Hunger Town (14 page)

He frowned, puckering his brow in his effort to remember. ‘We ran into the square, Judith?'

‘Yes.'

‘The railed area?'

‘Yes.'

‘There were lots of people and fighting?'

‘Yes.'

‘Two cops grabbed me and started to hammer the daylights out of me.'

‘Yes.'

He paused, thoughtful. ‘A woman screamed? She kept on screaming “Rape!” The cops stopped bashing me. I think they went to look. I couldn't help her.'

‘You didn't need to.'

‘No.'

He considered me. ‘It was you, Judith?'

‘Yes.'

He looked worried. ‘You weren't?'

‘No, of course not.'

‘It was to save me?'

‘To try.'

He chuckled feebly. ‘ Thanks, Judith. You are a card. Such a card.' He reached me his hand. The effort of talking had again exhausted him and he lapsed into a light doze.

Very gently I leaned over him and touched his lips with mine.

On the brink of deeper sleep, he smiled. ‘Butterflies,' he sighed.

After a week Harry had recovered enough to go home. Frank, Pat and Nathan all came to help him along the wharf and into Pat's car. My mother cried a little to see him go and hugged the part of him that did not hurt to be touched. He did his best to grin at me. ‘Do I remember some butterflies?' he said.

I blushed.

‘What a card you are, Judith,' he chuckled. ‘Won't be long before I'm dancing again and I'll shout you a threepenny hop at the Bloodhouse.'

I returned to my work at the Chew It and Spew It. My boss scowled, ‘There was no need for those two union heavies to come around here threatening me. I wouldn't have sacked you. It's too hard as it is to find good workers.' And that was as much recognition of my labours as I was likely to get.

However I was surprised and a little embarrassed. What could I say about the union heavies? I knew they had gone to the foundry on Harry's behalf but had never imagined they would think of me. Perhaps I owed my boss a sort of indirect apology. Irresolutely I looked at him.

‘Well, haven't you any work to do?' he grumbled some more.

With all the terrible events of the previous days I had forgotten that I had sent my drawing of Joe Pulham's grave to the
Sun News Pictorial
so it was with surprise that I opened a letter from their editor. He had returned my drawing but accompanied his refusal with a courteous letter. ‘The drawing is good,' he wrote. ‘It shows considerable promise.' He assumed that such a feeling cartoon must have sprung from some painful personal experience, but for a newspaper a cartoon had to be topical. It must encapsulate a particular event and display a clear viewpoint. The best cartoons were satiric or ironic or funny. He suggested that I study the work of Will Dyson. He wished me well and hoped that I would continue to draw. If I produced others his paper would be happy to consider them.

Apart from Joe's opinions this was my first experience of a judgement of my work from an outsider. That my drawing had been treated with serious consideration lifted my spirits. I felt that a part of me, previously ignored, was now acknowledged. Maybe there was some place for me in a world that I had never before dreamed of entering. Again, like Alice, I had come to believe that I would never fit through the door into the magic garden. How pertinent
Alice in Wonderland
was to our deepest fears and hopes, how relevant its images that time could never consume.

While Harry lay prone on my bunk bed and I watched over him I had been unable to forget that last horrifying image of him before I flung myself to the ground and screamed, ‘Rape!' Strung against the iron railings that reared above his head like the obscene arms of a crucifix, he was helpless to resist the vicious flagellation. Each time that image imprinted itself on my retina I felt so ill that the need to vomit nearly overwhelmed me. Part of me needed to draw that image to free me from its pain but another part cringed and retreated from re-living it.

Now, with the editor's letter, my thoughts returned to Joe Pulham. He had taken a book of Goya's etchings from the shelf, handed it to me and told me to look and learn from them. That, too, I had forgotten until now. In fact, I remembered guiltily, I had also forgotten to return the book to the library. I searched, found it, and sat down to turn the pages thoughtfully. Some of the drawings were incomprehensible; I supposed they were dependent on an understanding of Spanish history and culture. But the series
The Disasters of War
arrested me.

