Hear the Train Blow

by Patsy Adam-Smith

  ‘I think we’ll have to get on with it, Birdie,’ Dad had to gently remind her the day the trucks arrived at the siding to take on our goods. She wandered about, talking of the times we’d all sat up through the night with half our neighbours in the lounge listening to the Test match being played in England, amazed that we could hear such a thing from the other side of the world.

  ‘Of course, it’s all for the best,’ she said brightly. We knew she didn’t mean it any more than we did.

  On my last day at school the fourteen children presented me with a crystal powder bowl. I have never used it for fear that it might break.

  ‘Goodbye, dreamer,’ Mr Schmidt wrote on the card. ‘Don’t let them stop you from that. You’re never beaten while you’ve a dream.’ Ah yes, the dream, the beckoning finger. Gus Schmidt is dead now and my dream has vanished along with him.

  The presentation to my parents in the Waaia hall was gay with music and dancing. Old Bill Leaf presented Dad and Mum with a most elegant canteen of cutlery and said that it was like seeing the horse-drawn wagons leave the roads to see the Smiths go from Waaia.

  ‘You’ll not be forgotten at Waaia,’ he said. ‘And we know you will not forget Waaia.’

  They had us stand in the middle of the hall and they all stood about us in a circle and joined their hands.

  ‘Oh no . . .’ Mum said. They had already started to sing those words that must have wrenched more hearts than any others: ‘Should auld acquaintance be forgot . . .’ I didn’t know till then why people weep when it is sung.

  Next day the platform was crowded with people to watch the Smiths go. A royal send-off for a railway fettler and his family. We travelled in the guard’s van; all our furniture was in the trucks ahead on the long goods train. At the last moment Mum remembered some instruction she had meant to leave for the new station-mistress who would come on the morrow; the fettlers came into the van for a last word with old Nip in his box with bars across the front.

  The driver and guard didn’t bustle us, but the time came when we must go. As the train began to roll, Bill Leaf on the platform called, ‘Three cheers for Albert and family. Hip hip . . .’ We waved from the windows in the van till they were out of sight. We had scarcely sat down when an explosion went off under the wheels, then another and another, bang bang bang as the wheels ran over the rails. It was detonators, used normally by the men to warn the guard of danger on the line. Now they put them along the track to farewell their mate on his way.

  THE NEW LINE

  Penshurst is in the Western District, a stony land twenty miles from Hamilton. This was the last part of our continent to settle down, and rocks from the time of upheaval haven’t yet decayed. They lie around in such profusion that stone walls, houses, public buildings and miles of stone fences have been made with them. Penshurst itself grew up beside the crater of a dead volcano, Mount Rouse. It was quite a big town by the standards of anywhere else we had lived. There was a grocer, two butchers, a baker, a café, two hotels and two banks as well as – indication to us of its size – a railway station-master.

  It was sheep country. The wealth of the district was in the score of sheep stations spread over the rocky volcanic countryside. There were no passenger trains through Penshurst, only steam-hauled goods trains. As at Monomeith the trucks on these trains were often the coaches of the job-hunters travelling down to the city or up the country looking for work. When the train with our furniture on board arrived I was watching Dad coming down the side of the track with his shovel on his shoulder, and as I watched his hand jerked imperceptibly upwards, the thumbs-up silent ‘How are you, mate?’ to a man peering from beneath the tarpaulin covering a truck.

  We were a changed family now. Jack had gone to work in Gippsland and we were rarely to see him again in the future. Bob and Mick had come with us to Penshurst.

  ‘There’s sure to be plenty of work in such a big town,’ Bob said in his optimistic way. Until he found this permanent job he and Mick were to live with us.

  Bob was very good to me. He had had to leave high school when his people could no longer afford to keep him there. Now he encouraged me to go on with my plan for learning. We were further away from a high school here than we had been even at Waaia. Hamilton, twenty miles away, was the nearest and there was no transport even had we been able to afford it, which we couldn’t.

