The Black Dress (13 page)

The shop was in an imposing building with a stone façade, three storeys high. ‘VICTORIA STATIONERY WAREHOUSE’ was carved in stone right across the top of the building. Above the ground floor I read, ‘SANDS, KENNY & Co.’ in gold. A great many signs in Melbourne in those days were picked out in gold, as though reminding visitors where the city’s wealth came from.

The windows were piled high with books, ledgers, writing desks, pens, drawing instruments and stationery samples—things I’d never seen before. There was even something that I took to be a theodolite for surveying mining claims. Above these things, pinned to the board that shielded the windows from the prying eyes of passers-by, were the maps: Victoria and the South-Eastern Provinces, the entire World. Underneath was a placard, ‘This is the largest and best Map of the World published.
’

Along the street, the smart carriages and the slow drays rattled over the paving stones. The noise as hooves and metal-rimmed wheels went past was ear-splitting. A bullock team passed. Even though the dray they pulled was empty, the bullocks trudged slowly, keeping to their perpetual rhythm. It took a while for the bullocks to pass by. I stared at the door of the shop the whole time.

It was early. The sign on the door said, ‘We regret that we are closed at this time. Please call back.’ I knocked.

Mr Kenny himself answered. It was typical of him to be waiting to greet me. He was a kind man. Too kind for business, Aunt Julia said, but Sands, Kenny & Co. was thriving.

‘Come in, come in, Mary. Come and meet the girls.’

A long wooden counter ran around the shop. Behind it were shelves upon shelves, right up to the high ceiling. The shelves were chock full of goods—it was like Aladdin’s cave. There were two other girls behind the counter, dressed like me in simple frocks buttoned down the front. These girls also wore blue aprons. They stared at me unsmiling. I could feel butterflies flying wildly about in my stomach. What if they didn’t like me?

‘This is Sarah McGowan, Mary. She is the foreman of the shop and she will teach you what you need to know.’ Sarah was a tall freckled girl with hair that was almost, but not quite, red. Her blue eyes flicked up and down and I was conscious that although my boots were cleaned and polished, they were also shabby.

‘And this is Eileen O’Connor. She has been with us for almost a year now, isn’t that right, Eileen?’

‘Yeth, Mr Kenny.’ Eileen’s voice was a soft lisp. She smiled tentatively at me.

‘Well, I’ll leave you girls to show Mary around the shop. Later on, Mary, I’ll get Mr Sands to show you the printing works at the back. He knows more about that side of things than I do.’

Mr Kenny lifted up a flap in the counter and went towards the back of the shop.

Just before he disappeared behind a green curtain he turned. ‘I’m counting on you to show Mary your duties, Sarah. After you are married, Mary will be foreman here.’

He left silence in his wake.

‘I—I’m pleased to meet you,’ I said.

‘Nice to be a friend of the boss’s,’ Sarah sneered, crossing her arms and leaning back against the shelves.

I should have expected this.
After all, Sarah had worked hard to become foreman. It was natural that she should resent a stranger just walking in and taking her job, even if she was leaving.

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘it is nice. Mr Kenny is a very generous man.’

‘I worked here three years before I was made foreman.’

I nodded. ‘I know I have a lot to learn.’ I spoke as calmly as I could, and smiled at both the girls.
I have to make them
like me. I couldn’t bear to work with anger all around me.
Sarah sniffed, but uncrossed her arms.

‘Well, you’d better be quick about it. I get married in two weeks.’ Sarah had a strong Irish accent but she spoke so crisply it didn’t sound Irish at all to me. I was accustomed to the soft, slow brogue of Mrs L’Estrange. ‘Here’s your apron. The shop opens at 8.15 sharp. We’re to be here no later than eight to set up for the day. The printing works starts at seven, so there’s always something to do if the shop is made ready early. Whenever there’s a quiet time, we go through to help the boys in the packing department. You get half an hour for dinner and there’s a room out the back where you can eat it but we don’t because the men eat there. If Mr Kenny or Mr Sands isn’t in they let us eat lunch in their offices, but usually we have to go to the park. You can’t go to dinner until after the dinner-time crowd has gone back to work, so have a big breakfast.’

