Union Belle (2 page)

February 1951

T
he heavy tread of Tom’s boots on the back porch was Ellen’s usual signal to put the frying pan on the coal range, and give the fire smouldering inside it a good jab with the poker.

‘You’re home early,’ she said over her shoulder as her husband stepped into the kitchen, still carrying his rucksack and his crib tin. When he didn’t answer, she looked around and noticed the expression of barely concealed triumph on his face. ‘What’s happened?’

‘We’ve gone out,’ he said, dropping his bag on the floor. ‘Where are the boys?’

‘Down at the creek looking for crawlies.’ She opened the refrigerator, took out a bowl of sausages and laid four in the pan. Poking them with a fork to rupture the skins, she added a scrape of dripping and broke in three eggs as well. ‘Because of the watersiders?’

Tom sat down at the kitchen table. ‘More or less. We worked most of the shift, then came up and voted to go out in support of them, and in protest against the emergency regulations. It was unanimous.’

‘Are all the Waikato miners out?’

‘All the underground jokers. Thompson’s is staying open to supply the hospitals, but the other opencasters have all walked off. It’s not on, bringing in emergency regulations, not in this country. Typical Holland, what a bastard. Worst bloody prime minister we’ve ever had.’

Ellen tucked thick strands of russet hair behind her ears, leaned against the bench and crossed her arms. Her husband was a good-looking man—fit and rugged, as miners tended to be, and tall too, not always a bonus underground—although his eyes could be hard and his face darkly belligerent when he was angry.

‘Was it a secret ballot?’ she asked.

‘No, just a show of hands—we didn’t have time to fuck about with secret ballots. Sorry, love.’ Tom normally refrained from swearing too coarsely, as he didn’t hold with bad language in front of women, except in dire circumstances. It was tricky after a day at work, though; the swearing down the mine was shocking. ‘West Coast and Taranaki are out too, and so are the freezing workers, the hydro-electric jokers, Portland and Golden Bay cement, and most of the drivers and railway workers. Nearly all the TUC affiliates and a fair few of the FOL unions too, as of yesterday and today.’

‘The Southland and Kamo miners as well?’

Tom’s mouth set in a hard line of disapproval. ‘Not yet, but they won’t be far behind, they’ll come into line.’

‘It’ll still slow the country down though, won’t it, even with just half the pits out?’ Ellen sighed. ‘Well, at least we knew it was coming.’

And they had, this time, unlike the miners’ strike of 1942 and the countless stoppages that had come after that. In ‘42 no one had been prepared, and the strike on top of the war rationing had meant hard times for nearly everyone. She and Tom had only been married a year, and she’d been pregnant with Neil.

Back then, the Pukemiro men had gone out because ten of them had been paid less than the minimum wage by Pukemiro Collieries, the private owner of the mine, and within a week all Waikato miners were out in sympathy, although no miners elsewhere in New Zealand downed tools.
The government, panicking because of the effect the coal shortage would have on the war effort, had come down hard on the strikers. Every Pukemiro man was served a summons for illegal striking and 182 of them sentenced to a month in prison. But after a round of intense meetings, and at the very last minute, the government announced it would take over control of the mines for the duration of the war and that the prison sentences of the Pukemiro men would be suspended, providing they went back to work. They did.

Ellen had been sick with worry at the thought of Tom in jail. She spent the day before they were all due to leave mending his suit so he wouldn’t have to go to prison looking tatty, and had burst into tears of relief when news of the reprieve came. Tom thought it all a great joke, but Ellen had been rather less amused, despite her support of the men’s demand for the minimum wage. But they’d survived then, and she expected that they would survive this time too.

When the trouble with the Auckland watersiders had started a few weeks ago, she’d gone into Huntly to the Co-op and stocked up on tinned food and other bits and pieces they might need. But it was worrying—money was fairly scarce at the best of times. They were still paying off the mortgage on their house, and now there was her new refrigerator as well, her pride and joy even though it was only one of the smaller models, on hire purchase from Farmers. It was an extravagance, but her mother had given her the money for the deposit and she’d pestered Tom until he’d finally given in and said she could have it, even though they couldn’t strictly afford it. Since its delivery just before Christmas she’d marvelled every day at how she’d ever managed without it, but she might just have to again if they couldn’t keep the payments up and it had to go back. Which could be very embarrassing as well as disappointing, as just about every housewife in Pukemiro had been around to admire it.

