Thorn on the Rose

by Joy Dettman

  ‘Tell him I’m going home on Thursday, Mrs Norris.’

  ‘Of course, pet. Will you have dinner with me tonight?’

  ‘You’re doing too much for us, Mrs Norris.’

  ‘I don’t enjoy eating alone, pet. We’ll be eating leftovers.’ She’d put on a spread for her minister — perhaps attempting to fatten him up.

  They were washing the few dishes when Wilfred called again. This time Jenny took the telephone.

  ‘We have a function on Saturday night, my dear,’ he said. ‘At that Hornsby Hall we had such difficulty finding. They have asked specifically for our pretty singer.’

  ‘I can’t, Mr Whiteford.’

  ‘Would Jim have wanted you to give up your singing?’ he asked.

  He shouldn’t have said that. It made it sound as if Jim was dead. And he wasn’t. It made her realise too that the last thing in the world Jim would ever want was for her to stop singing.

  ‘I can’t manage on Friday night tips, Mr Whiteford. If I had someone to look after Jimmy, I’d get a proper job and I’d stay and sing for free.’

  ‘Of course,’ he said. ‘Forgive my lack of consideration.’

  ‘Is money a problem, Jenny?’ Myrtle asked when the phone was back on the hook.

  ‘I’ve got some in the bank.’

  ‘I’ll miss you and this dear boy so much.’

  ‘We’ll miss you and Amberley, but it will be better if I’m at home. If any news comes about Jim it will go to his father. Up here I won’t hear it for days.’

  ‘You and Jimmy are his next of kin, pet. You have every right to contact the —’

  Jenny looked at her landlady, wishing she could tell her the truth. She didn’t dare. Didn’t want to lose that woman’s respect.

  ‘When do you hope to leave?’

  ‘I’ll see if I can get a seat south on Thursday. My rent is paid until Thursday.’

  ‘That’s of no account —’

  ‘It is to me.’

  ‘I . . . I could not fail to hear your conversation with Mr Whiteford. You must know that I’d be more than happy to care for Jimmy — if you decided to seek employment.’

  ‘I hadn’t really thought about it until I said it.’

  ‘Perhaps you should give yourself time to think about it.’

  ‘You mean you’d look after him every day? All day?’

  ‘You must know what a joy he is to me.’

  *

  On Monday morning, Jenny left Jimmy with Mrs Norris and went to the bank. She withdrew ten pounds then walked to the station to buy her ticket home.

  A train was waiting there, and on impulse she bought a ticket and took the train to the station near that street of factories. She found her way back to that heavy green door with the sign still pinned to it and before she could change her mind she rang the rusty old door bell.

  A woman with cottons in her hair answered the bell’s clamour.

  ‘You’re advertising for machinists. I can use a treadle machine.’

  ‘That won’t do you much good here.’ The green door began to close.

  ‘My husband is missing in action. I’ve got a little boy to feed.’

  ‘I’ve seen your type come and go, girl. They last five minutes in this place,’ the woman said.

  ‘I promise I’ll last more than five minutes.’

  ‘We start at eight,’ the woman said. She was closing the door.

  ‘Does that mean . . .’

  ‘You’ve talked yourself into a five-minute trial, girl. Be on time.’ And the door slammed shut.

  She had a job! Or a five-minute trial for a job . . .

  On Tuesday morning she arrived well before eight, clad in her once-lime green frock, and Maisy’s thigh-length black cardigan, and she waited for half an hour in the chill of morning while girls wandered up to that door, smoking girls, talking in bunches. Jenny stood alone, knowing she didn’t belong here, scared stiff, or frozen stiff, but the door opened and she followed the crowd into a barn of a room, a cold, high-ceilinged room, with many lights hanging low on lint-covered chains, and beneath those lights, wall to wall machines. The girls separated, chose their machines.

  She stood until the forewoman saw her and led her down worn steps to a smaller barn, led her around a tall table that might seat forty to where three girls had taken their positions to snip threads, led her between giant machines to a long workbench with a field of machine heads growing out of it — and nothing, nothing in that cold barn which bore any resemblance to Granny’s little treadle sewing machine. She’d talked herself into this. She had to go through with it.

