Potato Factory

by Bryce Courtenay

  While official leniency may have existed for the female of the species, no such thing was true of the unofficial behaviour of men towards women. Van Diemen’s Land was a brutal society and violence towards women was so common as to place a female convict, who was thought to be of little worth, in constant jeopardy. Rapes were frequent and brutal bashings of females were as commonplace as a Saturday night tavern fight. Settlers, returning home drunk, would beat their female servants, sometimes crippling or even killing them. The body was usually dumped on the outskirts of Hobart Town and the murder would then simply be explained by reporting the prisoner as missing.

  It is doubtful that the less stringent laws Arthur imposed on females were very successful in reforming them. But there was danger enough abroad for any convict woman, and fear of the law was the least of her concerns, nor observance of it likely to make her life any easier. Only the threat of being sent to the interior seemed to have any real effect. No greater fear existed in these city-bred women than that they should find themselves in the wilderness of the interior, where the cruelty of the men who lived as woodcutters in the forests was the subject of many fearful and gruesome tales told in the taverns and the disorderly houses of Hobart Town.

  In short then, although Mary’s confinement to the Female Factory might have seemed the harsher sentence, assignment to a settler was not the easy ride so fondly imagined by Mary’s shipmates.

  The moment Mary had heard of the existence of the orphans’ school she had determined to gain a post within it as a teacher. The orphans’ school housed the children who, shortly after birth, had been separated from their mothers. They were, for the most part, the children of assigned convicts. The women were routinely returned to the Female Factory by their masters, always with the story that the prisoner had been absent without a pass and had become pregnant while whoring. Hobart was full of orphan brats who bore a remarkable resemblance to many a settler’s family.

  The child would be born at the Factory, which also acted as a maternity hospital, and taken from its mother the moment it was weaned. Arthur considered the female convicts the very last persons to whom children ought to be entrusted. The mother would then be detained in the Female Factory to be punished for her licentious and drunken ways, and after serving her additional sentence either returned to her original master or assigned to another.

  The children who had come to the island with their convict mothers and who were not convicts themselves were simply allowed to stay in the Factory with their mothers, as few settlers would entertain the prospect of another mouth to feed. They became wild creatures who wandered about the town and learned to pick pockets, bring in contraband, mostly tobacco and grog, and soon became rapscallions and petty thieves of the worst possible kind. Many of them were hardened criminals before they had reached the age of ten.

  Mary would capture the hearts of these prison children with her stories and teach those who would submit to learning to read and write. She would also use them in quite another way, which was to earn her great power and respect among the other female inmates.

  Mary was put to work in the prison bakery. This was not brought about by her intelligence or any skill she possessed, but because of her hands. They were thought to be too mutilated to be useful at any of the other tasks, while kneading dough was considered within her limited capacity.

  It was a decision which, together with the requirement that Mary work two afternoons a week in the prison allotment, would give the direction to her future life. The allotment, an acre on the slopes of Mount Wellington, was used to grow potatoes, cabbages and some Indian corn, two of these, most fortuitously, being vegetables with a use beyond the platter, though a use not in the least contemplated by the prison officials.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  Ikey had eight hundred and thirteen pounds on him. Some of this was the remainder of the money paid to him in Birmingham by Maggie the Colour and Silas Browne, and some furnished by Hannah as a ploy to convince him of her sincerity in aiding his intended escape. It was sufficient to pay his fare to America from Denmark, as well as allowing him to stock up on merchandise likely to be in short supply in the New World.

  Ikey, always a dreamer and schemer, saw America as a land of rich pickings for a man of his character and talent. It was his intention to land with a portmanteau stuffed with merchandise to confound the locals.

  Alas, this was not to be, the prices for these articles in Denmark being too high at the shopfront and, besides, it was against Ikey’s principles to purchase goods which afforded only a small margin of profit. It had not occurred to him that the Danish Jews might not speak Yiddish or contain a Jewish criminal class who would furnish the merchandise he required direct from the fob pockets of the unsuspecting citizenry, and therefore at prices a lot more competitive than those obtainable in wholesale jewellery emporiums.

