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A ‘different’, isolated yet intensely human community is the subject of this novel. Between the high barrier of the Southern Alps and the Tasman Sea lies the strip of New Zealand which is the only ‘West Coast’ in the world to its inhabitants. Coal Flat is a Coast mining town. The name is not on any map. But the lines and features of its life are marked on the mind of every ‘Coast’ dweller; the small close-knit community, the traditions of unionism, working together, and hospitality.
‘You have achieved in Coal Flat something
found only in the classic novels, you have
created a whole society,’ remarked an American
reader who saw the manuscript. Bill Pearson
is indeed well qualified to become the first
novelist of the real West Coast, so different
from the Coast of popular New Zealand legend.
He was born and grew up there. His perspective cleared and widened in his years of war
service, study and teaching overseas. Bill
Pearson’s Coast is flattered by no haze of
nostalgia for he has revisited it many times in
recent years.
Coal Flat is longer than many novels are
in these days of quick impressions and impatient readers. Its technique is unusual. Yet
it is classical in its scope and its variety of
openly drawn characters. We meet the miner,
the dredge-worker, the priest, the doctor, the
teacher, the pub-keeper and his wife and their
family. Near the heart of it all is the troubled
young child of an unhappy home.
Paul Rogers, a young teacher, returns to Coal Flat from the army and is unwillingly involved in a strike crisis, which at first he cannot take seriously. Because he tries to bring to Coal Flat knowledge and experience gained in his years away he finds himself in conflict with the township which claims his love and loyalties. His own emotional life is also deeply involved.
This novel explores in breadth, depth and subtlety the relation of an individual to his community, and shows incidentally the relation of a community like Coal Flat to the whole of the country.
It is to be expected that a fictitious community like Coal Flat
should be based on a real place, and Coasters will have no difficulty in recognizing the geographical location and physical lay-out
of the Flat. A few historic characters and newspapers are mentioned by name. Apart from this, however, all characters in this
novel are fictitious and any resemblance to actual people, living or
dead, is coincidental.
There was in fact a beer boycott in
At the back of the novel there is a list of explanations of such expressions and references as may be unfamiliar to some readers.
In Maori words not already borrowed into New Zealand English I have followed the increasing practice of spelling long vowels double, to give a better idea of how they should be pronounced.
It was a sunny February morning throbbing with cicadas,
and the main road, in spite of the unpainted wooden houses and
the sections filled with rank growth of blackberries and Yorkshire
fog, had its air of attraction. It belonged to the wilderness, to the
hills to the left knobbled with bush, fresh and damp in the summer
sun, to the never far-off gurgle of waters in the creeks on either side
of the township and in the water races running through the town, to
the crackling of the tree-cicadas in the bush across the creek.
Truman Heath, fresh from six weeks’ holiday, warmed to the sun
and the prospect of another year’s work. He was conscious of his
ready-made blue suit, awkwardly fitting him, just demoted from
Sunday to everyday wear, of his soft hands and the leather case he
carried. The children too looked cleaner on this day than they
usually were, and this seemed to confirm his anticipation of a year
of zestful work. As he passed mothers at their front gates he tipped
his hat and said in his ingratiating way, ‘Good morning’. To the
post-boy sweeping the steps of the post office his tone implied
‘Well, you and I didn’t hit it off at school, but now that you’ve left,
well, bygones are bygones’. To Mrs. Palmer shaking a mop from the
hotel door, he called, ‘Lovely morning!’ To an old man silent and
contemplative at the corner, ‘Good day!’ What if some of the
mothers only muttered in reply? What if the old man didn’t answer?
It was part of his job to mix with all types and classes of people, and
so far, he told himself, he hadn’t had any trouble. With his trilby
hat and suit and case he could afford to be indulgent.
Round a couple of corners there were only children on the road.
He didn’t bother to speak to them unless they addressed him, which
except for the infants, was seldom; but he blessed them all with a
general smile which seemed to say, ‘Well, kiddies, ready for another
year’s work?’ Occasionally his leather case annoyed him because he
felt an impulse to rub his hands. The school showed up as he’d seen
This year, he thought as he entered his office, he hoped to make a go of it. No year to his memory had ever lived up to his expectations, but then, he smiled to himself, that was because his expectations were so high: he was in his way an idealist, a very practical idealist though. And his staff had to realize that he had never been anything but fair; if only they were to co-operate they would find him one of the easiest men to deal with. ‘There’s nothing very frightening about me,’ he muttered, looking into a mirror and fingering his chin smooth and pink from shaving; and chuckled. ‘No, indeed,’ Well, he was prepared this year, as always, to let bygones be bygones, to start off on a new foot and if they were to see reason and recognize him for the man of goodwill he was, there would be no friction, and furthermore, he would be doing all that could be expected of him.
And this year, he expected, would be his last in Coal Flat. His standing in the eyes of the Education Board was high enough now for him to be sure of getting whatever school he chose to apply for. He looked out of the window. ‘The new assistant,’ he thought, and watched him open the gate for Miss Johnson. What he saw was a tallish, rather ungainly young man in sports clothes, with thick red hair greased low. His forehead was tall enough to suggest that he had some intellect. His lips were vaguely open and his face carried a faint beam of goodwill for any of the people or objects his blue, slightly bulgy, eyes happened to light on. ‘Not what I expected,’ Heath thought. ‘Gawky looking. Doesn’t look like a returned man. But I might have known. He’ll be completely inexperienced. All theory—green as they make them!’ he muttered aloud. ‘You’ll see—no experience!’
‘You’ll meet it,’ Miss Johnson was saying. ‘All too soon you’ll meet it.’ Rogers opened the gate and children stopped in their play to stare at them. A girl’s voice called, ‘Hey! It’s Mr Rogers back again!’
Heath was in the corridor waiting for them. ‘Mr Heath,’ Miss
Johnson said, ‘This is Mr Rogers, the new assistant.’ Heath
beamed while Rogers, still with the same expression of vague
On the way to Rogers’s room they ran into Mrs Hansen. She was big and firm in belly, buttocks and breasts, and today her lobes sported pearled earclips. Her face betrayed, in spite of the subdued coating of powder over the hairs on her cheeks, her thirty-six years, yet, no more than at five years before could Rogers detect any sign of her having once in that time doubted her own ability or her own judgement. ‘Hello, Paul,’ she said. ‘How’s it feel to have to work for a living?’ Her eyes sparkled: they weren’t above a wink at a private joke.
He smiled the smile of renewed acquaintance, rather sheepishly as if she had caught him out on some peccadillo. He was a boy when she was at training college; he had seen her through the fence next door down in Greymouth, while she berated her mother with the new-found independence of a girl who had been away from home and seen how other people live. She had taught in the primers of his school when he was in Standard six. She always treated him as if that relationship had not changed. ‘Have you met the worm yet?’ she said and compressed her lips. Her jowls were flabby like a bulldog’s.
‘I was agreeably surprised. He’s not as bad as I expected, Belle.’ He wanted to demonstrate that he wouldn’t boycott this man on other people’s say-so.
Her face went aloof, with raised eyebrows. ‘You’ll find out,’ she said. ‘Well, have to skip! Sue, come and I’ll show you that pattern-book.’ Miss Johnson followed her.
The classroom was pretty bare with its twenty-odd desks and his
table and chair. A long strip of brown paper bellied from the wall
where a drawing-pin had fallen out; the cut-out chickens and dogs
on it had faded and lost their sheen in chalk-dust. On the back wall
there was a Pictorial Education poster, an agricultural idyll: the
purposeful muscular farmer of an unidentifiable country stood,
while his wife mixed flour, admiring a table heaped with bread and
fruit as in a country church at harvest thanksgiving; while children
Mrs Hansen lined up the younger half of the school by the end entrance. ‘Heads up! Shoulders straight!’ she said. ‘Look how I’m doing it. Like soldiers.’ Rogers looked at her and wondered if she had missed her calling. ‘Forward march. Left, right, left, right.’ Infants in the first process of being made self-conscious grinned or sternly strode with high arms through an avenue of coat-hooks and wash-basins into the room.
Rogers had been away from the game so long he didn’t know where to begin, till a face gave him an idea, the face of a boy in the front desk—the healthy face of boyhood, of Hollywood boy actors, of advertisements for breakfast cereals. He had seen this boy on the bus the day before, and it made him feel familiar with his class to know one of them. He looked from eye to eye waiting for expectant silence. He kept it up longer than he needed: it was a game of suspense, and he knew they liked it.
‘Well, kiddies, we won’t be doing much today,’ he said, ‘till we find out what books you’ll have to ask Mum to buy for you. So in the meantime we might just have a few talks. Perhaps you can tell me what you did in the holidays—all those six long weeks and no school to go to. One of you went to Christchurch. I know because I saw him get on the bus at Stillwater yesterday. Who knows who he is?’
A chorus trumpeted, ‘Danny Hales!’ and Danny got up.
Rogers knew this unreal goodwill would flake off in no time: affections, scorns, personal attitudes would creep in like heresies. He thought, ‘Well, for them it’s self-expression.’ But it wasn’t. Danny Hales went on and on: ‘And Uncle Tom took us to the races and we saw all the horses. And there’s a lot of trams in Christchurch. And a lot of pitcher-theatres. And Uncle Tom hasn’t got any fowls.’
