The Denniston Rose (21 page)

NOT MANY CLAIMED to know Mary Scobie well, but those who did — her own boys, that indestructible crone Granny Binney, the Reverend Godfrey Parkin who worked underground all week and took Chapel on Sundays, a few of the older miners’ wives — all these swore Mary changed overnight as if visitors from outer space had magically extracted the essence of that quiet, capable English woman and poured a new personality into the waiting skin.

Granny Binney said it was the sudden lifting of a depression. That she had seen it many times and experienced it herself at about Mary’s age.

‘Oh yes, oh yes, you reach the bottom of the pit,’ said Granny, rocking in her dark corner of the Binneys’ kitchen and wagging her hairy chin back and forth in the certainty of her knowledge. ‘And then the fright of what might happen next opens a door. Overnight
the darkness clears. Light enters. Overnight. No, no, no, nothing to get excited about here. Many times I have seen it. Many times.’

The Reverend Godfrey Parkin knew it was the hand of the Lord. When people pointed out to him that Mary had turned away from the church, walked on the plateau instead of attending Chapel, he simply produced the smile that came and went over his face all day like sunlight — the result of a sunny nature — and said that the Lord moved in mysterious ways and Mary would one day realise that she was His chosen handmaid.

The boys were simply relieved that the darkness had lifted. Were both proud of and embarrassed by their newly galvanised mam. They groaned over the way their house became a railway station for visitors, for other wives, for the new school teacher, all arguing politics, arranging meetings, distributing food. But a railway station was better than a mausoleum any day of the week, and a bossy, driven mother better than a sighing one. Children never puzzle over their parents’ moods, but accept whatever is handed down as best they can.

Con the Brake, who never knew Mary well but who had a theory about everything, believed it was Denniston itself that changed her.

‘This place is an anvil, you know?’ he said, banging the hammer of his fist down on Tom Hanratty’s new bar to illustrate his point. ‘All we are beaten to new shapes, new metal even, up here. Take me.’

Tom Hanratty took him up on that one. ‘How in the name of Jesus can we take you, Con the Brake, when we know not one damn thing about you?’

‘I am talking about Mary Scobie, man, do not divert. That woman, she come here in shape like a true English wife. Miner’s wife, you know? Stoic, dependable, life laid out cradle to grave, the pattern bred in generation to generation.

‘But inside, you know, is this little kernel, hard shell around it like a walnut, waiting. If she stay in England, in her home town, that hard shell never break — she is good wife, good mother, good neighbour, the pattern never change. She come to the Hill, wham!’ Con pounded the bar again and Tom leapt to save toppling bottles. ‘Wham! Everything different, you know? The anvil of Denniston! I seen her face when she arrive up the Incline that first day. By God, she change fast! Then blow after blow, she is beaten on that anvil. We all too. All the same, you know? Wham, wham!’

As usual, Con was carried away by his own argument. Everyone laughed as a glass, escaping Tom’s reach, crashed to the floor.

‘But for Mary it is no laugh, you know? She is not bred for strange and new. All her breeding is for same, generation by generation, same same same. Denniston is too different. She is beaten till her spirit grows thin, thin like sheet metal, and she herself might crack, as metal does, you know? Beaten too hard, too thin. Then. Then!’ Con raised his glass in triumph as if proposing a toast. ‘Then that little walnut, she crack. The hard shell split, you know? At last the little kernel can grow. Behold, a new Mary Scobie!’

‘Jesus, Con,’ said Tom, grumpy over his lost glass, ‘you are as full of bullshit as you are of my good beer. You know how long a walnut tree takes to grow? Mary changed overnight.’

Con spread his arms to his audience and shook his head sadly. ‘Tom Hanratty is a good barman and a better builder, but where is his soul, eh? This is Con the philosopher speaking, Tom. I am illustrating human nature, man, not writing encyclopaedias!’

He drained his glass, grounded it on the bar, and went for the door. Since the baby’s death he never left Mrs C for long. At the door he turned. Con always went for the dramatic exit.

