‘When did Mrs Scrubbs get kicked?’ I asked.
‘Oh that was this morning after the last of them had left. She called Faith a prostitute. Faith was standing on the landing looking down but she didn’t take long to come down those stairs when she heard that.
‘She grabbed Mrs Scrubbs then Perce comes out and the three of them mixed it for a while. Faith wouldn’t let go. I didn’t interfere. I thought it would do them all good to let off steam. They screeched at each other.
‘Faith was getting the worst of it until she started using the boot. She doubled up Mrs Scrubbs and had Perce hopping round on one leg. Mrs Scrubbs rang the coppers then.’
‘What a rotten place this is,’ I said.
‘Yes. Get out of it. You’ll never do any good here. I’m leaving. Dolly has got hold of a flat with a bathroom out at Parkville. I’ll share it with her. She can’t get work so I’ll have to carry her for a while. What you ought to do is to sell out while you’ve still got some furnishings to sell.’
‘I’ll do that,’ I said.
I watched her go off to work then entered the house. Mrs Scrubbs met me with resentment, Faith with sulky defiance. Mrs Scrubbs with lifted chin and with uncertain driven eyes told me she was leaving that day. Faith too was ‘getting out’, as she put it.
I expressed no regrets, made no excuses. I too had decided to ‘get out’.
I placed the sale of the leasehold and furnishings in the hands of the pious agent who accepted the assignment with a reflection on the prevailing slump in the price of apartment house leaseholds and an assurance he would do his best to get what I gave for it. He then shook my hand—without pressures—and went away with his head down.
The barmaid had not yet left. She was working back late earning extra money by waiting on the hotel tables after she finished her work in the bar.
‘Dolly will need some money till she gets over her trouble,’ she explained.
I set about cleaning the flats of Mrs Scrubbs and Faith which had been left with no attempt to tidy them. The beds were unmade, dirty kitchen utensils lay piled in the sinks, the tables still bore the knives, forks, cups and plates used in their final breakfast.
Faith’s flat was littered with beer bottles. A chair with a broken leg lay on its side against the wall, discarded clothing had been left in the drawers.
I entered the flats with the feeling of a trespasser. They each contained something of the personality of the two women who had lived in them. I had to force myself to take the blankets, sheets and pillowslips from the beds to be sent to the laundry. I did not like touching them.
I cleaned the dirty saucepans, the frying pans, emptied the chamber pots they had left full under the beds. In doing these tasks I experienced a feeling of identification with the two women, a sense of possessing a similar character, a similar outlook. I found it most objectionable. I told the barmaid about it.
‘You will always involve yourself in the lives of others,’ she said. ‘You shouldn’t let the dirtiness of others flatten you. One of these days you take time off to get to know yourself.’
‘Practise selfishness?’ I said.
She laughed. ‘Dreamer,’ she said.
I returned to my cleaning of the flats. In the flat Faith had occupied were two brass candlesticks. I often stopped work to look at them. They suggested a beautiful room to me; an atmosphere of dignity and quiet, leather-bound books and people listening to great music. When I had cleaned the flat they were the last things I looked at before I closed the door.
I sat in my room thinking about them. When the barmaid was asleep I sneaked up the stairs and entered the flat where they sat in darkness upon the mantlepiece.
I hurriedly removed them, holding one in each hand while I moved stealthily down the stairs. In my room I wrapped them in paper and hid them in the wardrobe.
I gave them to my sister Mary, to whom they would speak as they spoke to me.
‘I pinched them from one of my flats,’ I explained. ‘Somehow I had to do it.’
‘How could you pinch them when they were already yours?’ she asked me.
19
I sold the leashold and furnishings of the apartment house for ninety-five pounds, five pounds less than I gave for it. I took a room in Brunswick and moved in during the last week of the Modern Shoe Company’s existence.
A meeting of shareholders had been called and there the papers would be signed that would put us in the hands of the liquidator.
The staff had been reduced gradually. Men and girls were sacked one by one. They stepped out on to the street clasping their last pay envelope. This was it. What they had dreaded was upon them. They were out of work with little hope of getting another job. In those last few days their fears and despairs were concealed beneath a false gaiety.
‘Let’s throw a party on the last day.’
‘Let’s all have a drink together.’
‘Take it easy, girls; talk as much as you like.’
We suddenly had need of each other’s friendship. “We greeted each other with warmth. We were bound together in the face of a common disaster and our regard for each other became a support.
Ahead of these men and women was the tramp, and the tramp, and the tramp …
‘Full up here, girlie.’
‘Full up here, son.’
‘My boy’s got a job, thank God. Mum reckons we’ll manage, but I dunno.’
Upon the faces of middle-aged men rested a resentful resignation.
‘The street corner for you now, Shorty.’
The younger men were more optimistic.
‘I’ll crack it somewhere. I’ve got enough to last a fortnight.’
They did not have families to support.
The manager of the factory and the foremen of the various sections were not prepared to face resolutely the prospect of unemployment, as were the men in their charge. Unemployment had always been a possibility to those who tended the machines or packed the shoes or swept the floors. They had lived close to the spectre, were familiar with it, could face it without panic.