It could also be very likely, now that the coalminers had gone out in support of the watersiders, locked out of the Auckland ports en masse a week ago. At face value it was over a pay increase, but people were starting to realise now that it went deeper than that, that Holland and his Tories were gunning for the wharfies, and through them the country’s other openly militant trade unions. But Ellen knew they weren’t the only ones who might be facing trouble—if they were to find themselves in financial strife, so would plenty of other families.

She turned back to the range and gave the sausages a gentle nudge so they wouldn’t catch. ‘How long do you think you’ll be out?’

Tom shrugged. ‘Depends on the watersiders, I suppose. Not long, if Jock Barnes gets his way.’

Ellen pulled a face, but made sure Tom couldn’t see it. She didn’t particularly like Jock Barnes; he might be the national president of the Waterside Workers’ Union, and a founding member of the new Trade Union Congress, but in her opinion he was loud-mouthed and overbearing. Toby Hill, Barnes’ right-hand man, wasn’t much better. But the watersiders revered Barnes, and the miners had always supported the watersiders, so you couldn’t say a word against either man. And she agreed wholeheartedly with Barnes’ convictions. There was nothing wrong with a bit of good, organised industrial militancy to rattle the government’s dags.

She arranged the sausages on a plate and placed the fried eggs next to them with exaggerated care. Tom hated it when the yolks broke and, because he did, so did Neil and Davey, so she had become very skilled at keeping them in one piece.

As Ellen set Tom’s plate in front of him, he grabbed her and pulled her down onto his knee. She was nine inches
shorter than him and nearly five stone lighter, and he could easily pick her up and carry her, which he sometimes did if he was feeling particularly playful.

She sniffed his short light-brown hair, fluffily clean and smelling of soap from his recent shower at the mine bathhouse. Beneath the hair, and out across his right temple, ran a jagged line of coal tattoos ground into his skin after the face he’d been working at four years ago collapsed and almost killed him. The marks had never faded, and neither had the mental scars; he still had nightmares and cold sweats from time to time, although he would never admit this to anyone but Ellen.

His big hands settled on her waist and he gave her a gentle squeeze.

‘Don’t, the boys will be in soon,’ she said, although she was giggling. ‘Eat your eggs before they go cold.’

‘They won’t be in for ages.’

Ellen knew that, but she also knew she had to start the dinner; the sausages and eggs were only Tom’s afternoon tea, and he’d be hungry again by half past six.

‘Let me up, love,’ she said, ‘we’ll have a cuddle tonight if you like.’

He pushed her reluctantly off his knee, gave her backside a friendly pat and turned his attention to his plate while she rinsed the frying pan in the sink.

Halfway through his third sausage, he said suddenly, ‘Oh, the committee’s coming over after tea, to talk about the strike. Could you rustle up some supper?’

Ellen sighed inwardly. There was a perfectly good miners’ hall just down the street, why couldn’t they meet there? Neil and Davey would be awake half the night with the kitchen full of rowdy men.

‘Probably,’ she said, ‘but I’ll need to pop down to the shop.’

Ellen took her apron off and fetched her walking shoes from their bedroom, but when she came back Tom seemed lost in contemplation.

She was almost out the back door when he said, ‘Ellen?’

‘Mmm?’

‘Don’t worry, love. I don’t think it’ll go on too long, this one. We’ll be all right.’

Ellen looked at him for a moment. ‘I know,’ she said, then went outside.

Under a bright blue sky bulging with the heat of a relentless summer afternoon, it was even muggier than it had been in the kitchen, and Ellen felt sweat trickling down from her armpits before she reached the front gate.

She glanced at her neighbour’s house as she walked past, wondering how poor Dot was taking the news about the strike. Badly, probably, given her chronic nerves. There were five children in the Sisley household, all under the age of ten. Dot’s husband Bert was a good, steady bloke, but even he was hard-pressed to manage when she was having one of her bad spells.