‘That anvil of Denniston lays bare we all,’ he said, ‘but every kernel is not so sound as Mary’s.’

THREE TIMES THAT terrible winter Josiah Scobie, newly elected committeeman of the Denniston Miners’ Mutual Protection Society, tramped up the iron steps to Eddie Carmichael’s office with the demands of the men. Three times he came stamping back out into sleet or hail, cursing at the bland reason of the mine manager. How could a unionist make progress against such a shifting target?

The fourth visit was different. Eddie rose from his seat, wouldn’t look the committee in the eye.

‘Men,’ he said, ‘I have my orders from Westport, and they have theirs from Dunedin itself. They are brutal orders and I don’t say I’m agreeing with them, but there it is. My hands are tied.’

‘Well, spit it out, Eddie,’ said Josiah. ‘We are not strangers.’

‘Your men will not be happy …’

‘Eddie.’

‘I beg you to consider the situation the Company is in.’

‘What is there to consider?’ growled Josiah. ‘You have said not one word of substance. Get on with it, man.’

Con the Brake, at the top of the Incline, reckoned he heard Josiah’s roar of fury that day. There’s no doubt the men loading skips at the Bins heard it. They heard him pound the iron walls of Eddie’s office until the icicles on the eaves shook clear and rang like bells on the lean-to roof below. They saw the men emerge, their angry words blowing clouds in the cold air, as if they were engine, not man, and they saw them turn back at the foot of the steps to shout up at Eddie that this was war; that the bloody owners had finally given themselves a headache worth whinging about.

By midday, deep inside the three mines of Denniston, the news was spreading. Josiah, back in the darkness of Banbury mine, stood at a crossroads where the arms of two sections bisected the rope-road. Here the roof-coal had come down cleanly. In the vague flickering light of miners’ lamps the bare rock showed grey between the timber props. At Josiah’s feet the rails of the rope-way gleamed faintly before disappearing east and west into the dark tunnel. In the midday break the rope-road shut down. The mine was silent except for the steady munching of the horses as they fumbled in their nosebags, their snorting as they blew chaff away from soft nostrils.

In sweaty groups the miners ate their lunches, dimly lit by the glow of the oil lamps that hooked onto their cloth caps. Some men sat on upturned shovels, others stood, propped against the damp walls, the bread of their bacon butties the only white thing in this black world.

Josiah was still on fire. His words rang against the rock and came back eerily from the branching tunnels.

‘Come in closer, lads. I want to see you. Tom! Jack! Crowd up, crowd up! Aye, bring your pony too, Rhys: it’s his livelihood as well!’

The men laughed, catching his mood. They jostled and crowded, eager for the news. This dark and tunnelled world, so oppressive to outsiders, wrapped these men in security. Living underground was second nature to them and most of them entered it each day gladly, ready for the challenge. To end the day stiff and sore maybe from the shovelling but with a good tally of boxes to your name, now that was something to be proud of.

Josiah peered at the grimy, sweat-streaked faces, acknowledging each one, drawing out the moment. When he had them all listening he threw his arms out, wide and empty. ‘We are rejected on all counts! And that is only half of it. One: they will not recognise our miners’ holidays, which we have had by right before, and our fathers before us. If an important order falls due on our holiday, says the manager, we work!’

Josiah paused to let the growl die down. ‘Two: they will not recognise the committee to be negotiators on your behalf. Nay, listen, men — they will not recognise the Society at all! Three: they cling to the right to employ unskilled miners. They care nothing for our safety!’

Josiah rammed a balled fist into his open palm, driving the points home. ‘They are short-sighted bastards who care only for cash today! Forget about a dependable industry, forget about steady production. They say, “We want our profit now!”’

Josiah paused again to let the men rumble, then raised his voice a notch.

‘And
that
is only half of it. Hear this! They are punishing us for being so forward. For wanting safety, and a day or two off to be with our families. From today they are
cutting
the hewing rate for skilled labour.
Cutting
our rate and lumping us with the riff-raff. Each man’s box is to be riddled before it’s weighed!’

