by Ruth Park
These Victorians lived in a dangerous world, where a whole family could be wiped out with typhoid fever or smallpox, where a soldier could get a hole in his head that you could put your fist in, where there were no pensions or free hospitals or penicillin or proper education for girls, or even poor boys, probably. Yet, in a way, it was a more human world than the one Abigail called her own.
‘I wish I could stay awhile,’ she thought, ‘and find out why all these things are. But I can’t think about any of this till I get home. Getting home, that’s what I have to plan.’
Chapter 6
The day Abigail ran away to go home started like any other day. As usual she was wearing clothes borrowed from Dovey, flannel underwear and a brown gingham dress covered by a long white pinafore. She felt draggy and looked it.
She had noted that the ladies in the carriages dashing through to Kent and Cumberland streets – some of them being real ladies and others, according to the cynical Beatie, only ‘high-steppers’, or women unacceptable to polite society – wore lace jabots, handsome buttons and silk braids, and tight jackets that narrowed to fish tails at the rear.
Working women wore drab, ankle-length dresses with long sleeves and aprons. And whereas the rich ladies and the dashing high-steppers both peacocked in saucer-shaped hats tipped forward to make room for elaborate chignons of plaits and curls, the working women flung shawls over their centre-parted, smoothly brushed, or, more often, disorderly and dusty, hair.
It was hard to tell a high-stepper from a real lady, thought Abigail; but you would never mistake one or the other for a working-class woman. She understood now why Kathy never got any lower-class Victorian clothing at Magpies. It had all been worn out by unceasing labour a hundred years before.
‘Mum knows a lot about Victorian and Edwardian days,’ ruminated Abigail, ‘but she has no idea how hard the women worked!’
‘Are the high-steppers prostitutes?’ Abigail innocently asked Dovey.
Dovey flushed ‘Oh, Abby, never let Granny hear you use such language! It’d fair make her swoon awa’.’
Abby added prostitutes to the list of things she was not to mention: the Deity, legs (in front of menfolk), any natural function (except in whispers), the privy at the end of the yard, which consisted of a can and a scrubbed wooden seat (this was ‘the wee hoosie’).
‘Lot of blanky rubbish,’ said the outspoken Beatie when she was alone with Abigail, ‘with The Rocks the way it is, full of seamen and soldiers and language to curl your hair. Not to mind some of the worst grog shops and crimp houses in Sydney.’
‘What’s a crimp house?’ asked Abigail.
‘A grog shop where they put opium in the seamen’s drink, and then shanghai them away to ships that need crews and can’t get them, leaky old tubs bound for China and maybe intended to sink so that the owners will get the insurance. So Judah says.’
‘But that’s cold-blooded murder,’ cried Abigail. ‘Things like that can’t go on in these days!’
‘Do they no’ go on in yours?’ asked Beatie hopefully.
‘I don’t think so,’ said Abigail.
She could not bring herself to tell the eager Beatie about nuclear bombs, chemical warfare, napalm bombing of peasants’ villages and fields. The little girl thought of the late twentieth century as a sort of paradise, a place of marvels. In some ways it was a paradise compared with Beatie’s own time. Let her go on believing there was no dark side, thought Abigail. She would not live to see it, anyway.
On the day Abigail tried to run away to her own time she was not wearing Mrs Tallisker’s best buttoned boots, though now her ankle was its normal size again. Granny had bought her second-hand shoes from the boot barrow. They were heel-less slippers of kid, very uncomfortable, and the barrow man had passed cheeky remarks about the size of her feet. That was another thing she hadn’t known: that even Victorian working women had tiny feet.
Beatie went off to the Ragged School. She was excited because Judah’s ship was in port; he would be home that night.
‘And I’ve learnt how to decline six Latin verbs,’ she told Abigail joyfully. ‘Judah teaches me.’
‘Has Judah studied Latin, then?’
‘Oh, aye, has he not!’ said Beatie proudly. ‘And wasn’t he top of the class when he was only thirteen. Mr Taylor gave him a grand book, Travels in Africa, with “First Prize for Scholarship” and his name written in copperplate, and he sorely wanted him to go to Fort Street School for Boys; but Judah, he was that set on the sea and he wunna!’