Before the riot and the police bashing they would have meant little, a brutality that took place in another country at another time and alien to me in its ferocity. But now experience had changed my viewpoint and I saw in their savagery the agony, pity and suffering of people at war, the nobility of defiance that ended in useless defeat, the clarion call for liberty. These were not just Spanish works, they were universal in their message and power and they were about ordinary people, like Harry and me and Nathan and my mother and father and Jock and Frank and Pat and darling innocent Winnie, who might have been in that square and seen what I had seen and lost her sweetness and trust for ever.

If Goya could face such vile events and record them then I could draw Harry as a crucified Christ. I wasn't religious. My father had cured me of that and my mother's church-going was wishy-washy at best, but I could see there were universal symbols that we all recognised and responded to no matter what our political beliefs. Donald Grant, an IWW, had spoken of Christ returning to earth and weeping for the poor and this image resonated with people and stirred their sense of right and wrong. Some symbols were perhaps particular to local cultures. I suspected that perhaps some of the animal images in Goya's works were more local to Spain but the image of the tortured Christ was universal.

So I began my drawing of Harry and the two policemen, one striking him, the other with baton raised and I wrote the caption beneath:
Defenders of free speech
. I was aware as I drew that somehow I was not fully catching the sense of Harry's body beneath the clothes but I did my best and when it was finished I set it between two sheets of cardboard and sent it to the
Barrier Daily Truth
in Broken Hill. This I knew to be a radical miners' paper that might appreciate my viewpoint.

Following the
Sun News Pictorial
editor's advice I went to the Institute at the Port and requested any interstate newspapers that might have featured some of Will Dyson's cartoons. I found several and a book of his works published in 1919. They were full of images of capitalists with huge bellyfuls of lard spurning abject women and children or thrusting heroic workers back into the pit of poverty. But, like Goya's, his cartoons—of Australian soldiers at war—were realistic and tragic. Their nobility lay in their suffering, not in some fake set of heroics, and what struck me more than anything else was the complexity of the drawings. Some were bitter angry political statements, like
Peace and Cannon Fodder
published in 1919, depicting three of the leaders of Europe and Woodrow Wilson after the signing of the Treaty of Versailles. There is a child weeping behind a pillar but they fail to see him.

Joe had said to me that we would rue the Versailles agreement, that it was a pitiless exercise in revenge. Nathan had also spoken of the starvation of German working people and Adolf Hitler had written his terrible book. Did Dyson's cartoon foretell that the terms of peace would again let loose the dogs of war? A shiver ran down my spine.

In both Goya's works and Will Dyson's there was a strong honest mind behind the works, a passionate integrity. I returned home thoughtful. My mother had hoped that I might spend some of my hundred pounds on training for office work but shorthand and typing seemed an empty future. Instead I decided I would spend some of my money in enrolling at the Adelaide School of Art. There I could learn to draw. That is what I wanted to do with my life.

I had needed to spend some of my hundred pounds on my father's fine but we had been relieved that he didn't receive a jail sentence. Jock, knocked off his box and kicked around, had received a month's jail as had several of the other unemployed marchers, accused of causing the affray. Now I hesitated about enrolling at the School of Art. In the circumstances it seemed self-indulgent, a training that didn't ensure a job at a time when money was becoming more and more the measure of all things. I dithered between longing and guilt. I didn't like to discuss the matter with my mother. It was a decision on my behalf I hesitated to impose on her.

My doubts about this dream grew as I accompanied her on weekends to the Salvation Army soup kitchen. She and three friends, Ailsa Thornhill, Mavis Jones and Brenda Danley, volunteered to assist the overstretched Army workers seven days a week. There was a kitchen at the back of the Army hall and an old wood-burning stove. Brenda Danley's son was conscripted to collect firewood and whatever else might burn. Ben was fourteen and had left school but there was no work for him. School fees were beyond his parents, so he hung around the Port with a gang of other lads and his mother worried about what mischief they might get up to. Some of the wood he brought in was palings from someone's fence that had disappeared during the night. ‘Fences I don't mind,' she said, ‘although if the police catch him …'

I knew that stealing was now a way of life for many. ‘You're a good girl, Judith,' she added. ‘Such a strength to your mother. Boys are different.'

