Hunger Town (6 page)

I sat in the non-smoking compartment with the women and children. Through the door window I could see a couple of working men lounging in the open vestibule, smoking and occasionally hawking tobacco spittle out the carriage doorway. Unkempt and unwashed they folded their arms about themselves to keep warm as the fresh breeze zipped through the vestibule. It seemed that wherever I saw ill-clad people they were folding themselves in to keep out the cold. I thought about Harry and impossibilities. He could play anything on the piano and he could dance and box but now had to earn his living in a hot dirty foundry.

I recalled the workers in their heavy leather aprons feeding the huge coal-fire furnace. Its stomach of molten fire vented heat and showers of brilliant sparks rained about them. I had flinched as if personally attacked but regardless of the danger they continued to open the iron doors and shovel in more coal. With each fuel load the volcanic centre roared into powerful life and momentarily the workers were black figures silhouetted in the mouth of Hell. That their faces, eyes and hair were not seared was a miracle.

I had made some drawings of the workers in their leather aprons and sketched the boy suspended from the huge belt. Barely able to hold on, he was a figure dancing in space, carefree but precarious, his grip on the belt as tenuous as his grip on life.

Earlier when my father expressed his anger at the unprotected dangers of the foundry I had taken out my drawings and rather shyly shown them to him and to my mother. My mother, busy preparing the evening meal, glanced at them cursorily. ‘Yes, dear, very nice,' she said. My father grunted dismissively, ‘Those leather aprons are bloody heavy to wear all day.' And at the sketch of the belt-swinger, ‘Bloody idiot. I'd take a belt to him, no mistake. And it wouldn't be the one he's riding like some crazy cowboy.'

Although not certain what it was I had expected or even wanted from them I had hoped for more. Disappointed and deflated I returned my sketches to the drawer. Over the years I had accumulated quite a pile of them.

Reflections about Harry's fate had brought my own life into focus. Lack of education doomed him to the foundry; lack of education doomed me to the Chew It and Spew It. My life stretched before me a desolate dreary wasteland of drudgery. I read of other women with different lives. They weren't always happy but it seemed that their strivings had some dignity. Even the tragic endings were beautified and uplifted by passion. In the pages of a book, women's lives unfolded meaningfully and their fantasy lives made my own seem worthless by comparison. Sunday excursions to the gardens with Winnie seemed minor diversions, sweet but pointless interludes. In fact, I was set to have a real fit of the blues.

My mother watched me gloomily pick at my food and suggested that I accompany my father to the Club to change my books. As our financial situation worsened, she fell back on my love of reading as some consolation she could offer me. I knew she felt guilty that I was unhappy and knowing her financial struggles I felt miserable for inflicting my gloom on her.

This emotional tangle passed my father by. Hard physical work from childhood had been his lot. He lacked the imagination to perceive that for me it might not be enough. So my mother watched and worried and suffered for me silently. I was coming to dislike my father and didn't think that a trip to the Club would help me but in the face of her worry I agreed to go.

‘Got over your grumps?' my father said. Sulking, I refused to give a yes or no answer.

‘Still feeling sorry for yourself?' he needled me and in a hectoring voice told me how lucky I was to have a job, three meals a day and some pleasures in life. He had never been able to stroll in the gardens with friends or go to the cinema, all he had had to do was work and damned hard work it had been. I should be grateful that my life was so much better.

Close to tears, I resented his attack. My mother intervened: ‘Stop it, Niels. Stop harassing her. You've said enough. More than enough. Button your lip and take your daughter to borrow some books. You should be grateful that you can offer your daughter something more than you had. She needs other things for her life. We all need other things.'

He grumbled and I would have liked to refuse to go but after her intervention it was impossible. In a fit of defiance, to assert something that was individually mine, I took out several of my drawings, placed them in a folder, collected my over-due books and went with him. Maybe, I thought, Joe will be there tonight and we can talk.