He studied them while Danny prattled and the rest of the class
listened with more attention than they had given him. Miners’
children, a bit cleaner and sprucer today than they would be later in
the year; brought up in a hard puritan society, materialistic to the
point that it was afraid of ideas because ideas were not material. Yet
he was glad that he wasn’t in a farming district, where the children
would accept their parents’ beliefs as unquestionable. These children were brought up to sneer at authority and vaunt their
The door whinged and Heath came in, a prepared smile approving. ‘No one,’ he seemed to be saying, ‘can say I start any discord.’ The children looked at him. ‘Good morning, children,’ he said and half of them replied, not all together. ‘Now sit down, you,’ he said to Danny Hales, and spoke aside to Rogers. ‘By the way, Mr Rogers, it’s a school rule that if ever I come into the room for the first time in a day they must stand…. Well, Mr Rogers, glad to be back? One or two things I want to tell you, to start off on the right foot, eh?’ The prepared smile opened again. ‘If there’s anything you ever want to know, anything you want a hand out in, come and ask me, won’t you? Don’t go running to the other teachers. Because I’m in authority here, Mr Rogers, and I’m responsible if anything goes wrong. That all right?’ His smile seemed to preach the value of starting off with amicable understanding, but beneath it Rogers was aware of Heath’s internal fumbling. ‘And you will find, Mr Rogers, there’s a lot you’ll have forgotten after being away from the game so long.’ He checked Rogers’s protest before he had framed it. ‘Oh yes, your refresher course. I’m not forgetting that. But that’s not first-hand experience, is it? It’s not in the front line.’ He smiled at the aptness of his military reference. ‘You’ve only had your probationary year in actual teaching, Mr Rogers, where I’ve had twenty-five years. I’ve had the experience and I have the ability. I’m looked on as one of the most efficient teachers the Board has.’ He dropped it as a cold fact immune to challenge. ‘So just remember, Mr Rogers, when in doubt, ask me.’
When 3.20 came it was a relief. The noise of active children had jarred already and Rogers lit a smoke. Mrs Hansen’s bulk sailed past the door, then thrust into the room from an afterthought. ‘Oh, Paul,’ she said, ‘care to come up home with Sue and me for a cuppa?’
‘Well, yes, thanks Belle,’ he said clumsily, the words tumbling
out in his eagerness. He was oddly grateful that she had accepted
him, though he suspected the invitation, because she still treated
‘When are you going?’ he said, but she had gone back to her room to collect her things. She liked a plain answer, yes or no.
The three of them walked down the road between water-races flanked by lush blackberries and Yorkshire fog. Ahead of them there was a prospect of wilderness, the river, purple hills and beyond them more hills and the peaks of the Alps, with a few patches of snow that had so far survived the summer. Not many of the house were painted; the boards and the rickety fences sprouted lichen. Outside each front gate was a pile of coal. Mrs Hansen’s house was painted a bright cream. A collie leapt at the side gate as they approached. ‘Hello, Bounce!’ she said. Her firm blackboard hand pawed its nose. ‘Hi ya, big bo’!’ She took a glossy women’s magazine from the shopping bag she always took to school, and put it in the collie’s mouth. ‘Beat ya round the back!’ Bounce snatched the magazine and bounded out of sight round the corner of the house.
When Mrs Palmer called out to Mr Heath going past she stopped with her mop upright and watched him. Her face took on a drawn concentrated look rather like a gipsy fortune-teller’s and her big. eyes narrowed slightly. ‘Dad,’ she called, not very loud, ‘Dad.’ Old Don Palmer appeared in slippers and shirt-sleeves, just risen from breakfast, ‘What, Lil?’
‘I wonder how Paul will get on with old Heath.’
‘All right, I s’pose. He got on all right with the last one, didn’t he? Till he got those silly ideas of his.’
‘I dunno. I’ve just got a funny feeling.’
‘Oh, what’s wrong with you?’ old Don said with exaggerated gusto. It was his way of dealing with the expression of any sentiment he couldn’t understand. ‘Heath’s got his job to do. Paul’s got his. If they do their jobs, what can go wrong?’
‘I dunno. There’s something not quite above-board in Heath’s nature. You can’t tell me….’
‘Well, I always reckoned the same about Paul.’
‘Oh no, Dad. He’s a good young chap.’
‘You’ve got a soft spot for him, that’s all. Anyway, what are you worrying about? If Paul does what he’s told, what can go wrong?’ Before he took the hotel old Don used to be foreman at the dredge and he didn’t have much time for employees who were difficult, ‘It’s a contract, that’s what it is, and they’ve each got to fulfil their part of it.’ His lips seemed to have borrowed finality and importance from the editorial language.
Rogers came down the stairs just then. ‘Oh, Paul,’ Mrs Palmer said. ‘You just missed your boss. He’s just gone ahead…. Well, you’ll get a clear run this time, son, and you make a bird of it and get ahead in your job.’
Rogers grinned with engaging embarrassment. ‘I’ll try,’ he said.
‘You mark my words, Paul, it’s Mum talking.’
‘You see,’ old Don said when Rogers had gone, ‘I’ve got nothing against him—I like him—but he’s not straightforward. He doesn’t look you straight in the eye. Anybody’d think he was ashamed of something.’
‘Now, Dad, he’s got nothing to be ashamed of. He always has been shy. He’s a good open-natured boy.’
She knelt and vigorously started to polish the floor. Old Don said, ‘I s’pose I ought a shave,’ and went away. A boy of eight came running down the passage, a fresh comely girl of twenty-one after him. ‘Good-bye, Grannie,’ the boy said and with a certain inner withdrawal volunteered his cheek for her to kiss. ‘Good-bye, pet,’ Mum said. ‘Now you work hard at school, and Donnie, watch your new clothes.’ ‘Yes,’ he said and ran out.
‘Did he take his book, Flora?’
‘Yes, Mum, he’s got everything,’ the girl said. She was dark and softly fleshed; she looked like a pale-faced Maori and she spoke with a plush voice.
‘He’s a worry, isn’t he, Flor? I don’t know what they’d do without us. Poor kid, he’d be in a home somewhere. And young Don in Christchurch enjoying himself, and poor old Grandma gets all the work and worry. I thought once Doris might have taken him when she came out of the home—but you can’t blame her really, Flor. No woman wants to rear anyone else’s kids—even her brother’s. I wouldn’t want to lose him now.’
‘You and I can manage him between us, Mum.’
‘Well, the time’ll come—you know—that you’ll be stopping off and leaving us….’
‘I can’t see that happening for a while, Mum.’
‘Well, there’s plenty here’d be glad to get you, Flor. But there’s none of them I’d let you spit on their boots. Except Paul….’
‘Oh, Mum….’ Flora pursed her lips.
‘Well, he hasn’t settled yet. He doesn’t know his mind yet. But I can tell you, if he asked you, it’d suit me down to the ground. He’s a fine clean-living lad and he doesn’t push himself like most of them.’
‘Paul knows his own mind, Mum, and if he sees fit to ask me, it’s time enough to think about it, not before.’
‘You’re a sensible girl, Flor. I wouldn’t want to lose you.’
‘You wouldn’t Mum. If—you know—if it happened, we’d be seeing you pretty often.’
‘Well, Doris said that. But I dunno—that thing she married. When he was going with her we tried to bring him out and I didn’t reckon at that time you could have met a finer fellah. But now he’s just slipped right back into his sullen old ways. He never comes to see us if he can help it, and he keeps Doris at home; she won’t have a word said against him. I’m going to have it out with them some day.’
‘Don’t go starting trouble, Mum; you’ll only make it worse.’
‘Don’t you worry about your mother, kid. She’s old enough to look after herself and she knows when it’s time to do something.’
‘Things didn’t work out the way we expected.’
‘No … Myra with us all those war years and little Donnie. And
then to clear off like that and Don in hospital. After
‘Mum, you’re getting morbid.’
‘I am, Flor. Too much work and worry. Look on the bright side’s what I always say.’
Don came down again. ‘What are you two moaning about?’
‘We’ve just been having a blues session, Dad,’ Flora said.
‘You don’t want to come at that. Here.’ Dad went into the bar and brought a brandy for Mrs Palmer. ‘Get that into you. And never let it be said there was any moaning at the bar at Palmers’.’
There was no doubt about it, Mrs Palmer thought as she finished the passage, you could always fall back on Dad.
Mrs Palmer was busy at the kitchen range shifting a big black-leaded iron kettle when Rogers walked in after coming from tea at Mrs Hansen’s. A tall greying-headed man sat by the white-scrubbed table, by a cup of tea. Rogers recognized him as the policeman. ‘Come in Paul,’ she said. ‘Do you want a drink—or would you rather have a bit of a snifter with the boys? Have you met Mr Rae?’
The constable erected his six feet and shook firmly. He was a man who prided himself on being open and above-board: he would do his duty openly and with a sense of mission. ‘You’ll find us not a bad crowd up here,’ he said. ‘No formalities. The miners are good people. I always say if you treat them square, they’ll treat you square.’ He sounded as if he thought he was presenting an unusual opinion.
‘Yes, Mr Rae, I reckon the same,’ Mrs Palmer said. ‘And there hasn’t been any trouble here since the Seldom strike and that was before we came.’