  I went along to the local State school. It was a big school, at least eighty children; a frightening rabble it seemed to me, used as I was to a maximum of twenty schoolmates. The headmaster could offer me no more than a desk if I wished to do correspondence lessons here.

  I went home. ‘I’d never learn quickly enough there,’ I told Bob.

  ‘What’s the hurry?’ he asked.

  I had become a tense child in the past few months and had developed a tic in the lid of my right eye; it now began to twitch. I turned my back so that Bob would not see it, but he took me by the shoulders and turned me round.

  ‘You’re frightened,’ he said.

  ‘I’m never frightened,’ I snapped.

  ‘It’s in your eyes. You’ve changed in the last few months. You’re lost.’

  ‘I’m going to go away,’ I told him. I hadn’t known until then what it was I was going to do.

  ‘What are you running away from?’

  I didn’t reply. My eye was shuttering up and down, I could feel the pull on my face muscles.

  ‘Everybody loves you here.’

  ‘Yes.’ I knew that.

  ‘Then why leave?’

  I shook my head. I didn’t know.

  Money seemed scarcer than ever here, because of course there was more to spend it on. I went out to work. I was fourteen. At first I kept the books and did the accounts of a butcher, and in this way learnt the practical application of accounting; but such work could not fill my day now. As though smitten by some disease that gnawed the walls of the mind, exciting it to take in more and more, I applied myself to the limit. Calmly I set about studying whatever was available to me, without actually speaking of this to anyone, yet my urgency was such that it was conveyed to others. All sorts of people, unasked, offered to help me.

  The town’s policeman offered to teach me typing.

  ‘I use two fingers,’ he said, ‘but I did learn to touch-type once and I’ll teach you.’

  Then I wanted to learn shorthand. ‘I can’t remember any of it, but I’ll learn it again as I teach you,’ he offered. Each day at 5 p.m. I’d tramp to the police station and apply myself to this dullest of all trades taught to women but, as I knew, one of the few occupations in business open to them.

  The local priest offered to teach me Latin, surely the most beautiful of all languages. On Saturday mornings I’d cycle up to him for a two-hour lesson.

  The correspondence lessons still came and these I did at night.

  I had been learning music in a desultory manner for years from anyone who set up to be a teacher, but I had never had a good tutor. We had been at Penshurst for a few weeks only when Mum came hurrying home from a Progress Association meeting.

  ‘There’s an excellent teacher comes here once a week,’ she told me. ‘I’ll send you to her.’

  Madame Sherman was not only talented, she was a fanatic. Music was her whole life.

  ‘You’d better learn the violin too,’ she told me. ‘It will give you a wider appreciation of music.’ She lent me a squeaky, cheap violin and each morning and evening as well as most of each weekend I practised these two instruments. (We had no near neighbours.) Under this musical martinet I sat the exams of the Music Examinations Board, the London College of Music, and the Trinity College of London, gaining diplomas from them all for the piano and advanced passes for the violin and theory. In one month, May 1939, I sat for and passed five examinations. I was as indefatigable as Madame. We punished one another with our perseverance and labour.

  Because the work I had begun was tedious and because I wanted to earn more money than the fifteen shillings a w
eek offered for book-keepers, as well as wanting to have more time to study, I set up in business on my own, a freelance you might say. Mum advanced me the money for a secondhand typewriter and with this I tendered to do the monthly accounts of three shops – two butchers and a baker. I arranged that I was to work when and for as long as I pleased so long as I had the accounts out by the first of each month. At ‘peak’ periods such as Friday nights and Christmas week I worked for a newsagent, a fine chinaware shop, and served at the bakery.