I kissed my mother goodbye. She had turned on the wireless and taken out her darning. The wireless was her consolation and tonight she listened to George Wright singing ‘Drink to me only with thine eyes'. Afterwards he might sing ‘Comin' through the rye' and she would hum along happily. She loved the soft sentimentality of these songs. Once I saw her with tears in her eyes listen to Nellie Melba sing ‘Home Sweet Home' and it had been sweet, excruciatingly sweet, a nostalgia at once painful and beautiful. My father scoffed, calling it fairy floss, a lament for a world that in reality never existed, but she ignored him. She needed a small world that was hers alone.

I looked forward to meeting Joe Pulham, the old librarian I had met five years earlier. He had become my friend. He still did odd jobs at the Club but his cough had grown worse. Now he needed to sit down when he talked to me and the words often struggled out between gasps of breathlessness. He was quite direct with me about his illness. ‘Leaded,' he said, ‘we're all leaded in the printing industry. The lead slugs, you know. Gives us all dickey hearts. Industry is a grand killer, Nearly-Twelve.'

He always called me Nearly-Twelve. When I reminded him my name was Judith he chuckled. ‘I know,' he said, ‘Judith Emma Larsen, but if you don't mind I'll keep on calling you Nearly-Twelve and then I won't forget the little girl who planned to read Aristotle and Aristophanes.' He always laughed, then coughed, when he said Aristophanes as if he had some secret joke.

Maybe Joe would take some real notice of my drawings. Over the years he had talked to me about the books I had borrowed. I think he had read most of them. ‘Reading's the only education most of us could get,' he said. He didn't say who ‘us' was but as I grew older I knew that ‘us' meant the class of people we lived amongst. It didn't mean family. Joe never mentioned his family. It meant those who were poor. Now that the hopeful days of the early twenties were passing the number of ‘us' had grown. My father spoke angrily of ‘us' when he meant waterside workers and unionists; my mother spoke of ‘us' when she meant women struggling to put food on the table or keep the family clothed with constant washing, darning and mending. ‘Us' certainly meant a large group opposed to ‘them' who did not have to struggle.

In our discussions Joe had introduced me to Aristotle's very important question: What is the purpose of living? I recalled Joe's amusement as he reflected, ‘A huge question, that, Nearly-Twelve. Now if I had the answer to that …' He didn't give me an answer to Aristotle's question but waited patiently for me to ask, his eyes intent over the top of his glasses. That is how Joe and I talked. He would introduce an idea from a book and then wait for me to ask an appropriate question.

‘Well, Joe, did Aristotle have an answer?'

He was gleeful. ‘He did, Nearly-Twelve, he did, but whether it solves anything I don't know.'

‘And what is the purpose of living, according to Aristotle, Joe?'

He looked at me triumphantly. ‘To be happy, Nearly-Twelve.'

I gaped. ‘Is that all? Anyone could have come up with that idea. And how are we all to be happy? My father says people will be happy in a socialist state. My mother says people who believe in fantasies will always be unhappy. I'm not sure which one I should believe in, my father or my mother.'

‘No, Nearly-Twelve, Aristotle didn't have such a down to earth answer as your father or mother. He said people could be happy if they behaved in the right way and behaving in the right way was being moderate. For instance, someone might have a lot of courage and think that courage made them happy but if they had too much of it they could be foolish.'

It was an interesting idea but quite frankly, at that time, I didn't think that Aristotle had a great deal to offer and wondered why he had been around for two thousand years.

It wasn't until I saw the boy at the foundry, tenuously clutching the belt as it surged dangerously to a revolving wheel that could crush him in an instant, that I recalled Aristotle and his view on foolishness and moderation. Aristotle would have called him a downright idiot. It had been comforting to have my thoughts confirmed by someone wiser. It gave them substance and authority. That, I decided, was at least one of the purposes of books.

When years earlier I had asked Joe to explain to me what Aristophanes was saying, he had given his secret chuckle, ‘The thing is, Nearly-Twelve, Aristophanes made people laugh at silliness and when you make people laugh you can get away with a lot of criticism. I suppose there were as many silly people in Greece two thousand years ago as we have to put up with now.' He sighed, coughed and asked me at that time, ‘How old are you now, Nearly-Twelve?'

‘Only thirteen,' I had said, crestfallen.

