Union Belle

by Deborah Challinor

  It could also be very likely, now that the coalminers had gone out in support of the watersiders, locked out of the Auckland ports en masse a week ago. At face value it was over a pay increase, but people were starting to realise now that it went deeper than that, that Holland and his Tories were gunning for the wharfies, and through them the country’s other openly militant trade unions. But Ellen knew they weren’t the only ones who might be facing trouble—if they were to find themselves in financial strife, so would plenty of other families.

  She turned back to the range and gave the sausages a gentle nudge so they wouldn’t catch. ‘How long do you think you’ll be out?’

  Tom shrugged. ‘Depends on the watersiders, I suppose. Not long, if Jock Barnes gets his way.’

  Ellen pulled a face, but made sure Tom couldn’t see it. She didn’t particularly like Jock Barnes; he might be the national president of the Waterside Workers’ Union, and a founding member of the new Trade Union Congress, but in her opinion he was loud-mouthed and overbearing. Toby Hill, Barnes’ right-hand man, wasn’t much better. But the watersiders revered Barnes, and the miners had always supported the watersiders, so you couldn’t say a word against either man. And she agreed wholeheartedly with Barnes’ convictions. There was nothing wrong with a bit of good, organised industrial militancy to rattle the government’s dags.

  She arranged the sausages on a plate and placed the fried eggs next to them with exaggerated care. Tom hated it when the yolks broke and, because he did, so did Neil and Davey, so she had become very skilled at keeping them in one piece.

  As Ellen set Tom’s plate in front of him, he grabbed her and pulled her down onto his knee. She was nine inches shorter than him and nearly five stone lighter, and he could easily pick her up and carry her, which he sometimes did if he was feeling particularly playful.

  She sniffed his short light-brown hair, fluffily clean and smelling of soap from his recent shower at the mine bathhouse. Beneath the hair, and out across his right temple, ran a jagged line of coal tattoos ground into his skin after the face he’d been working at four years ago collapsed and almost killed him. The marks had never faded, and neither had the mental scars; he still had nightmares and cold sweats from time to time, although he would never admit this to anyone but Ellen.

  His big hands settled on her waist and he gave her a gentle squeeze.

  ‘Don’t, the boys will be in soon,’ she said, although she was giggling. ‘Eat your eggs before they go cold.’

  ‘They won’t be in for ages.’

  Ellen knew that, but she also knew she had to start the dinner; the sausages and eggs were only Tom’s afternoon tea, and he’d be hungry again by half past six.

  ‘Let me up, love,’ she said, ‘we’ll have a cuddle tonight if you like.’

  He pushed her reluctantly off his knee, gave her backside a friendly pat and turned his attention to his plate while she rinsed the frying pan in the sink.

  Halfway through his third sausage, he said suddenly, ‘Oh, the committee’s coming over after tea, to talk about the strike. Could you rustle up some supper?’

  Ellen sighed inwardly. There was a perfectly good miners’ hall just down the street, why couldn’t they meet there? Neil and Davey would be awake half the night with the kitchen full of rowdy men.

  ‘Probably,’ she said, ‘but I’ll need to pop down to the shop.’

  Ellen took her apron off and fetched her walking shoes from their bedroom, but when she came back Tom seemed lost in contemplation.

  She was almost out the back door when he said, ‘Ellen?’

  ‘Mmm?’

  ‘Don’t worry, love. I don’t think it’ll go on too long, this one. We’ll be all right.’

  Ellen looked at him for a moment. ‘I know,’ she said, then went outside.

  Under a bright blue sky bulging with the heat of a relentless summer afternoon, it was even muggier than it had been in the kitchen, and Ellen felt sweat trickling down from her armpits before she reached the front gate.

  She glanced at her neighbour’s house as she walked past, wondering how poor Dot was taking the news about the strike. Badly, probably, given her chronic nerves. There were five children in the Sisley household, all under the age of ten. Dot’s husband Bert was a good, steady bloke, but even he was hard-pressed to manage when she was having one of her bad spells.