She was tall, Mrs Palmer, and her face had the drawn look that
some Maori women get when they are past the plump freshness of
youth, but unlike theirs it wasn’t relaxed; there was something
harsh about it. She was a quarter-caste, originally from south,
Pukereraki or somewhere near Dunedin. She was well educated and
one of her satisfactions was in out-classing people who tried to be
superior because of her colour. So she could act, when she wanted
to, as if she were more respectable than the best-bred. Rogers
could remember, five years ago, Mrs Hansen asking him, ‘And just
how much Maori blood is there in her?’ She pronounced Maori
immaculately, like a radio announcer, lest she should commit herself
to any attitude to colour. Rogers was genuinely surprised and said
it had never occurred to him. Mrs Hansen looked scornful. It was
as if she had caught him out in a lie.
‘Here, Paul,’ Mrs Palmer said; ‘go out and get me a drink. We’ll have a round for old times’ sake, eh? … Won’t you, Mr Rae? … Well, I never yet saw anyone come to any harm by it as long as they knew when to stop.’
‘Oh no, Mrs Palmer, I agree. I don’t care what you say, moderation is the secret in everything. The man who’s moderate in all things makes the best citizen. If everyone was like you in that respect, well I reckon I’d be out of a job, and I’d be taking a pub meself. Though there mightn’t be much profit in it, eh?’
‘Doris and Frank are back now, Mr Rae. You know, they were up at Benneydale.’
‘You missed them, I’ll bet, Mrs Palmer.’
‘Yes, especially when you’ve had them all round you since they were little. And we’ve all grown up together. Dad and I were just like two of them when they were all kiddies. Still, when a girl gets married she has to study her husband; she can’t be worrying so much about Mum and Dad then.’ She said this as if she was trying to convince someone who thought different.
‘No, my word. When the wife and I started off, I had to do a lot of breaking her away from that.’
‘Still, if you can have them near you, it’s okay all round, I say.’
‘Well, it won’t be long now before Flora goes too, I suppose, Mrs Palmer. My word, she’s grown into a fine young girl, that. She’ll be a good wife to someone.’
‘Yes, but I hope it’s a good man she gets hold of.’
‘Well, she mustn’t throw herself away. That’d never do.’
‘And do you think I’d stand for it if she did? The way I’ve slaved for those kids, worried over them—he’d be a sorry fellah that ever laid a hand on any of my girls.’
‘You wouldn’t be doing yourself justice if you let her do otherwise. Every mother has a right to expect her girl to choose sensibly.’
‘But Flora would, Mr Rae. She’s a sensible girl. You know, I’ve
got to hand it to her. She’ll sit with us at a party and all she’ll drink is a raspberry and she never gets cross or tired. She’s content to be in with the crowd—you know—and in on the fun.’
‘Well, I reckon you ought to be proud of her, Mrs Palmer. These days there’s every temptation for a girl to run wild.’ His voice became confidential. ‘You know, Mrs Palmer, if you knew the number of illegitimate births in this country—four per cent. Mrs Palmer, four per cent!—in the Force we get to know about these things. I wouldn’t mention this to anyone, Mrs Palmer. Only I know you’ll take it in the right way. It’s shocking. It’s hardly fit to be talked about.’ He blushed and continued: ‘I think you ought to be proud of her.’
Rogers came in with a tray. On it were a glass of beer and a brandy for Mrs Palmer.
‘Well, I hate to leave you out, Mr Rae, but here’s what-ho, eh
Paul?’ She winked and jogged him with her elbow. ‘For old times,
eh?’ She swallowed half the brandy. ‘We were just saying Flora
would be a good match for you, Paul. Now, now. Look at him
blushing, Mr Rae. But my gosh, Mr Rae, I wouldn’t oppose it.
Rogers grinned without showing much embarrassment; he was used to this from her. He was at a loss for words, however, and stared passively. She had a way of sucking spontaneity out of young men.
Rogers uneasily adapted himself to her mood. ‘Well, it’s better than having to stand on your own feet all the time,’ he said limply. He recalled her sympathy once when she found out that his mother had been dead several years. ‘I’m a second mother to you,’ she had said. He had been drunk and sentimentally loyal to a remembered picture of his mother. ‘It couldn’t be the same,’ he had said. She had looked, for one of the few times he could remember, puzzled and cheated. But he chose now not to think of this or of his mother.
‘Don’t you believe him,’ Mrs Palmer said. ‘He’s stood on his own feet. He’s studied and passed his exams and everywhere he’s got, he’s got there by his own steam. Do you know Mr Rae’—her voice lowered and became more intense—‘his father was a common old engine-driver. Don’t worry, Paul, I don’t tell everyone. You can trust Mr Rae. We’re all friends here.’
‘I’m not ashamed of it….’ Rogers began.
‘That’s what I like,’ said Mrs Palmer, ‘a son to stick up for his old man, come right or wrong.’
‘Well, it’s to your credit, son,’ the constable said. ‘And I reckon if Mrs Palmer adopts you there can’t be much wrong with you. It’s a recommendation in itself.’
‘There was only one time, only once, I didn’t see eye to eye with him, and that was during the war. Paul didn’t like war, and he wouldn’t go.’
‘Oh, well,’ Rae said, protesting loudly. ‘There’s none of us like war. No one wants war. But we had to fight a country that did.’ Rogers recalled the time he’d first told Mrs Palmer of his objection. With chameleon cowardice he had falsified his attitude. ‘I’d rather be helping people than killing them,’ he had said. Flora had been there, and to demonstrate her loyalty to him, ‘It’s a good way to be, Paul,’ she had said. Mrs Palmer had said nothing for a while, thinking probably of Don in the North African desert; then quietly, as if to heighten the effect, she had said, ‘Well, I think it’s just a case of some people realizing their responsibilities more than others.’ To Rogers, the harmony of the situation had demanded his capitulation, and he still winced when he remembered what he had said: ‘Yes, perhaps you’re right.’
‘Oh, so you were the young fullah all the fuss was about?’ the
‘But he saw reason after a while,’ Mrs Palmer said. ‘And he’s a returned boy like Don now. He was overseas just after he was twenty-one, so he didn’t lose any time. And he can hold his head up like the next one, especially in a place like this—look at all the young chaps here that hid in the mine. You know they come in and drink and I’ll drink with them and be good company and have their money—but I’ve always got that little bit stored under my cap: my boy was a man and that’s more than you dodgers were, skulking behind a protected occupation. And I’m not one to forget it, Mr Rae…. Here, Paul, it’s my shout. Murn’s dry. She’s been gassing too much. Give us a smoke, boy.’
The constable was leaving when Rogers came back. ‘Well, son, I’ll be seeing you again,’ he said. ‘You’re in good hands here anyway.’ His manner was not so hearty now: it was as if he was cautioning Rogers not to try to evade his responsibilities again.
‘Drop in any time,’ Mrs Palmer called from the stove. ‘You’ll always find me here up to my eyes in work. But Mum can take it—no eight-hour shift for me. We never growl—do we, kid?’
She turned round and gave Rogers a cigarette. ‘Get that into you, kid,’ she said and winked. ‘Well, it’s great to have you back anyway, son. It’ll be just like old times again and I can expect Don back any day. They always come back to Mum…. You know I asked the constable straight out about closing at eleven, and he says it’s all right so long as we close at eleven. I said, “You can trust me, Mr Rae. If I make a bargain, I stick to my part of it.”—“Well, you can rely on me for my side,” he says. “I know I can trust you and Dad” —they all call him Dad here—“I know I can trust you to run the place as you should do.”—“No,” I says, “Mr Rae, there are no fights at our place and we always refuse the undesirables.” Oh, it shows you, it pays to be on good terms with the right people. There’s no under-the-counter dealings with me. If I want something I ask straight out. And now we know exactly where we stand with the law and everything’s fair and square. Treat people square and they’ll treat you square.’
In the bar there were a dozen familiar faces, of miners on their
way home, in rough clothes, their sugar-bags and crib-tins laid on a
‘One without a collar, Paul?’ old Don said with just a little more pep in his voice than usual: he had evidently had one or two with Jimmy too. Always the same, old Don, was what everyone said of him. When he was foreman of the dredge nothing ever got him ruffled. Even if they were repairing a cable by lamplight in drenching rain he had never been known to lose his calm. And now that he had bought the hotel from Jimmy Cairns no one in the bar could ever draw him into an argument. ‘And how are you turning over the money, Don?’ Jimmy asked. ‘Are you making a better first of it than I did?’
‘Oh, can’t growl, Jimmy, can’t growl. Course, mind you, they don’t have to fish me out from under the bar when they clean out in the morning.’
Jimmy laughed and swooped at the bar with one arm. ‘Well, you can’t say they ever did that of me. Though bloody near at times. You know, my lad, you shouldn’t be touching this stuff. If your principles were too high to take you to a war, they should keep you out of the pub, filling some fat publican’s bloody pocket.’
‘Look at the pot on me now Paul,’ old Don said, though he had none.
‘Oh, you want to watch these publicans, they’re sharks. Don’t let John Barleycorn get you, son. It’s been the ruin of many a good man. Look at me.’ He prodded Rogers’s chest. ‘I’ve got principles too. I’m a Communist. But discipline—discipline’s the thing I can’t stomach. I’d be a bad citizen in a socialist state. But I had this pub for three years and I’m still drinking in it. See, Don—there’s a sermon in every soak. And there’s a sermon in me too—how not to be a bloody capitalist!’