The foremen had held positions of minor power for years. They were paying off houses, had felt secure, their wives had never stood hesitant before piles of vegetables in the shops of greengrocers, wanting to buy but lacking the money. They had always bought.
The adjustments they would soon have to make, revealed to them by tense announcements from their husbands, did not seem imperative or real. The forbidding prospect of being forced to deny themselves and their families the food and clothing their conditioning had taught them to accept as a permanent feature of their lives, existed as a situation created by words rather than as an imminent and concrete reality.
They saw the future as a threat, not as a state. It was disturbing but would soon be dispelled by assurances from their husbands.
‘I have another job’ were the magic words of release. They waited for them, protected from despair by blank inexperience.
There was, too, a perverse feeling of pleasure in the thought that their husbands, soon to be deprived of their source of strength and confidence, would be driven to a greater dependence on them. They had shared their husbands with the factory for years; now their husbands belonged to them entirely as if they were their children.
The factory tottered to its death amid confusion and protest. The once full-throated roar of its machines had abated to a complaining whine.
In the days of its prosperity some of its resolution resided in those who worked there. The girls ordered their lives on the promise of a future that would supply them with the love of a man, a home and babies. It was a dream nurtured by regular wages, a feeling of security and by the smiles of men confident in a similar future.
Love was not an urgent and desperate need since the conditions that promised it were not only here but ahead of them too. They could wait.
In the meantime it was fun to have one’s defences tested, if you were a girl; to attempt a conquest if you were a ma
n. The girls skipped aside with a laugh or a protest when would-be lovers sought to embrace them in secluded corridors. Kisses were but promises to be broken. If there was a final embrace it was one of love.
Now the future promised no fulfilment and barriers came down. The worried, troubled or unhappy girl turns to sex for comfort be it in dreams or in practice; the man denied a future in which he can support a girl he loves becomes a hunter.
The isolation of the individual is intensified in times of trouble and at such times there comes a need in the man and the girl to escape their aloneness, to merge, to be one with the other, the state that lovemaking promises.
Some of those that had resisted now succumbed. And behind bales of leather and partitions they escaped their loneliness for a space. There was comfort in a man’s arms; it helped when a girl loved you.
The foremen, isolated by their position of power, were concerned with money. They searched the racing pages of the newspapers then made their last futile attempts to secure themselves against want.
They curved over the phone in my office, speaking with urgency into the plastic mouthpiece. Across their features played their emotions—uncertainty, doubt, avarice and fear.
‘Ten bob each way on Sonny Boy … Yes, in the first race … That’s right … Hey, wait … Look, make it a quid, will you? … Yes … A quid each way Sonny Boy. If any, a quid each way Guardian in the third … Did you get that? … Good oh.’
Their faces grew tight if the horses lost. They sought to escape a feeling of guilt by walking swiftly on errands of purpose, by giving orders, their tones sharp.
When they talked together they abused Fulsham for his rotten management. They blamed him personally, failing to see society’s guilt.
‘I saw this coming six months ago. If he’d done what I said we’d be right.’
‘The belt’s off the pulleys, Mr Robinson,’ said a girl interrupting him.
‘Damn the belt!’
It didn’t matter now.
They stole in sudden bursts of resentment. They filled their luncheon bags with sole leather then experienced periods when stealing seemed futile.
‘Leather won’t fill your guts.’
When the liquidator moved in and the knowledge that this day was the last could no longer be avoided, tension and worry vanished. A temporary gaiety seized the men and the girls, and the atmosphere of a celebration pervaded the factory.
Couples danced between the silent machines and girls sang a few words of popular songs while pivoting away from smiling youths weaving their shoulders to imaginary music.
The liquidator watched them, accepting with paternal tolerance this last defiant act in a play he knew so well.
He was a big man with curly hair. He wore a dark blue suit and new shoes taken from the bankrupt stock of the last factory over which he had conducted his obsequies. He smiled benignly as he inspected the factory, giving the standard orders of his profession in the manner of an auctioneer repeating the rules of a sale.
‘Every man and girl except the executives will cease work tonight. See that your machines are in working order. Every shoe must be accounted for. Continue your work as usual. List the equipment for which you are accountable.’
No one listened to him, a fact which he accepted as being the normal reaction to his orders.
‘This is your permanent job, is it?’ I asked him.
‘Yes. I do nothing else—just go from factory to factory. Business has never been better.’
‘You must witness a lot of suffering,’ I observed, noting a sympathy in his attitude towards the staff.
‘No,’ he said, ‘I don’t. Just look around you. There comes a time when you don’t give a damn.’
He explained the work he was doing and named half a dozen factories awaiting his attention, commenting that directors rarely suffered.
‘The owners generally make sure they have something stacked away,’ he said. ‘Their wives become wealthy overnight. When times come good they’ll be in it again. Your boss is one of the mugs, they tell me. He’s taken it in the neck. You would have thought he’d be sitting pretty before he called me in. But that’s how it goes. It’s hard to understand some men.’
