They would talk and laugh when a transformed street saw them surging homewards in the evening. Now they must hurry—girls with unbuttoned coats, the sides floating outspread, with hair still tossed from pillows, running girls with anxious faces.
It was almost 7.30. Hurry!
Rivers of men and youths flowed up streets and round corners—youths with belts around loose-hipped, grey trousers, with soiled grey trousers of flannel, with old coats …
There were hatless youths with thick hair, youths wearing hats on the sides of their heads. There were old men with grease-polished suits, men carrying perished leather bags that rattled with tools or were fat with lunches, men on bicycles crowding the roadways.
The gaping doors swallowed them all. At 7.30 the tardy ones were jerked into a run by the sudden command of factory whistles. They shrieked from jets of steam on factory rooftops. There were wails and long-drawn blasts. They came faintly from distances. One followed another, answering, competing …
Beneath this shrill sounding came an answering murmur from the depths of buildings. It was more a tremor than a sound, the first movement of an unleashed power. It grew to a rumble, a growl.
Inside the factories pulleys sped into blurred circles, belts leaped upwards and fell thwarted. Machines began to clamour their answer to the whine of motors.
Within their voices were the complaining cams of the rapid stitcher, the scream of the pounder, the snarl and tear of furious needles, the rumble of racks being pushed along wooden floors. It was a summons.
The workers before the machines sprang into movement.
This was now my world. I had a room a hundred yards from the factory and each morning I was one of those who walked to work through the streets.
‘Start with the men,’ Fulsham had told me.
The shrieking whistles heralded my deep breath before a desk as it did the resolve of the men before machines.
There was a different atmosphere in the Modern Shoe Company from that which had surrounded me in the Crown Casket Company. The struggle was fiercer. There was intense competition in the shoe trade where depression conditions were sending many factories bankrupt.
The retail stores were beginning to sell a solution to paint on the worn soles of shoes to make them last longer. It stiffened and waterproofed them and the people were buying it. They only bought shoes when they had to.
My increased wages released me from a cage in which I had been pacing to and fro looking through bars of physical inadequacy to distant places of enchantment denied me by my confinement.
I paid a deposit on a second-hand car and now the freedom of movement that as a child had been granted to me through the legs of a pony was mine through the wheels of a car. That dark companion of my city wanderings, fatigue, no longer haunted me. I could come and go with complete freedom from strain, seeing the streets, freed from forbidding distances, go moving past me without enmity.
I paid the car off and traded it in for a better one but now the weekly payments were larger and the upkeep more than I anticipated.
Factories began their losing battles to survive by a more ruthless exploitation of labour. My wages were slashed by half. To retain my car I had to get a reduction in my weekly payments, an extension of time from the hire purchase company that financed its purchase.
I ate at the cheapest cafes, deprived myself of all that was not essential to my existence. I was determined that the last thing I would lose would be my car.
Men worked desperately to hold their jobs in the boot factories, undernourished girls fainted before their machines, pacemakers were introduced. (‘Keep up with the pacemaker on your left or out you go. And he’s fast. He’s a picked man. And you’ve got to be fast too.’)
As the depression deepened, employment of children increased, while men and women over twenty-one found it almost impossible to get work.
It was summer time and I stood making entries in an accounts book. There was a timid knock on the counter behind which I was standing and I looked up into the eyes of a girl wearing a red beret. Her head did not come far above the counter. Her eyes seemed too large for her pinched face. She had the flat figure of a child.
Her lips were parted ready to form words she had prepared before coming into the office. But no words came. She turned her head away from me, then faced me again.
‘Is there any work?’ she stammered at last.
‘Hold on a minute and I’ll find out,’ I said.
I pressed a button on an automatic phone. It was labelled ‘Cleaning Room’. A woman’s voice answered and I said, ‘There is a girl over here, Mrs Bourke—a beginner. You want one, don’t you? All right.’
I hung up the phone and said to the girl, ‘The forewoman is coming over to see you.’
She accepted this concession with a self-conscious ‘Thank you’ spoken in a whisper. Her face had flushed. She turned and looked down the passageway from the entrance door, a corridor hidden from me by the wall of Fulsham’s office, to where someone was standing. Her expression was in the nature of an urgent plea. A thin woman stepped into sight and stood beside her; her mother, I concluded.
They did not speak to each other. They stood together in this strange, unfriendly, impersonal place that though vibrating with the noise of machinery yet contained a demand for respectful silence.
They stood together in isolation from all kindliness and help, the mother a priestess offering her child for sacrifice, the child poised ready and hoping for employment that would spell the death of her childhood amid the clatter and roar that came from behind the closed door.
The door through which she hoped to pass was built for the passage of adults. It was high and wide, stained with grease from working hands, built to confine. Upon it were painted the words, ‘No Admittance’.
There were no green paddocks upon which to skip and play behind that door; no gathering of children singing to a teacher, no books, no pictures … All the lovely things that she should know she would never know once that door closed behind her.
She would learn to paint the sole of a shoe, not a picture. Her hand would become skilful and sure, her mind, now ready for introduction to beauty and knowledge under the guidance of teachers, would remain untended.
