Potato Factory

by Bryce Courtenay

  And pulled out a plum,

  And said, ‘What a good boy am I!’

  He was feasting away,

  And ‘twas late in the day;

  When his mother, who made it a rule

  Her children should ever

  Be learned and clever,

  Came in to prepare him for school.

  Mary was also determined that their morals should be of the strictest rectitude and they would be most severely punished should they not tell the truth. She had sent to England for a book with the rather long title, The Good Child’s Delight; or, the road to knowledge. In short, entertaining lessons of one or two syllables; Nursery morals; chiefly in monosyllables. This she read to them so many times that Hawk, at the age of five, could recite the entire book. Others she bought from the Hobart Town Circulating Library, where she drove the stern-faced Mrs Deane quite mad with her requests for children’s books. One of the boys’ favourites, for they cried at each reading, was The Happy Courtship, Merry Marriage, and Pic Nic Dinner, of Cock Robin, and Jenny Wren. To which is added, alas! the doleful death of the bridegroom.

  On their cots Mary constructed strings of wooden beads in the same configuration as an abacus, so that their earliest memories would be of the rattle and touch of the red and black beads in their tiny hands.

  At five both children were well acquainted with the alphabet and could read well and write simple words upon their slates. Tommo was clever enough but would quickly become impatient, while Hawk seemed much more interested. At the age of seven, when Mary took them to Mrs Tibbett’s primary school, an establishment which took the young children of the tradesmen rank, both Tommo and Hawk proved well in advance of other children in their class. Hawk was not only the largest child among his age group, he also stood out as the most intelligent.

  Though children are not concerned with colour, their parents soon enough perceived the presence of Hawk and it did not take them long to complain about the black child. Mary was asked by Mrs Tibbett to remove Hawk and Tommo from the school.

  It was a fight Mary knew she could not win, and she saw no point in venting her spleen on the hapless Mrs Tibbett, who seemed genuinely distressed that she was forced to make the demand. Besides, Mary felt that the school was holding back her children for the benefit of other children less well prepared.

  So she determined that she would continue as she had begun and personally attend to the education of her two children. In this she had elicited Ikey’s most reluctant assistance, particularly as she required that he teach them nothing in the way of dishonest practices. Ikey protested that he knew of no other way to teach an urchin, and that if he should be forbidden to teach Tommo and Hawk the gentle art of picking a pocket, or show them how to palm a card or otherwise cheat at cribbage, pick a simple lock, short change a customer, successfully enter a house though it be securely locked, or doctor a stolen watch, there was nothing contained in his lexicon of knowledge which he believed could be useful to them.

  ‘You will teach them of human nature! They must grow up able to read a man or woman the way you do. How they stand or use their hands or smile or protest, how to know the fool from the villain and the good from the bad. Who to trust and who should be avoided. The manner o’ the confidence man and the language o’ the cheat and the liar. That is what I want them to know, Ikey Solomon!’

  Ikey laughed. ‘They are not Jews, my dear, they are not the raw material it has taken a thousand years and more to breed, so that this kind of wisdom is ingested without the need to think.’

  ‘You must teach them, Ikey. Hawk most of all, for I fear greatly for him in this world where the dark people suffer even though they commit no crime, where the lowest wretch thinks himself superior to a black skin. You must teach Hawk to be a good reader of human nature.’

  Ikey soon discovered that children with full bellies who are surrounded by love and attention make poor observers of human nature. Children learn the lessons in life by being thrown into life, and so he decided to take Hawk and Tommo to the races each Saturday. But first he taught them a new language. He found that both boys enjoyed the finger and hand actions which comprise the ancient silent language used among the traders in Petticoat Lane, Rosemary Lane, Whitechapel, Covent Garden and the other London markets. It is said that it is a language used by the Jews since the fall of the great temple of Solomon. That the Jews brought it to England in the Middle Ages and it became a language used in English prisons and had been brought to Port Arthur, where prisoners were not permitted to talk to each other. It was also most useful at the race track, where bookmakers talked to each other, setting the odds and laying of bets across the paddocks, and there it was commonly known as tic-tac.

  Tommo and Hawk, like all young children, quickly learned the rudiments of this language and it did not take long before they added some of their own unique signs and devices, which meant they could silently communicate to each other on any subject.

