Swords and Crowns and Rings (57 page)

The Nun mentioned this loyalty when he went to console himself with a beer at the Hero of Waterloo. And someone said that he had heard of ten or twelve fellas at a time, workmates, who were stood down rather than have one of them sign the wages book for the award wage when he was forced to accept only half of it.

‘You mean employers come at that, the mongrels?'

There was a general laugh. ‘Come down in the last shower, mate?'

As for Jackie, he had never been within whistling distance of a job. They took one look at him, the faces that were twin brothers to those who had looked at him with embarrassment or outrage in his youth. But to that was often added a careless brutality and impatience: ‘Your own brains ought to tell you you're unsuitable. I'm a busy man.'

From the desk to the door, Jackie bristled, longing to turn around and spring at the barbarian, squeezing his chicken neck till his tongue came out. But underneath this brief tumult was an uncritical and impersonal understanding of the man's position.

Once indeed he turned about and said, ‘I'm a good book-keeper, sir, and you don't need height for that.'

The man stared, his pulpy face swelling with blood pressure or affront. Jack thought, ‘He's in a funk for his own job. If he takes on a dwarf there'll be someone after his hide and he can't risk it. He'd rather play safe with a full-sized man with half my qualifications.'

The man's face deflated, and a cryptic expression passed over it. He brought out five shillings. ‘They're rotten bloody times, old man. Will you take this and get yourself a decent feed?'

Jack instantly saw that the man needed him to accept the money, either to prove himself humane or to prove that the unemployed had no pride. So he took it, with grave thanks, and observed the manager's relief.

He's like that pig-cocky who tried to turn us out of the pen that cold night, Jack reflected. Every time he sees a man without a job he sees himself. Poor bastard, he's haunted. They're all haunted.

When he got home, he found the Nun, with a butter-box set up in Towser's backyard, giving passers-by haircuts for threepence a shot with the departed Atkinson's clippers. He sometimes made a shilling or two this way. Jackie stood near by, seeing how Jerry's neck had become stringy, and his big corded workman's hands soft and pinkish from lack of manual labour.

The Nun had convinced himself that he hid his depression successfully. Carrying it off, he called it, cracking hardy. But to Jackie he was like a pane of glass. He began to feel much older and tougher than Jerry, profoundly defensive of him.

But communication between them had slowed like a stream of glue. Jerry mostly wanted to yarn about Kingsland—what had happened to this person and that—stories about Peggy; but he didn't like to. Once he said unexpectedly, ‘D'you remember, me old Jack, the way tomato plants smell with the sun on 'em?' and then was silent, fearing that Jack would tumble to his homesickness and think him an old granny. So there seemed little to talk about as they trudged from factory to foundry, shop to market garden, soup kitchen to ration-ticket depot. The fatigue of the constant walking wore down any desire to converse. Getting one foot in front of the other, that was the day's problem.

Sometimes Jerry thought he'd try somehow to get back to Kingsland. It'd be no harder there to make out on the five and sixpenny ration ticket. A bob to the baker, two bob to the butcher, a bit of tea and sugar, a small tin of condensed milk. Make sure the shopman gives you a receipt, and no tobacco, you hear! Those in work aren't paying a shilling in the quid unemployment tax so that you stiffs can have a smoke.

But in Kingsland he'd be alone. Loneliness was the worst, the wicked thing. Towser's house was full of Alone people, like Jock. Even Jock's past had vanished. The violent anarchy, the prison, the floggings of his young days, were like a set sun; there was a diminished glow of it in his eyes sometimes, but not often. He had no comrades left any more. Not even the communists seemed to have heard of the IWW—the Wobblies. It was all Lenin and Trotsky with them—and Joe Hill hanged and forgotten, martyred Joe.

Jock's name was William Isbister, but there was no one to call him Will any more. Not even Jerry could bring himself to it, somehow.

‘I sometimes think it was all a dream,' said Jock. He had become more intelligible as Jerry got used to his accent. As well, he always put in his teeth when he went upstairs to play draughts by candlelight, for the Nun always contrived to have a bit of food ready for him.