  So Ikey took the first ship he could find bound for New York. Though his hands were empty his head was full of plans for a life lived on the straight and narrow path as a merchant jeweller.

  The crossing was rough and utterly miserable. In late February the Atlantic swells were large and frequent gales whipped the tops of the steel-coloured waves into a fury of howling white spray. The small three-masted packet was tossed like a cork seemingly all the way to the mouth of the Hudson River.

  On a cold March morning, with dirty islands of late ice still floating on the river, the ship anchored at the immigration wharf at Castle Gardens. By early afternoon Ikey had paid his entry fee, been subjected to a smallpox vaccination and was allowed to step onto the streets of New York as free as an English lark.

  It is a part of the human imagination to carry in our minds pictures of places we have heard or read about, pictures which have no substance other than the bricks and mortar of pure speculation. Ikey had expected New York to be a city not unlike London, though perhaps more primitive, for New York too lay on a great river and spoke the English tongue with a strange half-Irish intonation.

  As an English Jew Ikey had assumed that he would fit in snugly enough. After all, the Jews of his world were street traders and merchants and of a naturally talkative and friendly disposition with the inclination to congregate together, marry among themselves, and on those several pious occasions such as Passover, Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur to share their faith. They would also attend synagogue on the Sabbath as brothers according to the ancient laws of Abraham, the prophets and the rabbinical creed.

  Being a Jew, while being a matter of religion and orthodoxy, was also one of temperament. A Jew does not expect any but his own kind to understand him. Being Jewish is not something you wear outwardly like a badge, rather it is something you feel inwardly. It is as if your heart beats to a different cadence. This is as true of the Jew who is a villain as it is of one who is a rabbi. The smell of a chicken soup fart with noodles is absolutely one hundred per cent unmistakably Jewish. If you should be making chicken soup, delicious chicken soup, and you wish to make it Jewish, maybe you could try making these noodles.

  Beat two eggs with a bit of pepper and salt. Add flour until it is a stiff paste. Flour a cutting board, then roll out the paste until it is very thin. Allow to dry for two hours. Now cut the dough into strips about three inches long by one inch wide. Stack and cut again into matchlike strips. Separate them by tossing, and spread them out to dry. Then toss them with boiling chicken soup and boil for ten minutes. Guaranteed to produce first-class farts when added to chicken soup!

  New York, Ikey told himself, would have its own Rosemary and Petticoat Lanes, its rookeries with noxious smells and a low-life similar to St Giles, Whitechapel and Shoreditch, and a population composed from rags to riches which seemed to live the one on top of the other. This was the situation in London, Amsterdam and Hamburg and, in fact, wherever European urban Jews could be found. A Jew was not a part-time Jew or a sometime Jew or a non-observing Jew, he was Jewish for the duration of his life. This gave a wandering Jew a strength and unity he could depen
d on wherever he found a congregation of his own people.

  Ikey had not stopped to think that being a Jew also made him accountable to the dictates and rituals of his community. In the matter of being Jewish he was expected to act in a prescribed manner, but not necessarily as a good man. In the good man business, the ritualised and formal nature of the English and European Jewish code of behaviour had allowed the form to become more important than the function, Jewishness being more important than goodness.

  Ikey never missed going to the synagogue, where he gained a reputation for being a devout man and an Israelite without guile. In the synagogue each has a separate seat with a box where he deposits his holy books and locks them up until he returns to worship. Ikey frequently made use of his box for the most unhallowed of purposes, concealing within it items which if discovered would have sent him ‘across the water’ several times over.