  The woman pointed her to a vacant chair set before a dustsheet-covered machine head. ‘Sit.’

  Four or five girls on either side, a matching number opposite, and at the far end of the workbench a huge belt, like at the sawmills, slapping, driving whatever it was that drove those twenty bench machines.

  Her ears were assaulted by the noise. Eyes assaulted by too much. The size of the place. The metal-lined gutter running down the centre of the bench like a water channel — a shirt channel. Bits and pieces of shirt running like small tributaries into the main channel, streams of collars, streams of pockets. Jenny sat in stunned silence while the forewoman instructed. A loud woman; voice on her like a bullocky, Granny might have said. She needed to be loud.

  Someone else was louder. ‘Mrs Crump!’

  And the woman with cottons in her hair, who must have been Mrs Crump, was gone and Jenny left holding a misshapen piece of fabric. And what the hell was she supposed to do with that?

  Girl on her left zipping around collars, dozens of them. Cotton running from giant reels, never cut, never tied off like Granny always tied off her threads. Girl opposite, already creating a blockage in her section of the metal channel.

  Five minutes the forewoman had given her. Had she been here for five minutes? Jenny was ready to run.

  But some of the girls looked like schoolkids. She watched the girl on her left feeding in collar after collar. She turned to the girl on her right and watched her break a needle, heard her swear. Turned quickly back to the girl on her left, who looked fourteen, with a face full of pimples and bottle-top glasses, but had her machine eating the fabric out of her hand and howling for more. She saw how the girl placed the fabric beneath the foot. The machine foot was the same as Granny’s. Jenny placed her fabric, then pressed down on the pedal. The machine attacked. She snatched her hand away in time.

  Heard the cry of ‘Mrs Crump!’ from Jenny’s right.

  ‘They don’t grow on trees, girl,’ the forewoman said. She fitted a new needle, and to prove she’d last more than five minutes, Jenny got her machine hopping at a pace she could control. That was the trick, just the barest pressure on that foot pedal, then slam down your heel when you wanted the thing to stop.

  Mrs Crump stood behind her, watching her turn that misshapen fabric around as Granny had shown her how to turn the fabric around, with the needle down; watching her following that stitching line back, then with not a word she was gone.

  Backwards and forwards Jenny went, up and down that fabric, showing the machine who was boss — until the noise died.

  It was like being in Woody Creek when the mills stopped. Like a world-ending silence. She glanced around, wondering why the machines had stopped. There was no blackout; the lights were still on.

  ‘Morning tea,’ the girl on her right said. ‘And thank Christ for that much.’

  Jenny followed the herd through a rear door. Tea was supplied, but she had to bring her own cup.

  ‘Use Barbara’s,’ a girl said. ‘She’s off sick today.’

  ‘Sick of work,’ another said.

  Jenny used Barbara’s cup and never in her life had a cup of tea tasted so good. She sat at a rough wooden table. A woman with peroxide blonde hair offered her a biscuit, and her name. Norma — or was she Roma, and the girl beside her with the glasses was Norma? Too many girls. A hive of girls all talking at once.

&nbs
p; ‘Jenny. Jenny Hooper,’ she said.

  They washed their cups at a grubby sink, queued to use two toilets, clustered before a small mirror to comb their hair, then back they went to the machines.

  The forewoman dumped a bundle onto Jenny’s section of the workbench. ‘Pocket hems,’ she said.

  It wasn’t pockets. It was a bundle of bits tied together with a strip of the same material, a cardboard tag on it.

  ‘Untie it,’ the girl with the pimples and bottle-tops said, pushing through more collars — and how could there be so many shirts in the world needing collars?

  ‘Fag it,’ the girl on her right said. ‘She’ll tell me not to come back tomorrow.’ Pretty little dark headed girl, she looked sixteen. Her mouth didn’t sound sixteen.

  Jenny opened her bundle and found what looked like pockets.

  ‘Oh, bugger me dead if I haven’t done it again! Mrs Crump!’ the dark girl yelled.

  ‘Fools are thick on the ground, girl,’ the forewoman said. ‘I can pick them up for a penny a dozen.’

  ‘It’s the cotton’s fault. It keeps bogging up underneath,’ the girl argued.

