Four Fires

by Bryce Courtenay

  You’d think they’d put down rat poison but the trouble is, the rats crawl into dark places to die, like under floorboards where you can’t find them and they stink the place out so that’s not on. Catching them is the only thing you can do.

  In the winter when there isn’t a lot of food in the drains and gutters, the rats get really hungry and they’ll have a go at anything they can find, like the sequins off the expensive gowns, the fur trimmings on coats and horsehair shoulder pads. When this happens, Mr Stan and all the other owners have to go to the extra expense of calling in the official rat catcher who comes in of a Sunday. He’ll arrive with five or six little Fox Terriers and the whole lane will be filled with their yapping and the squeals of the rats getting slaughterated.

  Mike says the whole of The Lane is one big stinkhole, that the conditions for the workers are terrible and that factory workers in any other industry wouldn’t work there in a fit. The seats the women sit on behind their sewing machines are old and broken so they make cushions to pad their backs and bring a blanket from home to drape over their knees to keep themselves warm in winter. In summer it is so hot they take off their frocks and work in their slips and brassieres.

  The toilet is old and broken, without a seat, and is always clogging with you-know-what as well as the women’s monthly rags. That was the first time I’d ever heard about such things and I think it was for Bozo too. There’s one toilet for the fifty women machinists and it’s so dark in there you can hardly see, with just an old smelly cloth to wipe your hands. There’s a bin for where they should put the stuff that shouldn’t go down the toilet but they don’t always do the right thing and emptying the bin is also Mike’s job. Poor old Mike says he can’t go in without first tying a hanky around his nose and mouth.

  Of course, Mike only tells Bozo and me about this, because he doesn’t want Sarah and Nancy to know what he has to do. He just tells them that he has to clean the lavatory once in a while, which doesn’t sound too bad when you think of city lavatories like the ones they have in the Russell Street gym. You know, white porcelain and shiny white tiles on the walls and red tiles on the floor and a chain you pull so everything disappears in a rush ’n’ gurgle of water and is the very meaning of cleanliness itself.

  Because we don’t have that sort of posh toilet in Yankalillee we can’t even imagine what it is that Mike’s describing. Things like proper flush toilets being cracked, broken and old, clogged with stuff, just isn’t in our experience yet. But anyway it’s not the sort of thing you can tell Nancy or she’d go spare and march on Melbourne and down Flinders Lane and up the stairs where she’d wallop Mr Stan with an uppercut and grab her son back from the brink of disaster.

  ‘All the Jewish-women machinists suffer from nerves and they’re not the only ones,’ Mike says. ‘In the toilet there’s a jar about this big,’ he indicates a jar about six inches high. ‘I fill it with Bex every morning and by the night it’s empty. Sometimes you see them taking five or six at a time when the tea lady comes around. You can’t blame them, there’s fifty machines going all at once on an old wooden floor and the din is something terrible.’He says that you can cut the air with a knife, it’s that stale and stinking with sweat and bodily odours, which Mike calls B.O.

  The Greeks and the Italians are the worst, because they don’t shave under their arms and eat stuff called garlic and they can really pong the house down! But then, on the other hand, Mike says they are the nicest to him and bring him things to eat from home that taste delicious, little flaky pastries soaked with honey called baklava and there’s a delicious sweet stuff called halva the Jewish women bring in. He says he’s also learned to eat sort of berry things called olives and little parcels of rice wrapped in grape leaves. Both sound weird. They also laugh a lot and flirt, but the Greek women are completely dominated by their men, who on pay day wait outside and, as soon as the women come out, take all their pay to gamble with and drink something called ouzo.

  Mike explains that most of the women, not only the Jews, have had a terrible time during the war, so that their nerves were already shot before they came to Australia. If a small thing goes wrong, they just stop and cry and after a while they start their machine again. Everybody understands this and if one worker can’t cope, the others finish her work for her, or if a young girl seamstress messes up her bundle they all help to unpick it and then fix it for her.

  ‘It’s like a big family, even though there’s the three kinds. It’s like we belong to each other, we’re all part of a glamorous world that gives us our identity,’ Mike says.