Jock thought Towser a champion. The only point on which they disagreed was over the Premier of New South Wales, J.T. Lang. Towser maintained that this strange, powerful man was fascist, like Mussolini in Italy, or the rising trump in Germany, Herr Hitler. But old Jock thought that Lang was true Labor, putting the working man first, not like them gutless bowsies in Canberra.

Whenever Mr Lang spoke in public, Jerry and Jack would walk miles to listen. He was a spell-binder, delivering short barking sentences, straight-forward and non-ambiguous. Immense gatherings of unemployed hung on each word, hope sparkling once again in their bloodstreams. They stood in domains and dusty parks, most of them unmoving while thunderstorms in summer rage burst out of the scalding skies, and Lang talked on under a big black umbrella. There was savage heckling and cat-calling; often fights started amongst the audience. The mounted police were always there, their glossy horses unmoving at the edge of the crowd.

Once Jack and his father, because they had waited most of the afternoon, were just below the bandstand from which the Premier spoke. Jack looked up at the enormous height of Lang, observed the dark suit, the dark hat set with clerical demureness above a long smooth face, hollows for eyes, with nothing to prove that they were there but a flinty gleam reflected from a nearby gas-lamp.

It was a critical time for the Labor Premier. The oldest, most heavily industrialised State, New South Wales had always had a reputation for intransigence. Now people spoke openly of secession, even civil war. For more than six months the State had defied the Commonwealth Government, a Labor Government that had come to office two days before the Wall Street crash in 1929: to inherit the consequences of the witless extravagances, the lack of foresight, of its predecessors.

Its leader, the dedicated and honest James Scullin, had when in Opposition consistently condemned the rash borrowing of the then Government. He was a prophet destroyed by the authenticity of his prophecies.

The terrible task confronting the Prime Minister was com-plicated by a powerful and obdurate Opposition Senate, which defeated and delayed all attempts to ameliorate the desperate condition of the Australian people. As well, Scullin had to suffer this Old Man of the Sea, the demagogue Lang, a lone mutineer, formidable, impossible to intimidate, who uttered blasphemous strictures against the Mother Country of a kind hitherto heard only from bolshies.

At the Premiers' conference earlier that year, Lang's motion to postpone the payment of interest to bondholders had been received with consternation. One member of the Opposition, whose destiny it was to become Prime Minister and an elder statesman, announced that he would rather see every man, woman, and child in Australia starve to death than have a single British bondholder wait for his money.

Jack could feel the electric thrill amongst the crowd as Lang spoke. It was sunset, and the red light was hard and bright on the stems of dusty palms that looked like upright serpents, unnatural, not like plants.

‘My friends,' said Lang. ‘The bondholder has a mortgage on your sweat.'

He repeated it softly, in a penetrating near-whisper, and there was a hideous roar, as of bears caged. The mounted policemen sidled their horses closer.

A man near Jerry shot up a black-woolled fist and shouted in a ringing Welsh voice, ‘Fair go, mister! D'you think they're better off than us in England? They're starving in their thousands and I've seen them, mister.'

Many English voices spoke. The swarming immigrants of the twenties boom shrieked out their defence of their country, their disillusionment with the new land to which they had been driven by the tottering economy of Great Britain. A brawl or two broke out, a horse was ridden into the crowd.

Dorothy Moy saw the sunlight red as blood on an upraised baton, someone dragged a bundle of old rags out of the crowd. Robert said cautiously, ‘I think I'd better get you out of here, Miss Dorothy.'

She said, ‘I'd like to hear more. That man...he's tremendous.'

He said firmly, ‘Begging your pardon, Miss...You haven't seen a crowd lose its head yet, Miss. I'd appreciate...There could be rough stuff...'

She saw he was excited and tense. ‘Would you like to stay, Robert? I'll walk down to Parramatta Road and get a taxi.'

But he disapproved of the idea, and took her away to where the big black Packard waited, a safe distance from the meeting.

So she missed seeing Jackie Hanna.

Lang waited till the noise had died down. He spoke directly to the Welshman. ‘You speak in defence of our brothers in England, my friend.'

The Welshman was hoisted up by his mates. ‘Unemployment is worse there than here...starvation...miners...mines shut down...bloody misery...my dad...brothers.'

