Hunger Town (8 page)

He said, ‘Thank your lucky stars you've got a job. A bit of extra work won't hurt you. It's only a bit of domestic labour.'

My mother stiffened and looked daggers at him. ‘Only domestic labour,' she said in her tone that meant ‘don't say anything more'. He mumbled.

When he had gone she said to me quietly, ‘You don't want to lose your job, Judith. You'll just have to grin and bear it. Maybe,' she added as a sop to my anger, ‘we could find some way to help you get training at night school, perhaps in shorthand and typing at the Adelaide School of Mines. Office work is nice for a girl. We wouldn't want you to end up in a factory, working on a conveyor belt.'

Harry fell into the habit of visiting us on Sunday afternoons. At first he had come with Winnie but then he began to drop in on his own to chat with my father, charm my mother and beg an invitation to play our piano. He confided to me childhood memories of Winnie and often mentioned Nathan, who still lectured the foundry workers. I got the impression that Winnie had convinced him Nathan and I were friends and that my denials were some sort of maidenly reticence.

I was irritated and disabused him sharply. He looked so hurt that I hastily reassured him that, although I didn't care for Nathan personally, I was interested in his ideas. This pleased Harry and he began to talk enthusiastically about communism. Occasionally I caught my mother glance from his eager face to mine and she would smile indulgently as if she had some secret knowledge.

Some weeks later Harry came on board for his usual Sunday afternoon tea,. He was still full of his usual enthusiasm and mad keen for me to accompany him to a Communist Party meeting.

‘I don't know, Harry,' my mother demurred.

Challenged by her doubtfulness over a political matter, my father instantly asserted that I should go, that it would be educational for me.

My mother continued to object. It wasn't that she was directly influenced by the anti-Bolshevik sentiment around us but indirectly it made her suspicious and careful. Besides, she hated being pushed by my father.

Harry wheedled, ‘I'll look after her, Mrs L. You know that with me she's in the greatest care. I'll be like a father to her.'

This preposterous statement and Harry's mock solemnity made her laugh and once she laughed at Harry she was defeated. My father, aware that Harry's persuasive tricks were better than his, kept quiet.

The meeting hall we entered was cold and characterless. It was a space and nothing more. It had been a mild day but the evening closed in with a sharp wind off the sea and the dank smell of impending rain. Our footsteps on the bare wooden floor echoed eerily and chairs pulled back screeched a protest. We were the first there and found ourselves tiptoeing to seats in the middle of the room. ‘Let's go up front,' Harry said, but I shook my head. I could see Nathan seated at a table at the front of the hall and after the incident in the gardens I had determined to keep my distance. He shuffled through a heap of papers, diligently taking notes, only occasionally looking up to comment to a man who leaned over his shoulder. The other man was Jock from Glasgow. There was no mistaking his squat pugilistic stance. There was no sign of Bernie-Benito.

‘How many come?' I whispered to Harry. It seemed irreverent to speak out loud.

‘I don't know. This is the first time I've been. Nathan invited me. He asked me to bring you along. He said he knew you, that you'd met at The Chew It and Spew It.'

‘Yes,' I said, non-committal.

‘Then you do know him?'

‘Sort of.'

I wouldn't be dragged into any relationship with Nathan. He was more unpredictable than Harry, and that was saying a lot.

‘He admires you. He says you're a true proletarian.' Harry was not to be put off. ‘Come on, Jude, tell me what's between you two.'

‘Mind your own business, Harry. There's nothing between us.' I was annoyed.

‘Wow,' he said, putting up his hands in mock self-protection. ‘Sorry. Didn't know you felt like that. Tell Uncle Harry all about it.'

‘Shut up, Harry. Don't try to wheedle me as you do my mother. I'm up to your tricks.'

He put a careless arm about me and gave me a squeeze. ‘OK, Miss Larsen, I'll be good.'

More people had drifted in, about three dozen in all. They looked ordinary, cleanly but poorly dressed, tired and subdued. Winnie would have called them earnest but I felt they were there to fulfil a duty. Bernie-Benito was amongst them. With his loose frame and ungainly gait he looked like a benign rag doll. He drooped into a chair in the front row and, like one who speaks English as a foreign language and feels the need to shout, yelled, ‘Good evening, comrades.'