  ‘Keep convincing me that you’re a fool and you’ll be out that door.’

  Jenny stitched the hems of pockets until the machines stopped for lunch. She hadn’t brought lunch but she followed two girls to a street of shops five minutes down the road. There she bought a hot pastie with tomato sauce, which she ate on the way back.

  ‘I’m Selma,’ one of the girls she’d followed said.

  ‘Jenny. Jenny Hooper.’

  All afternoon, she stitched pocket hems, keeping her head down and her fingers safe. And she learned that she’d only thought she’d been living in Sydney these past months. She hadn’t. Jim had set her down on some school-teaching, hot water on tap, la-di-da island. This place was the reverse side of that Sydney.

  ‘Have you got the time?’ The dark girl on her right wanted the day over.

  ‘No watch.’

  ‘You’re married, too?’

  ‘He’s fighting the Japs.’

  ‘Mine’s up north somewhere. He got me up the duff to get out of going, then had to go anyway, and I got stuck with his mother and a pair of bawling twins. How’s that for luck? Twins first pop.’

  Jenny nodded, stitched pocket hems, never-ending pocket hems.

  ‘He was getting leave, so I cleared out. I’m staying with my cousin — the blonde on the buttonholer. She got me a week’s trial. Do they have to keep you for the full week?’

  Jenny had been given a five-minute trial. She stitched faster, her mind centred on shirt pockets until someone turned off the power and her machine freewheeled to a halt.

  ‘And thank Christ for that much,’ the girl on her right said.

  Dustsheets being spread. Jenny spread her own, tucked it around the bundle of pockets she hoped she’d be allowed to complete in the morning.

  ‘She’s coming. She’s going to tell me not to bother coming back. I’m Lila, by the way. It’s been nice knowing you.’

  The forewoman didn’t tell them not to come back. Lila was shorter than Jenny, with the figure of a bathing beauty — and a fag in her mouth before they stepped into the gloom of late afternoon. She offered her packet and Jenny needed one. She was a factory girl now, lighting up with a dozen more. Norma, the older woman with the peroxide blonde hair, joined them.

  ‘So, how did it go today then?’

  ‘Fagging awful,’ Lila said, and they walked on, Jenny part of a threesome of lint-covered girls, each one flicking cottons from their skirts as they walked, Jenny flicking harder at her black skirt and cardigan.

  ‘Are you in mourning or something?’ Lila said.

  ‘Mourning and the joint we work in don’t go hand in hand, kiddo. Wear something light coloured tomorrow,’ Norma advised.

  FINDING JENNY

  Money is the grease that oils the cogs of choice. A little of it encourages more. Gertrude’s letter was waiting for her, with a ten-pound money order folded inside a sheet of paper urging her to use it to buy a ticket home.

  Not much else in the letter, no word of Jim. She wrote of Vern, of his daughters.

  Jenny wrote back, about her job, her landlady who had offered to look after Jimmy.

  And the weeks passed, and at times three seemed to roll into one, and Jimmy started to think he lived downstairs, seemed to look on Myrtle Norris as a second mother. If he fell, he ran to Myrtle as often as he ran to Jenny. And on dark mornings, when he was lifted from the warmth of his cot and carried grizzling down the freezing passage to the warmth of Myrtle’s rooms, he reached out his arms to Myrtle, pleased to go to her.

  ‘We should bring his cot downstairs for the winter, pet. It would be easier for both of you.’

  ‘You’re doing too much for us already, Myrt.’ No more la-di-da landlady now, no more Mrs Norris, just Myrt and Jenny, just friends now, and Myrtle not wanting to accept Jenny’s rent money, and refusing to take a penny for looking after Jimmy.

  Jenny caught a cold in late June and she gave it to Jimmy. Number five was a freezing tomb of a room and a small single-bar radiator in the sitting room did little to warm more than a patch of skin at a time.

  Then Myrtle found a folding bed in the storeroom and what is the use of arguing against logic? Jenny helped set it up beside Myrtle’s bed.

  ‘Dat my big bed,’ Jimmy said.

  He didn’t miss Jenny in the night. She missed him, missed waking up to him in the mornings, but it was easier, and she had more room to move in number five without his cot.

