Potato Factory

by Bryce Courtenay

  Mary Abacus and Ann Gower, with the help of Margaret Keating, had created the two things most in demand on the island, strong drink and lewd women, and both at a price most attractive to the customer.

  Governor Arthur was determined to stamp out drunkenness within the female prison, and his orders were that any turnkey caught selling grog was to be instantly dismissed and severely punished with three hundred strokes of the lash. While it had been comparatively easy to use the children to smuggle tobacco and liquor into the old Factory, it was considerably harder in the new, where they were regularly searched by the guards at the gates.

  Now Mary and her partners could not only sell grog to the free population but they could also bring into prison significant quantities of the fiery poteen concealed in the loads of vegetables delivered to the kitchen each evening.

  The three women worked well together, Ann Gower being utterly loyal to Mary and Margaret Keating being a quietly spoken and sensible woman who was a political prisoner. Within six months of the completion of the still, having served three years in prison, she was assigned to an emancipist of good repute who offered at the same time to take her as his wife.

  To her husband’s surprise she brought with her a small but much-needed cash dowry, the source of which he was sufficiently prudent not to enquire about. And so Margaret Keating left her two erstwhile partners to enjoy a life of hard work and the utmost respectability, where she would lose one child and raise four others in the happiest of family circumstances. Mary took over the working of the poteen still.

  Both Mary and Ann Gower knew well enough that whoring and strong drink taken together spelled trouble, so they were careful not to create a convivial atmosphere about the running of their business. Hobart Town abounded in sly-grog shops where all manner of homemade liquor could be obtained. This was a most potent and dangerous concoction and often laced with laudanum. When the revellers became too drunk and noisy they were given a finishing glass which consisted of a strong poison and was designed to render the drinker unconscious so that he might more easily be thrown out onto the street or, if he was a whaler with a pocketful of silver American dollars, robbed of all he possessed.

  Men were not permitted to congregate or drink on Mary’s prison vegetable plot, but only to use Ann’s services or make a purchase of grog. A single transaction, the purchase of a ‘pot’, as a small container of poteen became known, took two minutes. A double transaction, a ‘pot ‘n pant’, took no more than ten, a shilling being paid for each service, after which the recipient was required promptly to scarper from the premises.

  Mary’s poteen soon earned a reputation for its excellent quality and as men must always put names to things, this being especially true for things clandestine, where a wink and a nod may be involved, or a euphemism employed, some began to call the enterprise ‘The Potato Patch’.

  ‘Where are you going, mate?’ a man might enquire of another.

  ‘To the Potato Patch,’ would be the reply.

  However, late one winter’s afternoon a trooper, not a usual customer, after obtaining his two shillings worth demanded company to go with his proposed drinking. When promptly ordered to leave he grew most cantankerous and, stumbling away, he turned and yelled at Mary.

  ‘This place be shit! It be nothing but a damned potato factory!’

  The name stuck and Mary’s still became known as ‘The Potato Factory’. It was a name thought most excellent to those who used its services, for it contained some character and style, which is an essential ingredient in any decent man’s drinking habits, the Potato Patch always having had about it a somewhat base and primitive feel.

  Now it might be supposed that an operation such as this would soon enough be the subject of the tattle tongues to be found in great numbers in a women’s prison, and that the prison officials would soon come to know about it. But Mary and Ann Gower saw to it that the prisoners had drink sufficient to keep them happy, and that their children had clothes and physic when they had colic or were otherwise taken with sickness. Mary reigned as Queen no differently in the new Female Factory than she had done in the old.

  Similarly, it must be expected that a customer of the Potato Factory would at some time reveal its whereabouts to such as an undercover plainclothes constable set about gathering useful information within the premises of a brothel or a tavern. Gossips and narks are among the most virulent forces at work in any convict community, but no sooner had one sly-grog outlet closed down than another would spring up in its place.

  Even if human weakness is more often exercised than human strength, a community such as was to be found in Hobart Town could keep its secrets well. Most of the people who walked the streets were either emancipists, ticket of leavers or active prisoners, and all felt they had just cause to resent authority and to keep some things secret from the free settlers whom they disliked almost as much.

