The Dyehouse

by Mena Calthorpe

  MENA CALTHORPE was born Ivy Bright Field in 1905 in Goulburn, New South Wales, and baptised Philomena. From childhood she was a keen writer. She attended a local Catholic school, Our Lady of Mercy College, and subsequently became a schoolteacher.

  In her late twenties, during the Depression, she married Bill Calthorpe. The pair left the Southern Tablelands for Sydney, where at first they ran an unsuccessful shop in Paddington. They lived in the Sutherland Shire, in the city’s south, for the rest of their lives.

  A committed socialist, Mena Calthorpe was a member of the Communist Party for some years and a lifelong member of the Labor Party. Working in a range of office and manual jobs, she wrote in her spare time, and was active in the Australasian Book Society and the Australian Society of Authors.

  In her widely praised debut, The Dyehouse (1961), Calthorpe—encouraged by her husband—drew upon her experiences of a textile factory and other workplaces to create a deftly observed account of working life in postwar Sydney. The novel was published in translation in Europe, and republished in Australia in 1982.

  The Dyehouse was followed by The Defectors (1969), published by the Australasian Book Society, which dramatised unions’ internal power struggles. Calthorpe’s third and final novel, The Plain of Ala, a saga of Irish migration to Australia, appeared twenty years later, when she was in her mid-eighties.

  Mena Calthorpe died in 1996.

  FIONA MCFARLANE is the author of The Night Guest and The High Places.

  ALSO BY MENA CALTHORPE

  The Defectors

  The Plain of Ala

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  Copyright © Mena Calthorpe 1961

  Introduction copyright © Fiona McFarlane 2016

  The moral rights of the authors have been asserted.

  All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright above, no part of this publication shall be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.

  First published by Ure Smith 1961

  This edition published by The Text Publishing Company 2016

  Cover design by WH Chong

  Page design by Text

  Typeset by Midland Typesetters

  Printed in Australia by Griffin Press, an Accredited ISO AS/NZS 14001:2004

  Environmental Management System printer

  Primary print ISBN: 9781925355758

  Ebook ISBN: 9781925410112

  Creator: Calthorpe, Mena, 1905–1996, author.

  Title: The dyehouse / by Mena Calthorpe; introduced by Fiona McFarlane.

  Series: Text classics.

  Dewey Number: A823.3

  CONTENTS

  INTRODUCTION

  The Art of Work

  by Fiona McFarlane

  The Dyehouse

  The Art of Work

  by Fiona McFarlane

  I FOUND my second-hand copy of The Dyehouse among the glorious chaos of Gould’s Book Arcade in Sydney’s Newtown. I had never heard of Mena Calthorpe, but after reading the first line I knew I’d buy it: ‘Miss Merton came to the Dyehouse one windy afternoon when smoke from the railway-yards drifted darkly over Macdonaldtown.’

  It wasn’t just the authority of that sentence, the energy of arrival; it was also that Newtown, where I lived at the time, is right next to Macdonaldtown. Calthorpe assures the reader in a preliminary note that ‘The “Macdonaldtown” of the story is…fictitious, and no accurate description of a real place is intended’ (she called it Emmatown and Lewistown in various drafts): yes, yes, I thought, as I walked home through the gentrified streets of my Macdonaldtown, by the railway-yards and the rows of terraces with their ‘gleaming brass name-plates’. The Dyehouse is set in a textile-dyeing factory in 1956. There are no more factories in Macdonaldtown, there’s no more smoke; still, Calthorpe’s industrial inner Sydney remains recognisable. But hers is a city of girls in summer frocks emerging from filthy red-brick factories, of terrace slums, of men in overalls, of early mornings and long commutes, of trains and smokes and smoke-stacks. There are beauties to this Sydney, but it’s a long way from the harbour.

