Take my word for it, Mrs Smithson. If we don’t stop them now they’ll be over here.
But what would they want with Blackball? She wants to ask it out loud. What would they want with us? Haven’t they got land enough where they are? She wants to ask, aren’t the German soldiers human like us? Haven’t they got their own babies left behind at home? Would men who have babies of their own kill other people’s and eat them?
But if she says that they’ll think she’s for the Hun and disloyal to Our Brave Lads. But then, their own union of miners is against the war. Who’s right? What’s right? The Germans are the Hun, the Beast, yet the Germans are also Otto and his mother and Klara and though she’s never liked Klara and has good reason to dislike her more now, she can’t imagine Klara would ever kill and eat a baby. Otto’s father? She can’t remember much about him, only that he had pale eyes the same as Otto, and he was big and talked funny like Mrs Bader, but from what she remembers of him he was kind enough.
They whisper about him now. Gone back to Germany, they say, carrying with him the information he got from spying all the years he was here. But what in Blackball is there to spy on and didn’t he leave before all this happened? At the time everyone said he had another woman but now it’s turned around to him being a spy. Otto says, with the war on, his father can’t send money to his mother any more. She wonders if people have taken against Mrs Bader and if they will still let their girls learn to play the piano at her house. She wonders if Mrs Bader is still allowed to bake bread for the general store, or if people won’t buy her bread any more because of how she makes it, thick and brown with pumpkin seeds across the top. German bread.
Ma is fading. She was thin, always, but now she’s insubstantial, like a shadow flickering by the edge of a room, her wrists and ankles spindly and brittle and underneath her eyes is purple-blue. Sometimes she presses her hand against her side and her breathing comes harsh. She goes earlier and earlier to bed. Daddy comes in late if he comes in at all. She’s heard he has a woman in town and that suits her well enough; so long as he gives her money and keeps away from Ma she has no need for worry about him. She waits until Ma’s asleep and settled before she goes out herself.
She looks up as he comes up over the bank towards her. ‘People are still saying it’ll be finished with soon.’ She looks down at the ground, takes a handful of stones and sands and sifts them through her fingers. ‘At Smithsons, Mr Costley said German soldiers were cutting off Belgian kiddies’ hands.’
‘Do you believe that?’ He’s watching her as if what she thinks really matters and she thinks carefully before she answers.
‘I don’t want to believe it. But if it’s not true, why are they telling us such terrible things?’ She’s asked the right question because now he’s smiling. And, oh, that smile he has for her, her dazzling boy, his arms and face pale gold and his hair shining, his eyes glittering.
‘Because those who want the war mean us to believe it. They tell their lies so people will believe Germans are monsters who have to be stopped and keeping on with the war is the only way of making them. In Germany there’ll be the same stories coming out about us. They’ll be saying British soldiers are cutting off German children’s hands.’
‘They never would.’
‘Of course not, but what these warmongers want people to believe is this war is about right against wrong so they’ll think their men are dying for an honourable cause when all the time it’s about economic rivalry. The Stuttgart conference — have you heard of the Stuttgart conference, Pansy?’
She shakes her head. She feels nervous, now, because he’s read all of these books and he’s talked to clever people and now he’s telling her and trusting her with it, hoping she will understand and see it the same way.
‘Well, what the resolution that came out of it said was war between capitalist states — and this is what this one is, of course, Pansy — is all about economic rivalry and countries arming themselves to the hilt so they can compete. The conference said that wars divert the working class from its own battle and from solidarity with the workers of other countries.’
Oh, how she loves to hear him talk with his hands moving and his eyes and voice fair sizzling with his ideas, the words rat-tat-tatting out at her like pellets. He makes her feel more important than just another girl cleaning and cooking for a boarding house in a little place miles from anywhere and anything. He makes Blackball out to be somewhere where grand things happen.
‘I wasn’t ever coming back here but once I was at the university I started to think about it because what’s the use of learning unless it’s to try to change things? I started to see what’s here is a perfect little model of the way the rest of the world is. The way it’s set up with the management in a different part of town from the workers and the difference in the houses, the management with their big gardens and clean water supply while all the workers get is a bit of scrub and the water that runs off the roofs. And the single men’s huts, hardly bigger than dog kennels and blazing hot in the summer and freezing in the winter. What better example could you have of divisions of class? Then there’s the owners above it all creaming off the big profit and never coming near the place.
‘But think what’s been done here by the worker for the worker. It’s the workers who’ve set everything up here. All we ever get from the company is wages, nothing for the town or for the workers and their families. But look at what the workers’ union has built up here. And not only that, look what else that’s been done. Union militancy. The longest strike ever held in this country — and we won it as well.’