She had never been prepared for this. She would listen appalled, shrink, question in bewilderment and finally accept, never knowing that what she was accepting was not the natural fate of little girls with poor parents but a calculated pattern of existence fashioned by grasping men for their need.
Mrs Bourke opened the door and stepped into the office. She was frizzled and peroxided and rouged into the image of an old-time music hall star.
We smiled our affection for each other and I said, ‘How’s your little boy?’
‘Not too good. I wish they’d tell me what it is. His throat is terrible. I know a doctor, he’s a sort of cousin of mine. I’m going to take him there. Half of these doctors don’t know as much as they think they do.’
‘No,’ I murmured doubtfully.
She walked to the counter and looked from the girl to the mother.
‘How old is she?’ she asked the woman.
‘Fourteen last month’, said the woman.
The girl stood tensely in the background. Her hands were clasped tightly in front of her and her glance wavered between her mother and the forewoman. She glanced down the corridor out on to the street where the warm sun lay on the pavement and where there were no walls.
‘Has she got a permit?’
‘Yes.’ The woman fumbled in her bag. ‘Here it is.’
Mrs Bourke took the form and looked at it.
Department of Labour,
Government Offices,
Spring Street, Melbourne
Permission for Girl between 14 and 15 years of Age
to work in a Factory
I hereby grant permission to Rene Gaunt of 84 Carey Street, Richmond, a girl of 14 years of age on 12.1.31. who is not required to attend school under t
he Education Act, to work in a Boot Factory.
L. Currey
Chief Inspector of Factories
Mrs Bourke handed it to me for filing.
‘Can she start right away?’ she asked the mother.
The mother looked quickly at her daughter as if she were called upon to protect her.
The girl drew a deep breath. She looked unwaveringly into her mother’s eyes, seeking strength.
‘Yes,’ said the mother. She smiled encouragingly at her.
The forewoman motioned the child through the office doorway. The girl drew herself together. She faced with a last appeal the reluctant renouncement in her mother’s eyes.
‘I will send your lunch round,’ the mother said.
The forewoman stepped back to the wall, smiling down reassuringly at her new hand. There was silence a moment then the mother bent and kissed her daughter. The girl stepped into the office. She stood there uncertainly, waiting for orders that would direct her.
The forewoman closed the counter behind her. She fastened the heavy bolt—click. The girl closed her eyes for a moment.
The forewoman placed her hand on her shoulder and guided her across the office. The girl blundered past the door leading into the factory. The forewoman pulled her back and opened the door, letting in the low, unceasing roar of machinery.
It overwhelmed the girl like a wind. She paused as if from a buffet before passing through.
11
A head wound suffered during the Great War was bringing paralysis to Arthur. Walking was becoming increasingly difficult to him and he was approaching the stage when he would be forced into a wheel chair.
‘I used to look at you, you know, and wonder how you felt about it,’ he told me. ‘Now I know.’
He had married Florrie. They had bought the leasehold of an apartment house in Albert Park but the rooms they had to let were often empty and they were sometimes short of money.
Florrie worked hard. She was determined that the apartment house should keep them without the need for Arthur to work. The slow deterioration of his muscles only served to increase her devotion to him.
Arthur often searched her face, seeking yet fearing to find a look of pity upon it.
‘If she shows pity I will build a wall between us,’ he said to me one night when I was visiting him.
We had been talking about the need he had to preserve his independence even though she had become necessary to his existence.
‘You become only half a person,’ he said. ‘The other half is her. You know if she goes you’re done. Like as if you had your lungs torn out of you. You can’t live without them. Well, she’s lungs to me. Without her I can’t go on. But somehow I don’t want her to know that. I want to be able to say, I’m off and to hell with her and everyone else. But I’ve come to love her, that’s the trouble. Even if I wasn’t crook I’d need her.’
She became so valuable to him he wanted to share her thoughtfulness with me that I might benefit from it as he had done. Each night she rubbed his back to relieve its ache and since I had at one time complained of backache he felt I had need of her skill.
‘I asked her,’ he said, ‘and she says she’ll rub yours every night too. Come up here every night after tea. She mixes up some stuff with eucalyptus in it. There’s a hell of a lot of other stuff in it too, mind you. After she lams into you for ten minutes you’re glowing like a coal. It’s good, I tell you. Now you start tomorrow. You’re just as crook as I am.’
I did not have need of Florrie’s skill at easing painful backs but I had need of Arthur’s friendship. I sometimes felt it was based on a swapping of troubles and in the process they ceased to be important.
But the troubles that oppressed us were those of the mass of people rather than our own and it was impossible for us to escape involvement in what was happening to them. In the defeat of their hopes was the certainty of defeat for your own.
There lay over Melbourne, as over all Australia, a mass hopelessness that touched everyone, even those who felt secure. It was impossible to escape being affected by it.
By day city and suburban streets were tramped by men and women looking for work. At night groups of men stood at street corners brooding or discussing the most likely places to get jobs. They kept calling at the Modern Shoe Company with the question, ‘Any work?’