A lone drinker along the bar, a battered and wrinkled man of middle age hawked in his throat and said in a sneering tone, ‘Sermons be damned! What do you know of sermons? Beer’s the poor man’s medicine.’ Rogers listened but so far held aloof because he was still picking up the threads of Coal Flat. He didn’t as yet fit in. More quietly the middle-aged man said, ‘It’s a small consolation in a miserable world.’
‘Now don’t you start your preaching, Herlihy,’ Jimmy’s companion said. He had a soft but deep Clydeside voice.
‘Sermons!’ Jimmy said. ‘I should say I haven’t heard one for so many years I couldn’t count them. Never mind, Herlihy, even if you can only get beer on earth, there’ll be pie in the sky when you die.’
‘Ay,’ Jimmy’s companion said, ‘God created heaven and earth and his priests created sin.’
Don laughed and served another beer. ‘Here, you’ll be offending me,’ he said. ‘I’m a bit of a Bible-banger myself.’
‘Sin’s as old as Adam,’ Herlihy said, unable to resist being drawn out, as he knew they wanted. ‘If there was one thing my education taught me it was that. You ought to know that, lad,’ he said to Rogers. ‘With all the exams you’ve had to pass.’ Rogers looked at him without answering, puzzled that this older man should want to make an ally of him. ‘Sin,’ Herlihy said, as if it was a word only the initiated could understand, and swallowed half a mug, pondering.
Jimmy crossed himself in mockery and said, ‘Your education,
Herlihy! Now tell me what did you learn. The seven deadly sins.
All the mumbo jumbo and lumber of useless bloody theory that
doesn’t add up to a thing. Did they teach you the facts of life? Did
you learn the economic set-up?’
‘You turn things into sin,’ Ben Nicholson, Jimmy’s mate, said. ‘You put a false complexion on everything natural and it becomes sin. What is there the church can preach that men can’t handle using their own reason and common sense?’
Jimmy began to intone a garbled mockery of a Catholic mass. Herlihy said, ‘You should know that, young fellah,’ to Rogers. And Rogers, his face bare of that generalized goodwill, stared at him resentfully and said, ‘Don’t try to drag me in on your side, mate. I’m no believer.’ He was hurt at the brazenness of Herlihy’s invitation to desert his friends when he didn’t even know him. Herlihy’s eyes narrowed and lowered; he was obviously more hurt than Rogers, though Rogers couldn’t see why. ‘All education isn’t religious,’ Rogers said, as if to justify himself, though he couldn’t see that he was in any way to blame. Herlihy continued to glower over his beer.
‘Easy does it chaps,’ Don said. ‘This one’s on me. And you too,
Mike, just to show there’s no hard feelings.’ Herlihy accepted the
beer with a nod and went out to relieve himself. Rogers stared with
a puzzled expression at Jimmy. ‘Why did he try and bring me in on
his side?’ he muttered. But Jimmy clearly wasn’t interested in the
subtleties of the argument. ‘I dunno,’ he said. ‘Trying to convert
‘Well and what’s it like to be bawling at kids again?’ Jimmy said.
‘It’s a pretty poor selection of teachers you’ve got up there now.
Your head’s a bloody blowhard—what I’ve done for the school,
and how the school’s gone ahead since I’ve been here.’
‘Well, if you don’t blow your own trumpet, no one else will,’ Don said. ‘Still, I suppose he’s got his job to do like everyone else.’
‘To bring the kids up to respect the same bloody nobs he crawls after. Tell me, are you still the mutinous young rebel you used to be? The idea of telling the Gover’ment you wouldn’t go away and fight for them. And then you did go. Are you still a Socialist?’
Before Rogers could reply, old Don said, ‘You’re like me aren’t you, Paul? Vote for the ones that’ll look after you.’
Rogers grinned as if old Don was trying to pull his leg. ‘Jimmy, he said proudly, almost rhetorically, ‘my political opinions haven’t changed a bit.’
‘You’re still on our side, are you?’ Jimmy said with slight irony. ‘I’m still a Labour voter. And I haven’t joined your bloody Communist Party yet. Or likely to.’
‘More’s the pity. Oh, you’ll end up like the rest of the teachers, a paid hack worrying about your promotion. One thing about a miner, he’s free. I stayed a miner while I had this pub.’
Ben grinned. ‘They are a pretty conservative lot at the school,
aren’t they?’
‘What do you expect?’ Jimmy said. ‘Who have you got? Heath for a start. We know about him. Then there’s this new girl just relieving. I don’t know her name….’
‘Miss Johnson,’ Rogers prompted.
‘She seems a nice sort of girl,’ Ben said.
‘Then there’s Fred Lawson,’ Jimmy said. ‘Quiet chap. You’ll
‘He’s had a good crop of lettuces,’ Ben said. ‘I envy him. Then there’s Hansen’s wife.’
‘She should have balls,’ Jimmy said. ‘She doesn’t know much about kids, that one. Five on the staff, and you’re the only Socialist there. Hello Mum.’
‘Was that me you were talking about, Jimmy?’ Mrs Palmer said, coming in. She put three plates of meat sandwiches on the bar. ‘If it was, it’s not true. I could prove it…. Only wait till Dad’s not about, that’s the main thing.’ She winked and slung compliments and backchat at the other drinkers. ‘You watch yourself, Paul,’ she said. ‘You’re in bad company. I don’t want anyone to say we got the schoolteacher tight on his first day back here.’
A stocky middle-aged man entered. He had shining pink cheeks and gold-rimmed spectacles under a cropped blaze of silver hair. He came up to the school Rogers was drinking with. Ben didn’t acknowledge him. Jimmy looked quizzically askance at him, as if laughing at him but in a friendly way.
‘Well, well, Paul! So you’re back with us again!’ the stranger said. ‘Of course, I knew you were coming. It’s nice to see you.’
Rogers recognized him as Arthur Henderson, a miner who was
something of a public figure in the town. He was nothing important
in the union, but he was a church elder, had been on the E.P.S.
committee during the war practising civil defence, and was probably
on several of the smaller local bodies. He wrote the Coal Flat notes
for the Argus.
‘Hullo, Mr Henderson,’ Rogers said, and Arthur Henderson
beamed because it wasn’t often anyone outside a meeting called
him by his surname with the Mr in front of it. ‘Will you have a
beer?’
‘Well, I’ve only time for one,’ he said in a garrulous chatter. ‘My word, I’m running late tonight. I had some business to attend to on my way.’
‘Oh, I know where you’ve been,’ Jimmy said. ‘You looked in at the swimming baths to see some of the girls in their bathing costumes.’
Arthur Henderson bridled as if flattered. ‘No, no,’ he said firmly.
‘Ah, now, don’t come at that,’ Jimmy said. ‘We know all about you.’
‘No, no, Jimmy,’ he said. ‘Seriously now’—and his face seemed
to appeal to their sense of justice—‘I just looked in at the library to
Ben eyed him all the time, without hostility, but without speaking. Henderson had clearly brought uneasiness to the group. Jimmy seemed to be watching for an opportunity to banter him again. As if to cover up, Henderson kept talking. ‘Now, Paul, there’s a job for you. Right up your alley. You can look after the library on Tuesday nights. All you’ve got to do is write down the name of the borrower and the date the book’s due back. I’ll mention it to the doctor. He’s the chairman of the library committee.’
Rogers responded eagerly to this tribute to his usefulness. ‘Okay, Mr Henderson,’ he said. ‘I’ll look in tomorrow and you can show me the ropes.’
‘This bugger can’t read,’ Jimmy said. ‘What do you ask him to run the library for? He’s still going to the school. Ask him.’
Henderson swallowed the rest of his glass and gestured mischievously as if to say, ‘No more tomfoolery, now!’—‘I’ll have to go
now,’ he said. ‘The missus is waiting.’ He bridled again. ‘Ah, Paul,’
he said in condescending confidence, ‘You wait till you’re married.
Then you’ll know all about it.’ He almost shouted, ‘Then all your
troubles will come at once! Eh, Jimmy? Eh, Ben?’ All jokes aside
again, he said, ‘Right-oh then Paul.’ He pressed his hand on
Rogers’s shoulder, as if registering a palm-print. In a sprightly
voice, ‘We’ll be seeing you again,’ he said, and went to the bar.
‘May I use your phone please Mrs Palmer—thank you!’
When he had gone, Jimmy and Ben exchanged glances. ‘Now young fullah,’ Jimmy said. ‘You watch yourself tomorrow night. Don’t let him catch you bending!’ He burst into loud laughter. Ben didn’t laugh. Rogers was embarrassed and, rather than pursue the subject, asked no questions. But Jimmy wanted to continue. ‘The village queen,’ he said, smiling now.
‘It’s not natural,’ Ben said, ‘I can’t see the logic of it at all.’
Mrs Palmer came near and leaned across the bar, almost in confidence. ‘It makes you sick,’ she muttered. ‘Of all the damn dirty things. Dad and I stopped going to church because of him being an elder there.’
‘There you go!’ Mike Herlihy called from along the bar. ‘That proves my point. You don’t know what sin is.’
Ben turned round incredulously. ‘Is that all you learnt in your bloody seminary? That that’s sin any boy could tell you that.’
‘There are some things decent people just don’t want to know about,’ Mrs Palmer said.
‘You all pretend you’re so innocent,’ Mike Herlihy said. It
‘Mike Herlihy, you’ve got a dirty mind,’ Mrs Palmer said. ‘You stand there and say there’s sin in me. I’m as innocent as anyone in this bar. I’ve never done anything in my life that wasn’t for the best. And you’ve got the damn cheek to compare me with that sexless wonder.’