‘What?’ shouted Rhys Blunt. ‘They never would!’

Josiah jabbed his shovel into the loose floor-coal to make his point. ‘Oh, they will, they will, the fools. We will be paid only on our riddled coal. Any loose stuff or slack will not count. The bosses take no account of what type of coal the mine produces.’

‘Jesus,’ moaned Fisty McCulloch. ‘Coal down my section has been one-third slack all week. How can I get to the clean stuff without digging the soft first?’

‘We’ll be down to working unskilled rates!’

Josiah had to quieten his men for fear their shouts would loosen rocks and cause a cave-in.

‘Aye, lads, you are right to be wild. But we must stand firm too. For it will take time and hardship to right this wrong. Are you firm?’

‘Aye!’ shouted the miners. ‘Aye!’

Rhys Blunt’s terrified pony broke his traces, dashed for the entrance, and was not sighted until three days later, when Con spotted him, belly-up and bloated at the bottom of the gully.

Josiah, triumphant as if his wife had just produced twin boys, raised his hand.

‘I say it is time to take tools to bank!’

‘Tools to bank!’ roared the men. They left boxes where they were, shouldered picks and shovels and headed for daylight.

Up at Burnett’s Face, Arnold Scobie in Ironbridge Mine and Tommy Jowett in Coalbrookdale were whipping up the same fury. By mid-afternoon all three mines were silent, a stack of picks and shovels at each entrance, the empty skips returning empty on the long loop of the rope-road, back to the Bins.

The matter of what next, and how to eat, was left to the women to solve. In particular, to Mary Scobie.

THE PROBLEM, NATURALLY, was food. The getting of it and the paying for it. There were some fifty families involved, over a hundred miners. The strikers were the English miners, the ones recruited in England, who came out qualified and expected to be treated differently, paid more than the Camp drifters who got the jitters after a few hours underground and whose shoulders never learned the rhythm of a steady day’s hewing. The Burnett’s Face miners knew they had a good case and believed they could win, but the wider support wasn’t there in those days. In the whole colony there wasn’t one properly established miners’ union. English miners were beginning to organise, certainly, from Coromandel to the deep south, but this was the first strike. Where were the strike funds, the support of other workers to see them through? The pittance in the Miners’ Fund would not last a week. As Mary
Scobie pointed out to Josiah when he came home that first day, eyes ablaze from the excitement of the battle.

It was all very well, said Mary, planting her feet like a man, to sit out the strike, knowing right was on your side, but the families had to eat, and no one was going to survive on the few wizened carrots and parsnips, the dwarf-sized cabbages and silver-beet they managed to wrestle out of Denniston’s stony soil. A hundred and fifty stomachs needed filling three times a day, and that was going to take as much organisation as running a mine and a strike put together. Why, for pity’s sake, had the men not planned a little in advance so that supplies might be laid down and a system of distribution worked out?

It was typical of this new Mary, though, that she would not waste time in unproductive railing. She organised.

Josiah Scobie tried at first to curb his wife’s zeal. He tried only once.

‘Mary, it is not seemly you should call the men to a meeting. Wives, surely, but the men are my business, and I will organise them.’

Mary looked at him with her newly clear eyes and spoke in a deep, surprising voice, unknown to him.

‘Well, they are called and coming. You orate and I will get the work done.’ She patted his arm as if he were a good old dog, and buttoned her coat.

‘Well, come on then,’ she said as she headed for the door. ‘We need you there too, Josiah.’

She called him Josiah, not husband or my dear, or your dad. Josiah. Equal footing.

Two days after the strike began she sent Brennan to school with two notes. One was for the new teacher, Henry Stringer (from this time on Mary Scobie called everyone, man or woman, by their
Christian name, whether or not there had been a formal introduction, causing more than one man to rear back in fright or look desperately from side to side like a cornered mouse, and causing many women to draw their lips tight together in case such familiarity might be catching). The other note was for Totty Hanratty.