  But the best means of earning money was playing in the dance band. The New Mayfair Dance Band was, when I was invited to join, composed of four cool sophisticated male musicians. I still wore my school clothes, my hair was dressed in shoulder-length curls, I wore cotton stockings and lace-up shoes. Our engagements were usually only on Saturday nights at the local hall, but during the shearing season we’d get several bookings from the shearing sheds for ‘cut out’ dances, the social event of the sheep country year, held in the cleaned-up shed to celebrate the end of the shearing on each station. Dressing was formal, the women in floor-length gowns, and a certain distinction was lent by the presence of an ‘official party’ consisting of the matron of the local hospital (to which proceeds from the dance were donated), the doctor, squatters and their wives, a bank manager or two, and the local councillors. But all this respectability could not dampen a shearers’ hop and it was the bales of wool set around the walls for seats that set the atmosphere for the evening. Sometimes they danced until dawn. We were paid to play until 2 a.m.

  The first ‘cut out’ ball I played at was in a shearing shed near Coleraine. At 2 a.m. the shearers decided the evening had only then begun so they started to take the hat around.

  ‘We must keep the orchestra,’ they said.

  When the hat came to him, a smart ‘gun’ said, ‘Aw, b—that!’ and slapped a ten shilling note on top of the old piano. Half a dozen followed suit. The little pile of money shook and trembled there near me all the while I played. At the end of the long night we musicians would share it. I knew I would have at least £2 to take home to Mum.

  These young musicians were kind to me. Although my mother insisted on my appearing dressed as a child (as indeed I was), these boys knew I was dance-mad and when they’d see a young shearer look at me they’d call to him, ‘Why don’t you ask her for a dance?’ and they’d play while I danced. But the moment the dance ended they shepherded me back into their midst like clucky hens.

  The best shearers were often the best dancers and almost always the best dressed, but they were also likely to be the wildest. Sometimes, dancing by the big, open doors at the end of the shed, you could see white shirt-tails flapping as men fought in the light of the big fire built of tree trunks. One night my partner told me that there were three fights going at the same time and that four of the fighters were ‘gun’ shearers.

  I was book-keeping, studying piano and violin, learning Latin, taking six school subjects, playing in the dance band, and now I took music pupils. I was a good piano tutor, but I was not a meticulous book-keeper and I was constantly employed thinking up quick answers to irate customers. But it was all worth it. One week during which I played with the dance band for two engagements I brought home £6 from my various projects. Mum bought herself a new pair of lace-up corsets and the sight of those formidable stays filled me with pride.

  At this time we lost a dear friend. Old Nip, the dog, who for so long had been one of the family, died at last. He was as old as I was, which was old for a dog, but still he went to work on the Casey and trotted slowly down the track after Dad.

  This morning when Dad called him as he went out the gate on his way to work the old dog didn’t respond. Dad went round to his kennel. The dog’s head barely lifted at his approach.

  ‘Hey, you old scoundrel. Have you gone on strike?’ Dad said. There was fear in his voice as he put out his hand to pat the old head. ‘Come on, boy!’ he said, and whistled. But the dog couldn’t rise. His beautiful brown eyes were opaque with pain.

  ‘Poor old feller,’ Dad said. ‘My poor old mate.’

  He tried to help him, but the dog was beyond help. He went then and got a gun from Joe Page, a fettler.

  Mum put her arms round me and we went inside. Dad picked the grizzled old dog up in his arms and carried him down the line away from the town.

  BOB’S MATE

  Historians say that the Depression ended before the war broke out, but for the men who needed work the Depression was still on, even if it had ended for the financiers. Dad was a ganger now and we knew how badly men wanted jobs.

  One night of that year, 1939, Gus Schramm knocked on our door. It was late, but I was up studying so I answered the knock. Gus saw me come out in the lamplight and jumped back into the shadows near the garden gate; he had not expected anyone other than Dad to be up. I was scared and backed into the passage-way.

  His voice spoke from the darkness, ‘Get your Dad, Smithy.’

  ‘Dad,’ I bawled. ‘Dad! There’s a man in the garden.’

  Dad came out and put his arm around my shoulders. He was not a big man and since the accident was thin like a shoe-lace, but he was as strong as ever and radiated security. He went to the door casually, leading me beside him, calming my panic with ease.

  ‘How are you, mate?’ he said out into the silent dark. The way my father spoke was an assurance of goodwill.