While we were talking Fulsham walked in. He was carrying a heavy suitcase which he placed on the floor before looking around him. His eyes were tired from lack of rest. He had lost weight and the flesh of his cheeks, once firm from regular meals and peaceful sleep, now sagged as if it had been deflated.
He came up to us and greeted the liquidator perfunctorily then added, looking steadily at him, ‘Everything’s as I said, isn’t it?’
‘Yes. I’ve listed those who’ll stay on for a week or two. You haven’t unloaded as much stock as I expected. There’s quite a large stock. You’ll probably pay eight bob in the pound.’
Fulsham didn’t reply. In a few weeks, though he didn’t know it, he would be working as a nightwatchman for a firm he had helped to prosper with his past custom.
Some augury of his future state must have suddenly isolated him from the world of the liquidator for he walked over to the benches and stood with the men working there. They grouped themselves around him as if, knowing he had suffered the same defeat, they were offering him the support of identification.
‘I thought we might all have a drink together, Bill,’ he said to one of the men. ‘Could you get them all down? Get the lot.’
The man hurried upstairs on his mission and Fulsham got his suitcase and arranged the bottles it contained along one of the benches.
‘Get some pannikins, Harry—cups, anything.’
He turned to me, ‘Have you got any cups in the office?’
‘I’ll get them,’ I said.
The girls were coming down the stairs from the machine room, the clickers from their benches, the stuffcutters, the first lasters. They brought tin pannikins, chipped cups, tins they had used for drinking. They surrounded Fulsham who with evidence of strain upon his face watched them gather.
They filled their containers with beer—men and girls. The younger girls, so pitifully immature, their working life only beginning, looked at the beer in their cups with wavering resolve.
‘This’ll be the first beer I’ve ever tasted.’
‘Just take a mouthful, Annie, if you don’t like it. No one cares. You’re in it with us whatever you do.’
It was a moment when Fulsham felt impelled to express his feelings in a speech to them. I knew that he was struggling to find words to express gratitude, friendship and thanks so that on this last day of his career as an employer he might be accepted as one of themselves. He wanted their respect.
He began to speak.
‘I’d just like to say …’ he began, then stopped and lowered his head.
‘I’d just like to say …’ he began again, looking up but still gripped by the same inadequacy to express himself, ‘that …’
Words would not come to him. He looked helplessly at the quiet, intent faces watching him then said, the words forced from him by emotion, ‘I’ve done you no harm.’
He stood in silence a moment before their judgment then held out his hand towards them in a final plea, ‘Have I?’
They moved forward as one, reaching out their hands to pat him, to touch his arms. They raised their cups and pannikins and drank a toast to him. They sang ‘For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow’ and cheered him.
The cheering and the shouting overwhelmed him. He stood uncertainly before them till their acclaim stopped and they were silent.
‘Thank you,’ he said then turned and walked resolutely out on to the street.
20
The three men sitting by the side of the road rose to their feet as I came into sight fleeing before the nose of pursuing dust. They watched me approaching them, the attitude of each a study in concentration. They were each occupied in looking for signs that suggested I would pull up and give them a lift.
The car was old and shabby which was promising. A modern car
would have suggested wealth and a driver with little sympathy for the unemployed. You had much more chance of getting a lift in a rattletrap car. But it was a single-seater and this was bad. The truth would come from me.
I wouldn’t look at them if I were going to continue on, or I would increase my speed, or I would gaze at the instrument panel, and pretend to be occupied with a defective instrument, or I would gaze across the paddocks to where sheep were nibbling their way through tussocks on the opposite side of the road to where they were standing.
One of the men reached a decision quicker than the others. He turned swiftly, lifted his swag and stepped out on to the road smiling. I pulled up opposite them and watched the other two pick up their swags and billies before coming over.
‘Where ya making?’ I asked the first one to reach the car, the one with the smiling face.
‘Wherever you are, sport,’ he said swinging his swag into the open boot where upon the dickey seat my belongings were stacked.
Melbourne lay over two hundred miles behind me. I was making for Queensland not only because winter was at hand and it would be warmer up there but because of a desire to escape from the compulsion to keep looking for work that life in Melbourne imposed upon me.
I could not sit in a rented room shivering, scanning the papers for jobs, or stand on street corners talking to huddling men worse off than myself.
Before the crash of the Modern Shoe Company I began writing humorous articles. I wrote one a week and sent a carbon copy to the biggest newspaper in each capital city on the assumption that if I did this regularly, sooner or later an editor would accept one of them. I was a patient fisherman casting my baited hook into a pool of well-fed fish.
For some months the articles were ignored, then they began appearing in either one state or the other until I could rely on one a week being published somewhere.
I was paid a pound for each one published and was thus assured of some income after the Modern Shoe Company had closed down.
It was under these conditions that I left Melbourne, travelling in a car along roads where hundreds of unemployed were making north by foot. When I ran out of money I would camp and write articles. I felt confident I could always get a feed. I got on well with country people.
In Mine Own Heart Page 17