  Yet Ikey was an excellent example of a pious, if not strictly orthodox, Jew. While he did not observe the dietary laws, mutton stew followed by a dish of curds being his most frequent repast, he never worked on the Sabbath. He paid his tithes, contributed to Jewish charity, took his seat in the synagogue and observed with a full heart Rosh Hashanah, Passover and Yom Kippur.

  Therefore it came as a great surprise to him to find that what he had always taken for granted was no longer the case in New York. Being a Jew was none, or very few, of the mystical things he’d always supposed it to be, nor was it any longer the secret satisfaction, despite the eternal suffering of the Jews, to be gained from being one of the chosen people.

  The New York Jews neglected the Sabbath and many of them were now taking their rest on Sundays without the slightest show of guilt. The lighting of Sabbath candles and the singing of the Sabbath song was seldom practised. Secular learning of a pragmatic nature was regarded as more important than the study of the Torah. Moreover, philosophical thinking, based on the precepts of freedom and emancipation, was being given precedence over rabbinical discussion. The rebbe was not the centre of the universe nor did he settle all the arguments on behalf of Jehovah. The new Bnai Jeshu-run synagogue on Elm Street contained only a handful of worshippers on any given Sabbath morning.

  However, if the loss of the rituals and strictures of orthodoxy defined the American Jews, it did not lead to a corresponding loss of ideals, moral misconduct and social irresponsibility. In all this secular speculation, they had not given up a belief in Jehovah or the responsibility of God’s chosen people to behave in a moral and honest way. Instead they rejected meaningless ritual and accepted natural goodness as the central tenet of their faith.

  To be a good Jew meant to be a good man. What all this amounted to was that Ikey could no longer hide behind his observance of Jewish ritual while continuing to behave in an altogether reprehensible manner. While he had determined to turn over a new leaf in America, this realisation nevertheless came as a profound shock to him.

  Ikey was also astonished to find that New York had few poor Jews and that the Jewish community lived openly in the mid-town area spread on both sides of Broadway. New York contained only five hundred Jewish families. Most were American-born and had formed into a community over the past one hundred and fifty years. There was none of the frantic struggle to gain a foothold in a new society or the clash of contradictory cultures between the immigrant and native-born children. The Jews of New York were an established, sober, moral and well-integrated minority population, most of whom had been in America before the War of Independence. They all seemed to know or be on nodding terms with each other, and had excellent business and social relations with their gentile neighbours.

  Ikey had timed his arrival badly, for if he had landed in New York ten years later he would have found some forty thousand European Jews in New York, and their numbers would continue to grow hugely for the remainder of the century. The dreadful slums, starvation, poverty and crime of the Lower East Side would come to exist as poor Jewish immigrants came to Goldeneh medina, ‘The Golden country’. Alas, in Yiddish Goldeneh medina had a second meaning and was the name also given to a ‘fool’s paradise’, a false gold, bright but worthless.

  In this fool’s paradise Ikey would have been completely at home. But he was totally at odds with the calm and ordered society he now found himself in, despite his determination to lead a sober and respectable life. Ikey’s notoriety had not escaped the notice of the Jews of New York and the tight-knit community immediately closed ranks against him. England’s most notorious Jewish criminal was not given a warm welcome. Ikey, despite his apparent wealth and appropriate philanthropy, found himself largely ostracised by his own kind.

  Even those contacts to whom he had previously shipped stolen watches and silver objects had conveniently come to see these consignments as having been legitimised by the fact of arriving on American soil. They saw themselves as moral men, albeit practical, who had asked no questions of the origin of the merchandise and so heard no lies, their guilt assuaged.

  But while they chose to believe that the stolen merchandise Ikey had sent them had somehow been ‘washed’ in the Atlantic crossing and thus transformed into honest goods, they were unwilling to accept that, by the act of the same crossing, Ikey had converted from being a criminal to an honest man. They felt morally obliged not to encourage a notorious criminal to establish himself in business in their own city or neighbourhood.