  Across the dusty street the little primary school was silent and empty now that the school day had ended. Cicadas shrilled and rattled raucously in nearby trees, but over the racket she could still faintly hear the shrieks and howls of children as they played and swam in the stream at the bottom of the gully below the town. She envied them; floating in the cool shade of a bush-canopied creek was surely the best place to be on a day like this, although she doubted there’d be crawlies within a mile of the place by now.

  She turned into Joseph Street and began the trudge down the hill to the shops. By the time she’d stopped several times to exchange the latest news and speculate on how long the strike might last, whether Barnes would back down over his demands, and whether or not that bastard Fintan Walsh from the Federation of Labour would come to the party and support the watersiders, she had to hurry the last few yards before Fred Hollis the grocer closed his shop.

  On her way back home she made a short detour to say hello to her parents. Climbing the steep wooden steps at the rear of their house, she rapped on the open back door and called out, ‘Mum? Anyone home?’

  Silence for a moment, then the measured walk of her mother as she appeared out of the gloom of the hallway.

  ‘Hello, dear,’ she said. ‘Come through, I’m in the lounge.’

  Ellen followed her mother down the hall and into the sitting room. Gloria Powys never entertained in the kitchen, not even her own family. As far as she was concerned, the only appropriate room in which to receive visitors was the lounge. Not the sitting room, the lounge.

  Ellen flopped down in an armchair and slipped off her shoes, waggling her bare toes in the slight breeze from the open window. ‘Where’s Dad?’

  ‘Where is he normally?’ her mother replied, sitting down on the matching couch opposite.

  ‘At the pub?’

  Gloria’s sour expression said it all.

  Ellen’s father, Alf Powys, was a bit of a drinker. Having retired from the mines several years ago, he had contrived ever since to spend as much of his time as he could manage in the pub or the workingmen’s club in Huntly, or at the Glen Afton club, known to locals as the Blue Room, or at the Waingaro hotel—anywhere in fact that Gloria either couldn’t go or wouldn’t be seen dead. Ellen knew that if he was at the Huntly pub this afternoon, he wouldn’t be back until well after six when the last train from town pulled into Pukemiro Junction, at which point he’d get off and stagger the rest of the way home past the Pukemiro mine and over the hill everyone called Gentle Annie. She was disappointed—she’d wanted to talk to him about the strike. He loved to discuss union business, and he missed dreadfully the daily comradeship of the men he’d worked with for decades.

  Throughout much of her adult life, Ellen had pondered the mystery of why her mother had ever consented to marry her father, and at the age of thirty-one she still hadn’t come up with a decent answer. They were as different as coal and gold: her father was without doubt the coal, while her mother was absolutely convinced she was the gold. Ellen had done the arithmetic years ago and worked out that her older sister Hazel had been born well after her parents had married, so that hadn’t been the reason. Surely then there must have been love between them at some point? But Gloria maintained steadfastly even now, and especially after a couple of sweet sherries, that she’d been tricked into believing she was marrying a man well on his way up the ladder, a man destined to become a mine manager at the very least, but had realised far too late that Alf Powys was going to fall well short of that mark.

  Alf, on the rare occasions that Ellen could recall him bothering to defend himself, insisted that Gloria h
ad been sadly mistaken, that he’d only ever been one for shovelling the coal, not managing it, and that he’d never had ambitions to organise anything other than himself. And the men in the union he belonged to. The social aspirations had always been Gloria’s, not his, and if he’d disappointed her then he was sorry, but he couldn’t do much about it now. Pass the beer. He was a very decent man, Alf Powys, respected and well liked, but age and life with Gloria had also made him extremely stoical.

  As compensation, or perhaps revenge, Gloria had over the years demanded the best of everything—the latest in household gadgets and furniture, the best quality clothes for her daughters, the smartest house in Pukemiro. Alf had worked his fingers to the bone, almost literally, to earn the money to pay for it all, but these days, while he had his many mates, his popularity and his memories, all Gloria had was a new lounge suite and a house that didn’t have paint peeling off the outside.