  Ikey was delighted with their progress, and when they were seven he would take them to the races, where they would move from one on-course bookmaker to the other sending back the odds to Ikey so that he was seldom caught short or ‘holding the bundle’ as it is known in racing parlance. In exposing them to the myriad people to be found at the Hobart races he was able to begin teaching Tommo and Hawk the lessons Mary wanted them to learn. Ikey taught them how to look at a crowd and break it into its various components.

  ‘If you knows what you’re looking for in a crowd, my dear, then you can read it like a book.’ He looked down at Hawk. ‘A crowd be composed o’ what, Mr Dark Thought?’

  Hawk looked at Ikey with his big serious eyes. ‘Folks?’

  ‘Folks! That be a right and splendid answer, very clever indeed!’

  ‘What sort o’ folks, Mr After Thought?’ he asked Tommo.

  ‘Very ugly ones what stinks!’ Tommo replied, waiting for the giggle to come from Hawk.

  ‘Well, well, well and we are the pretty ones what smells perfect are we then?’ Ikey said. ‘I stinks meself and I am not very pretty I admits. So be the crowd all like me? Like Ikey Solomon?’

  ‘All sorts of different folks,’ Hawk replied for Tommo.

  ‘Yes! With all sorts o’ different needs and deeds,’ Ikey replied. ‘Needs and deeds, that be what you have to learn, my dears. If you knows what folks needs, you can begin to understand their deeds.’

  Ikey would patiently teach them how to spot the pickpocket, and to listen to the chatter of a tout, to notice the gestures and the patterns of speech of the confidence trickster, how to know when a man was a liar or a cheat. How body language was almost always the first way to judge a man.

  ‘Then, when you’ve seen how he stands or sits or walks or uses his hands and his head, and he fits into a pattern, then, when you talks with him you listens with your stomachs, my dears.’

  ‘Your stomach!’ Tommo laughed. ‘Be me belly button me new ear then?’

  ‘That be most clever of you, Mister After Thought, most clever and to be remembered. “Let your belly button be your most important ear!” ‘

  ‘Have you got a very big belly button then, Ikey?’ Hawk asked. ‘Big as your ear?’

  ‘Huge, my dear!’ Ikey slapped his pot belly. ‘Nearly all be ear what’s constantly listening.’

  The two boys found this very funny. ‘So what does you do with your ears on your head?’ Hawk asked.

  ‘Now that be another most clever question, Mister Dark Thought.’ Ikey pulled at both his ears. ‘These be your listening eyes.’

  ‘Eyes can’t listen!’ both the boys shouted.

  ‘Oh yes they can! If they be ears!’ Ikey said solemnly.

  ‘But ears can’t see,’ Hawk said emphatically.

  ‘Oh yes they can! If they be eyes! Ears what is eyes and eyes what is ears is most important in the discovery o’ human nature!’

  ‘How?’ they both chorused.

  ‘Well, human speech be like pictures, only word pictures. When we speaks
we paints a word picture what we wants others to see, but we only paints a part o’ the picture what’s in our heads. The other part, usually the most important part, we leaves behind, because it be the truth, the true picture. So your ears have to have eyes, so they can see how much o’ the real picture what be in the head be contained in the words!’

  ‘How then are eyes become ears?’ Hawk asked.

  ‘Well that be more complicated, but the way we moves our hands and heads, and folds our arms or opens them up, scratches our nose or puts our fingers over our lips, tugs our ear, twiddles our thumbs or fidgets, or puts one foot on the instep o’ the other like Tommo be doing right now, that be what you calls the language o’ the body. If you listen to the language o’ the body with your eyes and sees the picture in the mind with your ears, you begins to get the drift o’ the person, that is if you listens. . .’

  ‘Through the ear in your belly?’ Hawk shouted, delighted.

  ‘Bravo! If he don’t feel good in your stomach, then always trust it, my dears! Bad stomachs and bad men go well together!’

  Tommo appeared to pay less attention to these lessons, but Hawk silently absorbed everything Ikey told him. Unlike his previous pupils in the Academy of Light Fingers, neither Tommo nor Hawk suffered from hunger and cold, homelessness or a lack of love. Privileged children only embrace the more difficult lessons in life when their survival is threatened and then it is often too late.