Jock replied cheerfully, ‘Shut up, you little fascist bastard. Can't you see we're working?'

Bernie-Benito doffed his cap, grinned and lolled back in his chair, rocking it precariously on two back legs. ‘
Avanti popolo
,' he hummed under his breath.

I felt that Bernie-Benito would carry a knife and smile charmingly while he used it.

There were no women present, except myself, so when two other women entered I took particular notice of them. Harry with over-done gallantry jumped up to welcome them. His greeting interrupted their conversation and their glance of dismissal was a hurtful rebuff. He returned flushed and embarrassed. ‘I suppose it's our first night here and I shouldn't have intruded.' I looked at him with pity and he blushed again.

‘You should recognise when people are downright rude to you, Harry.' I was going to add, not everyone will like you, and thought better of it. After all, I knew what it was to be mortified.

I studied the two women. They were dressed in sombre clothes: black skirts and coats, with matching cloche hats. One wore a fake fur tippet about her neck. Thin sandy hair escaped in wisps from under their hats and their complexions were colourless, unaided by rouge or lipstick. They looked like a pair of unpleasantly self-sacrificing acolytes.

‘I'd say, Harry, they lacked moderation and probably lead a thoroughly unhappy life. I hope all the comrades are not like that.'

Harry did not appreciate my reference to Aristotle and now, recovered from his moment of embarrassment, was looking about him with bright expectant eyes. My eyes followed the two women as they walked to the table. Nathan jumped up and kissed each on the cheek.

‘They must be family,' I commented to Harry. ‘Is he married?'

‘No. Sisters, I think. He said they were coming to support him.'

I giggled. ‘Revolution's a family affair, then?'

‘Shush, Judith.'

‘Shush yourself, Harry.' He grinned at me. ‘Stuck up bitches,' I said.

He sucked his breath on a laugh and squeezed my hand.

We had expected to be part of the evening but now felt like aliens. Harry was clearly disappointed. I supposed Nathan's interest in him made him believe he was special and would be included. I was peeved because, although I did not want to be claimed by Nathan, neither did I want to be ignored. So, naturally, I was prepared to be antagonistic to whatever followed.

I can't say I was pleasantly surprised by Nathan's speech but I found myself becoming interested in what he had to say. After his botched address at the gardens I had expected the worst but here there was no need for him to be an inspirational orator.

He began quietly and with conviction. Much of what he said confused me. My knowledge of history and political theory was limited. I felt I had acquired some education in untidy snatches. I was rather like a cloth on which a number of patches of different colours and shapes had been sewn to fill in holes. But no patch matched or related to another. There was no overall design. I recognised that Nathan had a pattern of thinking; a set of ideas that fitted together and this was orderly and pleasing.

He began with references to the Russian Revolution, which happened when I was eight, and although interesting they were beyond my comprehension. I vaguely recalled excited conversations in our galley but at that time I was more interested in the swimmer searching for a crust of soggy bread. I didn't know that Russian soldiers on the battlefront had deserted, nor that Russian peasants burned manor houses and took over the great landed estates. The only farmers I knew were the people who lived at fly-blown Piggery Park and tried to make a living rearing and selling pigs. My mother and I had gone there once to take some clothes for the children of a chronically ill man. The mother, an exhausted, harassed woman, had offered us tea, scooping a handful of flies off the milk before she poured it into our cups. My mother had said hastily that she only drank black tea and I only drank water.

Nathan said that the Russian Revolution had made capitalist society afraid of Bolshevism. He spoke of Kerensky, Lenin, Mensheviks, Petrograd and Trotsky. I didn't know who they were. He asserted that Russian bosses would have preferred the German invasion to a workers' revolution in Russia and that speculators had been allowed to commandeer food so that workers were starved into submission. The Russian Revolution was the end of capitalism that for too long had rolled like a juggernaut over working people destroying them, their wives and their children. History was the history of class war. The economic structure of society determined all else. Until people controlled the means of production they would never be free. The working class and the employing class had nothing in common.