  Mike works in Lancashire House at 36–50 Flinders Lane and he says there are forty-two rag traders and twenty dress factories in the same building. He says when you walk through the place with all the sewing machines going, the building vibrates and you have to raise your voice to be heard. When you walk down The Lane during working hours with more than two thousand industrial sewing machines going from the various garment-makers, the whole Lane has this rumble like a train approaching in the distance.

  ‘This Mr Stan doesn’t sound like a very nice boss,’ Nancy says, without having heard the half of what poor old Mike has to do. ‘Can’t you get a job in one of the other firms?’

  ‘Mum, Mr Stan is one of the best. It’s Flinders Lane, it’s all like that, it’s the rag trade.’

  ‘Collecting other people’s rubbish is bad enough, but at least it happens in the fresh air! I don’t want my son to be cleaning other people’s lavatories and catching their rats!’ she snorts, ‘Mike, I think you ought to seriously think about doing something else. We haven’t sunk that low yet, even though if Tommy’d had his way we would have been nightsoil carriers as well as rubbish collectors! You can always go back to school and end up being something decent like Sarah’s going to be.’

  Mike looks shocked. ‘I am gunna end up doing something decent! Mum, I love it! I love Flinders Lane. Not doing stuff, like toilets and the rats, of course, but what I’m learning. The trade, how to make beautiful gowns, you can’t believe the beautiful dresses and things that can come out of such a crap hole.’ He sees our doubtful looks. ‘F’instance, yesterday Miss Australia came in for a fitting, she’s modelling an evening gown for us. Imagine that, Miss Australia in one of our Style & Trend evening gowns! And then the other day Mr Stan said to come with him and we went over to Henry Haskin and Hartnell, who are the big boys in the trade. I thought maybe Mr Stan wanted me to carry something back, but when we arrived, there were people from some of the other factories there as well and Mr Haskin had this curtain drawn across part of his showroom. I’m standing with Mr Stan, who knows everybody and is shaking their hands and chatting on. I’m feeling a bit of a galah, wondering what it is Mr Stan wants me to do.

  Then he turns to me and says, “You want you should be a dress designer, now you will see a dress, my boy.” And then Mr Haskin draws the curtain and there’s a model and she’s showing the dress Henry Haskin has designed for Lady Brooks, the wife of the Governor. It’s the gown she’s going to wear to open the mannequin parade in the Myer Mural Hall.’ Mike’s eyes are excited as he describes the dress. ‘It had this wide skirt of magnolia satin, embroidered with deep rose shading, palest pink to red with traceries of green leaves. It was the most beautiful gown I have ever seen!’

  I tried from Mike’s description to imagine what it looked like but couldn’t so I said, ‘I bet you could have done the embroidery better!’

  Bozo, who probably couldn’t imagine what the dress looked like either, came right out and said. ‘But, Mike, you’re not making beautiful frocks for Miss Australia or Lady Brooks, you’re cleaning the shithouse!’ He’s angry that Mike has to do such things. ‘Is it that you’re not Jewish they make you do all the dirty work?’

  ‘No, nothing like that!’ Mike is adamant. ‘Nobody’s like that in The Lane. It doesn’t matter what your religion is, the Italians are all Catholic anyway and so are a lot of the A
ustralian girls and the Greeks have their own church called Greek Orthodox. It’s just that I’m a boy who wants to be a fashion designer. They don’t understand that. Not even Mr Stan. There’s never been a male fashion designer in Australia. In Paris, yes, but that’s different because they’re French. I’m Australian and male so it doesn’t make sense to them. If I want to be a steam-presser or a truck driver or a clerk in the dispatch department, that’s okay, but nothing more than that.

  ‘Mr Stan says in the old country a boy who wanted to be a tailor started at the bottom because you had to know how to do everything. He and the other owners did the same, they started sweeping the floors and running messages and slowly worked up to be skilled machinists, then tailors.

  ‘Mr Stan calls me the shammes and when I asked him what it meant he told me the shammes in the old country is sort of the dogsbody in the synagogue, the bloke who keeps the synagogue clean and warm, calls the village to prayers, looks after the Torah, which is the Jewish Bible, only it’s in a big scroll, announces the official sunset time on the Sabbath, runs the messages for the rabbi, does the repairs around the place. Mr Stan said, “Without a shammes in the synagogue nothing can happen, Mike, you are the shammes for Style & Trend.”