  Mary saw to it that the troopers connected with the Female Factory were kept silent with a regular supply of poteen. Furthermore, several key members of the local constabulary would receive a pint-sized ‘pot’ with a tight wooden cork, brought in by a street urchin each week. And, at least one magistrate was known to consider Mary’s poteen ‘The purest water o’ life itself!’ and took pains not to ask his clerk, who declined to take payment for it, where he habitually obtained it.

  Mary’s vegetable garden and pottery continued to prosper and the prison authorities had no cause to complain. Abundant vegetables and sacks of splendid potatoes arrived at the Female Factory kitchen and, while much of this fresh produce never found its way onto the prison tables, being appropriated by those in charge, this did not concern Mary. She well understood that those in charge had even further reason not to look too closely behind the cabbage leaves.

  From time to time, the chief clerk, Mr Emmett, would receive a reasonable sum of money, being the proceeds for the sale of plant and water pots. He would receive the funds together with a summary of what had been sold, to whom and at what price. A clerk sent about the town confirmed Mary’s reconciliation correct to the penny - all this in Mary’s neat hand, the columns precisely drawn and the addition and subtraction without error. The payment would always come together with a handsomely turned pot which contained some exotic forest bloom, Mr Emmett being famous for his garden and his cottage, Beauly Lodge, was considered the most beautiful in Hobart Town. Once, for his daughter Millicent on her tenth birthday, Mary sent a standard rose, a veritable pin cushion of tiny, perfectly formed pink blooms.

  Mr Emmett, observing the honesty and integrity of Mary Abacus, called on the Female Factory to offer her the position of a clerk with the colonial secretary’s department. But, though Mary had declared herself most flattered, she declined the offer.

  ‘Do you not understand, Mary, that there are no women in my department or, I dare say, in any other? You should perceive this as a great honour.’ Mr Emmett smiled and then resumed. ‘No woman, I’ll wager, and never a convict woman has been placed in so great and fortunate a position of trust on this island, my dear!’

  Mary wondered how she could possibly think to refuse. Then she looked down at her twisted hands and her eyes filled with bitter tears at the memory of the cold winter morning in London’s docklands, when she had left Mr Goldstein’s warehouse with her heart singing. How in the swirling yellow mist the male voices had risen to envelop and crush her. . .

  Mary, Mary, Bloody Mary

  Who does her sums on bead and rack

  Go away, you’re too contrary

  You’re the monkey, the bloody monkey

  You’re the monkey on our back!

  The harsh memories flooded back and Mary was most hard put to restrain herself from weeping.

  ‘I’m sorry, sir, I may not accept. There be reasons I cannot say to you, though me gratitude be most profound and I thank you from the bottom o’ me ‘eart.’ Then she looked up at Mr Emmett, her eyes still wet with her held back tears. ‘I prefers the gardens, sir. The air be c
lean and the work well disposed to me ability.’

  Mr Emmett made one last effort to persuade her. It was apparent that he did not like being refused and now spoke with some annoyance. ‘There are few enough on this cursed island who can read or write, let alone reconcile a column of figures! Good God, woman, will you not listen to me? You are. . .’ he took a moment to search for words, ‘. . .wasted in this. . .this damned potato patch of yours!’

  ‘Then let me teach, sir!’ Mary pleaded urgently. ‘So that we may make more of our children to read and write and meet with your ‘ighest demands!’

  ‘Teach? Where? Teach who?’

  ‘The orphanage, sir. The prison brats. If I could teach three mornings a week I could still manage the gardens.’

  Mr Emmett looked bewildered. ‘Your suggestion is too base to be regarded with proper amusement, Mary. These are misbegotten children, the spawn of convicts and drunken wretches!’ It was apparent that he had become most alarmed at the thought. ‘They cannot be made to learn as you and I may. Have you no commonsense about you, woman?’ He shook his head and screwed up his eyes as though he were trying to rid his mind of the thought Mary had planted therein. ‘First you refuse my offer, now this urchin-teaching poppycock! These children cannot possibly be made to count or write! Surely you know this as well as I do? Have you not observed them for yourself? They are creatures damned by nature, slack of jaw and vacant of expression, the cursed offspring of the criminal class. I assure you, they do not have minds which can be made to grasp the process of formal learning!’ He smiled at a sudden thought. ‘Will you have them to do Latin?’