  They would not recommend Ikey to wholesalers or to jewellery craftsmen, the greatest majority of whom were Jewish. Diamond merchants would not trade with him and the gold and silversmiths found themselves regrettably short of supplies or lamented that their consignment books were filled with orders beyond their expectations to complete. Despite his offer to pay them in cash, even in gold, their doors were closed to him. The few goods Ikey managed to assemble he sold only to gentiles. His poor selection, together with the used nature of his merchandise, attracted little attention and earned him a reputation not much beyond that of an enterprising pawnbroker.

  The only respect Ikey commanded was from the First Manhattan Bank of New York where the manager, wreathed in unctuous smiles, would come out of his office to greet him personally. On the Sabbath, Ikey sat, a stranger in a strange land, alone in the bright new synagogue on Elm Street. The psalms the cantor sung were old, but the feeling of complete and abject loneliness was new.

  Ikey had always thought of himself as a loner, a solitary soul who kept his own counsel. In his own eyes, but for his money, he was a worthless person. But now he began to realise that he had lost the human infrastructure, the supporting cast of thieves and shofulmen, card sharps, pimps, whores, actors, street urchins, his Academy of Light Fingers. How he missed the coarse company around a ratting circle, the hustle of Rosemary Lane, the rank humanity of the poor and hopeless, the tinsel and despair of the West End, the pickpockets and swells, beggars and noblemen who made up the street community of his native London.

  America was proving completely alien to his past, his talents and to his very demeanour. Ikey’s fortune and life had been developed on the mean dark streets and in the chop houses, taverns and thief dens of the grandest and most woebegone city on earth. He was by nature a creature of the night, wrapped in his familiar coat of secret pockets and accustomed to skulking within the dark shadow cast by a flat-topped, wide-brimmed hat.

  Now all that had been forsaken for shopkeeping in daylight on Broadway, dressed in a suit of good American broadcloth which constantly scratched and itched. Ikey was a deeply unhappy man, but one determined to redeem himself in the eyes of his fellow Jews in his new country. Ikey was in search of personal redemption, but first he had to save himself from himself. He must separate from Hannah without losing the fortune contained in the Whitechapel safe. Four months after arriving in New York, he sat down to write to his wife in London.

  My dear Wife,

  America has proved a most pleasant place and the prospects for the advancement of our ambition is most encouraging. With the early summer come to u
s, at last the climate is most salubrious. You will take kindly to the air and space and the houses are of a solid brown stone and well proportioned. There is a spacious central park with room enough for children to play to their hearts content in safety. It is as though they should find themselves in some country dell. I have opened a jewellery establishment with excellent fittings on Broadway, a location which shows the promise of good trading if goods to the liking of the population can be offered at a price to be afforded. The craftsmen here are not of a sufficient standard to be desired, or of the same quality to be found in London, there being a notable shortage of finely made fashionable jewellery, the Americans being behind in what is of the latest mode in London and Paris. There is here also a great shortage of good watches of the medium quality variety and I beseech you to obtain quantities of the same. I have reason enough to believe I can turn these to good account, though I charge you to send me none but ‘righteous’ watches and not to touch even one what has been gained ‘on the cross’. I shall require these to be of an assortment of nickel plate, sterling silver and gold. I believe these will here obtain up to six times the price of the watches purchased by you on the straight. My greetings to your children.

  I am, as ever, your humble husband,

  Isaac Solomon.

  Ikey took care to be cheerful in his letter, though not overly so, for he knew that Hannah might smell a trap, the discussion of cheerful subjects and outcomes not being the usual nature of their conversation together. His mention of children and the park was sufficient to alert her to his desire to have her join him. He also deliberately refrained from sending a money order for the goods, giving her to understand that she should finance the purchase herself for their future mutual benefit. This thought being conveyed with the single sentiment ‘. . .for the advancement of our ambition. . .’ She would receive the letter and see it clearly as a test of her intention to follow him to America, in which case, provided she co-operated with him, he would eventually send her his part of the safe combination.