Lang said, ‘You are right. Britain has a greater rate of unemployment than ours. It began earlier, it may go on longer. But those of whom you speak, the miners, your family...
are they bondholders
? Were they able to invest millions in overseas loans? Man, I am not saying that it is the ordinary British working man but the bondholder who has a mortgage on your sweat.'

He waited until the roar had died away, and added, ‘It will do that prosperous gentleman no harm to wait for his interest.'

Jack Hanna yelled, ‘Tell us what the loans were for, Mr Lang.'

He saw the gleam of the man's eyes as he turned towards him. ‘You ask what the loans were for. Much of this enormous sum went towards ordinary national development...railways...secondary industry...port improvement. But...'

Jack admired the long significant pause. He thought, ‘That's good. That's where I'd put it if I were up there.'

‘But...a good proportion of British loans at high interest were made to equip and support the AIF so that Australian soldiers should be able to fight Britain's war in far-away countries...in France and Palestine. Shall I repeat that, ladies and gentlemen?'

During the outcry that followed, Mr Lang stooped towards Jackie.

‘Will you come up on the platform, sir?' he asked.

Jerry thought, ‘Gawd, don't go, boy, he's only asking you because you're a dwarf. You'll make a guy of yourself, Jack!'

But already Jack had swung himself up on the platform, was shaking hands with Mr Lang, who looked all the taller because of the young man's lack of stature. There was a murmur of surprise from the crowd, a ripple of laughter. Jack turned to face them immediately.

‘That's right,' he shouted, ‘I'm a dwarf. Does that mean I don't eat? Does that mean I don't need a job? Does that mean I haven't a right to self-respect?'

The crowd responded, laughing and whistling. Though it was approbatory, it was a frightening sound, like the breathy howl of an organ pipe.

Jackie shook his clasped hands over his head like a boxer, and turned back to the Premier, who said, ‘May I know your name, sir?'

Jackie told him. He was amused that the Premier should call him ‘sir', and not ‘boy', or some half-jocular nickname, which had been his lot since he was a child. But Mr Lang addressed him as Mr Hanna, and asked him if he had any more questions.

Jerry was both awed and baffled when he talked it over with Jack afterwards.

‘Don't you tumble?' asked Jack, grinning. ‘He knew I'd ask the right questions. So that he could give the right answers. Like when I asked him to explain why the Commonwealth Government was suing New South Wales. So he could tell the crowd that as soon as he refused to pay bond interest last April the Federal Government went creeping off and paid it, and are now dunning New South Wales for reimbursement. Everyone knows the facts but he wanted to put it his own way, so as to get the reaction he wanted. Like a comedian and his straight man.'

The Nun couldn't fathom it. But Jackie remembered the faces, thousands of them, looking for a saviour, waiting, needing to be reassured, to be told they'd survive, that things would come good again, that they'd make it in the end.

He thought, ‘I could do what Lang does. I could do it better.'

As Christmas neared, various religious and civil charity depots dispensed Christmas cheer to the needy. There were haunting scenes of crowds queueing in the sun for five or six hours waiting for a depot to open. Jerry had stood in a few of them. He was embarrassed to do so, but his wistful longing for a shirt with an unfrayed collar was too much for him. Sometimes he thought he might even land a pair of boots.

He sincerely enjoyed the deplorable hassle when a mob, driven wild by heat and impatience, rushed a depot and caused a ton of potatoes, four hundred cabbages, and nine hundred pumpkins to vanish in seven minutes flat.

‘I timed them,' said Jerry to Jack. ‘There was not a bloody thing left but the do-gooders, and they woulda snitched
them
if they coulda eaten them. But they was all wire and gristle.' He added, ‘I could do with a toothful of Christmas duff, couldn't you, me old Jack? Crikey, your mum used to make a corker pudden.'

So they walked all the way out to Glebe Town Hall, where a Christian Ladies' Guild was giving out Christmas puddings to genuine cases.

They arrived good and early, and Jack thought it was a bit unnatural that there were no more than twenty or thirty people around the door.

A curdled-looking fellow looked over Jerry and Jack's susso cards penetratingly, hoping to find that they were out of date or fraudulent. At last he said reluctantly, ‘I can only give you single men's puddens, you know.'