  ‘Ergo sum, “I am one”,’ Mary said quietly. ‘I were born a urchin same as them, slack-jawed and vacant o’ face the way you looks when you be starvin’!’ She cocked her head to one side and attempted to smile, though all the muscles of her lips could manage was a quiver at the corners of her mouth. She reached up to her bosom and clasped the Waterloo medal in her hand. ‘Only three mornings?’ she pleaded. ‘I begs you to ask them folk at the orphanage, sir.’

  The chief clerk seemed too profoundly shocked to continue and for some time he remained silent. ‘Hmmph!’ he growled at last. ‘I shall see what I can make of it.’ He shook his head slowly, clucking his tongue. ‘Clerks out of street urchins, eh? I’ll wager, it will be as easy to turn toads into handsome princes!’

  A week later Mary received a message to see the Reverend Thomas Smedley, the Wesleyan principal at the orphanage in New Town which had been given the surprising name of the King’s Orphan School, though no teaching whatsoever took place in the cold, damp and cheerless converted distillery which served as a home for destitute and deserted children. With this invitation came a pass to leave the prison garden so that she might attend the meeting scheduled for the latter part of the afternoon.

  The Reverend Smedley was a short, stout man, not much past his fortieth year, who wore a frock coat and dark trousers, both considerably stained. Neither was his linen too clean, the dog collar he wore being much in need of a scrub and a douse of starch. He wore small gold-rimmed spectacles on a nose which seemed no more than a plump button, and the thick lenses exaggerated the size of his dark eyes. Though it was a face which seemed disposed to be jolly, it was not. Any jollity it may have once possessed was defeated by a most profoundly sour expression. The Reverend Smedley was clean shaven and his cheeks much crossed with a multiplicity of tiny scarlet veins, a curious sanguinity in one so young and not a drinking man. He was a follower of Charles Wesley and, unlike his Anglican counterparts, was sure to be a teetotaller. Instead of adding a rosy blush, these scrambled veins upon his fat cheeks exacerbated further his saturnine expression. It seemed as though he might be ill with a tropical fever, for apart from his roseate jowls, his skin was yellow, while a thin veneer of perspiration covered his podgy face. To Mary he looked a man much beset by life who was in need of the attentions of a good wife or a sound doctor.

  ‘What is your religion, Miss. . .er, Abacus?’ Mary had been left to stand while Thomas Smedley had flipped the tails of his frock coat, and sat upon the lone chair behind a large desk in the front office of the children’s orphanage.

  ‘I can’t rightly say, sir. I don’t know that I ‘as one.’ Mary paused and shrugged. ‘I be nothin’ much o’ nothin’.’

  ‘A satanist then? Or is it an atheist?’

  ‘Neither, sir, if you mean I believes in the opposite or not at all.’

  The Reverend Thomas Smedley looked exceedingly sour and snapped at Mary in a sharp, hard voice which contrasted with his flaccid appearance.

  ‘Do you, or do you not, have the love of the Lord Jesus Christ in your heart? Have you or have you not, been washed in the Blood of the Lamb? Are you, or are you not, saved of your sins? If not, you may not!’ These three questions had been too rapid to answer each at a time and his voice had risen fully an octave with each question so that the last part was almost shrill, shouted at Mary in a spray of spittle.

  However, at their completion he seemed at once exhausted, as though he had rehearsed well the questions and they had come out unbroken and, to his surprise, much as he had intended them to sound. Now he sat slumped in his chair and his head hung low, with his chin tucked into the folds of his neck, while his chubby hands grasped the side of the desk and his magnified eyes looked obliquely up at Mary as he waited for her reply.

  ‘May not what, sir?’ Mary asked politely.