‘Then, Only-Thirteen, perhaps you need to grow a bit to understand Aristophanes. He'll wait, you know. He's been around a long long time.' He stopped, wheezed and gasped for breath.

‘Are you not well, Joe?' I had asked.

‘No, Nearly-Twelve, you could say that and you wouldn't be exaggerating.'

Joe understood many things and he seemed to have lots of time. When I had finished reading Jack London's
White Fang
and
Call of the Wild
, I told him how my father had also lived in a very cold place with the Icelanders. He had looked amazed.

‘Well now, I never knew that.'

‘And can speak their language.' I was determined to impress through my father.

My father's hard life had been a source of pride then and I wanted to boast of it.

‘Are you educated, Joe, if you can speak another language?'

‘It helps,' he said. ‘It helps.'

‘Jack London was an adventurer,' I said, ‘like my father. There's a piece at the start of the book about him. But he never had the happy life Aristotle talks about. I suppose he wasn't moderate.'

Joe managed to laugh again without coughing. ‘You kill me, Nearly-Twelve. You kill me. Jack London moderate? Not by a long chalk. A happy life? Probably not. But an interesting one. Lots of experiences.'

‘He killed himself the book said.'

Now Joe was sober. ‘Yes, I believe so.'

‘Why would someone do that, Joe?'

I had puzzled over this because I had seen the smallest most unimportant creatures dash away from danger to live: a bird with a broken wing fluttering in protest; a fish gasping and flapping on the deck in an effort to regain the sea. If they struggled to live why would a man give up?

Joe agreed, ‘Very strange, Nearly-Twelve, very strange, indeed.'

‘And he didn't even have industry to kill him.'

‘There are other things, Nearly-Twelve.'

In reflecting on death with me Joe prompted my thoughts about life.

That night when we arrived at the Club my father was grabbed at the entrance by his two friends Jock and Bernie. Jock was a small thickset belligerent Scotsman. Bernie-Benito, was a lank Italian with large soulful eyes and a soft mouth like a baby. They were an odd pair, but inseparable.

Jock had emigrated from the shipyards of Glasgow. Bernie had fled an Italy that was becoming increasingly fascist under Mussolini. My father said Bernie was a fanatical and fiery communist who had seen the writing on the wall. When he smiled at me with his soft liquid eyes, a smile that seemed to loosen his features so that only kindness showed, I couldn't imagine him being fanatical about any idea. Jock, always at his side, often slapped his back and called him ‘my fascist friend' and roared with laughter.

Catching on to a few of my father's ideas, I asked why he called him a fascist if he was a communist. My father laughed. ‘It's the name. He shares a name with Benito Mussolini, the Italian prime minister. They're both Benito. It's not an insult, it's affection.'

Jock and Bernie nodded to me but their absorption was in their latest political grievances. ‘Our bastard of a prime minister, Bruce, plans to reduce wages. Says we have to compete on foreign markets. Us poor working men can be caned but those Queensland landholders, those robber baron bastards, they don't have to reduce their incomes. I tell you, Niels, we fought for very little when we fought for the English.'

Jock's rich Scottish accent burred his words but they were forceful enough. Bernie nodded. Jock usually acted as spokesman for them both. They moved away enclosing my father in their resentment. Ignored, I went to find Joe.

He was at his desk, reading. The room was silent, dimly lit, and still held the musty smell of old books.

‘Why, Nearly-Twelve,' he still called me this. ‘I haven't seen you for some time. Your books are overdue.' He pretended to look stern and I grinned at him.

‘I'm a working girl now, Joe, and don't have much time to read.'

‘That's a pity, Nearly-Twelve.'

I sighed, dispiritedly. ‘I know.' And in a mood of desperation I appealed to him, ‘What is to become of me, Joe?'

‘In what sense, Nearly-Twelve?'

‘I don't know.'

His expression became compassionate. ‘Are you unhappy?'

‘Yes,' I burst out, ‘of course. I have a terrible job and no hope of anything better. I don't have any education and I don't think I have any talents. My mother has a hard life as a domestic drudge and her satisfaction now is to escape into sentimental songs. They don't appeal to me. I can't abide too much sweetness and I don't want to listen to music that looks back so sadly. I want a future.'