‘Who’s Mr Taylor?’ asked Abigail.
‘Oh, he’s the headmaster of Trinity Parish School, y’ken, and he took Judah into his special class for promising boys. Aye, promising, that’s what he said about our Judah. Smart as a whip he is, and will be master of his own vessel some day.’
Mr Bow had been very morose and silent since his last escapade; he was a wretched man, and Abigail was sorry for him. It must have been a terrible thing to lose his wife and little son all in a day. This child was not the only one he and Amelia Bow had lost. Three daughters had died of the smallpox. They had come between Judah and Beatie. Judah had taken the disease too, but lightly. The pock on his cheek, that looked like a dimple, was the only sign of it.
Abigail had not looked closely at Judah’s face: she had been too frightened and confused that night. But she remembered the quaint way he had got her name out of her, and the ease with which he had lifted her to look out the window – to find that her own world had vanished as if by enchantment. She tried to get Mr Bow to talk about his children, but he only gave her a piteous look from those preposterously crossed eyes, and she desisted.
She was making bonbons for Granny. They were small squares of orange and lemon peel threaded on a fine steel knitting-needle. Abigail dipped the needle into a pot of boiling sugar flavoured with grated lemon and a drop of purest whale-oil.
‘To keep the syrup from brittling,’ explained Granny. These bonbons were then laid carefully on a buttered slab of marble and allowed to get cold and crisp before they were packed in paper cones for sale.
It was interesting, thought Abigail, how she had been so absorbed into The Rocks area without further question. The fiction that she was an immigrant girl of good education and no kin, bound for a situation on the High Rocks, knocked down and injured by Mr Bow in one of his spells, and now without memory or worldly resources, had been accepted by those customers made curious by her occasional presence in the shop. She had now been two weeks with the Bows, and there had been no further reference to that curious conversation between Granny and Dovey about her lost green dress. Nor would Beatie answer any questions about ‘the Stranger’. She shut her mouth like a rat-trap and admitted frankly: ‘I’m that scared of Granny. She’d murder me if she knew what I’ve told ye already. She’s got the power, I’ve told ye over and over again!’
‘You’re dotty!’ said Abigail. ‘Granny would never hurt you, or anyone else. She’s the best soul in the world.’
‘’Tisn’t that she’d hurt me,’ explained Beatie reluctantly. ‘But she’d look at me. And I dinna want Granny to look at me.’
And that was all she would say.
Yet Beatie was relentless in her questioning of Abigail about the years to come. Abigail told her about jet aircraft, about men landing on the moon and their voices and pictures coming all the way to earth, clear and bright. She told her about new countries that did not exist in Beatie’s day.
‘But where is the Empire?’ Beatie asked, baffled.
Abigail did not know. ‘It just seemed to break up and dribble away,’ she admitted lamely.
‘But who’s looking after the black men?’
‘They’re looking after themselves,’ said Abigail. But Beatie could not understand. ‘Black men canna look after themselves. Don’t be daft!’
Abigail was constantly surprised at what Beatie would believe and what she could not accept for a second. That men could land on the moon, yes. That people bathed n
aked from public beaches, no. She scoffed at the idea that there were only three or four kings and queens left in the world, but believed without question that many married folk divorced and married others.
‘For rich folk do the same right now,’ she said in her matter-of-fact way. ‘But for a housewifie now, should her man starve or beat her and the bairns, there’s naught but running away or rat poison.’
Most of all she wanted to know about people, whether girls could become doctors, teachers, do good and useful things. Abigail was glad to be able to say ‘yes’.
Always these conversations ended the same way.
‘But how did those bairnies know my name? Dinna ye ha’ some more ideas, Abby? I tell ye, I’m ettlin’ to find out, come what may!’
The older children at the Ragged School had their lessons after dinner-time whistle, a midday orchestra of hideous noises from steam cranes, factories, and loading ships. It was taken for granted by the Ragged School board that the children worked for a living. Some were boot blacks or newspaper boys in the city; others ran errands for offices, or delivered for merchants; many were ‘sparrow-starvers’ or sweepers of manure. Each youngster did something, anything, to earn a few pennies, and many of their parents resented their wasting afternoons at the Ragged School.