She was only a girl still at school when the strike happened; all she knew of it was Daddy wasn’t at work and that meant trouble for her and Ma with him home all day. She remembers coming home from school for her dinner and all there’d be was the soup made from scraps of meat and barley at the beginning of the week, watered down to do another day. She remembers Ma’s face the times she came back inside the kitchen with the empty tin after the hens didn’t lay and Ma going out with the tomahawk in her hand to kill another of them even though they were still young and good layers. Ma sending her to the grocer’s for flour and sugar, I told your ma, no more tick till it’s paid, the kids who didn’t come to school any more because of the families leaving, some of them in the night because they didn’t want to be seen giving in. Worst of everything, though, was the week after week of Daddy going off to meetings and coming back with his face flushed up, ready for another row.
But the way he explained it to her, the strike was history in the making. The strike was a blow against capitalism. It was workers rising up for their rights.
‘The men are down in the mines long hours and it’s dangerous, filthy work yet all those buggers would allow them was fifteen minutes out under the sky to eat their crib. Fifteen minutes was all they had until Pat Hickey said he hadn’t finished his pie and he was taking thirty. Then what did that bastard Leitch do but sack him and the six other men with him? Troublemakers, he said they were. Troublemakers for wanting a bit of time to eat?’
He laughed, throwing his head back. ‘And then what happens but the other men come out with them. Thirteen weeks they stood against it and the town stood with them. The day they took Pat and his mates away for the trial, the whole town came out to see them off with the brass band and all. Thirteen weeks of no pay packets and courts and threats and fines but they won. And we did it again. Last year’s strike and we were the ones who held out the longest. I’m learning here and this is the best place for it, working beside the others, listening to what they have to say, reading everything I can get my hands on. We might be a little place but this place is all about solidarity, Pansy. Solidarity and strength.’
She knows they listen to him in the union. He’s got a name already there and she’s proud of how he is. ‘So those leading the war are only making it up about the Belgian babies and the nuns to keep the fighting going?’
‘In the Argus it said ladies in the cities were in the streets giving out white feathers to men not in uniforms and some of them went to sign up because of it. Seems like everyone’s in on it now.’
‘Well,’ he says, ‘looks like we’re stuck with it. All we can hope for is something better will come out of it.’
‘I thought you were against it.’
‘This war could sort things out once and for all. After it’s over, those who’re left might see what’s been lost and who’s responsible and start thinking differently about their kings and kaisers and czars and the politicians and generals and industrialists all safe and warm in their own houses while the boys were out being killed in the muck they created.’
‘Mr Costley says—’ Though she keeps her face serious, inside she’s laughing at teasing him. ‘Mr Costley says if we don’t stop them over there, next thing they’ll be over here and that’ll be the end of justice and freedom in the world.’
‘Costley’s a fool!’ He looks angry.
‘Mr Costley says they’re coming over. He says they’re on their way. They’ve got their hand grenades all ready for us to play with.’ She reaches out her hand and tickles him under the ribs, the way she used to when they were children and he grasps her arms and holds her and he’s laughing now as well. She loves how his man-seriousness collapses into the boy she remembers and she reaches her hands upwards and tugs his hair.
‘They’ll be waiting for you,’ she whispers. ‘Down the mine. All ready with their bayonets.’
Long ago they’d told their stories in the dark, stories that’d frightened each of them out of their wits, every one of them more frightening than the one before it. Now his body is pressing against hers and he’s kissing her, his lips so full and so soft. She loves it all, the talking and the teasing and the kissing. She loves him. She loves him.
The trick is to see it when the right person, strong enough to rescue you, comes along.
16
The summer comes so hot, most nights they go down the creek to swim. He goes ahead of her to where the men and boys swim naked; not that you talked about it, but you knew the place for men to go and the women to stay separate. When they were children, they’d always swum together, taking little notice of the difference in their bodies though Pansy was always glad when she looked that she didn’t have anything so uncomfortable and untidy dangling between her legs.
Now, she waits until he’s gone before she takes off her dress and underthings and slips into the water. She longs to swim, needs it after the heat of the day and working in Smithsons’ kitchen. But they have little enough time together.
It’s her that says it: ‘Swim here with me.’
Her that comes to him and presses her mouth and her body against his in the coolness of the water.
Daddy talks against him, she hears him say he’s a young hothead who’s got big ideas of himself speaking out the way he does against older men. If people begin to talk, if Daddy hears of it, there’d be the kind of trouble that would see them both off out of the town and, though leaving is in their plans, it’s not the right time yet. She’s under age, she can’t marry without her parents’ consent — and she can’t leave Ma.
But neither can she leave him these nights. They stay later and later together. She has learned his body: the lean stretch of it, the silkiness of the hair around his groin, the tickly curls on his chest, his little bum that she can cup and grip in her hands, the way his prick bends and rises when she strokes it, when she lowers her face and touches it with her tongue.
Afterwards they stay pressed together. They shared their childhoods but after that there’s still so much left to find out about. She tells him about the scholarship, about Miss Appleby, she tells him how she tried to trick Daddy and he tells her about the school.
‘They wanted us all the same, Pansy. Sons of the Empire. It was all about cricket and rugby and thinking we were better than anyone else because we were at the school with our lives set before us. I didn’t see it at the time, there was no one there thought anything different. It wasn’t till I went to varsity, started talking to others with different ideas and going to their meetings that I started thinking for myself.’