  Gus responded and stepped closer, but he kept to the shadows like a guilty man; and Gus was guilty. He had come to do his best friend, my brother-in-law Bob, out of his job.

  He blurted out his shame to my father. ‘It’s two years since I’ve had work. There’s the kids . . .’ he said. He had three. ‘There’s another on the way. I want Bob’s job.’

  Dad knew what Gus’s next remark would be. He had waited to hear it from someone ever since he had given the job to Bob two weeks before. Now it was Gus who said it.

  ‘Bob’s got a finger missing. Government regulations for his job say you can’t employ a man with his finger missing.’

  Men working on the job for a long time might know this, but Gus was young and had never worked for a Government concern – how would he know?

  ‘Who told you?’ Dad asked.

  Gus hesitated, then said abruptly, as though shame had sped with his pride, ‘Bob told me.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘Tonight, on his way home from work. We had a yarn. He was afraid someone would find out about it.’

  Dad said, ‘So he told you, his mate.’ Gus didn’t answer that. After a while he said, ‘Will I start in the morning?’

  Dad was holding me very tightly around the shoulders. I thought he was angry but he only sounded very tired when he spoke. ‘Why are you so sure you’ll get the job?’

  Gus’s answer was logical, final. He even stepped from the shadows into the lamplight as he replied.

  ‘Because I was the first to apply for it after Bob was put off.’

  Probably it was only a second, but it seemed like a very long time they stood there looking at one another. They didn’t speak, but after a while Gus turned and stumbled towards the gate. Dad, with his arm still about my shoulder, turned and went into the house.

  Bob was twenty-two, my sister nineteen, and their first baby was only three months away. This, Bob had thought, was the permanent job he was always speaking of getting.

  Dad went into their room and wakened Bob.

  ‘I’ve got bad news,’ he said. Bob held up his hand, the one with only four fingers, and Dad nodded. Bob asked who had come with the accusation.

  ‘Never seen him before,’ Dad said. Bob asked if Dad had given the informer the job. Dad shook his head.

  Quickly Bob said, ‘Then lend me your bike. I’ll nick round and give Gus the tip before word gets round. He needs work bad and he’d have done the same for me if things had been different.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Dad. ‘He would have if things had been different.’

  And the money from that l
ittle finger was all gone now.

  The Western District was hard hit at this time. There were no factories here, no mills, few farms. The large sheep stations in the district had permanent staff. Even their rabbit-trappers were permanent. There was nothing here for men looking for work but the dole. It was this that had driven Gus to take Bob’s job.

  Now that he was out of work again Bob was free to wander the streets, hold up the verandah post of the pub, or wander idly to the billiard room, but he never became apathetic about being unemployed. He was always optimistic: something would turn up. He had a go at anything. He even learnt to knit, and to pay for his keep at home he made clothes for dozens of dolls Mum was dressing for distribution to needy children that Christmas. They were fiddling little dresses, and minute booties and bonnets that tied under the dolls’ chins with narrow ribbon. Bob’s big, callused hands were clumsy at first, but by the time he was finished every doll was perfect because he unravelled all his work until it was just right and, as he said, the calluses soon disappeared when a man was out of work. He prowled the town every day keeping his eyes and ears open and picked up lots of odd jobs. He was one of the first to hear that a contractor was coming to open up the old quarries to get metal out for a road job. This meant that he was in the first gang to start work there.

  So many men applied that the contractor offered two days a week to each man to split it up fairly. But that only lasted two weeks. On the first day of Bob’s second ration of work Bluey Turner was killed. We knew about it in the town because someone rang the Catholic church bell. We all ran up to see what the trouble was.

  The priest said, ‘The overhang at the quarry has fallen in and buried poor Bluey Turner alive. They want him dug out, quick.’

  All the men and boys raced off on bikes and trucks and the shops and the hotel shut because all the men had gone. There had been little equipment at the quarry to move rock and earth; little was needed when there were so many hands anxious for work. They tried to save Bluey with their bare hands, scrabbling into the sharp stones and heaving boulders aside.