Don took Mike’s half-full glass. ‘You’ve had enough tonight, I think, Mike.’
‘What are you getting so preachy about anyway?’ Jimmy asked. ‘You chucked it up because John Barleycorn got you. If I ever come to needing a sermon, I’d go to a parson with his proper fancy dress on, not to a bloody renegade priest.’
Mike Herlihy was hurt and morose without his beer. His face was mean and drawn, and Rogers found it repulsive, wondering how on earth this man could have imagined that they should have anything in common. ‘Decent people can get along without your type of sermon,’ Mrs Palmer said. ‘Actions speak louder than words.’
‘I didn’t have a vocation,’ Herlihy said. ‘I might have been weak. I might have given up. Discipline,’ he said, mocking Jimmy. ‘Discipline’s the thing I couldn’t stomach. The flesh see.’ He patted his stomach. ‘The flesh—what you buggers can’t see past. I’d have been a bad priest. But at least I know when I’m sinning and that’s more than you do.’
He looked driven, Rogers thought. He must have been. People didn’t usually talk religion in bars, even in mining towns where the range of bar-room topics was greater than in other parts of the country.
‘Well, you can do your sinning somewhere else from now on, Mike,’ Don said, ‘till you like to apologize to my wife for those insulting remarks.’ Mike stared back without submission.
‘You’re welcome to your bloody remorse and guilty conscience,’ Ben said. ‘Self-respect and reason and happiness make for a more upright stand at any time.’
‘Security and bread,’ Jimmy said, as Mike walked out.
‘And beer,’ said old Don filling another round.
Rogers’s room had a wardrobe, a chest of drawers, two beds and
two hard-backed chairs. The room would normally have held two
On his chest of drawers was a Country Library Service book—A. S. Neill: The Problem Child. That and a book on education by
Ethel Mannin had been his most exciting reading lately, old though
they were. He was jealous of the opportunities Neill had had to deal
with delinquent children. To strike any in Coal Flat would be too
much to hope for. The children here would be average—rowdy,
ready to learn but slower than you would wish, disobedient but
never in revolt. It was characteristic of Rogers that he felt uncomfortable with everything that was average and normal.
Was that at the bottom of his objection to military service? That now seemed a long time past, and the ideals he had professed were embarrassing to think of like a past he had to live down. Sometimes he could afford to be avuncular towards them, smiling at the dreams of youth. They were rather like a varsity blazer, recalling silly undergraduate antics and yet a period of hope, ambition and self-fulfilment. But there were times when he winced to recall them and wished he could obliterate them from his life.
For he had stubbornly worn the varsity blazer. From the start he
had expected the wind to blow through it, the moths to get at it—the Truth attacks on conscientious objectors, the unwilling headiness when the bands led the first recruiting parades, the white-feather glances from people who thought he was shirking, the
shaded whispers behind his back, and then his own despairs. He
had thought all he needed was courage, to wear the blazer in a
It was young Paul Rogers from the house next door to Belle’s that put on the hated uniform and got on the train. He felt he had sold out—yet formally he had won, because he hadn’t objected to non-combatant service. He was humbled like a penitent child by the deep unrecognized knowledge that he no longer believed in his objections; that it had only been stubbornness that kept him fighting till he had won his point. Once he was in the army he hid his flags and covered his tracks. An officer said, ‘Twenty? You were a long time coming in,’ and he lied: ‘I was exempted.’ The little boy wanted a chance to get his bearings.
For, once that first fight was over, he saw everything in a different perspective: that it wasn’t simply an old-style war where workers of one country were pitched against workers of another, where the conflict could be ended by a refusal to fight by both sides. That fascism was a worse threat to men than war itself. That in Europe and Asia people were suffering, dying, fighting, sacrificing themselves and being tortured for their race, their beliefs, for a cause, while he had been sitting back consulting his conscience. It was humiliating to admit to oneself that one had been so completely wrong. He had applied for a transfer from the Medical Corps to the infantry, but by then he was a trained medical orderly, and the army wouldn’t shift him, and why should the army reorganize itself every time he had a change of conscience?
Yet what else should he have done? If he had simply shrugged away his principles in the first place, gone to camp along with everyone else, he couldn’t have held up his head to himself again. At that stage it was necessary to bear witness to his principles, even if they were wrong ones. The thing would have been to have made sure they were right in the first place. But once he had decided on his course he refused to re-examine the situation, because he was afraid of finding excuses for a retreat: romantic stubbornness, not reason, kept him in his first position. And the society he lived in kept him there too.
To most of the people he knew this was just another of those wars in which the Mother Country got involved periodically, through the knavery of foreigners, another jingoistic war like the Boer War and the First World War. It was this kind of war he was protesting against. Only he was as deceived as anyone else; like other people he thought it was a war against Germans, not against Nazis. The beginning of his doubt in his position came when Russia entered the war, for at that time he admired the one country of socialism. But he stubbornly fought his doubts, because he was afraid that he might have to accuse himself of having ratted on his principles.
When he came out of the army he got a Rehabilitation grant to finish his B.A. The clerk at the Rehab. office advised him to do this and actually filled in the application form for him, handing it over only for his signature. Rogers was uneasy at taking these benefits so readily. Yet he wanted to bury the past; to raise any objections to accepting this aid would be like renewing his objections to service in the first place. It would only have irritated the clerk, and would probably have seemed irrelevant to him. He would have pointed out that according to the regulations returned soldiers with so many years overseas service were entitled to so many years at university if they needed it. It wouldn’t have affected him that Rogers couldn’t even have claimed active service; two years in the Pacific, the last year of the war in Egypt and Italy, his only contact with the enemy was with Italian prisoners of war who served in the mess at Ma’adi. ‘You had no choice where you were sent,’ the clerk would have said. ‘You might have been sent to some nasty spots, but you weren’t.’
So that now he felt guilty. Society had called on him to fight, and he had refused. Then after he had changed his mind and served in the army, society had helped him to study. Society was paying him back for service he had actually done; that was true. Yet he couldn’t help feeling that he had got more than he deserved. And he wanted to make up for it by co-operating harder with society, by living down his past, asking fewer questions, rebelling less, conforming more. A faint voice inside him said, ‘You’ve been bought,’ but he made it shut up.
The only reason Arthur Nicholson liked union meetings was
that the men knocked off early for them. He swung the last box of
coal round on to the rails and pushed it up the incline, trundling it
along the unevenly fixed rails while his mate stayed to fix the jig—which controlled the boxes going to and from the coal-face fifteen
feet above them at the side of the rails, where a pair of miners had
been filling them. Arty pushed the box slowly, waiting for his mate
to give an arm to it too. He stopped and looked back, holding the
box still with one arm. The two miners caught him up; their eyes
and teeth showed white under the lamps on their helmets; their
faces and trunks were smeared with sweat and coal dust. They wore
black singlets and trousers. They carried leather satchels at their
shoulders.
‘Come on there you two, give us a hand!’ Arty said. ‘Sitting up there on your arses all day and me slaving my guts out down here!’
One of them walked on. ‘Ach, you bloody youngsters. You’re all the same—frightened of a bit of sweat.’
‘Why do you think we pay you truckers threepence a box?’ the other asked. But he pitted the heel of his hand against the rim of the box and began to push it up.
‘Let the lazy bugger do his own work,’ the first miner said. But he joined the other in pushing it, while Arty grinned, knuckles on hips, and shouted, ‘Watch out, Charley, it’ll run back on top of you if you don’t push harder! Look oop soonny!’ he called in mimicry of the underviewer who spoke as he had learned in Haltwhistle on the Tyne. ‘Look oop! Oh—oh—don’t overdo it now! Remember your wife and family! They don’t want you to drop before your time!’
One of them stopped. ‘I’ve got a — good mind to let the bugger run back and run off the rails. Just for your bloody cheek!’ They carried on pushing it.
Arty stood grinning and his mate caught him up. ‘Take your time, don’t you, dig?’ Arty asked. ‘Leaving all the work to me.’
‘You got the miners working for you now, as well?’ his mate said. ‘Some people….’
The two miners fixed the box to the winch-rope and put a nail to the two wires to signal for the winch to start up.
‘That’s the last time I’ll do that for you, Nicholson,’ the miner said. ‘It’s only that you’re your old man’s son that I did it.’
‘Are you scared of him?’ Arty said. ‘I’m not.’
The four of them walked along the tunnel, past the main lay-by where another trucker was sending off the last boxes, and up the slant dip till they came to the place where the trolley could come for them, once the line was clear of boxes. There was soon a crowd of miners, truckers and timber-men. Some of them sat on a platform of coal dust caked with oil at the side, some of them stood; some of them were brooding with that conservation of energy and comment which heavy manual labour makes a habit; the youngsters barracked and outboasted one another loudly. Arty’s father sat quietly near, but Arty didn’t notice him. In the mine father and son were fellow-workers who called each other by their first names, and except in an accident, their relationship only belonged above-ground. These youths enjoyed showing off in front of their fathers and the men of an older generation from whom, as boys, they had hidden their mischief; checking men of all ages, boasting of a sexual callousness more imaginary than real, made them aware of the full taste of independence. The older men were sceptical and tolerant and remembered their own years of youth.
When the trolley came Arty pushed his way on to it. He collided with Joe Taiha, a young Maori chap who hadn’t long been in the pit. ‘Move along, you black bastard!’ Arty said.