On this fateful afternoon, Beatie had long gone off, grizzling and fiery-eyed over the ‘lassies’ rubbish’ she would be taught. Granny and Dovey were upstairs with Gibbie; Mr Bow, hoop-backed, speechless and glum, stirred a cauldron, his back to Abigail.
Abigail delicately placed the last skewer of bonbons to dry on the marble slab, and walked without haste out of the shop.
It was late in the afternoon. The ships’ masts, bare as trees after a bushfire, stood up in the Harbour, very straight, like a thousand spillikins, criss-crossed and twigged with spars and lesser gear. The westering sun seized upon bright specks of metal on these masts and made them burn like stars. Abigail walked straight down Argyle Street.
Not for a moment did it occur to her that she was not going home, to her mother, her father, the bear chair, Magpies, school. All she had to do was turn up Harrington Street, find the stairway and the lane up which she and Beatie had run, and she would descend towards George Street and Circular Quay, and see Mitchell standing there in its steel and glassy grandeur.
‘My father designed it,’ she had told Beatie, who looked at her as if she were lying.
There were trees in Argyle Street, oaks, she thought, covered with curdy green. Many alleys spindled away, turning into flights of steps as steep as ships’ companionways as they went up and over looming sandstone knobs and reefs. Sometimes houses perched on these outcrops like beached Arks; sometimes they were built into them so that the back wall of the house was living sandstone. The lanes were runnels of wet and filth between mouldering shops, factories and cottages. The whole place was cankered with poverty and neglect. The people also – all had something the matter with them: rotting teeth, clubfeet, a cheek puckered by a burn. A little girl, dressed fantastically in a woman’s trailing dress and squashed hat, snarled, ‘Ooya starin’ at?’ and raised a dirty fist as if to strike. Abigail saw that the little one’s face was despoiled by a hare-lip.
But who could fix these infirmities in Victorian days? wondered Abigail. If you were born crooked, you stayed crooked and made the best of it, as Granny Tallisker made the best of the violent deprivation of her son Robert, her daughter Amelia, the four grandchildren dead before they grew up. It was all God’s will.
The gutters, made of two tipped stones, were full of garbage. Abigail saw scaly tails twitching amongst the rotting debris and sprang away.
‘Steady on, Missie!’ It was an elderly soldier with a roast-beef face. He held his musket horizontally so that she could not pass, and she saw a gang of convicts clanking across the street. Some had yellow jackets with large letters and figures daubed in black and red. Others wore coarse canvas cover-alls, part grey, part brown, like grotesque harlequins. Those who were chained had hitched up their chains to their belts with fragments of rope or rag, so that they could walk. But their walk was a slow, bandy-legged shuffle.
She said, ‘I thought transportation stopped years and years ago!’
‘These canaries are long-termers, Miss. They bin loading coal down yonder.’
‘It’s terrible, terrible,’ she whispered.
The soldier said with harsh kindness, ‘You just out from the Old Country, Miss? Well, New South Wales ain’t no place of harps and angels, that’s sartin.’
He stiffened to attention. Abigail saw a young officer, very dandified and bored, ride out from under one of the flattened arches that marked the many courts or wynds. He cut carelessly with his crop at the mob of skeleton, matted-hair urchins that milled about his horse, yelping, ‘Chuck us down a copper, Guv!’ and rode after the convicts.
Now she was outside the Ragged School. She passed it cautiously, for she did not want to meet Beatie unexpectedly. She heard from within the drone of many voices reciting the Lord’s Prayer, the sudden whip-like whistle of a willow cane. But even as she sighed for the pauper children within, she heard behind her the hoarse voice of Beatie Bow.
‘Eh, it’s Abigail! Abby, come back! Where are ye off to?’
Abigail plunged across the street. A stunted child, face black with a lifetime’s dirt, ceased sweeping horse manure and whacked at her legs with his broom so that she almost fell. Her first thought was that Beatie had called from one of the school windows, but now she saw her, accompanied by the sturdy figure of Judah, running along from the direction of the wharves.