  The world kept on turning. People had to learn to turn with it, or fall off the edge into nowhere. She stood on her own two feet now, a factory girl during the week, a singer at weekends, and managing to keep the two sides of her life separated — until late June, until Norma, Barbara and Lila came into the club one night with a mob of Yanks.

  Those girls were her weekday friends. She knew their life stories. They spilled them over the lunch room table. She knew that Lila was two years her junior, that she’d left twin sons in Newcastle with her in-laws. She knew that Norma said she was twenty-four, but Jenny guessed that she was probably closer to thirty. She had a nine-year-old son and two school-aged daughters living in a children’s home. Barbara, an only child of elderly parents, was going on twenty-one, and wild. Her favourite pastime was picking up Yanks — and doing more than just picking them up, Lila whispered.

  They didn’t know Jenny’s life story. They thought she was Jenny Hooper, that her husband was fighting the Japs. He was, the last time she’d heard from him, so in her mind that’s where he remained. She was living a lie in Sydney, so why shouldn’t she lie to herself?

  By lunchtime on Monday, everyone at the factory knew Jenny sang at a club.

  ‘Dark horse,’ they said. ‘What else don’t we know about you?’

  They didn’t know she lived in a mansion, that her la-di-da landlady had fallen in love with her son.

  July 1943

  My darling Robert,

  Myrtle wrote pages each Sunday night, emptying out her week of days to her Robert. Her days now spent with Jimmy, her letters were filled with him.

  . . . watching him evolve is such a joy to me. He calls me Myrtie now and is beginning to speak in sentences. ‘Want bickie, Myrtie,’ he says and so clearly. ‘Jenny gone-a work,’ he says. I would gladly give all I own if he could be my mine.

  She’s only nineteen years old, far too young, and such a pretty girl. She’ll marry again when the war is over and have more children.

  I know little of her family situation, other than that she was raised by her grandmother. She never mentions her parents, whom she apparently hasn’t seen in years. There is such a wide-eyed country girl innocence about her, but a deepness, too. I offered to contact the war department for her regarding Jim, and she told me she didn’t want to make it real.

  I doubt she was legally married to him. She told me once that the family had not approved the mat
ch . . .

  On the weekends Wilfred Whiteford and his merry men had no function to attend, Myrtle lost her boy from early Saturday morning until seven o’clock on Monday morning. Those weekends were long. She spent them watching the stroller leave, waiting for it to return, and when it did, she was constantly listening for Jimmy, her eyes turned to the ceiling, wondering if he was running around up there barefoot.

  He has had one severe cold this winter. I don’t want him getting another. She’s a capable girl, and very frugal. She brought home a bundle of material scraps from the factory last week, dyed them the prettiest shade of blue then turned them into tiny frocks for children her grandmother cares for. She ran up the larger seams at the factory but hand-stitched the rest then sat for hours, making such neat buttonholes . . .

  As one long and lonely Sunday loomed before her, Myrtle heard them in the lodgers’ kitchen. Seeking an excuse to go there, she armed herself with clean tea towels.

  Jimmy ran to her. She kissed him, collected the lodgers’ soiled tea towels and stood for a while, watching Jenny squat before the gas oven, attempting to light it with a burning twist of newspaper. Myrtle got the oven burning for her, then held Jimmy back from the heat while two trays of biscuits slid in. With no good reason to remain longer but no desire to leave, she picked up one oddly shaped section of fabric Jenny had spread on the larger of the two kitchen tables.

  ‘What are you making, pet?’

  ‘Overalls — with long hems this time. He’s got his daddy’s long legs.’

  ‘Have you been in contact with Jim’s people at all?’

  Jenny shook her head and went to the sink to wash the mixing bowl, to leave the kitchen as she’d found it. A lot of Amber had rubbed off on her. She liked a tidy kitchen, and liked sewing, too; kept her threads in a shoe box like Amber had. Reels of thread, pins, needles — she’d even made a pincushion.

  ‘Are both of Jim’s parents still living?’

  ‘Only his father,’ Jenny said. She snipped a length of thread and aimed it at the eye of the needle. ‘He’s got two older sisters — both old maids.’