Joe grinned and moved. ‘Who are you to talk about black?’ he said. ‘Right now you and me are both the same colour.’
Arty never thought about it till he was out of the bath-house, feeling fresh and clean walking in the mid-afternoon sun to the Miners’ Hall. He was with two of his mates, when his father passed him with Jock McEwan. ‘Here you,’ Ben said. ‘Not so much of this “black bastard” business when you talk to Taiha. Understand?’
‘Oh, Christ!’ Arty said, surprised and annoyed. Ben and Jock walked ahead and Arty spat.
‘Your old man thinks we work in a — Sunday school,’ one of his mates said, but Arty didn’t answer. He didn’t talk all the way to the hall.
As if he’d meant it seriously. It was just a way of talking. He
I’ll move along
instead’?
His old man was too bloody serious, that was the trouble with
him. As if Arty cared two hoots about the colour bar, one way or
another. Colour bar, that was something you read about, happening
in America and South Africa, not here. And anyway the Maoris
were different from the nigs, a bloody sight more intelligent. And
they liked you to be rough-mannered with them, they didn’t go for
this pansy stuff: ‘So sorry, Mr Taiha, I didn’t notice you meant to
sit here.’ Colour bar—more of his old man’s book stuff about class
struggle and imperialism and exploitation and warmongers. All
words that didn’t mean anything to Arty Nicholson. You went to
work and you got paid once a fortnight and then you went and spent
it. You only went to work because you had to get some money, and
you did as little as you could get away with—your mates always kept
you up to it, though; naturally they didn’t want to carry any passengers. But the boys weren’t overworked, there was plenty of
work, an eight-hour shift and the promise of a seven-hour one; they
had good conditions, and there was a Labour Government in. What
did his father worry about? Some people were never satisfied. There
were more important things than politics to think about—the Stillwater dance on Saturday, women, a game of billiards, a few drinks
with the boys. That was life—not worrying about work all the time.
You only enjoyed yourself after work.
Colour bar—God, Flora had some Maori in her. That made him grin. His old man might have some little black bastards as grandchildren. How would he like that, eh? Then he mightn’t be so keen to lecture him about colour bar. That is, if…. If…. He was jumping a few fences all right. He didn’t even know if Flora would have him. He hadn’t even asked her to go out with him regular. But that was his intention and tonight he’d ask her. He was tired of not knowing, tired of only thinking of her when he was in bed. If Arty wanted something, he wanted it soon or not at all.
The union meeting bored him. His father in the chair, Jock
McEwan talking and getting worked up about another bloody
watersiders’ dispute. The only time it brightened was when Jimmy
Cairns said something; he would make you laugh whatever he did.
They were amused too every time Pansy Henderson got up on a
point of order, silly old fool. Talk, formalities, resolutions; what
Arty got to his feet. ‘If you ask me it’s a bloody silly idea,’ he said. ‘As it is the bus’ll stop anywhere to pick you up. If you have regular stops, a man’ll have to walk half a mile to catch it.’
The youths of his own age were moved to comment for the first time. They had been sitting like soldiers at a compulsory lecture. ‘That’s telling him, Arty!’—‘Lazy bastard! A walk’ll do you good!’
Jock McEwan got up, the secretary. He was a small man from Glasgow with red hair, a bit of a zealot—a bloody slave-driver, Arty often thought.
‘I’d like to know what the hell’s come over you youngsters today,’ he said. ‘When I was a lad we used our time to improve ourselves. We used to read and study to arm ourselves for the struggle. You youngsters spend all your time in the billiard room and the pub….’
‘Just a minute, Jock,’ Ben said. ‘Can you stick to the item under discussion?’
‘Well, if you’re too bloody lazy to walk a couple of hundred yards to a bus shelter, you might think of the women-folk with prams and babies and shopping-bags who have to stand in the rain.’
‘They can wait on their front verandas,’ another youth said.
‘The proposal is a stop every quarter of a mile or so,’ Ben said ‘So you’d only have to walk a couple of hundred yards at the most.’
‘You want to remember you won’t be young all your life,’ Jimmy Cairns said. ‘You want to think of old blokes like me.’ There were cat-calls from the youths at this contribution.
‘Do you see what we mean?’ Ben said to Arty. It gratified Arty that he spoke as if he was addressing any fellow-worker, not his son. Even so, he didn’t reply, only nodded.
The proposal was that they make representations to the manager of the local branch of the Railway Road Services; the vote was put and carried without dissent.
As Arty left the hall he felt more reconciled to union meetings. He turned down his mates’ invitation to come into the pub. He was still brooding on his father’s remark; a few beers under his belt and he might pick a fight with someone. Anyway he didn’t want his breath smelling tonight. He had to see Flora.
He had seen her often enough in the last seven or eight years, yet
It was strange the way the homeward bus trip was so different. Going there, they were a cheerful gang, laughing, singing the latest hits, taunting one another, all boys together with the girls joining in the fun. Going home they were more subdued, they were mostly paired off, and the boys who had missed out sat tired or drunk or disappointed in the back seat. The lights were out and no one threw off at anyone else, because he knew his own turn would come some day.
When Arty got out of the bus with Flora they walked round to the back of the hotel; the front door was locked, the back door left open all night.
‘Thanks, Arthur,’ she said, so softly, it struck him. So genuinely. Yet there wasn’t any come-closer in her voice, he noticed.
‘Can I see you again?’ He was glad he had to whisper, because it hid his strange humility.
‘The town’s not very big,’ she said. ‘We can’t help seeing each other.’
‘On our own though?’ He felt strangely daring, hoping he hadn’t said too much.
‘Tuesday then, after tea.’
‘Okay, Flora.’
‘Good night,’ and she was gone. It was only then that he realized
he hadn’t attempted even to kiss her. ‘Good night,’ he said softly,
but only to the night air, because she was inside now. He felt
So, now Tuesday was come, he got down his tea with such impatience that his mother commented on it. His younger brothers—still at Tech.—were trying to annoy him, but he only shouted at them out of habit. He was immune to irritation from them. His brothers didn’t know a thing yet; his mother was everyday, ordinary; if she knew much she didn’t let on. He went to his room and put his best suit on, with a clean shirt open at the neck, where a bush of fair hair sprang. His mother looked him up and down.
‘Hullo,’ she said. ‘Who’re you meetin’ tonigh’?’ She spoke with a
Clydeside accent stronger than his father’s.
‘Oh, jus’ takin’ a stroll,’ he said casually.
‘I can see we won’t be havin’ you with us much longer,’ she said.
And the kids chimed in: ‘Why? Where’s he going?’
Then his father came in for his tea, fresh from the pub.
‘Who’s the bloody dude?’ he said with some admiration. Arty was both flattered and irritated by this attention. ‘It’s only Tuesday night, you know.’ Arty ignored him. ‘An’ while I think of it, don’t forget what I said about Jocy Taiha. No “black bastard” talk around here.’
This was too much for Arty. ‘Oh shut up, can’t you?’ he shouted, and squared up to Ben.
‘Now, Arty!’ his mother said. ‘Don’t speak to your father like that!’ But the two men ignored her, and she stood staring at them. His brothers stood agog. ‘Arty, mind your suit,’ she said.
‘Now say it again and see what you get,’ Arty said.
Ben looked him up and down without raising his arms. ‘My, you’re in fine fettle, son. You won’t settle much with your fists, you know. Some day you’ll try that once too often and you’ll come off the worse for it.’
‘Are you threatening me?’
Ben sat down at the table.
‘I don’t mean me,’ he said. ‘I won’t take you on. Someone else will some day, someone as young as yourself and a bit handier with his fists than you are.’
Arty lowered his fists. ‘You’re too bloody serious, that’s your trouble,’ he said. ‘Jocy Taiha’s a good mate of mine and I don’t need you sticking in your nose in talking brotherly love. You should ha’ been a bloody parson.’
‘You’ve got a lot to learn, son,’ was all Ben said.
‘Now get along, Arty,’ his mother said. ‘Ben, eat your supper.’
Arty left surprised that he’d established his manhood so easily in his own home.
He was feeling in fine form when he waited, as casually as he could look, dolled up in his best suit on a week-day, outside the post office over the road from the pub. Five minutes later Flora came out of the side-gate by the pub, looking round, pretending to be casual like him. Arty was a little disappointed she hadn’t got herself up as flash as she was at the dance. Even so she looked classy; silk stockings, a chocolate-brown skirt and a wine jumper. And that black glossy hair of hers in natural waves! He didn’t step out to meet her: that would make it too obvious. She came to him.
‘Where do you want to go?’ he said.
‘I can’t be out too late,’ she said. ‘Shall we go for a walk?’
That suited Art. Walking out with someone in this town was like a public declaration. She was announcing a permanent attachment.
They set off down the footpath between the fences and the road. Arty didn’t know how to start, what to say. For a while he felt proud and happy just to walk with this girl who had agreed to walk with him. It hadn’t struck him till now that it was so wonderful that she should want him the same as he wanted her. Or that up till a week ago they had passed each other frequently without a second thought; and here they were walking together.
‘Did you sleep all right Sat’d’y?’ he said.
‘You mean Sunday morning,’ she said. She pronounced it Sunday. ‘Yes, I always do. I was up at eight.’
He laughed. ‘That’s better than me. I wasn’t up till—till near midday.’ He had checked himself swearing. But he wasn’t sure with Flora: bragging about lying in on Sundays might be all right amongst the boys, but it might give her a bad impression. ‘Nothin’ else to do,’ he added in self-justification.