  The Dyehouse is a novel about the workers of the Southern Textiles Dye Works, and so it is a novel about work. According to Studs Terkel, the great American cataloguer of labour, this means that it is, ‘by its very nature, about violence—to the spirit as well as the body’. And this is true—Mena Calthorpe was a socialist, and it’s impossible to read The Dyehouse without noticing its political commitment. But the spirits and bodies of Calthorpe’s characters are always specific and convincing. We meet Miss Merton first, looking for and finding a job in the Dyehouse office: a ‘precise, maiden lady, well into middle age’, with a neat skirt and sensible hat. How easy she might be to stereotype; and yet we get hints of an unusual sensibility: she hears victory or defiance in the sound of passing trains. We meet Patty Nicholls, office worker, dreaming with complicated innocence of marriage to the boss; and we meet the boss himself, the head of the Dyehouse, Renshaw: ‘Miss Merton heard him coming before she saw him. In the rhythm of his step there was something exciting; Miss Merton thought of spurs, of chargers and banners. More than six feet tall, he swung across the warehouse floor and through the doors into the vestibule.’

  The vivid mobility of these characters! And there are so many of them. The Dyehouse is an ensemble novel, its cast organised by each person’s association with the Dyehouse, yet each character is animated by a distinct inner life. There’s Oliver Henery, detached and mocking, who works half-naked, his head tied with red cord, in the steam and heat of the dye vats; weary Barney Monahan, blindsided by his ageing wife’s pregnancy, and canny Goodwin, who knows a woman who can help; Mr Mayers, engineer and Welshman, whose ‘soft and burred’ voice conjures ‘tall houses with apples ripening in the attics’. And there’s Hughie Marshall, head dyer, in love with the precise poetry of the job out of which Renshaw is determined to push him, after years of faithful service:

  All around the Bunsen burners were little snippets of colour wrapped in white. Every so often Hughie pressed them with his fingers, unrolled them and examined them for bleeding. Sometimes after the lights were out in the warehouse Hughie stayed on, stirring his squares of cloth in the metal beakers, lifting them lovingly to the light with the glass rod; nodding in satisfaction or flinging them down in disgust.

  Hughie’s treatment at the hands of Renshaw is illustrative of the powerlessness of the working man. But Calthorpe is just as invested in the individual conflicts of her characters as she is in the general conflict of labour. The Dyehouse makes this clear, as do her papers in the State Library of New South Wales: on the back of one of the exercise books in which she wrote the first draft of her novel I found, among the Arithmetical Tables, the name Hughie written six times in a mournful list. And still, the general: a note to her editor on the inadequacy of the basic wage.

  So The Dyehouse is both a work of art and an art of work. Reading it for the first time, I admired Calthorpe’s dexterous sentences, her skill with rhythm and pace, the emotional clarity of her characters; and I was equally struck by her unapologetic desire to bear witness to injustice, to change hearts. It all made me want to know: what is this book? Where did it come from? And who is this writer?

  *

  Mena Calthorpe was born Ivy Bright Field in Goulburn, New South Wales, in 1905, to a Protestant mother and Catholic father—‘neither fish nor fl
esh’, she declared in a 1987 interview. Her baptismal name, Philomena, was shortened to the one she was known by: Mena. At Goulburn’s Our Lady of Mercy College, fifteen-year-old Mena wrote a novel that so ‘startled and annoyed’ the nuns they confiscated it. The Fields were friends with T. J. Hebblewhite, editor of the Goulburn Evening Penny Post and mentor of the young Miles Franklin; Calthorpe never knew Hebblewhite, but her childhood was spent in the company of his daughter Timpy, in his library of controversial books, and in the lingering glory of Franklin’s success.

  Calthorpe’s father, a droving contractor, only employed union men and kept records of their poetry: the ballads and laments of the nineteenth-century overlanders, which Calthorpe loved and could recite from memory into her eighties. These early connections between work and art illuminate some of the beauties of her writing in The Dyehouse, from Hughie’s love of weighing dyes as water drips from the laboratory ceiling to the incantatory rhythms of office work:

  Clack! Clack! Up came the carrier and ejected papers onto Mr Dennet’s table. There they lay: the Fanfolds! the Ledger Copies!

  The Debits!

  Mr Dennet took up his pen and began entering in the Control Book. The Comptometers sprang to life. Two young women with painted nails fell upon the papers.