They knew the answer would be ‘No’, were prepared for it, but the impact of it upon them was always sharply felt as though hope had momentarily blinded them to reality.
In the evenings I ate in cheap cafes, then wandered round the streets recording in a notebook what I saw and heard.
There was an alley beside an hotel in Elizabeth Street. Each night about eight-thirty I noticed a queue of men lined against the side wall of the building that skirted this entrance to a back door. It stretched back from this door of the hotel to the alley’s junction with Elizabeth Street. Here the light from the main thoroughfare revealed the faces of the men in the queue. At the head of the queue beside the door the men stood in semi-darkness.
I wondered why they stood there. They were generally silent, some taking puffs from the cigarette butts they had picked up on the street and which they kept in tobacco tins, others hunched and gloomy, staring ahead of them.
They were not young men; most of them would be over forty. They had reached a stage in a long period of unemployment where optimism had vanished. They were shabby and unshaven. They had long since ceased to be concerned with their appearance. They had no money to buy soap, toothpaste, boot polish, get a hair cut.
The bursting shoes upon their feet were not worth cleaning. They were bowed under a weight of hopelessness. Food was their problem—food. This was all that mattered now.
I joined the queue. I stood behind a man wearing a grey sweater the elbows of which were darned with blue wool. He had no hat. His unbrushed hair, thrusting stiffly outwards in a tangle like grass, suggested the presence of dust deep within it.
Deep lines were engraved upon his face. His lips were dry and bore grey flakes of skin. He was leaning with his back against the wall, staring at the ground. After a while he raised his head and looked at me.
‘You’ll want some newspaper, sport,’ he said after a brief survey.
‘What… ! Yes,’ I said. ‘I haven’t got any.’
He was holding a newspaper. He drew a double sheet from its folds and handed it to me.
‘Here, take this.’
I took the sheet and folded it, then stood holding it, waiting for I knew not what. All the men were holding newspapers. They waited too, the papers tucked beneath their arms.
The man at the head of the queue had spread a number of sheets of newspaper on the cobblestones in front of him. They made a white square on the darkness of the paving.
Suddenly the door, two stone steps above the square o paper, opened. The queue changed from its passive state and became imbued with purpose. It moved forward, divided and gathered itself round the paper on the ground.
A man in a dirty white apron appeared in the doorway. He was carrying a rubbish bin on his shoulder. His bare arms, shirt sleeves rolled up, held it aloft against the side of his head.
The bin was so tightly packed with refuse the lid did not sit securely on its rim but perched at an angle on the top of its bulging contents.
‘Stand back,’ said the man. The bin was heavy.
He upended it, spilling on the spread newspapers the accumulated kitchen waste of the day’s meals in the hotel.
It formed an unstable mound that subsided as I watched, pushing its perimeter, girdled by a brown liquid, towards the edges of the newspaper square.
‘There she is,’ said the man with the apron. He carried the empty bin back through the doorway.
The man who had headed the queue now took charge. He had grey hair and an efficient manner.
‘How many are there?’ he asked.
‘Twelve,’ someone said.
He bent swiftly over the mound and thrust
his two hands deep into it. He quickly divided the mass into twelve separate heaps, pushing them apart from each other to make room.
‘Now,’ he said. “Who’s first?’
An old man with thick-jointed hands held them out towards him. They supported his sheet of newspaper.
The grey-haired man raised a dripping mass of the refuse and lowered it on to the paper. The old man stepped back.
‘Righto! Who’s next? Come on.’
The heaps, speckled with sodden tea leaves, contained chop bones, the fatty selvages of steaks, pie crusts, saturated bread, the stringy sections of roasts, corned beef fat, scrapings of potatoes stained with gravy, blobs of rice custard, cabbage, pieces of carrot and nibbled portions of cheese. In some heaps disintegrating cream slices rested on picked bones. Permeating them all was the black sand of coffee grounds.
As each man received his share he stepped aside, turning so that his back was towards his fellows. He did not want to be seen eating. None of them wanted to be seen eating. It robbed a man of that last remnant of pride he still possessed.
They wolfed the food like dogs.
I stepped back from the group.
‘I feel crook,’ I said to one of the men. ‘You have my share.’
These men were not derelicts because of character defects, because of laziness, drink or an inability to work. Unemployment with its accompanying despair and hunger had done this to them. They had worked when times were good, kept families. What were the women and children, once dependent on them, doing now?
I walked out on to Elizabeth Street, into light and moving people. They passed the alley mouth, chattering and laughing. They did not know what was happening so close to them. None of them looked down the alley. They had to get home. It was getting late.
After a while the men emerged and moved away amongst people going home. I did not know where the men were going.
There was a time when I had imagined that even hunger could not drive a man to eat that which naturally revolted him. I learnt that he reached that state in stages, down, down to the level of animals.
In Fitzroy there were a number of cafes that supplied a three-course meal for sevenpence. In the early morning a spring cart drawn by a bony horse pulled up in front of these cafes. It was laden with hessian bags stuffed with vegetables and fruit swept from the stalls of the Victoria Market or gathered from the gutters where it had been tossed for disposal by the council cleaners and their brooms.
In Mine Own Heart Page 10