Loving and talking, falling asleep until one of them wakes and when she slips inside the door at home the roosters are already calling and there’s the light coming in the kitchen window. She looks first at Ma before she gets into her own bed for some sleep before she goes to Smithsons. Daddy’s never there. She knows the name of the woman now, it’s Letty Davis, works in the bar at the Dominion. Well, good luck to the pair of them, so long as they leave her and Ma alone.
Long as they leave her alone. Because this is hers. It’s not what she planned for herself but now it’s come she knows it’s what’s always been meant for her. For him as well. They’ll be together, they will be always. The war, Daddy, Ma, working at Smithsons, all of that will fade away and it’ll be just her and him, somewhere else, somewhere different, because, while he’s learning here, learning what he needs to know, it doesn’t end here, he tells her, not by a long chalk. After the war when things are left upside down, well, he’s going to be there in the middle when those things start to right themselves. And she’ll be right alongside him. She will be his wife.
And then there’s the morning she comes in and Daddy is there waiting for her, all filled up with whisky and rage and bluster.
Mrs Barnes from across the road called in last night wanted a cup of flour and there’s your ma on the floor dead. You left her, she was on her own they had to call for me you bitch where were you where have you been? It’s that Kraut, isn’t it? Don’t think I haven’t heard the stories. You’ve been with that Kraut.
Part Three
I knew a simple soldier boy
Who grinned at life in empty joy,
Slept soundly through the lonesome dark,
And whistled early with the lark.
‘Suicide in the Trenches’, Siegfried Sassoon
17
It had always been the three of them, him and Pansy and Otto. ‘You can see that lad is the apple of his mother’s eye,’ Mother always said. Gets away with murder, he does. You can see where all the looks and brains went to in that family, poor lass.
Klara had been at the Christmas dance tonight along with everyone else and he’d got her up for a couple of the schottisches, one of the gypsy taps as well; big and awkward as she is, there are never many lads that ask her. It’s worse now, her being German and all; he saw how some of the girls have stopped talking to her. He can’t help but wonder why she comes at all. Still, she was always that way; following him and Otto and Pansy about when it was clear she wasn’t wanted.
Poor lass. Poor Klara. He feels pity for her now, kept back one class then two and there she was, a head, at least, taller than the others, stuttering and stumbling through her reading and her sums. On Friday afternoons, Clem saw how even Miss Appleby, who was generally kind, flinched as Klara was called to recite. ‘“The Village Blacksmith” by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.’ It was the same poem, always, and she would raise her eyes and stare at the rafters high above their heads as she began to sway back and forward, her voice flat and heavy and relentless except for that one word in each line that everyone in the school had learned to wait for, even the littlest ones up front who clapped their hands to their mouths holding back the giggles from the shock of it. That one word bellowed out; it was Klara’s way of minding Mr Kennedy’s warning that they must not only memorise their poems but must recite with expression.
‘Under a spreading chestnut-TREE/ The village SMITHY stands.’
As Klara approached the end of the poem, she’d begin to recite more rapidly so she’d be fair racing through those final lines. Clem had read the poem for himself, seeing in his mind’s eye the gnarled trunk of the tree with the branches stretching above it, making an umbrella of shade for the blacksmith who needs the coolness after the heat and hardness of his work, but the words became so jumbled all he could picture was a fly caught humming and buzzing in a bottle.
‘Thus on its sounding ANVIL shaped/ Each burning deed and THOUGHT!’
Poor Klara. Poor Otto, as well, with his eyes fixed on her, his face flushed and his eyes glassy as if he wanted to cry. Still, Clem had watched the rage that stood out in dark red blotches on Klara’s face and neck as she threw her arms about, trying to swat Otto as he ducked and scurried and laughed at her.
Toiling, rejoicing, sorrowing. Toiling, rejoicing, sorrowing.
Well, they laughed at her and they ran away but she always dances with him readily enough and she gives him a bit of a smile when he asks her so she can’t bear a grudge for what’s past. He’s seen how she watches when he dances with Pansy and he hopes there’s nothing more in that than a bit of curiosity about who’s dancing together.
Pansy was two full years younger than Klara, though they were in the same class. Clem saw the glint in Miss Appleby’s eye whenever Mr Kennedy said her name and pointed at her with his ruler. That way she had of walking up to the front of the schoolroom and taking her place, her plaits with the little upward curls at the end where they were tied, her little hands folded, as Miss Appleby had told them, at the line of their waists. She’d stand a moment facing the silent room and then she would tip up her chin. ‘“My Kingdom” by Robert Louis Stevenson.’
Each word sounded faultless to Clem’s ear, chiming out like the sound of a clapper striking the underside of a bell, sweet and perfect. ‘Down by a shining water well/ I found a very little dell,/ No higher than my head./ The heather and the gorse about/ In summer bloom were coming out,/ Some yellow and some red.’
Through the Lonesome Dark Page 13