  And although she hadn’t understood at the time, Ellen could see now why her mother had been so against her marrying Tom McCabe. She’d been frightened that Ellen, her precious younger daughter, would be confined to a dreary life in a small mining town, making packed lunches day after day for a man who would always have coal dust ingrained in his skin and under his fingernails, and who might, with nothing more than a premonitory subterranean rumble or a sudden whiff of gas, leave his wife a widow well before time.

  It was true that Ellen did make Tom’s lunch every day, and his breakfast and his dinner, but she loved him and did that, and everything else they shared in their lives, willingly. She enjoyed living out at Pukemiro, unlike her mother who was on at her dad at least once a week to move into Huntly, and she was comforted by the closeness of the small community (except, sometimes, for the never-ending gossip) and the industry that made them such a unique little group.

  Ellen was definitely her father’s daughter: she loved the coal, she loved the life, and like him she regarded the trade union almost as a religion. Without the union there would be nothing for the men who risked death underground every day, and nothing for their families should they not come back up. And because the union had voted to go out in support of the watersiders, she would do everything she could to help.

  ‘Have you heard?’ she asked her mother.

  About the strike? Yes, I’ve heard, they’ve been talking about nothing but all afternoon up and down the street.’

  Ellen knew her mother didn’t have much time for striking miners, regardless of their reasons for going out, but whether it was simply because her father had been a lifelong union man himself, she had never been sure.

  ‘What do you think about it?’ she asked.

  ‘What I think is you’ll be very sorry if it goes on for much longer than a few weeks,’ Gloria said. ‘How will you pay your mortgage? And what about Neil and Davey? They can’t go to school on empty stomachs, you know. Do you want a cup of tea or a cold drink?’

  ‘Cold drink, please. They won’t go to school on empty stomachs, Mum, you know that. There’s plenty in the vege garden, and the union will rally around, they always do.’

  ‘I don’t know why you didn’t marry someone from outside, like Hazel did,’ Gloria said, shaking her head ruefully. ‘Look at her now, lovely house in Auckland, three beautiful children, husband making lots of money.’ She stood up.

  Ellen sighed—not this again. ‘I’ve got a lovely house in Pukemiro, with two beautiful kids and a husband earning all we need.’

  ‘Not after today, he won’t be,’ Gloria said as she went out to get the drinks.

  Ellen loved her sister, but she was sick to death of hearing about how marvellous her life was compared with her own. Hazel was eleven years older and had married very auspiciously, if you thought that sort of thing was important. And good for her, but Ellen had never once envied Hazel’s big house in Remuera, or her husband’s admittedly substantial income. She had Tom, she had her boys, and that had always been enough.

  Gloria came back carrying two glasses of home-made lemonade on a tray set with a perfectly pressed placemat, and handed one to Ellen. ‘Look at you, you look worn out. And where are your stockings?’

  Ellen sipped her drink gratefully. ‘It’s too hot to wear stockings, Mum. And who puts stockings on just to go down Joseph Street to the grocer’s?’

  ‘I do.’

  ‘Well, I’m not you.’

  Gloria ignored her. ‘At least your father will be pleased about the strike.’

  ‘He will, won’t he? It’ll give him something to sink his teeth into.’

  ‘Only if he puts them in.’

  ‘Oh, Mum, why do you always have to be on about him?’

  Gloria swirled lemonade around in her glass, watching the pips form a lazy arc then disappear beneath a lemon slice. ‘I really don’t know,’ she said eventually. ‘Force of habit, I suppose.’

  Ellen said, ‘You’ll drive him away one day, you know.’

  Her mother looked up sharply, then laughed. ‘I doubt it. He’s sixty-eight years old, where on earth would he go?’

  Ellen didn’t know what to say to that, and didn’t even want to contemplate it. She couldn’t bear the idea of not having her father around.

  ‘The union committee’s coming over tonight,’ she said, changing the subject. ‘I thought I’d do sandwiches and pikelets.’

