Hunger Town (16 page)

An abrupt silence fell on the room. Someone I didn't know jumped up and came to me. ‘Why, girlie, what is it? What has so distressed you?'

A murmur of sympathy ran round the room and I saw them look puzzled and questioning at each other.

‘Was it our chiacking, girlie?' my helper asked. ‘We meant nothing by it.'

I shook my head. Between sobs I got some of it out. ‘It's the cafe.'

‘Closing,' someone said, in a flat dispirited voice and they all sighed.

There was a faint intangible movement in the room as if everyone having dispensed with hope now resettled themselves resignedly in their seats.

‘Yes and no,' I struggled to find the right words. There weren't any. They waited.

‘Spit it out, Judith,' one said at last.

‘We can take it,' another added.

‘Don't be scared.' This was perceptive.

Brutality took the place of tact. ‘The meals are no longer free.' At last I had said the fearful words. They had come out very quietly as if subconsciously I hoped that they would have faded to disappearance and nobody would hear.

The young worker who stood at my side handed me a large white handkerchief. It was thin with a couple of holes but spotlessly clean. Some woman had made a Herculean effort to see that her son or husband went out to find work with a cleanly laundered and ironed white handkerchief. Pity for the little efforts people made to keep their pride overwhelmed me and with a mumbled apology to the whole room I stumbled from the cafe into the kitchen.

‘You tell them,' I stormed at my boss. ‘You tell them. I'm going home. I don't care if your whole bloody cafe collapses about your ears. It's your cafe. You face them.'

He ran after me as I reached the back door. ‘Please, Judith.'

Still crying, I shook my head.

He said, helplessly, ‘Tomorrow. Come to work a little later tomorrow. That'll be OK. I can manage on my own.'

I took no notice of the self-pity in his voice.

I slept late next morning and by the time I rose my mother had left for the soup kitchen. Preparations for the midday meal distribution began before eight o'clock.

Our hulk had not been bunkered beside any steamer in the Outer Harbor for several weeks. Winchmen were not needed so every morning my father went to the Waterside Workers' pick-up point at the junction of Lipson and Nile streets, to see if he could fluke a day's loading work on the wharf. The pick-up was an insecure haphazard arrangement for hiring wharf labourers but at best it might give him a full day's work.

Now rumours flew around the Port that instead of the single morning pick-up there might be a change of regulation to allow for two pick-ups, one in the morning, one at midday. I regularly heard angry talk between my father and his friends that this was the thin end of the wedge, a ploy by ship owners to reduce wages even further. How could men who lived at a distance from the Port attend two pick-ups? Unless they had bicycles they couldn't go home between them, perhaps to do a bit of gardening, and waiting around brought in only a small amount of appearance money.

The pick-up point was now dubbed ‘Poverty Corner' and in the smouldering discontent around me I heard the rumblings of rebellion.

Fear of changes that worsened their working conditions left everyone on edge and my father, wretched and helpless in the face of what was happening to him, frequently snarled at my mother. She urged me to be patient because it wasn't his fault and he needed to let off steam. But I resented his constant spleen. Too often he made her the butt of his anxiety.

When, in a petty taunt, he yelled at her to buy herself some new clothes because she was getting to look like an old hag, I exploded. ‘Then bring some money home yourself, you old bastard,' I stormed at him. ‘My mother's doing her best. New clothes! How the hell can she afford new clothes? Have you noticed that now she has to put cardboard in her shoes because the soles are so thin? And that she comes home exhausted to prepare you a meal because she has to walk home from the soup kitchen? Soon only the soup kitchen will keep us alive.'

His face had crumpled and for the first time in my life I saw my father weep.

‘Enough, Judith,' my mother said sharply, ‘enough.' And she put her arms about my father and led him into their cabin.

Overcome with guilt and shame I stood helplessly on my own, aware suddenly that in their marriage my parents were an entity and that between them was a bond I would never understand. In this situation I was merely a beloved outsider. As I took a chair and sat on deck in the morning sun I reflected on this.

