ she said, ‘are not characters of salubrity.’ It was a word she had picked up at the Carrington.
‘Does that mean we have caviar on our noses?’ I asked.
‘We are not boys,’ snorted Clancy again. ‘We are working men.’
‘I very much doubt that.’
‘See here, we have oodle.’ And Clancy spilled from his pocket some coins, which he then had to scramble for. I rolled my eyes and gave her a look as if to say Please ignore this immature child, but I don’t know if she received this message.
Clancy and I showed her how we could balance along a sandstone wall, but she wasn’t greatly impressed, so I climbed down and dawdled beside her while Clancy bounded along, jumping up to swing from overhanging branches, shaking water from the leaves and making her squeal. When we neared her house in Darley Street she suddenly turned, saying she couldn’t be seen with us, as her brothers and sisters would give her no end of grief. And if her father caught us … well, we didn’t know what he was capable of.
‘I don’t care what he thinks,’ said Clancy. But I did. I cared greatly what Mr Kefford thought.
She ran off. Seeing her go, her hair coming loose, was the afternoon’s little glowing moment that warmed us in the mist.
When we got back to Ann’s house she and Emma were ensconced by the stove, where they had spent the afternoon drinking about ten cups of tea each. It was warm. The kitchen smelled … exotic – I couldn’t think of a better word.
The house looked somehow smaller than when I had last visited. There wasn’t a spider web to be seen. A pot steamed and bubbled on the stove top. Sweet-smelling herbs lay on chopping boards waiting their turn. Braids of garlic hung from a hook in the ceiling. Emma later told me what they were.
It was nice to hear the sisters goistering together in their private language. It made me realise they had a history beyond that of my own little slop bowl. There were johnny cakes on the table. Clancy and I scoffed some and went back outside.
‘Make sure you bring in some dry wood from under the tarpy,’ Ann called.
‘It’s like a witch’s den in there,’ said Clancy moodily.
‘It smells pretty good,’ I said.
Emma couldn’t face the walk back down to the valley, so had decided we were spending the night at Ann’s place. That night, as we were dozing off the door gusted open and my father stumbled in, filling the small house with very different odours.
‘Thank goodness you’re here at last,’ we heard Emma say quietly. My father grumbled low in his throat like a horse over a carrot. He had been on the tiger. He burped musically, then kicked off his boots and rain-sodden trousers. In the glow from the stove his legs were pale as peeled sticks. He grumbled as he kicked a chair with his toe.
The sisters laughed softly at him. ‘You can’t sleep in this bed,’ said one of them. ‘Go and kip in a chair, you old soak.’
‘Can’t a man share a bed with his two wives?’
‘You can go to blazes.’
‘It’s your loss.’ He belched again, then scraped two chairs together and arranged a couple of cushions. Emma threw a blanket at him. Very soon he began to snore like an etherised cricket. Clancy and I lay awake for a long time listening to him. We all had an early start in the morning.
TWELVE
Violet Kefford was a beauty. She had just the right number of freckles on her nose. Her hair looked like it had been glazed with sugar and baked. Sometimes strands of it escaped her braid and caught the sunlight. She had been with us in the schoolhouse, but that was long ago. And now she worked as a chambermaid in the big hotel on top of the hill, hired on the recommendation of Mrs Haddock, head of house staff, who was friendly with Miss Husband’s mother. She had been there for ten months. It was a position that offered her some respite from the temper of her mother and father. Violet was earning her own oodle. She had money in her poque. If she saved a shilling a week she could estimate in her head how much she would have in twelve or eighteen or twenty-four months, and what use she might put it towards.
After that first Sunday when we’d met her outside the hotel, we often contrived to be there at around the same time to walk her home. Clancy always danced along beside her, hopping, skipping, buzzing about like a fly on a windowpane. One day he made her a special gift of a chisel. I don’t know what she thought of a chisel as a gift (probably it was as much use to her as the forceps Mr Kefford had brandished in my face). I think I saw more clearly than Clancy that Violet really wanted nothing to do with the likes of us – hopping, skipping, buzzing boys who collected firewood for their mothers. Besides, with five younger siblings Violet had enough of that sort of boisterous childishness in her own house. And Mr Kefford had taken an ambiguous dislike to me, and
a more clear-cut dislike to Clancy. Louts, he called us.
Violet enjoyed being part of the life of the town. The Carrington was a constant hive of activity. It was as busy as a wasp hole, with tradesmen and lots of important visitors coming and going whom she liked to tell us about. Clancy sometimes dared me (so that I would dare him in return) to sneak up to the hotel’s front entrance, or through the maze of alleys to the kitchen doors at the rear, only to be chased off by some ostler or iron-faced battleaxe. He was hoping for a glimpse of Violet at her work.
Violet’s duties, she explained, included laundering, ironing, bedmaking, assisting in the kitchen, waiting on tables, serving high tea – oh, and of course cleaning. She swept dead blowflies from all the windowsills. She polished the ornate gold-framed mirrors scattered throughout the hotel. She polished banisters and the grand piano in the music room until her reflection gleamed back at her. Sometimes, if no one was about, she would pluck a single note from the piano, letting it hover in the air, before moving guiltily on. But the place she most liked to loiter was the library, which required considerable cleaning. Books were such dusty things. It was also her duty, once Mr Goyder realised she was trustworthy, to wind the hotel clocks each morning. There was a special bunch of keys for this task, like a bundle of bird’s bones, kept behind the reception desk with all the other keys.
Every morning the cook would send her to the Chinaman to buy fresh vegetables for the day’s menu. Violet liked this job, because it allowed her out of the building, even though she didn’t wholly understand what the Chinaman said to her. ‘Missy’ seemed to be his favourite word. Their business was conducted in a series of gestures involving her slender fingers and Wei Sing’s abacus. Violet was good at her sums. In the schoolhouse her arithmetic was more advanced than ours on account of her being there longer, and her slates were always so much neater. Wei Sing gave her the best vegetables he had on his cart. If she objected to the quality of the beans or the shape of the carrots, he would reveal to her the better ones hidden away under a tarpy, placing a finger at his lips and glancing slyly about the street. If the cabbage moths had laid eggs in the cabbage leaves, he sorted through them until he found a clean one with no caterpillars.