  Both Mary’s boys showed an early proficiency in numbers and constantly used the abacus, but once again it was Hawk who most quickly mastered the mysteries of calculation. By the time Ikey took them to the Saturday races Hawk carried his own small abacus and could calculate the odds in an instant and send them by sign language to his brother. Tommo would stand well outside the betting ring but where Ikey could glance up at him while he worked, and as he began to prosper as a bookmaker he came to rely increasingly on the two boys.

  Mary spent as much time as she could spare with the boys tramping on the great mountain, and at Strickland Falls, and soon they knew the deeply wooded slopes and crags well enough to spend long hours exploring on their own. They hunted the shy opossum, who slept during the day in hollow tree trunks, and searched for birds’ eggs, though Mary forbade them to gather the eggs or trap the rosellas and green parrots not yet able to fly, but which were sufficiently well feathered to sell in the markets.

  Once, close to Strickland Falls, Hawk had his arm deep within the hole in a tree trunk looking for birds’ eggs when he was bitten by a snake. Within a couple of minutes he had presented his puffed and swollen forefinger to Mary, who was fortunately working at the new buildings for the Potato Factory.

  Mary lost no time and, consulting Dr Forster’s Book of Colonial Medicine, she applied a tourniquet high up on Hawk’s arm and sliced open the bite with a sharp knife, drawing a deep line down the flesh of his forefinger while ignoring his desperate yowling. Then she sucked the poison from the wound, spat it out, and applied a liberal sprinkling of Condi’s Crystals or, as it was called in the book, Permanganate of Potash. Though Hawk’s hand remained swollen for a week, his forefinger recovered well, the scar from Mary’s over-zealous cut being more damaging and permanent in its effect than the serpent’s bite itself.

  Mary was a strict mother who expected them to work. They gathered watercress and learned to tickle the mountain trout, and hunt for yabbies, the small freshwater crayfish abundant in the mountain streams, so that they would often bring home a bountiful supply. Sometimes they sold what they caught or gathered at the markets. They collected oysters off the rocks in the bay and set lobster traps, and both boys could swim like fish by the time they were five years old. At seven they were independent and spirited and in the rough and tumble of life in Hobart Town, where children of the poor grew up quickly and street urchins scavenged to stay alive, they mostly held their own. Though they would often enough come home to Mary torn, bleeding and beaten, robbed of the pennies or even a mighty sixpence they had earned.

  Hawk’s dark colour was almost always the problem, with the street urchins taking great delight in going after him. If Tommo and Hawk saw one of the gangs approaching and escape proved impossible, they ran until they found a wall and then, with their backs to it, would turn and fight their opponents. If they were not outnumbered they gave as much as they got and more. The street urchins learned to regard them with respect and to attack only in sizeable numbers, engaging the two boys just long enough to steal their catch, a brace of wood pigeons or several trout, a clutch of wild duck eggs or a couple of opossum.

  Mary would patch them up, but offered little in the way of comfort. She loved her precious children so deeply that she often felt close to tears when they returned home with a black eye, bleeding nose or a thick lip. But she knew it was a hard world, and that they must learn to come to terms with it.

  It was Ikey who finally gave them the key to a less eventful life. The two boys appeared at breakfast one morning, Tommo with both eyes shut and a swollen lip, and Hawk with one eye shut and a bruised and enlarged nose.

  ‘Been in the wars, has we, then, my dears?’ Ikey said.

  ‘They’ve been fighting again,’ Mary said, placing two bowls of porridge on the table. ‘A couple o’ proper hooligans, them two!’

  ‘It were not our fault, Mama, it be the wild boys again!’ Tommo said indignantly.

  ‘You must run, don’t fight them, just run,’ Mary said emphatically. ‘It’s not cowardly to run, only prudent.’

  ‘We had a bag of oysters what took two hours to collect,’ Hawk protested. ‘It were fourpence worth at least!’

  ‘You can’t run with a bag of oysters!’ Tommo explained further.

  ‘Well they got the oysters and you both got black eyes and fat lips and a bleeding nose, where’s the sense to that?’

  ‘We ain’t scared, Mama,’ Tommo said. ‘Hawk hit three o’ them terrible hard and I kicked one o’ them in the shins so he went howling!’