My boss at the Chew It could wait for me. My days there were already numbered. We both knew this but in the time left he was now dependent on me. For the small petty ways he had cheated me over my wages I could now have my revenge. He could wait. Wait and wonder whether I might turn up to work at all.

I settled myself more comfortably in my chair. To both fore and aft of the hulk a row of tugboats and steamers nose-to-stern groaned and sighed against their moorings. In the gentle swell they sidled against their ropes and rubbed against each other, creaking. An occasional gasp of black smoke from a steamer funnel ballooned into the air and dispersed with a filmy greyness. Early sunlight glittered on the warehouse walls but sent long shadows across the wharf.

On our banana boat—I smiled as I remembered Harry and the dead marines—three cormorants sat upright, immobile as pieces of charred wood. Two silver gulls swooped and squarked in a dog fight above me. They settled themselves on the deck, but apparently too close for comfort one lowered himself aggressively, jutted his beak and darted wrathfully at the other. His unwanted companion took off with a rebellious squawk, circled low over the hulk and then returned to a safer perch further along the deck. The first aggressor resumed a jaunty pose, strutted and muttered his winner's satisfaction and then fell into a quiet dream, resting on one leg. What it had all been about, goodness knows.

I returned to my cabin, collected my drawing pad and pencils and sat again to happily occupy myself drawing the scenes around me. The next hour I spent working and my worries fell away. What a joy my life would be if I could do this every day, even perhaps make some money out of it to justify enjoying myself.

At last I put on my work clothes and wandered along the wharf peering at some of the unfamiliar names of the trading ships. The
Milora
was being loaded with wheat but the usually busy wharf was ominously quiet. I crossed the Port Road into Lipson Street and passed ‘Poverty Corner', but there was no one there. I went on by a couple of the hotels.

Men standing outside talked loudly in groups. They gesticulated angrily. I caught the word ‘Beeby' and someone spat disgustedly. Someone added, ‘Justice Beeby' to a ribald round of contemptuous comments. ‘Justice? What a fuckin' joke that is. And he's a Labor man, mates. So he tells us. On the side of the workers. My fat arse.'

They did not see me as I strolled, taking the long way round to my job. Their anger lay like a scar on my previous enjoyment of the bright morning. At the Labour Exchange I saw more men, hundreds of them, patiently queuing.

My boss greeted me with effusive pleasure. The experiences of my walk had chastened me. We were all in this together. I made no excuses for my lateness but immediately got to work to help him with preparations for lunch. He fussed anxiously over how much we should prepare. He didn't suppose that he'd have a lot of customers. He didn't want to waste food but on the other hand he didn't want to run out. I did what he instructed me to do and didn't give him any lip.

Lunchtime was very quiet. There wouldn't have been a dozen customers, far quieter than my boss had expected.

‘Perhaps tomorrow,' he said, ‘tomorrow things will have settled down. They're angry today. Tomorrow they'll be calmer.'

I didn't have the heart to tell him that it was not a matter of calmness but of money. Besides, when he stopped deceiving himself, he would know this.

Nathan's arrival startled me. I hadn't seen him for weeks. He had never come for free meals. He looked neat, his shabby clothes clean and pressed, his hair cut, his chin shaved. His shoes had been shined but I had no way of knowing whether he, too, put cardboard in their thinning soles. Clearly Miss Abigail and Miss Adelaide were devoted to his appearance.

When I had asked Harry about his whereabouts he said that Nathan and Jock were busy organising a local branch of the Communist Party. Soon it would be a real political party with membership books and membership fees. He expected that he would join.

‘Will there be many others?' I had asked.

‘About thirty, I think.' Harry's casual response failed to conceal his excited anticipation.

I was sceptical. ‘I suppose it will grow.'

‘Certainly. Look about you, Judith. It's bound to grow.'

But I knew the waterside workers my father worked alongside. They scoffed at the Bolshies. A lot of hot air was the usual derisive and dismissive comment. All talk. Intellectuals they call themselves. Like to see them down here lumping a hundred and eighty pound bag of wheat or coal. And they want to tell us what our lives are all about.

Now I said cheerfully, ‘Hello, Nathan. Should I get you a bun and a cup of tea?' I grinned at him, recalling his earlier visits to the Chew It.

