Swords and Crowns and Rings (61 page)

Dorothy nodded. She recalled that the following morning she was on early duty in the Domain. The idea wearied her. The whole thing seemed witless. The poor were always there, always.

‘Not these poor,' Clara would have said.

Jack was taken along by Towser and ceremonially introduced to the Newtown tenants, the Murrays, but they were too agitated even to look at him. The wife had the bossed jawbones and frog eyes characteristic of those who had spent a long period on an inadequate diet. The man was in a sweat at the prospect of eviction, but even more disturbed by the strangers who had occupied his home since the previous evening. He had put on a spunky, even pugnacious expression, but his adam's apple fidgeted. Three young boys snoozed on a mattress on the kitchen floor, and an aged father incessantly complained of the radishes and late beans trampled in the backyard.

The woman whined a litany: ‘They're going to get us into terrible strife, Roy. What will me and the kids do if you're put in the cells, Roy?'

The cramped Edwardian villa was set askew to the street in a long row of identical brick dwellings. By the time Towser, Jock, and Jack Hanna had reached it, at four in the morning, the members of the Movement had barricaded the bottom floor with sandbags and snarled about the entire building with barbed wire.

Jack had been taken aback. ‘This what you call picketing?' he demanded. Towser replied absently, ‘We're putting up a bold front. Intimidation. Come on, better get inside.'

Sparse groups of people stood around in the lamplight; others gaped sleepily from windows. Men still worked on the glittering fuzz of wire. Jack knew then, as well as later, that that was the moment when he should have walked away. But he didn't. There were too many staring. So, half-undecided, half-intimidated by the resolution of his companions, he crawled through an aperture in the wire, which was then secured behind them.

Jack felt he was what Jerry would call a hairy goat. Certainly Towser and the old Scotsman had not misled him; but they had not said anything to correct his misconceptions either. But then, did they know he had had altogether a different idea of what the Unemployed Workers' Movement did?

Thus castigating himself, he emerged into a stuffy little front room, piled haphazardly with half-packed domestic goods and congested with men.

The house was lit with candles, and the quivering light gave a curious dolls'-house effect to the place. The electricity had been cut off months before, when Murray had been sacked and things began to slide. Around the bay window stood eight or nine men, peering dourly through the entangled wire into the windswept, dimly lit street. Jack was irresistibly reminded of pictures of beleaguered patriots during the Irish Revolution. Weapons lay to hand—pieces of iron railing, metal pipes, batons loaded with melted lead.

A couple of the men chaffed Towser about the under-sized members he was forced to recruit nowadays, looking meanwhile at Jack with a friendly grin.

‘That one's been pruned too hard, Towser. You'll never get a crop.'

Jock growled, ‘Shut your gob, you, or I'll shut it for you.'

The man was painfully taken aback. He said to Jack, ‘Only a joke, son, didn't mean anything, like.'

But Jock glanced furiously about, challenging anyone else to have a go at Jack.

Since their departure from Dawes Point, Jock's personality had altered more and more. His flat cheeks were carnation; his white hair seemed electrified. He had the elated expression of the old campaigner back on the familiar terrain.

Jack said to Towser, ‘I'm not struck on all this. What's going on?'

Towser said in his indifferent tone, ‘Publicity mostly. Landlords get scared when there's a demonstration. Public opinion makes them think twice about evicting a family. It's all a matter of strategy.'

Jack jerked his head towards the window. ‘That your public opinion out there in the street then?'

‘That's it,' said Towser. ‘They fight our battles for us. We give them a focal point.'

‘Then why the hardware?' inquired Jack, picking up and hefting one of the waddies.

One of the men at the window said contemptuously, ‘If you left your guts at home, stub, you better scarper off and find 'em before the johns arrive.'

Jack shot back: ‘My name's Hanna, and you bloody well call me that if you've anything to say to me, mate. And get this straight, anywhere I go my guts go too.'

The man grunted, turning to the window. The street lamps had been turned out; a wan pearly light filled the room. Towser said, ‘Take it easy for a while, Jack. We don't expect the police to arrive till seven or so.'