  ‘So when Mr Stan agreed to take me, he’s done what they’ve always done, make the boy start as the shammes.’

  ‘But you’re already a skilled machinist!’ I point out, ‘why do you have to start from the bottom as a dogsbody?’ ‘And finisher and embroiderer,’ Nancy butts in. Mike shakes his head. ‘Can’t tell ’em that. The women wouldn’t have it. Sophie says to keep stumm, keep quiet, about that until later. If I was a trained tailor then I’d be allowed to know how to use a sewing machine, but then I’d be the boss and not one of them, so that’s okay again. But a man shouldn’t be on the assembly line or seated with the girls, they just won’t have it. It’s like their nerves couldn’t stand it. It’s not kosher.’

  ‘And in the meantime you’re cleaning the shithouse?’ Bozo says again.

  ‘Yeah, only after I’ve drowned the rats and dumped them in the river, it wouldn’t be hygienic otherwise.’ Mike laughs at his own small joke. ‘Then I’m the delivery boy and the floor sweeper and I collect and match the cab bage from the bin and fetch Mr Stan’s morning cappuccino from Pelligrini’s and push the clothes racks down The Lane and load the vans and write out the delivery tags and fetch a bolt of cloth from the wholesale warehouses with a handcart if we run short. After that, I oil the Singers and change the bobbins, and at the moment I’m learning how to use the steam-presser and I’ve persuaded Wally Simons to teach me how to be a pattern-cutter in my spare time.’

  The amazing thing is that as he says this, you can see he’s happy. Mike who won Best Embroidery at the Royal Melbourne Show for his Bush Blossoms is drowning rats and cleaning shithouses and learning how to use a steam presser and he’s happy.

  Mike laughs and tells us how Sophie says he must be careful to brush all the scraps of cotton off his clothes before he gets on the tram to come home so people won’t know a fine boychick like him works in a clothing factory. ‘But I tell her, “Sophie, I’m not in a factory, I’m in the fashion trade!”’

  Mike tells how Mr Stan goes to Paris every season to attend the fashion parades. In Paris they don’t allow you to take a camera or a sketchbook into a parade so Mr Stan has a taxi waiting outside where he keeps a sketchpad and then has the taxi drive around Paris while he frantically tries to remember what every dress looked like. He also spends a fortune on calico toiles, which are patterns for dresses made from calico that you tack together and can then try on a model to show a buyer from a department store before they order.

  ‘Mr Stan can’t even draw well,’ Mike says. ‘I reckon sometimes he just guesses how something goes on a dress because the result is awful. One day I’ll be in Paris and London and I’ll do my own fashions without having to rip off someone else’s.’

  It seems a long way from shithouse to fashion house, but Mike knows where he’s going and Sarah says that’s half the battle.

  So there’s Mike away to a bad start which he says he loves. That’s the funny thing about Flinders Lane, the workers are happy despite the conditions, they like the bosses, like the business of being in the fashion trade, take great pride in their work and don’t even mind when Christmas comes and Mr Stan says, ‘Sorry, girls, we finish today, come back January.

  Have a Merry Christmas Day

  I’m sorry, girls, no holiday pay

  Have a nice rest please, my dear

  See you again in za New Year.’

  Nobody grumbles like they would in a normal factory and they wouldn’t ever think of reporting this to the union. Mr Stan is like a father, they’re his family, and before they break up for the Christmas holidays, he brings in a piano and a piano player and they have a great party and everyone brings a plate. This is not because Mr Stan is mean, he’d supply the food if they wanted, but it’s a chance for everyone to show off with their national food, Jewish, Greek, Italian and even Australian, which is always lamingtons and pavlova with passionfruit topping.

  Mike says all the girls have been up half the night cooking and it’s the best spread you’ll ever see with foreign things he’s never tasted before that are simply mouthwatering. Mr Stan puts on the booze and you can drink as much as you like because afterwards he calls taxis to take them all home. When January comes, everyone returns and signs on again.