It had not occurred to her that Beatie would play truant from school to go to meet her brother. But there they were, dodging amongst the crowd, gaining on her every minute.
She could not see the lamp-post that marked the stairs she had ascended on that first night; it was too late to look for the right alley. So she dived into the first opening she noticed. It was so narrow she could have spanned it with her arms. Its uneven cobbles ran sluggishly with thick green slime. Pressed against the wall, she saw Beatie and Judah run past.
Suddenly a hand fastened round her ankle. She looked down and saw a frightful thing grinning gap-toothed at her. It was a legless man, on a little low trolley like a child’s push-cart. He had a big bulging forehead and fingers as sinuous as steel.
‘Let me go!’ panted Abigail. With her free foot she kicked at the man’s face, but he dodged her with the nimbleness of a monkey. Laughing, he dragged her closer, and bit her leg just above the ankle. The pain was bad enough, but the horror that seized the girl was unbearable.
She let out a ringing shriek. ‘Beatie, Judah, help, help!’
That was all she could utter, for a bag smelling of rotten fish descended over her head and was pulled tight. She was half carried, half dragged she knew not where. Abigail was a strong girl, and her hands were free. She hammered and punched, scratched and tore. Once her fingers fastened in a beard: she could tell by the bristly texture of it. She gave a great yank and a handful came out. The owner slapped her repeatedly over the ears, cursing in an accent and tones such as she had never heard.
‘You’ve caught yourself no tame puss-cat there, Hannah!’ a husky voice said with a chuckle. Abigail’s hands were deftly snared and tied behind her back, and the sack was whisked off her head. She was in a dark, evil-smelling room, and before her stood a mountainous woman holding a blood-spattered fist to her hairy chin. She must have weighed nearly a hundred kilos; there seemed no end to her in her full skirts and vast blouse of gaudy striped silk. Out of the sleeves poked sausagey hands covered in rings. Ferret eyes gleamed at Abigail; the sausage hands filled themselves with her hair and jerked brutally.
‘I’ll have yer bald!’ she yelled. Abigail shrieked at the full power of her lungs, and kicked violently at everything she could see or reach.
A hand went over her mouth. It was accustomed to holding captives thus, for it pushed her upper lip down over her teeth so
that she could not bite.
‘Hold on now, Hannah,’ said the husky voice. ‘We’ve a pretty little canary bird here; she’ll go for a sweet sum, fifteen quid or more. But not if you take off all her hair at the roots.’
Abigail glared over the hand at the bearded woman. She had never seen anything so grotesque in her life. Whether the creature had come from a circus or not, she was terrifying.
Yet, now that the first shock was over, Abigail felt mad fury rather than panic. The panic ran underneath the anger, like a fast-rising tide. She realised clearly that she was in the kind of peril of which she had never dreamed. For the room contained many people, and there was no way, even if she could get her hands free, that she could fight her way out.
The room was, she thought, an underground kitchen. It was like a lair or cavern, pitch black except for a few candle stubs stuck in bottles or their own grease, and the murky gleam of a vast open fireplace. The smell was terrible, even for The Rocks – not only of unwashed and crowded humanity, but decayed meat and rotting wood.
A girl in a draggletail pink wrapper wandered over and looked at her curiously. She seemed half imbecile, with no front teeth and a nose with a flattened bridge. Picking this nose industriously, she lisped, ‘She ain’t much to look at, Master. Be she right age, you think? Mebbe with her ‘air frizzed out and some paint on she’d pass in twilight.’
Abigail felt her skin creep.
‘Shut your trap, Effie,’ said the husky voice. ‘She’s fresh as a new-laid egg. What else matters?’
Abigail felt a hand stealing around the hem of her skirt. Twisting sideways, she saw the terrible little cripple sniffing about her ankles like a dog.
‘She taste sweet as a newborn mouse, Hannah,’ he cajoled. ‘Let poor Barker have a nibble.’
‘Sho, you cannibal,’ shouted the woman. ‘Mark her and I’ll do fer yer, I swear I will.’