The men were tired. Some gave great yelping yawns; one or two slept. A woman with a worn, aggrieved face, the skin marked in square ruckles like the side of a crocodile handbag, came around with a big teapot and enamel mugs. She said the Murrays had dropped their bundles: they weren't worth fighting for—squibs, timid as bandicoots.

Jack was interested to see the men's deferential attitude towards Towser. He was obviously the boss man. Yet he had an aloof demeanour, as of an officer towards his men. He dropped a suggestion here; a word of commendation there. The orders were given by a couple of subordinate urgers, peremptory and tyrannous, enjoying almost voluptuously this brief opportunity to wear the iron heel.

The men in the house were a strangely assorted crowd. Amongst them were grey-haired ex-tradesmen, frayed, but with the signs of old respectability upon them, particularly about their boots. There was a fellow with dented scars and an ear that was a cartilaginous frill. His mate, an immigrant with no teeth, had a moustache that had retreated almost into his nostrils; he had lost hope, was beaten. ‘What can ye du?' he repeated. Most of them were stringy working men, long enough out of employment to be sore, if not bitter. Yet there was about them a grim hilarity that Jack immediately recognised: their nameless, formless enemy had, even for a brief time, taken on flesh.

After the wretched flounderings of months or years, they were offered something solid in the shape of an intractable landlord and a mob of cops who were being paid to harry them. They gratefully accepted the chance to come to grips with these symbolic foes. They were showing-off, too, chiacking the crowd outside, the tenants, and each other.

Towser was speaking earnestly to the Murray family. He had ruffled the hair of a little toad-eyed boy who had awakened, and drawn from the anxious woman a ritualistic smile. The old father had fallen asleep with his face squashed on the table like a half-empty leather sack. Jack watched Towser covertly.

The Nun's animosity towards Towser had previously awakened in Jackie an idly defensive attitude towards the man. He watched him now and realised that he did not know him at all. He supposed he was a communist, working to turn this ill-assorted gang of malcontents into a cell, or whatever it was that the Russians called their workers' groups.

The newspapers called the Unemployed Workers' Movement ‘communist'. Whether they meant Marxian or Tolstoyan was anyone's guess: so little was known about Russian Communism since the Revolution. Anything politically unorthodox or socialist in tendency was described as communist or subversive.

Towser was, in fact, a type of man of which Jack had had no experience. He was a quasi-intellectual of a kind later to become both recognised and exploited by radical political movements. He was a loner.

He had experimented with Marxism, but had no real feeling for it. The rigidities of its structure seemed to him to resemble the endless rules with which little boys hedged their games about. Excellently educated, of good family, he had had a shifting, unsatisfactory life until he discovered that by some peculiarity of personality he was able to put a bee in another person's bonnet, give him something to think about.

He came gradually to regard himself as a primary cause, a light-bearer, not corrupting, but awakening.

He took delight in his nickname. It was a
nom-de-guerre
, an adjunct to his private underhandedness, which loved conspiracy, mysterious comings and goings, secret hidey-holes,
not leaving tracks.
He lived poor, but he had kept all the money his mother had left him. It tickled him tremendously that he should gather and sell clothes-props and firewood while he had eight thousand pounds in the Bank. Not that he cared deeply for money; it was just another funk-hole. If he chose he could vanish from The Rocks, without a word, leaving all his belongings. He could imagine how this would add to his legend.

He had found his perfect place amongst the discontented unemployed of that district. Far from having any true notion of democracy, such men were ever on the watch for a strong, articulate leader. But there was not sufficient challenge for him there, so he had expanded into the more disorderly and subversive area of the Movement. Something in him craved the exhilaration inherent in the uncertain nature of these brushes with authority. The risk fed the witch-doctor in him.

At first he had just left ideas lying around, which the current organisers could pick up or not. But they always did. Then, almost imperceptibly, he found himself a leader. To him it was half a lark, half a gamble with his own power. There was little danger. As he had told Jack, the landlords tended to concede quickly. On the few occasions when certain of the Movement's members had been arrested for disturbing the peace, Towser had paid their fines ‘out of funds'.