  ‘Teach! Teach! Teach!’ Smedley yelled.

  ‘I do not understand, sir? I shall not teach them either of lambs or washing of blood, or sins and least of all of God, but of the salvation of numbers and letters, sir.’

  The clergyman looked up and pointed a stubby finger at Mary. ‘I am not mocked saith the Lord!’ he shouted.

  Oh, Gawd, not another one! Mary thought, casting her mind to the dreadful Potbottom, though outwardly she smiled modestly at the Reverend Smedley. ‘I had not meant to mock, sir, my only desire is to teach the word o’ man and leave the business o’ Gawd to the pulpit men, like yourself.’

  ‘God is not business! God is love! I am the way, the truth and the light saith the Lord! Unthinkable! Quite, quite, unthinkable!’ His eyes appeared to narrow and his fat fist banged down upon the desk. ‘Unless you are born again we cannot allow you to teach children! How will you show them the way, the truth and the light? How will you example the love of Jesus Christ?’

  ‘Who is teaching them now?’ Mary asked, hoping to change the subject.

  ‘They have religious instruction twice each day,’ the principal shot back angrily. ‘That is quite sufficient for their need.’

  ‘Oh, you have used the Bible to teach them to read and write,’ Mary said, remembering this was how the Quaker women had suggested they perform this task on board ship.

  ‘We teach salvation! The love of the Lord Jesus and the redemption of our sins so that we may be washed clean, we do not teach reading and writing here!’ the preacher barked. ‘These children shall grow up to be hewers of wood and drawers of water, that is the place for which they are destined in the Scriptures. They are no less the sons of Ham than the blacks who hide in the hills and steal our sheep. These orphan children are loved by the Lord, for He loves the sparrow as well as the eagle, the less fortunate as well as the gifted child.’

  ‘Then, with Gawd’s permission and your own, I will teach them to be more fortunate, sir. Surely Gawd will see no ‘arm in such tinkering?’

  Reverend Smedley looked up at Mary who stood with her back directly to the open window so that the light from behind flooded into the tiny room to give her body a halo effect, though, at the same time, it caused her features to darken, so that, to the short-sighted clergyman, she seemed to be a dark, hovering satanic form.

  ‘Tinkering? Permission? God’s permission or mine, you shall have neither. You shall have no such thing! You are not saved, you are not clean, you are not born again, you are an unrepentant and dastardly sinner whom I have every right to drive
from this temple of the Lord!’

  Mary sighed. The worst that could happen to her was that she be sent back to the Female Factory and to the prison gardens and this was no great matter. She was not in the least afraid of the silly little man who yapped at her like an overfed lap dog. Her fear was for the orphan children, for the child she had been herself, for the fact that had it not been for the Chinee contraption of wire and beads she would have remained in darkness. Her fear was that if she were not permitted to teach these orphan children they would grow up to perpetuate the myth that her kind were a lower form of human life, one which was beyond all salvation of the mind and therefore of the spirit.

  ‘What must I do to be saved?’ she asked suddenly.

  The clergyman looked up surprisd. ‘Why, you must repent, of course!’

  Mary shrugged and raised her eyebrows. ‘Then I repent,’ she announced simply.

  Smedley sat up, suddenly alert. ‘That’s not proper repenting. You have to be sorry!’

  ‘So, I’m sorry, sir,’ Mary sighed. ‘Most sorry.’

  ‘Not me! Not sorry to me, to the Lord Jesus! You have to go down on your knees before Him and repent!’

  ‘Repent or say I’m sorry? Which is it to be?’ Mary asked.

  ‘It’s the same thing!’ Thomas Smedley shouted. Then abruptly he stood up and pointed to the floor at Mary’s feet, where he obviously expected her to kneel.

  ‘No it ain’t! It ain’t the same at all,’ Mary said, crossing her arms. ‘I could be sorry and not repent, but I couldn’t repent and not be sorry, know what I mean?’

  ‘On your knees at once. The glory of the Lord is upon us!’ the Reverend Smedley demanded and again jabbed a fat, urgent finger towards the bare boards at Mary’s feet.