‘I had the breakfasts to get,’ she said. ‘I always let Mum lie in on Sundays.’ It was new to him to admire unselfishness, but it was good in a girl. ‘Then I went to church.’
‘Church!’ he said involuntarily, as if he didn’t believe her. ‘I haven’t been inside one in my life.’ Then he said: ‘That’s not to say I couldn’t start though.’
She didn’t comment and he wondered if he’d put his foot in it. ‘Just the way you’re brought up, I s’pose,’ he said. But that didn’t help, because she still didn’t say anything.
Her silence made him aware that her home life had been different
from his. For the first time in his life he felt ashamed of his home.
He didn’t know what he should be ashamed of, only that it wasn’t
They walked on for a while, and he tried again. ‘Have you been busy today?’
‘I’m always busy,’ she said. ‘I’ve been doing the washing for Mum today.’
‘I don’t know how she’d get on without you,’ he said, but she took it as flattery and didn’t acknowledge it.
‘How will she get on if you ever leave home?’ he asked.
‘Oh, I can’t see my leaving home for a while,’ she said.
Arty gave up, and walked sullenly, yet still gratefully, with her. They could see the hills across the valley turning soft people in the dusk. The peaks of the Alps were dissolving into a darkening indigo sky, with odd pink clouds tinged with lemon. ‘The hills are lovely tonight,’ she said. ‘Don’t you think so, Arthur?’
‘I never noticed them before,’ he said, shrugging. But it was true, they were beautiful. He had lived here nineteen years and never noticed them. It was one more thing he hadn’t been conscious of till he met her. He was flushed right through with a warmth and tenderness for Flora, such as he had never known for anyone. But his love had no tongue and when he tried to think of something to say, he only felt gawky.
There was no one about on the road, but it didn’t occur to him whether there might be. His hand felt for hers. She let him take it, but her hand was disappointingly hard and unresponsive. They stood in silence that was too tense for Arty till she said, ‘A penny for your thoughts, Arthur.’
That jolted him into embarrassment. ‘You’re putting me on the spot,’ he complained. Then impulsively he said, ‘Flora, how about it? Would you be my girl?’
Her few seconds of pause were agony to him. Finally she spoke quietly. ‘Arthur,’ she said. ‘I knew you wanted to say that. I’ve never encouraged you.’
‘I don’t care about that,’ he said. ‘Would you go out with me?’
‘Listen, Arthur, don’t take it badly. I’ve been thinking it over. I know it’s a hard thing to say, but it wouldn’t work out. We haven’t got much in common. I like you, Arthur, but it couldn’t go any further.’
‘Why, Flora?’
‘I just know it couldn’t. Mum and Dad wouldn’t hear of it for a start.’
‘Why wouldn’t they?’
‘I just know they wouldn’t.’
‘Well, we don’t need to care about them. It’s how you feel I’m
worried about.’
‘I wouldn’t go against them, Arthur.’
‘Then you won’t?’
‘Now don’t take it so hardly, Arthur. Everything about us is different. Our ways, the way we were brought up, everything.’
‘You mean I’m not good enough for you?’ he said angrily.
‘I don’t mean that, Arthur. I’m just being sensible, looking facts in the face….’
‘Then why did you come out with me tonight? You knew you were going to say this!’
‘Because I knew what would happen, Arthur. I wanted to spare you. Once Mum got wind of you being interested in me she’d have asked you round every night….’
‘What’s wrong with that?’
‘She’d keep rubbing it into you that your home life was different; she’d be always showing you up, to make sure that it didn’t come to anything. She’d make you feel small.’
‘What’s wrong with my home? I’m not ashamed of it. And if she’s as bad as that why don’t you walk out and please yourself?’
‘Arthur, you mustn’t repeat what I said. I like Mum. It’s the first
time I’ve ever breathed a word against her. Because I’m not against
her. She’d be right. She and Dad did bring us up properly. She’d
be doing it all for me, Arthur.’
‘You mean I’ve been dragged up?’
‘Don’t be awkward, Arthur. I’ve only been trying to make it easier for you … I’ve been honest, Arthur. I’ve been straightforward. I couldn’t let Mum ask you round and see you made a fool of. I had to tell you myself.’
‘That’s decent,’ he said ironically. ‘I’m not good enough for you, that’s what you mean.’
‘Oh, Arthur,’ she said. ‘You mining folk are so blunt and crude. You never take a hint gracefully. You’re all so unpleasant about things.’
‘I’m only a common old miner; so that’s it!’
‘I know myself it wouldn’t work. I told you I’m just being realistic.’
‘Let’s go back,’ he said. They walked back quickly without
speaking. At the pub Flora said, ‘Good night, Arthur,’ with an
Flora wasn’t anywhere near so cool as she had made out to Arty. She had deliberately suppressed a strong desire for his manly young figure and the coarse simplicity of his affection. She kept telling herself she was only being sensible; but what she feared most was breaking with her family. There had been difficulties when Doris, her sister, had married Frank Lindsay who worked at the mine. One Doris in the family was enough. Nor had Arty been the first of the local chaps to take an interest in her. But she had always fended them off with her deliberate politeness—which never gave an impression of coolness because her face was so warm in colour, so ripe in its outlines, and her voice so sensuous in tone. Her inaccessibility had earned her a reputation of respectability. She was a girl most of the young men thought highly of, and her name was never nudged and leered over in bars and billiard rooms. Many a young man would have been glad to get her but not many had tried because she seemed to demand that a man should be on his best behaviour. The only model of better conduct they knew was one of suburban respectability and they avoided that like hypocrisy. Everyone knew them for what they were, and for a man to change his ways suddenly for a girl might expose him to the taunts of his friends. Yet no one thought of Flora as snooty, only distant.
When she came in from Arty, Flora’s coolness dissolved and she
was full of conflicting emotions. It was a relief not to have to face
the difficulties with her mother, yet she felt sorry for Arty. But
how could she console him when she herself had hurt him, gone
out with him intending to hurt him? She should have been easier
with him—but then she had been so afraid of letting him see that
she felt something for him. How stuck-up she must have sounded,
but she hadn’t dared be otherwise. And it couldn’t have worked out.
She had no wish to settle in Coal Flat, to have children in one of
those ugly little houses without paint, without gardens, with a husband never going out but he would come back with beery breath,
with children learning to swear and act rough from the other
miners’ children. No, she wanted a man who would not take her for
granted, would set her up in a new house in a suburb of a town,
and work at a clean job. It could be all very romantic for a start,
going with Arthur, she thought, but after a year or two the glamour
would be gone and she’d be stranded in Coal Flat, saddled with a
Paul had never given any hint of wanting her, though before he had gone into the army, she remembered she had loved him in a moony, adolescent way. She didn’t feel the physical attraction to him that she had felt to Arty. Yet he was more fascinating, more difficult to fathom. He was educated, and Flora had great respect for anyone who was educated. She wondered what it would be like to be a schoolteacher’s wife? Would she have to take the girls for sewing? … But she checked herself. Paul was hardly five minutes in the house—two days, to be exact—and they hadn’t had more than a word together yet and here she was thinking things about him that she would be ashamed to own.
The parlour was empty. Through the wall she could hear the
noise of men in the bar. She settled down in an arm-chair that was
slightly battered and greasy from heads. Mum always said they
wouldn’t get any new furniture till they got a house of their own
again—the customers would only spoil it in a hotel. She picked up
some papers; she pushed Truth aside: scandals and crime were too
disturbing. The cable page of the Greymouth Evening Star meant
nothing to her, except that she got the impression from the headlines that the Russians were being difficult at a United Nations
meeting. She read the Local and General and the personal notes.
Then she picked up
Then the door opened and Paul came in. Flora looked around and smiled. Rogers grinned and stood over her.
‘What are you reading?’ he said. ‘Oh no! Not the royal family?’
‘Why not?’ she said in a hurt voice.
‘Well—’ Rogers hesitated. He knew what he thought, but he was impeded by that decision to conform, as much as he could, with what most people thought. ‘Well—they do take it too far, Flora. What have those princesses done for you and me?’
‘That’s not the way to look at it,’ she said. ‘They’re only young yet. The King and Queen have done a lot.’
‘What have they done?’ he said, grinning tolerantly.
‘They stuck by their people all through the war,’ she said passionately. She recalled a newspaper phrase that had struck her. ‘They shared the common danger.’
‘Why shouldn’t they?’ he said.
‘They could have gone to Canada,’ she said.
Rogers found it too difficult to soft-pedal. ‘Why should they have been privileged?’ he said. ‘They’re only ordinary people like you and me. Why should you admire them for doing no more than the British people did? The King and Queen never got bombed out.’
Flora, confronted by direct blasphemy of her dearest opinions, was at a loss and responded, like most of her countrymen in the same situation, with accusations.
‘Paul Rogers,’ she said. ‘You’re talking like a Communist. I thought the army would have cured you of all that tommy-rot.’
‘No, Flora, there you go,’ Rogers said. ‘How many times do I have to explain to people? I’m not a Communist, never have been, never will be. I’m anti-Communist, if you want to know. I’m a Labour supporter, that’s all….’
‘It’s nothing to boast of.’
‘I’m not boasting, Flora. I’m only stating my position. Every man’s entitled to his opinions, isn’t he? It’s a free country.’