I nodded and tied on the apron. Sarah slapped a long book down in front of me. It was beautifully covered with printed paper, a design of vines and leaves forming a rectangle around the title: ‘Catalogue of Commercial Law and General Stationery, Sands, Kenny & Co. Victoria Stationery Warehouse, Melbourne.’

‘You can take that home with you for the first week or so. You have to know every item in that catalogue and the prices for each.’

I nodded again. The catalogue had an index: two-and-a-half pages of items I would have to memorise. Blotting paper, brief paper, brown paper, drawing paper, parchment and vellum. Cloth envelopes, linen envelopes, mourning stationery. Things I had never heard of: ever-point pencils, copying presses, manifold writers. Things I had heard of but never seen: debenture paper, ivory tablets, bills of exchange.

‘We’ll start you off on something easy,’ Sarah said. ‘Eileen, show her the paper.’

Oh, the paper! I loved the different papers, their smell and feel, textures as different from one another as roses from lilacs. I remember astonishing Father Woods, years later, by asking him to write our Institute of St Joseph’s constitution on extra superfine glazed large post paper. He had no idea what I meant, which was a surprise to me. I think it was the first time I ever knew more than he did.

Even though I loved the papers, I can’t say I enjoyed my job all that much. It was a long, tiring day. The customers arrived with a rush at 8.30.

‘Monday is always our busiest day for office supplies,’ Eileen whispered as she showed me how to take cash and write a receipt for envelopes.

A steady stream of clerks came through the door and demanded debenture papers, promissory notes, marking ink, superfine blue wove paper, royal-sized account current books with 960 pages, minute books, guard books for filing letters and invoices, and superfine middle blue laid envelopes.

It was like another country where they spoke a foreign language. I’m sure I looked as frazzled as I felt, but Sarah kept an eye on me and came to my rescue when I was lost. Despite her stern manner she was very kind.

Later in the day, clerks or merchants from the local shops came in for ticket-writing ink, receipt books, ledgers and Indian rubber bands.

Everybody wanted pens. Not what we would call pens, now, the fountain pens we are so used to (God bless Mr Waterman, who invented them!). ‘Pens’ in those days meant just the nibs. The penholder was bought separately. There were so many kinds of pens. Steel pens, cold pens, Edinburgh pens, and ordinance pens for a copyist in the Lands Department, and best swan quills for the solicitors in the Imperial Chambers next door. At 35 shillings for a hundred they seemed shockingly expensive to me. But I supposed white swans were rare in Australia and black quills wouldn’t do at all.

The clerks from the lawyers barely looked at us. They ordered their goods staring over my shoulder and spoke only to each other: ‘We’ve a tort on tomorrow under Justice Barry. Three copies of the argument to be made before six tonight and not a decent quill in the place.’ ‘Better Barry than Stawell. He thinks torts are beneath him.’ Then they’d laugh together.

Rude. Rude and ill-bred. But perhaps they didn’t like having to do the shopping.

As the door opened and closed behind them the din of the traffic swept through like an explosion.

It was a long way away from the quiet and peace and fun of Erindale. By lunchtime on my first day, I had a headache from the noise of the carriages in the street. My feet and back ached from standing behind the counter and I was beginning to hate the lawyers’ snobbish clerks.

‘I don’t want to catch you leaning against anything, or sitting on the stepladder,’ Sarah said. ‘If a customer comes in, we have to be waiting, ready to serve them. Besides, if you’ve got time to sit down, you’ve got time to put that new batch of envelopes on the shelves.’

I nodded—all I seemed to do with Sarah was nod—and eased from my right aching foot to my left aching foot. Through the soles of my boots I could feel the pounding of the printing presses working in the back of the building. It was not so much a noise as a shaking; over and over and over, the vibration travelled up through my bones. My head began to pound in sympathy.
Offer it up for the Holy Souls in Purgatory.

‘Quick, here’s Mr Sands,’ Sarah hissed, and twitched my apron straight.

‘Good afternoon, Mr Sands,’ Eileen and Sarah chorused and curtsied. I followed suit.

‘Humph. Afternoon. Mary, is it? Come now, I’ve a moment or two to spare.’

Mr Sands was a lean, businesslike man with long, bony, ink-stained fingers.