He had arrived in a hurry, hotfoot with impatience, but now, as he met me, he hesitated, awkward and diffident. Something was afoot and I waited expectantly. From experience I knew that nothing stirred Nathan except some political event so shortly, when he relaxed, I would hear the momentous news. Behind his thick spectacles his eyes shone and he clutched a newspaper in nervous hands. Had some disaster occurred?

Frightened, I looked from the newspaper to his face and back again to the newspaper. Whatever I didn't want to read about was there in it. I took a deep breath. ‘You'd better tell me, Nathan.' I tried a little joke. ‘The Bank of England's gone bust? Australia's bankrupt? The army has taken over the government? Tell me if there's anything worse than that.'

He flushed. ‘No, of course not. Not bad news at all. In fact …' he thrust the paper at me, ‘see for yourself.'

I took it gingerly. Sometimes news can bite; sometimes I didn't want to read it. I looked down at the open page and through a miasma of anxiety saw my cartoon of Harry in Victoria Square looking back at me.

It was a copy of the
Barrier Daily Truth
Nathan had brought me. They had published my cartoon on the second page alongside an article headed POLICE BASH UNEMPLOYED. Stunned I reached for a chair and sat down. I seemed unable to shift my eyes from it. It was mine but publicly displayed. I felt it was the work of a stranger.

‘It's good, Judith.' Nathan had at last relaxed onto a chair beside me. ‘I didn't know you could do this sort of thing. On the way here I passed Harry at the Labour Exchange and showed it to him. He said you had always done drawings and had a lot of them.'

‘Yes,' I said. ‘What's Harry doing at the Labour Exchange?'

‘The foundry has reduced his hours. He only gets work now for one week in two. It's only a matter of time.'

‘Did he say anything about my cartoon?'

Nathan hesitated and looked embarrassed. I knew that Harry had said nothing. Now I was irritated that Nathan had shown my work to Harry pre-empting my triumph. I was also hurt that Nathan, not Harry, had told me about his job worries. Recently I had felt that the sad afternoon tea had erected a barrier between us. He didn't want our pity. He felt humiliated by it. The bright face he showed us was at times a mask to hide his misery and discontent. Now presumably he couldn't bear having to tell me that he might be jobless.

I sighed to myself. We'd all be jobless soon. We couldn't afford the niceties of hurt pride that Harry had learned from his mother. Maybe he needed the Communist Party to give him an outlet.

Nathan interrupted my thoughts. He was saying earnestly, ‘I work on the
Despatch
you know, Judith. I'm their chief compositor. They should take some of your work.'

‘The
Despatch
? Not likely, Nathan. With your political views I don't know how you can work for them; why they employ you.'

The
Despatch
was an imposing Gothic blue-stone building in Lipson Street and I was always cynically amused to read the Latin insignia over the entrance. Inscribed in a semi-circle from which radiated fake sunrays was the masthead inscription
Tantum eruditi sunt liberi
. I knew that this meant ‘only the educated are free'. Joe Pulham had told me it came from the Greek philosopher Epictetus. I regularly jibed at Nathan that it peddled propaganda, not education.

‘Why do you put up with its hypocrisy?' I asked.

He shrugged. ‘Why do they employ me? Best man for the job. They put up with my politics and I put up with theirs. I guess that's how a good society should be run.' He tapped my cartoon. ‘Not like this, with police bashing people for their opinions. When you do some more cartoons let me have them and I'll use my influence. Generally newspapers like controversial cartoons. They help sales. Look at Will Dyson. Even
Punch
took his cartoons.'

I thanked him. I couldn't make him out. While talking about his work he was assertive and confident. A few minutes earlier he had looked as if his body, and there wasn't much of it, was some sort of heavy encumbrance he didn't know where to put down.

When he had gone I still sat marvelling at my cartoon, now actually printed in a newspaper. Eventually I returned to the kitchen. No matter how jubilant I felt, the dishes would have to be washed and dried.

‘That your Bolshie friend?' my boss asked.

‘Yes, I suppose.'

‘He was in here some years back.'