  Tic-tac, tic-tac. Now over to the files.

  OK, Miss Brennan, you sort them out. City, Country, Government. Now break them up. A to K, L to Z, and into the files with them. Miss Bowden filed quietly, but Miss Graham sent the file flying. It flew back and forth, and her body swayed with it.

  Mena Field taught in country schools until her marriage to Bill Calthorpe in 1934—as well as the Depression—brought her to Sydney. We have few interviews with or autobiographical notes by Calthorpe, but in all of them she tends to describe herself with self-deprecating humour. She laughs at her and Bill’s inadequacy at running a corner shop in Paddington; at her arrival with a friend for her first Communist Party meeting in their ‘best hats…high heel shoes, gloves, handbags—the lot’ (The Dyehouse’s most militant character, Joe Henderson, has a special contempt for bourgeois women involved in the class struggle); at leaving the Communist Party in the early 1950s because she could no longer afford the stamps required for their mass mailings; at starting the peace movement in Sydney’s Sutherland Shire because ‘the world had to be saved, and no one but me in this shire would be capable of doing it.’

  Calthorpe joined the Labor Party and was a vocal member of the largest branch in New South Wales (her singular second novel, The Defectors, published in 1969, is an insight into branch and trade-union machinations). She was for some time secretary of the leftist Australasian Book Society (she unsuccessfully urged the ABS to publish another classic Australian novel of work, David Ireland’s The Unknown Industrial Prisoner). She worked, at various times, as a fruit picker, cannery worker, advertising salesperson, and roadhouse manager. And in the office of an inner-city textile factory, in a position much like Miss Merton’s. As a member of the Staff, Calthorpe was expected to protect the interests of the Company at all times; but, like Miss Merton, her sympathies lay with the workers. She began to take notes, thinking, ‘Oh well, while I’m preparing to write my great Australian novel, I’ll write this.’

  The Dyehouse was first published in Australia in 1961 by Ure Smith. It received mostly favourable reviews in everything from the right-wing Bulletin to the left-wing Tribune, and was commended for the Miles Franklin Award (Patrick White won, for Riders in the Chariot). A. D. Hope, who like many critics considered political novels to be of ‘documentary rather than literary interest’, conceded in 1962 that The Dyehouse had risen ‘slightly above the usual dreary levels of novels devoted to causes and movements’. The 1964 edition I bought at Gould’s was published by Seven Seas Books, an East German house; The Dyehouse was also serialised in an East German newspaper and translated into Czech, as befits a novel devoted to the lives of workers. Australia produced a lot of this kind of writing in the mid-twentieth century. Much of it was written by women, most with connections to the Communist Party: Katharine Susannah Prichard, Dymphna Cusack, Jean Devanny, Betty Collins, Dorothy Hewett. Much of it, like The Dyehouse, has been forgotten.

  Calthorpe and The Dyehouse do and do not belong in this company. Although she identified as a socialist until her death in 1996, Calthorpe had left the Communist Party by the time she wrote The Dyehouse. Strike action is only a faint glimmer in the novel, the possible future ambition of Southern Textiles’ newly formed shop committee. One of the few negative responses to The Dyehouse came, in fact, from the communist newspaper Common Cause: ‘It would seem to be a weakness that such a competent writer has left the struggle for the future.’

  Nor does Calthorpe limit her main characters to the shop floor: we have Miss Merton and Patty Nicholls in the Dyehouse office; the officious, frightened men of Southern Textiles’ middle management; the godlike Chairman of Directors, Harvison, who keeps working from hospital after surgery; and Renshaw, who in all his charismatic, grotty glory must be one of the great villains of Australian literature, not least because of the attention Calthorpe gives to his point of view and psychology. Here he is after a night with Patty Nicholls:

  Renshaw handed her his comb. He was anxious to be rid of her. He helped smooth her skirt and held the mirror while she dabbed her nose with powder and marked in her mouth with vermilion lipstick. She was pretty enough, he thought, and eager. She was like the smooth, lush peaches in an orchard he had visited as a child.