Across the dusty street the little primary school was silent and empty now that the school day had ended. Cicadas shrilled and rattled raucously in nearby trees, but over the racket she could still faintly hear the shrieks and howls of children as they played and swam in the stream at the bottom of the gully below the town. She envied them; floating in the cool shade of a bush-canopied creek was surely the best place to be on a day like this, although she doubted there’d be crawlies within a mile of the place by now.

She turned into Joseph Street and began the trudge down
the hill to the shops. By the time she’d stopped several times to exchange the latest news and speculate on how long the strike might last, whether Barnes would back down over his demands, and whether or not that bastard Fintan Walsh from the Federation of Labour would come to the party and support the watersiders, she had to hurry the last few yards before Fred Hollis the grocer closed his shop.

On her way back home she made a short detour to say hello to her parents. Climbing the steep wooden steps at the rear of their house, she rapped on the open back door and called out, ‘Mum? Anyone home?’

Silence for a moment, then the measured walk of her mother as she appeared out of the gloom of the hallway.

‘Hello, dear,’ she said. ‘Come through, I’m in the lounge.’

Ellen followed her mother down the hall and into the sitting room. Gloria Powys never entertained in the kitchen, not even her own family. As far as she was concerned, the only appropriate room in which to receive visitors was the lounge. Not the sitting room, the lounge.

Ellen flopped down in an armchair and slipped off her shoes, waggling her bare toes in the slight breeze from the open window. ‘Where’s Dad?’

‘Where is he normally?’ her mother replied, sitting down on the matching couch opposite.

‘At the pub?’

Gloria’s sour expression said it all.

Ellen’s father, Alf Powys, was a bit of a drinker. Having retired from the mines several years ago, he had contrived ever since to spend as much of his time as he could manage in the pub or the workingmen’s club in Huntly, or at the Glen Afton club, known to locals as the Blue Room, or at the Waingaro hotel—anywhere in fact that Gloria either couldn’t go or wouldn’t be seen dead. Ellen knew that if
he was at the Huntly pub this afternoon, he wouldn’t be back until well after six when the last train from town pulled into Pukemiro Junction, at which point he’d get off and stagger the rest of the way home past the Pukemiro mine and over the hill everyone called Gentle Annie. She was disappointed—she’d wanted to talk to him about the strike. He loved to discuss union business, and he missed dreadfully the daily comradeship of the men he’d worked with for decades.

Throughout much of her adult life, Ellen had pondered the mystery of why her mother had ever consented to marry her father, and at the age of thirty-one she still hadn’t come up with a decent answer. They were as different as coal and gold: her father was without doubt the coal, while her mother was absolutely convinced she was the gold. Ellen had done the arithmetic years ago and worked out that her older sister Hazel had been born well after her parents had married, so that hadn’t been the reason. Surely then there must have been love between them at some point? But Gloria maintained steadfastly even now, and especially after a couple of sweet sherries, that she’d been tricked into believing she was marrying a man well on his way up the ladder, a man destined to become a mine manager at the very least, but had realised far too late that Alf Powys was going to fall well short of that mark.

Alf, on the rare occasions that Ellen could recall him bothering to defend himself, insisted that Gloria had been sadly mistaken, that he’d only ever been one for shovelling the coal, not managing it, and that he’d never had ambitions to organise anything other than himself. And the men in the union he belonged to. The social aspirations had always been Gloria’s, not his, and if he’d disappointed her then he was sorry, but he couldn’t do much about it now. Pass the beer. He was a very decent man, Alf Powys, respected
and well liked, but age and life with Gloria had also made him extremely stoical.

As compensation, or perhaps revenge, Gloria had over the years demanded the best of everything—the latest in household gadgets and furniture, the best quality clothes for her daughters, the smartest house in Pukemiro. Alf had worked his fingers to the bone, almost literally, to earn the money to pay for it all, but these days, while he had his many mates, his popularity and his memories, all Gloria had was a new lounge suite and a house that didn’t have paint peeling off the outside.

And although she hadn’t understood at the time, Ellen could see now why her mother had been so against her marrying Tom McCabe. She’d been frightened that Ellen, her precious younger daughter, would be confined to a dreary life in a small mining town, making packed lunches day after day for a man who would always have coal dust ingrained in his skin and under his fingernails, and who might, with nothing more than a premonitory subterranean rumble or a sudden whiff of gas, leave his wife a widow well before time.