I followed him through to the printing floor at the rear of the building, where there were presses of every size, from the great ones that made maps and engravings to the small ones for handbills and personal stationery. To one side, the engravers worked.

‘Never go over there, girl,’ Mr Sands said. ‘They work with acid. Eat your fingers away if you touched it.’

I could smell it, a sharp tang under the headier scent of ink.

At the other end the boys worked packing the orders for customers. They were young—around 13, 14—and all were thin and growing out of their shirt cuffs, their wrists clearly showing the bones. But they seemed happy enough, grinning and chatting to each other as they worked, although I didn’t see how they could hear each other over the constant clamour of the presses.

‘Right. Come back some other time, I’ll show you more.’

I dropped another curtsy and went back to the shop. I stood for a moment behind the curtain that led to the counter. It felt like the first moment all day that I could breathe. I let out my breath, went through and smiled at the next customer, a merchant’s clerk who wanted erasers and ink and cold pens.

That evening, before I left, I went reluctantly to the door of Mr Kenny’s office. It had to be done, but I felt sick with embarrassment.

‘Come in, come in, Mary. How have you got on?’

‘Very well, thank you, sir. I’m very grateful to you for the opportunity.’

‘Nonsense! Happy to help.’

I bit down on my tongue to stop my lips shaking. No more biting my lip.

‘I—I’m hoping you may be able to help me again.’

Mr Kenny frowned.

‘I’m sorry, Mary, but we just don’t have room for John in the packing bay. I explained to your father—’

‘It’s not that, Mr Kenny. You know, since Papa lost the job at Back Creek, we’ve been staying at a—a
place,
in Collingwood.’

A
‘place’. A horrible back slum, with rats creeping along the rafters and a shared privy. And to get that we had to borrow from Mrs Stuart.

‘Aye.’

‘Well, now that I have a job, I’d like to move the family to our own house. I’ve found a place in Richmond, but the landlord wants a month’s rent in advance and I’ve saved only enough for two weeks.’

Mr Kenny nodded. His kind eyes were shrewd as well. ‘You want an advance on your wages.’

My cheeks burned red.
If he doesn’t help us, we’ll be living on bread and dripping for a month, and the bread will be an act of charity from Mrs Stuart.
‘Is it possible?’

‘Aye. Aye, we can manage that. How much do you need?’

The relief was like a cool breeze on a sweltering hot day. We could move tomorrow. Maggie could organise things. And Annie. I could depend on them to help Mamma.

After Father Woods and I started the Institute of St Joseph in Adelaide, we nuns went out begging on the streets to raise money to feed the hungry who poured into our providence every day and night. We begged to feed ourselves and to pay the rent on our school. The society ladies I met—so generous, most of them—would ask me how I could bear to beg for our food. I used to laugh. ‘God has trained me for it,’ I would say. ‘I’ve lived on charity for most of my life.’

It was a terrible cross to bear in my childhood and young womanhood, but I see so clearly how our poverty prepared me for the poverty of the convent—and prepared Lexie and Donald, too, for their lives in God. It’s always true, that the cross God sends you is a gift, given not only so that you may share Christ’s pain and so lessen it, but also to make you ready for other gifts of grace. I have taught children who had untroubled, unfettered lives, lives without illness or poverty or fear, and it is always hardest to teach those children to feel for others, to understand the needs and burdens of others. They take so much for granted. Parents want their children’s lives to be without pain, and of course it is their duty to guard and love and protect them. But a childhood without any pain at all, I have come to see, is one that ill-prepares the child for adulthood.

Perhaps that was the problem with my father. He encountered no check until he was an adult, and had no resources to deal with it, no flexibility of understanding, for all his academic brilliance.

Work became easier as time went on. I became accustomed to standing all day, every day, although my back kept a small ache at the base of my spine that only disappeared when I was walking to and from Richmond each day.

The noise was a problem, but I was determined to ignore it. What were headaches, after all?

The work itself wasn’t complicated. I took the catalogue home every night for a week and studied harder than I’d ever studied before. By Saturday I could quote for the most complicated order of stationery, ledger books and accessories that any customer could ask for.

Two weeks after I started work, Sarah left to get married. Mr Kenny and Mr Sands presented her with a white linen tablecloth and printed her invitations for free.