But lately he had had an intuition that it might be a good idea for him to go to prison for a short time, just as a gesture. Jock, the old revolutionary, over-simplifying in the romantic manner of his type, often said, ‘The martyr's blood is the seed of anarchy.'

Towser hankered to see how far he could go without getting into overt trouble. There were reckless men in the Movement who had long advocated a real siege, just to test the police. Towser had planned carefully that this Newtown eviction, should it come to violence, would reap maximum publicity.

Jack Hanna knew none of this. He only knew that George Vee was not an easy man to interpret. There was one thing he did know. The Newtown house was prepared for a long defence. He had prowled about, noticing the supplies of food, the washing tubs and bath filled with water, in case the police cut that off. Most ominous of all, the bedrooms upstairs were piled with bluemetal, like heaps of mullock.

‘Ammo,' thought Jack. His original alarm had subsided and he felt a fatalistic calm, as though he had been brought to this place deliberately. For some time now, in spite of his consuming loneliness, he had felt that he could cope with anything. But he didn't know how he could handle a Donnybrook with the police, if such eventuated. He didn't want to go to prison, even for twenty-eight days. But here he was, and here the situation was; a test perhaps, some part of the growth he had felt with such sensitive acuteness at different times of his life. He waited, saying no more. The sun came up, dark red in a bank of rain-cloud. Some time later from the crowd outside there arose a greedy groan. Two vehicles full of police had arrived. Jack saw the men in the room exchange glances half-cocky, half-apprehensive.

Towser said, ‘You go upstairs to Jock, will you, Jack?'

At the same moment there was a crash of glass from above, and Mrs Murray yipped shrilly. Jack ran upstairs. Jock had bashed out a window. He stood there statuesquely, a piece of stone in each hand. Jack could see that he would not care if he were picked off with a pistol or rabbit rifle. He had been martyred before, and he could take it again. It was one thing he was good at. His deliberate exposure of himself to police identification fitted some dramatic picture he had, as did the unnecessary smashing of the window.

His voice was tremulous with excitement. He chuckled meaninglessly. ‘Will we show them, eh, Jackie? Heck, it's grand!'

The sultry sun poured yellow smoke over the street, where the excited crowd had been swelled by women with milk billies, men on their way to work or unemployment depot, people hoping to see fun or violence. The police were mostly young constables, with three or four pot-gutted upper ranks to give orders. They were greeted with cat-calls, thrown potatoes, obscene noises; but the crowd parted meekly enough to let them through.

Briskly the constables advanced with wire-cutters to gain access to the house, but they were repulsed with showers of bluemetal from the upper windows. Some marked with dirt and blood, they withdrew for a conference. One of the constables hastened away, probably to phone for reinforcements, a tail of foul-mouthed urchins mocking his every movement. Jock chortled hysterically. He raved out something at the retreating officer but no one understood a word.

Jack thought, ‘This is crazy. We haven't a hope in hell.' Yet he continued undecided, thinking still that Towser must surely know more than he.

He was increasingly uneasy. He didn't like the looks on the faces of the other men, their discomfort and false humour. He wondered if they felt the same hope—that Towser had something up his sleeve.

‘Seems like we're going to be on the flickers,' he heard someone say.

On the roof of a shop near the corner a man hauled a movie camera through the window, and set it in position. Jack looked around for Towser. The expression that dodged across the man's face was absorbed and personal. He looked to Jack as if he were shaking hands with himself.

‘He arranged that somehow,' Jack thought.

By now the mob was immense, restless and shifting like a football crowd. A car like a cigarette lighter purled up and brayed impatiently. A policeman, looking nettled, ran over to speak to the driver.

Towser pointed. ‘There's the worthy landlord, Jack.'

‘He's got guts to come here today, give him that,' commented someone.

‘He's an arrogant idiot, that's what he is,' snapped Towser.

In a moment the car was invisible, the focus of a shrieking, tussling mob. Batons flashed, fell; the crowd coalesced; someone with a bloody head lurched out of it; a woman holding a child with one hand hammered at backs and shoulders with the other. From above, the police seemed both disorganised and panicky, shoving here and there, lashing out with batons, re-grouping in parties and charging back into the skirmish. From their opponents arose a boisterous yell that made Jack's hair bristle.