  ‘They’ll all bring beer and smoke their heads off and leave your house smelling like a billiard hall.’

  ‘Probably.’

  Gloria regarded her daughter with a sort of resigned sympathy. ‘I’ve got a nice bit of ham you can have, if you like.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  The men began to arrive at eight o’clock, knocking on the back door and greeting Ellen politely as they came in. They weren’t supposed to be meeting like this, according to the newly imposed emergency regulations, but no one was particularly bothered. They weren’t allowed to picket, display or distribute posters or subversive literature, or organise protest marches either, but all were topics on tonight’s agenda.

  By a quarter past eight, six members of the Pukemiro Mine Workers’ Union committee were crowded around the kitchen table; the president Pat Wickham, Frank Paget, Bert Sisley, Vic Anscombe, Lew Trask and Tom. As union secretary, Tom would be chairing the meeting and recording the resolutions.

  ‘Where’s Jack?’ he asked as he wrote the date and time in the record book.

  ‘Saw him up the street,’ Pat Wickham replied. ‘Should be here in a minute.’

  Tom checked his watch. ‘Well, we can’t wait,’ he said, and declared the meeting open.

  Several of the men lit cigarettes and Ellen placed an ashtray in the centre of the table. Neil and Davey were in bed, but she knew they would both be lying awake in the dark, eyes wide with the excitement of it all.

  She rearranged the damp tea towels draped over the plates of supper waiting on the bench, and was on her way out of the kitchen when there was another knock on the back door. Tom got up, so she continued on into the sitting room, where she planned to finish reading the latest Woman’s Weekly, then do a bit of sewing. She was making herself a new dress to wear to young Dallas Henshaw and Carol Selby’s wedding this coming weekend, and still had the hemming to go, which she always preferred to finish by hand because it looked so much neater. The dress, made from material she’d gone all the way to Pollock & Milne in Hamilton to buy rather than the fabric shop in Huntly, was in a dark-blue taffeta with a low back and a snug waist. The material had been an end-of-bolt, which was why she’d been able to afford it, and its length meant that the skirt wasn’t as full as she would have liked, but it was still a new dress.

  She left the windows and curtains open because of the heat and, although only the standard lamp was on behind her, the moths and mosquitoes soon arrived. But the insect killer was in the cupboard under the kitchen sink, and as she didn’t want to interrupt the meeting she resigned herself to an evening of slapping and scratching.

  Tom stuck his head around the door
an hour and a half later, just as she was putting the finishing touches to the hem.

  ‘Can you make us a pot of tea, love? We’ve finished and we’re having a few beers, but Frank’s having a cuppa.’

  Ellen nodded and put her sewing to one side. Frank Paget had sworn off the booze a year ago, and not before time as far as his wife, Ellen’s best friend Milly, was concerned. Frank had always been the last person to leave social events, and was always legless when he finally did, tripping and staggering and swearing his way home, more often than not arriving to a locked door and his pyjamas biffed out onto the front lawn. It had been quite funny for a while, but had become less and less amusing as time went on, especially for Frank’s family. Eventually he’d started smashing windows to get into his house, then one night he’d smashed Milly, resulting in a visit from the local doctor to tend to her broken nose and split lip.

  Milly and the kids had moved out after that and gone to stay with her parents in Taupiri, and Frank had really hit the skids for a couple of months. Ellen had wanted to go and talk to him about sorting himself out, but Tom had told her to keep out of it; according to him, Frank would come right in his own time. But then Milly’s father had been seen banging on Frank’s front door one night, and Frank turned up at work the next day with his own split lip, telling anyone who’d listen that he’d decided to take the pledge. And he did, too: not a drop of alcohol had passed his lips since. Milly and the children moved back home (their return observed with empathy and interest from behind net curtains by various Pukemiro residents), and Frank transformed himself. He’d always been a good bloke—well, until the booze had got to him—and Ellen admired the way he’d pulled himself together, so tonight she was more than happy to make him tea.