Her letters:

As soon as Brennan had stumped off to school, important with his letters and his information, Mary was buttoning her coat,
leaving dishes in the sink and washing unfolded, and setting off, forcing her ungainly legs to pump along as fast as they could towards the new home of her brother-in-law Arnold and his brassy London wife.

Arnold, driving in fenceposts in his shirt-sleeves, looked up from his sweaty labour and nodded to her. Mary had not once visited his house during her dark illness, but nothing ever surprised or moved this stolid man, whose trip to Nelson to get a wife was the one independent action of his life. Everything else, except the getting of future babies, was done in the shadow and the footsteps of his powerful brother.

Mary pauses, her face grey with the strain of the walking, ‘Well, Arnold, a strike is good for getting repairs done to the house!’

If Arnold is startled to see her so jolly and familiar he doesn’t show it.

‘I’ve come for a word with Janet,’ says Mary. ‘Is she in?’

Arnold nods towards the house. ‘Clearly,’ he says. There is pride in the voice.

Indeed the whole house is ringing with Janet’s song, some swooping ditty that she is embellishing with her own arrangement as if she is an opera singer, not an assisted immigrant wife stuck on a wild and lonely plateau in the distant colonies.

Mary finds her slapping dough in the kitchen. Janet is as voluble as her new husband is dour.

‘Mary Scobie! I swear I thought we two would live our lives strangers. Welcome! Sit down and let us have tea. I’ll just get this bread in the tin.’

Mary sits with a groan and watches while the strapping girl, cheerful as a sparrow, flours her hands again, shapes the loaf and sets it beside the coal range to rise. Janet has milky-white skin and rosy cheeks. She is not, in a strict sense, pretty — the features are coarse,
the nose large — but the openness of her manner gives the impression of beauty.

‘Save that flour,’ says Mary, watching her young sister-in-law sweep the coated table. ‘We’ll need every ounce in the days to come.’

‘Oh, what a lark,’ chirps Janet. ‘A strike! Me dad back in London would have a fit to think I got hitched to a striker. He’s a loner, my old dad — every man for himself — you’d never get him to stand alongside his fellow workers. Climb on the back of ’em, more like!’ She smiles at Mary’s frown. ‘Don’t fret, love. I’ll stand by the lot of you: we’re family now, right? I think you’re feckin’ barmy to take on the bosses, but if Arnold and Josiah think it’s worth a go, I’m in. Not that I’m keen on starving, mind. Will it really come to that?’

To be called love by someone twenty years younger is galling, but Mary ploughs on.

‘We will not starve if we work at it. You have a friend down in Waimang?’

‘I have. Two, in fact. Molly and Cherry Tartt. They married brothers.’ Janet bursts into laughter. It is like showers of gold coins spinning in the air. This girl is infectious. ‘They married the Dumpling boys!’ she gasps. ‘True! The Reverend couldn’t keep a straight face when he married them and the whole Chapel was in stitches. Will you, Cherry Tartt take this man, Sid Dumpling, to be your lawful wedded husband? Oh!’ The laugh breaks out again. ‘I reckon Cherry only done it for the name — to give us all a good laugh. Who knows what kind of man you’ll get, anyway, coming out blind? It’s a lottery whatever way you look at it. Not that I’m complaining. My Arnold will do good enough, I dare say. So she’s Cherry Dumpling now, which her husband says is a more suitable name for a married woman!’

Janet stops to take breath and wipe away the tears. Mary jumps
in before the chatter starts up again.

‘Are they sensible women?’

‘Right enough.’

‘And I know two down there that came out with us, though I’ve not seen them in two years. They’ll help if they’re still alive. We need a committee of women down in Waimang, Janet. To collect food, charity, on our behalf.’

‘Can
they help, though? No doubt their lives are just as much a struggle.’

‘They’ll help. The mines are their livelihood too. You must persuade them, Janet. The men will hump what is donated up the Track, but they’ll never organise the collection properly. You must fire the women up, my dear. I’ll write letters, but it’s not the same as a direct appeal.’