  But sitting in the car, impatiently waiting for her to go, he felt no emotion; nothing but a faint feeling of aversion he knew would deepen from now on.

  This is Renshaw in full flight: falsely solicitous, evaluating, removed. He preys on his female staff with tactical patience and uses similar skills to undermine Hughie Marshall. But Calthorpe understood that a villain must be complex, that unsympathetic characters must still be human. Renshaw isn’t spared her empathy (he frets over the difficulty of dyeing the new fabric, nylon), nor promised safety from injustice. As Miss Merton warns, ‘The trap’s set for us all.’

  For a novel that has been considered an example of social realism, The Dyehouse isn’t strictly realist. It’s formally experimental and, with its episodic structure and its restrained lyricism—like matronly Miss Merton remembering the voluptuous beauty of the Monaro, where the poplars yellow and the water goannas doze—it refuses realism’s mere witness. It pays playful attention to sound: ‘Clack! Clack!’ say the office papers; ‘O-bloody-K,’ says Renshaw; ‘Cock-a-doodle-doo,’ say the trains. It finds the music in words like ‘zinc’ and ‘cloth’ and ‘kerosene’.

  Towards the end of novel, Harvison brings in ‘efficiency men’ to help cut costs. They report ‘Hours of time spent on repetition…What purpose does it serve?…What for?’ But The Dyehouse is a novel in love with repetition: it spends whole paragraphs on ‘names and numbers’; it fragments sentences just to plant the word ‘green’ twice on one line. A novel about the dyeing of cloth can’t help but flare into gorgeous colour: ‘The cloth lay in heaps piled in the trucks. Green, peach, deep gold, salmon, apricot, peacock blue, purple, plum.’ And to notice the colours of Sydney, no matter how far from the harbour: ‘the dense green of the sward, the warm colour of the sandstone, the jewel of the late-flaring bud’.

  Reading The Dyehouse has been, for me, a process of rediscovery—of a lost voice, the precise, insightful voice of Mena Calthorpe. Of a lost Sydney—or perhaps only a displaced one. Of a lost literary tradition—the Australian books, many of them by women, that imagined work and the worker in the unreliable light of communism. What a pleasure to see it published again, in a new light. May it remain unforgotten.

  All characters and events in this story are wholly fictitious, and no reference is intended to any person living or dead. The ‘Macdonaldtown’ of the story is also fictitious, and no accurate description of a real place is intended.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  I wish to record my
appreciation of the help and encouragement given me by John Taylor.

  M.C.

  To Bill

  The Dyehouse

  CHAPTER ONE

  1956

  Miss Merton came to the Dyehouse one windy afternoon when smoke from the railway-yards drifted darkly over Macdonaldtown. More smoke rose from chimney-stacks and mingled in the surging air, against which all doors had been tightly shut. To Miss Merton, walking slowly, Macdonaldtown seemed deserted.

  She was a precise maiden lady, well into middle age. The skirt that swirled about her legs was neat and unpretentious. Her hair was smoothed, parted in the centre, and she wore a bun—not the kind of thing that one could call a chignon, but a plain, neat bun, firmly pinned at the nape of her neck. On the back of her head was fastened a small, sensible hat of fine black straw.

  She held a paper in her hand and was looking for a job.

  She passed the corner, where water unable to escape from the Dyehouse lay in a wide scummy pool, fighting for gutter space with discarded newspapers and fruit peels. Clasping her hands, for she was slightly nervous, she inspected the red door. Then she slipped off one glove and knocked.

  The knock had a hollow sound, and she stepped back.

  The sooty windows were barred and closed. No life stirred. Only an engine racing past on the nearby railway lines broke the silence. A blast, and then a prolonged cock-a-doodle-doo, cock-a-doodle-doo. To Miss Merton, hesitating at the Dyehouse door, it sounded like victory, or defiance. She stood listening until the sound was lost to her.

  Then she knocked again. She turned the paper over and looked at the advertisement. Southern Textiles Dye Works.

  There was movement behind the door. Someone fumbled with the lock. She heard the click as the bolt was drawn. The door opened and a young blonde stood smiling up at her.