  Mike says he doesn’t mind not getting holiday pay because in his first year he’s only paid three pounds a week and during the Christmas holidays the restaurant he works in needs him full-time and with tips he can make eight quid a week, so he’s laughing all the way to the bank. He also has time to sew, and he’s beginning to build up his collection, which means with scraps of material he’s saved, he’s experimenting with ideas he hopes some day to use on the clothes he designs.

  That was Mike’s first year and his hardest because he had to be accepted. Nobody thought he’d stick it out, but by the second year they were beginning to take him seriously. They’ve thrown everything at him, all the worst jobs, and he’s never complained and did them as well as he could so that he earned their grudging respect. They knew he was in the rag trade to stay and so he started to get a few breaks. Now he’s been there five years and has learned everything there is to learn.

  In his second year Mr Stan put in a word and Mike was allowed to attend fashion school at the McCabbe Academy. He was the only boy and this caused a few giggles at first among the young female students, some from the rag trade and some straight from school. But that soon stopped when they saw him on the sewing machine and when they were being taught the rudiments of hand-finishing. Mike the needle wizard left them all, including the teacher, gasping. He also knew how to work with a pattern and even how to cut one out. After two weeks, their teacher had him moved up into the second-year class. He only lasted there for three months before he was moved up again to the third year. In other words, he did the three year course in one year and still got the top marks. I don’t want to skite or anything, but you have to admit that’s pretty good and had never been done before and now it’s been done by a boy. Admittedly, Mike’s been at this sort of thing since he was seven years old and I suppose it’s not that unexpected that he’d do well. Nancy’s pretty proud of how well he’s doing and I think she’s beginning to believe that her dream of dragging the Maloney name out of the dirt is beginning to work.

  There are others in town, of course, who won’t have a bar of us, who point out that the eldest Maloney got herself up the duff when she was still at school, the next one is a fairy who makes frocks with the Jews in Melbourne, the third one is a brawler who started making trouble when he was still at primary school and keeps a vicious pack of dogs and has gone into the rubbish business with a man who’s spent time in gaol for near beating his business partner to death.

  As f
or me? ‘Don’t be fooled by him being the youngest bushfire fighter, he’s a kid who is a bit too handy with a rifle, if you ask me. You mark my words, there’ll be trouble there sooner or later! Goes bush with his father, who’s a well-known crim and alcoholic. They’re supposed to be shooting rabbits and foxes, wouldn’t be surprised if the rabbits grow a nice warm winter fleece and the foxes have cloven hooves and both turn up in a butcher’s shop in Albury looking remarkably like legs o’ lamb and best quality chops.’

  Nancy is convinced, of course, that the main source of all of this scuttlebutt comes from Dora Templeton, but really it’s just small-town stuff. There’s always those who think only ill of everyone else and, like I said before, most of the town is pretty generous in their attitude to us Maloney kids and Nancy gets a fair bit of praise for bringing us up, so she shouldn’t whinge.

  Anyway, Mike’s doing pretty good and from the second year on he’s been designing his own clothes, though not for the factory, except for bits and pieces. Mr Stan uses overseas patterns and designs and then lets Mike modify them for him, but not too much. Style & Trend is at the expensive end of the market and makes evening gowns and women’s suits and cocktail dresses. These are pretty traditional Paris fashion rip-offs and he won’t let Mike have a real go to give them a different look. Can’t blame him I suppose, last year they made an evening dress that took two thousand hours of beading, most of it done by Mrs P, and it sold for five thousand pounds.

  They have a second label, Collection, at the less expensive end of the market that works mostly with the new synthetic fibres from America. The label ‘Sanitised’ in a garment was good news to the average buyer with the promise that the garment didn’t pick up body odours. Dripdry meant no more slaving over a hot iron. Fabrics such as bri-nylon, high-bulk orlon, banlon brocade, and terylene quickly entered the everyday vocabulary of The Lane. The New Look, introduced by Christian Dior in his glamorous expensive dresses, has now moved into the American wash ’n’ wear fabrics at the cheaper end of the market. With its tiny, pulled-in waist and long wide skirts, the new design seemed the height of luxury to the average working girl without the usual labour-intensive care required of long, wide, often pleated skirts.