NEXT day Janet was setting off, atop Arnold’s precious pony, Duffer, a placid old plodder like his master, as easy going above ground as the mine horses were below. Arnold, uneasy about his wife’s free-ranging ways, walked behind to keep an eye on her. Mary expected them back in a day or two with news of a supply line from Waimang.

Denniston itself was another matter. Mary waited two days for a reply from Totty. None came. Brennan, when questioned, avoided her eyes. On the third day Brennan claimed a sore stomach and stayed home from school. Mary, struggling back to the house mid-morning, following her daily strengthening walk, heard the clear notes of his cornet slicing through the mist and knew his problem was nothing to do with stomach pains. But he would say nothing.

‘Have you talked about the strike at school?’ asks Mary.

Brennan nods.

‘Did you put the miners’ case to them?’

Brennan nods again. ‘Aye.’

‘And do the teachers agree?’

‘Mr Stringer does. Mrs Rasmussen doesn’t come to school any more.’

‘Mrs Rasmussen is from the Camp. She won’t agree.’

Brennan looks out the window.

‘Brennan, I can’t help you if you won’t say. You’re not sick; that much is clear.’

‘Yes I am. It still hurts.’

Brennan screws up his face and holds his stomach. After a while he peeks up at his mother. She is still watching with her head on one side. Not believing. He screws up his face again and tries a whimper.

‘What about Michael and Rose?’ asks Mary. ‘Are they for us?’

Brennan says nothing.

‘I see,’ says Mary. ‘Well, I’ll come in with you to Denniston tomorrow, my boy, and see for myself.’

‘You walk too slow,’ says Brennan. ‘Anyway I might still be sick.’

Which he is. Mary leaves him with his cornet and sets out for town. The rain has an icy edge to it, although it is high summer. Mary ties her scarf tight against the wind and slogs her way along the skipway. The few passing boxes, filled by non-unionists, earn a scornful glance or two, but mainly it’s head down, hammering away with the legs. She shakes rain from her face, nods vigorously, stabs her stick into the muddy ground. Her lips move. Mary is arguing with the wind, driving home points with only the rumbling skips for audience.

As she nears Denniston she realises her legs are not aching. That the placing of one foot after the other is no longer heavy labour but a sharp-edged pleasure.

‘Well!’ says Mary to her legs. ‘Well, my beauties. This is your
land now and you will learn to walk on it.’

Hanrattys’ guest house is larger than she remembers. A saloon has been added to one side, with a separate entrance for the drinking men, so that any lady guests will not be embarrassed. Though lady guests are rare, God knows. Mary hammers on the door and a maid opens it.

‘Oho!’ says Mary. ‘Servants, is it? Society has come to Denniston, I see. Is your mistress in, my dear?’

‘Totty’s in the kitchen,’ says the maid, ‘drying the flour. It’s got the mould with all this damp weather. Go on in.’

‘Ah well,’ says Mary, ‘it’s a comfort to know that upper-class habits have not entirely taken root.’

The maid nods cheerfully, not understanding a word but too busy to care. Mary removes her own coat, shakes out the head scarf and hangs them both to drip on the coat-stand.

In the kitchen Totty is sliding a huge meat dish, heaped with flour, into the coal range. Another stands on the top and a third waits, the flour lumpy and grey, on the kitchen table. Totty bangs the door shut, closes the damper and hangs up the oven cloth. Her face is flushed, her body swollen with the next child.

‘Mary Scobie!’ she says. An awkwardness hangs in the air. ‘I should have replied to your letter but it is hard to find time.’

‘Well, here I am!’ says Mary. The booming voice sets Totty back a little. This is not the withdrawn woman she remembers.

While Totty pours tea, the women exchange details of children, bereavements, confinements, husbands’ health, but Mary cannot hold back for long.

‘Now, Totty, the strike.’

‘Yes. The strike,’ says Totty, her eyes sparking.

‘Can you help us over the food? You and your husband are leaders in Denniston. Others would follow.’