  ‘Of course, my dears, fisticuffs be all very well,’ Ikey said, picking his teeth. ‘But a much sharper sword would be your tongue!’

  If the eyes of both boys had not been so well closed they would have rolled them in unison.

  ‘They be idjits, Uncle Ikey. You can’t try no reasoning on them, they not like us decent folks,’ Tommo said.

  ‘Don’t you speak like that, Tommo Solomon!’ Mary remonstrated. ‘They be poor brats what’s had no chance in life. They does the best they can to stay alive! They be just as decent as us given half a chance!’

  ‘Talk to them, my dears, use your wits,’ Ikey said. ‘Wits be much more powerful than fists.’ He rose from the table and stretched his arms above his shoulders. ‘I’ll be off, then. No lessons today, your Uncle Ikey’s had a long, hard night.’

  Later that morning the two boys were sitting on Mary’s magic rock on the slopes of the mountain when Hawk turned to Tommo. ‘What’s you think Ikey be on about this morning?’ he asked.

  Tommo shrugged. ‘It be Ikey stuff we be supposed to understand but can’t.’

  ‘I got an idea,’ Hawk said.

  Two days later the two boys found themselves accosted by five street urchins. They’d just returned from their lobster traps and their sack was bulging and bumping with six live lobsters they were hoping to sell to Mrs McKinney’s fish shop for threepence.

  Hawk looked at Tommo and the smaller boy nodded.

  ‘Wotcha got?’ the biggest of the urchins demanded.

  Tommo and Hawk remained silent, and the snot-nose who had asked the original question made a grab for the bag in Hawk’s hand.

  ‘Careful,’ Tommo shouted. ‘They be magic lobsters what can curse you!’

  The boy drew back confused. ‘Wotcha mean?’

  Hawk opened the bag, brought out a plump lobster and held it up above his head. The creature’s claws and feelers waved wildly in the air.

  ‘They can read your mind, them lobsters!’

  The boys standing around jeer
ed. ‘That be fuckin’ stoopid!’ the first boy answered. ‘Lobsters what can read me mind!’

  Hawk pushed the live lobster into the face of the boy, who reeled back.

  ‘Yeah, bullshit!’ another of the urchins shouted. ‘Ain’t no lobsters what can do that!’

  ‘Not your ordinary lobsters, that I admits, but these be special magic ones,’ Tommo said quickly. ‘It be the secret curse o’ the people from Africa!’

  ‘Who, him? The nigger?’ the boy said, pointing to Hawk.

  Hawk grinned. ‘Black magic!’ he said.

  ‘Wanna see?’ Tommo asked.

  The urchins had now forgotten their original intention to rob Tommo and Hawk of the bag. ‘Yeah!’ they chorused.

  ‘You brave enough to take the chance to be cursed by the great African lobster what swum all the way to visit us from the Cape o’ Good Hope in Africa?’ Tommo asked the eldest of the boys.

  The urchin hesitated but then, seeing the others looking at him, said, ‘It be stoopid! That be a fuckin’ lobster like any uvver what’s in the river.’

  ‘G’warn, show us the magic!’ the urchins challenged Tommo.

  ‘Don’t be cheeky!’ Tommo said to the bunch of skinny boys standing around him. ‘Or we’ll curse the lot of you, not only him.’ He scowled at the boy who had first accosted them and beckoned to the gang in a low voice. ‘Come here where that African lobster creature can’t hear what you is saying! Come right away all of you to that tree.’ He pointed to a swamp oak about fifty feet away.

  The urchins and their leader followed Tommo and stood beside the tree. ‘Now I wants you each to whisper your name in me ear, one at a time, and then we’ll ask the magic lobster to tell me brother what knows lobster language to tell us what your name be!’ Tommo pointed to their original attacker. ‘You what be double cursed already for saying it be a lobster what come from the river, you go first. Whisper your name in me ear with your back to the magic African lobster me brother’s holding.’

  Tommo knew the boy was known as Boxey, because his head was almost square. ‘George,’ Boxey whispered slyly into Tommo’s ear, though loud enough for those gathered around to hear him. There was a giggle from the others at their leader’s foxy trick.