My mother begged free milk from the dairyman. She had to water it to make it go round all the children and I went from door to door at the stores and fruiterers collecting anything that once they would have thrown away: cauliflowers browned, cabbages a bit slimy, carrots growing whiskers, potatoes with long white tentacles of shoots, mouldy onions that we peeled down until the skin showed white. The butchers were cajoled and upbraided. The day my mother unwrapped two shanks that already smelt high and found them crawling with maggots was a day I never forgot. For her, it was the final outrage, that she should be given for the destitute something so disgustingly inedible. She stormed back to the butcher dragging me in her wake and flung them on the counter. ‘Look at these,' she shouted. ‘Look at them. Lousy with maggots.'

The butcher eyed them without expression. He had, I think, become inured to angry women aggressive in their need. ‘Well, Mum,' he said, ‘them's surely maggots. I won't deny. But what do you expect for nothing? Glow-worms?'

My mother stopped in mid-shout, her mouth gaped. I laughed. It was untactful but there was little enough to laugh at these days.

‘Glow-worms,' my mother stuttered at last.

The butcher looked from my mother to my laughing face and grinned. ‘You know,' I said, ‘it's for the Salvos, their soup kitchen. The Lord won't forget any kindness you do.'

He looked abashed and muttered, ‘Didn't know you were Salvos.' Still mumbling he went into a back room, brought out a stack of soup bones, slapped them on some newspaper and handed them to me. My mother, dumbfounded, thanked him and we went out. ‘That was well done, Judith,' she said. ‘A timely lie, although perhaps not a real lie, just an implication.' And I thought, in her way, my mother is as puritanical as any Salvo.

I badgered my boss at the Chew It and Spew It to help. He had always seemed a mean and disagreeable man but now he showed a side that surprised me. ‘If a bloke is unemployed, Judith, just give him his stew and don't ask questions. You'll know because he'll ask for tick. If someone comes in for a bun and a cuppa and says they'll pay tomorrow, ignore it. Better that they're here and not at the pub. Better for their missus and the kids. They'll talk here and that's OK too. I hope, Judith, that you can continue to work here. I'll not give even a crust to some dirty scab to take your place. Not,' he added with crude cynicism, ‘that it'd be a mite of bloody use employing some out-of-towner that can't even speak the language. The Port is family.'

Then he asked me if I'd accept less pay because times were so tough. My wages were skimpy enough as it was. There had been no yearly increments as I grew older. I wasn't certain whether all this preliminary self-righteousness was to soften me up. It was hard to tell from his bland plump face whether the workings of his mind were honest or not, and yet if he wasn't completely noble then he wasn't entirely mean either. I accepted his offer, knowing that my employment might in the long run be as uncertain as everyone else's.

At the end of each day he filled a bag with leftover vegetables but I learned to open it and smell what was inside. If the smell was the sour odour of rotting vegetables I tipped them out on the kitchen bench and re-sorted them. I would look at him reproachfully and repeat what now had become a mantra: ‘And these are good enough for the Salvos?' And he would find some excuse. He had done it in a hurry. He hadn't noticed the rotten potatoes. We understood each other.

From my childhood I had noticed poor individuals: the swimmer after a crust of bread; the man in the gardens sneaking a cigarette butt; the man at the Club stealing newspaper to put under his coat; the unemployed returned soldier weeping; the poor hawkers who came regularly and tentatively up our gangplank offering mothballs and bits of this and that for sale. My mother purchased mothballs and afterwards laughed sadly as she told me moths and silverfish did not inhabit a hulk.

But these had been individuals, shocking because they stood out isolated and alone amongst those better off. Now everyone looked poor. At the soup kitchen gaunt and desperate women, their children clinging to their knees, lined up with men shuffling and defeated or angry, surly and defiant, and the children were spindly, the bones of their faces prominent, their skin pallid and blotched with sores.