That's right, I thought resentfully. I've got nothing in common with my boss. When he owes me money for overtime he wriggles out of paying it and although I'm employed as a waitress I'm also a skivvy. But, on the other hand, I reflected, the rest of the working class doesn't help me, nor does my unionist father.

My thoughts returned to Nathan. He peered at his notes, holding them close to his face. I remembered the moment he looked at me in the Chew It cafe, his eyes magnified and swimming myopically behind those dreadful glasses. Perhaps that was why he never looked at his audience. He couldn't see us. Poor Nathan.

He found his place. World revolution was coming, he said. It was inevitable. The capitalists' war, created through their greed for colonies to enslave poor workers in poor countries, had sown the seeds of their own destruction. It had torn apart the fabric of society and allowed people to see for themselves the evils of capitalism. There had been people's revolts in other countries besides Russia. In Germany itself the Communist Party was growing and no wonder. The Treaty of Versailles had subjected the German worker to penury and starvation.

He spoke for over an hour. Occasionally he reached for one of the reference books heaped on the table and searched laboriously for a quotation. He was learned. But, heavens! How tediously ponderous. Most of his audience had worked a long day and I heard an occasional snore broken by a hiccup as the sleeper jerked awake. His sisters seemed oblivious of the time and the hard seats. They sat upright and nodded frequently. But as the evening drew on his speech seemed interminable. My concentration started to fail me and his words merged into a haze. I shifted restlessly. Harry, always more impatient than I was, crossed and uncrossed his legs, clasped and unclasped his hands, rubbed his thighs, played a tune on his knee with his fingers, hummed a little under his breath, and tapped in time with his toe. I poked him and he stopped. He was bored and finally so was I. Clearly Nathan didn't know when to stop.

My thoughts wandered to Joe. I had once asked him if he believed in revolution. I had picked up a few points from Marx's
Capital
. He had looked startled. ‘Do I believe in revolution, Nearly-Twelve? Wherever do you get these huge questions from?'

‘Books, Joe.'

‘Of course, where else do we get our ideas from? How silly of me to ask. Do I believe in revolution? I don't really know. Change, certainly. But revolution? I'm too old for violence, Nearly-Twelve. After the war there doesn't seem to be much point in it and then there's history. I suppose at my age I take the long view. Instant results are a dream.'

‘So you don't believe in revolution, Joe? And you think Marx ought to have taken the long view?'

‘I didn't say that, Nearly-Twelve. Marx had some very sound ideas, better than a lot around now, but it's best to pick and choose from what someone says or writes, not swallow it whole. I wish I knew. It's hard to accept in old age how little one really knows and just as I think I may have got a grip on things something unexpected comes along. There's a new book out, Nearly-Twelve.
Mein Kampf
. It's in German so I can't read it but some have and apparently it's a thoroughly nasty book, written by a thoroughly nasty bloke—Adolph Hitler I think his name is. The world will be in a pretty pickle if he gets power.'

He coughed. ‘I'm reminded of Matthew Arnold's poem that we're on a darkling plain with ignorant armies that clash by night. Sometimes writers are prophetic. It would be bad to come out of one goddamn awful war and be dragged into the next because Europeans can't get along with each other. Them and their goddamn rivalries. Most of us came here to escape their mistakes and just brought them with us, leaving us still on a darkling plain and with plenty of ignorant armies.'

Joe always talked to me as if I was another adult and although my comprehension was limited I still felt my mind stretch and reach out to his ideas. They were wider, more expansive than my father's and far less limited than my practical mother's.

Finally Nathan's speech was over. The audience gave three relieved cheers and Jock from Glasgow took over. By contrast he was belligerent and fiery. He wasn't interested in history. As he spoke the audience, aware of his passion, came alive. It was a clarion call. Those who had lolled in their chairs listening to Nathan straightened up. There was an atmosphere of preparation and readiness. Jock raised his fist and shook it. ‘Comrades,' his Scottish burr lengthened the word so that it rolled off his tongue and rumbled around the hall, ‘comrades, the workers of Australia are under siege and we must ready ourselves to fight. To fight, comrades.' He punched the air. Voices from the audience cried, ‘Yes, hear, hear.'