‘Everyone doesn’t go round telling you what his politics are,’ she said.
‘Well, you forced me to.’
She didn’t say anything and he found his bearings again. ‘But all
this royalty business. These newspaper articles. They treat them
like film stars. I’m not against constitutional monarchy. But I
reckon they should live more like ordinary people, that’s all. Live
‘That’s ridiculous,’ she said. ‘That’s being mean. They’re entitled to better than other people.’
‘They’re only ordinary people, only they were born into royalty. It’s not democratic to fawn on them.’
‘I’m not discussing it, Paul,’ she said. ‘You do talk a lot of tommy-rot. I only hope you won’t let Mum hear you talk like that, that’s all.’
‘Why?’
‘Well, you know Mum hasn’t got any time for Communists.’
‘But, Flora, how many times do I have to tell you, I’m not.’
‘I can’t see the difference.’
‘I don’t think you even know what a Communist is.’
‘Trouble-makers, that’s what they are,’ she said. ‘Always stirring
up strife, and strikes, and always asking questions. They can’t let
well alone…. I believe in living in peace and helping people,’ she
said more quietly. ‘You used to be like that, I thought anyway.’
‘I am, Flora. We both want the same things,’ he said. ‘Peace, justice, a society based on co-operation. We disagree on the way to get them.’
‘Well, I’m not discussing them, Paul. I know I’m right, and I’m not getting bogged down in arguing about it.’
‘Let’s change the subject,’ he said resignedly. But they found it impossible to talk of anything else, with the argument unresolved.
‘Why do you always have to be asking questions?’ she said.
‘You’re always disturbing things. Everything decent people take seriously.’
‘Oh, that’s silly, Flora. You’re making out I don’t believe in anything.’
‘You must be a cynic then. Making fun of the decent things of life, the things decent people believe.’
Internally Rogers heaved a sigh. For all her beauty, Flora was no better than other people. What could you do with people? he thought. How could you win people to a happy society against their own wills? How could you remove these prejudices, this refusal to ask questions? It made him feel superior even in his despair. What was the use? Wouldn’t it be better to conform? Or at least to pretend to?
‘I’m going to bed now,’ Flora said, and softly she wished him
good night. By her tone he knew he was forgiven, yet he felt guilty
like a naughty dog. Let them think what they like, and let them
leave him alone. If he wanted to be left alone, then he’d have to take
Flora undressing asked why it had had to happen like that. She had hoped vaguely that she and Paul could have talked amicably, revealing themselves, warming to each other. But at first impact they had squabbled like children. Would he take much notice of her again? Perhaps there was something in what he said. Next time she ought to listen before she let off steam.
Rogers in bed kept seeing her hurt flushed face, kept sensing her spirited temper. It recurred to him with a new wonder how beautiful she was.
Though it was dark by now Arty couldn’t go home so soon. Dressed in his best he couldn’t pass off his excursion as something casual. His mother would have smelt something; she might have probed him or, what would be worse, she might say nothing and watch for clues. In any case he wouldn’t be able to settle in that kitchen, reading the paper or one of the westerns he usually read in spite of his father telling him they were trash and opium. If he went to the billiard saloon or any of the pubs the boys would twit him about his clothes. The prospect of a long walk by himself offered no relief, he was so wild with Flora that he could hardly bear his own company; yet he kept walking, not knowing where he was going.
He was so wild that he had forgotten for the time that he had
loved Flora. Not good enough for her—who did the Palmers think
they were? Hadn’t he a fit body like anyone else, good for a lifetime’s earning for her and a family? Hadn’t he a heart that would
feel for her, a tongue to talk with her, a brain to plan for her,
muscles to work for her, a body to embrace her? Did she want a
film-star? It was his ways, she said, his bringing-up. Well, he
wouldn’t change those for any woman. But she hadn’t even asked
him to change; she had turned him down flat, there and then, as he
was. She must have known he couldn’t change. Yet what was
wrong with him? Did she want him well-mannered, smooth and
sissy? She was as bad as his father, with his preaching. Or was it
that he didn’t have enough money to suit her parents? Let her
bloody well sink then, let her go without him. Some day, he hoped
she would be sorry and he would have no pity for her: there would
be other girls. Yet he knew it would be a long time before any
He noticed now that he was passing a group of huts put up by the Mines Department to house single young men working in the mine. Without knowing why he headed under some hawthorn trees across the thick grass to Joe Taiha’s hut. He even knocked on the door, though roughly, before he pushed it open.
Joe’s hut was simple: wooden walls with two small square windows, a roof of corrugated iron, a bunk with a wire mattress, a plain table and one chair. At the end was a small stove, and from nails on the wall hung a saucepan, an oilskin raincoat and some working clothes. The bed was neatly made up. There was a suitcase under the bed, and in a fixed wardrobe without doors in one corner, hung Joe’s sports clothes and a selection of gaudy ties. The hut was lit by a hurricane lamp on the table.
Joe was washing up the enamel plates he had just used for his dinner. He was surprised to see Arty fling the door open and walk in without any over-hearty or abusive greeting, with only, ‘Good day, Joe’.
‘Ah, Arty,’ Joe said. ‘You just caught me doing the washing up. Some day I’ll have a woman to do this for me.’
Arty sat on the bed and Joe put the plates on the table, hung up a saucepan and spread the tea-towel outside the sill to dry. He pulled in a towel which had been drying during the day.
‘Will you have a cup of coffee and milk? I’ll just put the kettle on,’ Joe said. ‘Oh, wait a minute, I think the tin’s nearly empty. No, we’ll have a beer.’
‘Not out of a mug,’ Arty said.
Joe grinned and produced two glasses from his wardrobe. ‘I got these from Palmers’,’ he said. They drank while Joe chatted cheerfully about the mine and Coal Flat, and Arty only commented with grunts and brief questions. Arty found Joe’s company relaxing, and in a dim way he envied Joe his ease. He kept wondering if there was some secret the Maoris had. Joe seemed to be able to enjoy being alive, not just the better moments of life. His nerves were easy, almost lazy. Arty thought he was an easygoing chap, but alongside Joe he seemed to be a tense bundle of worries.
As far as Arty knew Joe came from Arahura farther south, on the
coast. There had been a paa at Greymouth, twenty miles north, in
the old days. But when they sold the land, the Maoris shifted to
this town of unpainted wooden houses on one of the pieces of land
reserved for them, and drew rents from their reserve at Greymouth.
Joe had worked there on the gold dredge, then he had come to the
‘By crikey, Arty,’ Joe said. ‘It’s not often the Maori bothers to gave up. It’s a hard job for me all right. But I got to get enough for a house. Then we’ll go up to my home.’
‘I thought you lived at Arahura,’ Arty said.
‘No. I’m from the North Island,’ Joe said. ‘Ohinemutu, at Rotorua. I’m an Arawa. I came down with my mates to see the sights. And then I met Kahu. My mates have gone back home. I get homesick now and again. Arahura’s not the same.’ He pronounced it differently from Arty. ‘We live better up home.’
At last Joe asked Arty what he had been wondering since he came in.
‘You look worried, Arty,’ he said. ‘You don’t often come to see me, oh?’ He said this with such simplicity that it didn’t offend Arty, as it would if one of his mates had said it. ‘This is the first time, Arty. Why did you come?’
Arty couldn’t answer directly. ‘You know the Palmers, Joe?’
‘They keep the pub,’ Joe said.
‘They’re Maoris. What do you reckon about them?’
‘Ah, no,’ Joe grinned gently. ‘They’re not Maoris, Arty. Old
Mum, she got Maori blood in her all right, maybe quarter-caste.
They’re paakehaa, Arty. She married a paakehaa. They live like
white people. I bet they can’t even talk Maori.’
Joe’s easy face looked mildly scornful. ‘They’re proud, Arty, too proud to be like the Maori. They got money in the bank. Show me the Maori who’s got a lot o’ money in the bank, eh? Not in the South Island anyway. No Maori’s got a hotel of his own, eh?’
Arty kept watching Joe as he learned over from the chair, his arms on his knees; with his shining black wavy hair, his relaxed and lively good-looking face, his ready grin, his eyes that did not mask his feelings, he was so much more alive than Arty, and without being aware of it. Alongside Joe Arty felt self-conscious and habitually defensive, a man who was always posing before his mates. But as Joe talked he could feel himself relaxing slightly.
Joe’s eyes looked hurt suddenly. ‘One day I went in Palmers’,’ he
said. ‘There’s no one else in there. Only Mum behind the bar. She
said to me, “Come on Joe, we’ll have a tangi together.” Then she said
something from a haka. She got it all wrong. She was insulting me!’
‘What’s wrong with that?’ Arty said. ‘She was letting you know she’s got some Maori too.’ He said this out of curiosity, because he wasn’t in any mood to defend Mrs Palmer.
‘She’s only part Maori. I’m all Maori,’ Joe said. ‘She was reminding me.’
‘How?’ Arty said. ‘What’s wrong with being a Maori?’ He remembered his father’s words now and felt foolish. He wished he hadn’t asked the question.
‘Don’t you think I’m ashamed of it! Oh no! I’m a full Maori and
proud, too. You don’t understand what I say. Old Mum she meant
that I’m still a savage, that’s what she meant. Just quietly, eh?
Haka and tangi.’
‘But you do have tangis when someone dies. In the North
Island, ‘specially.’
‘You don’t understand what I mean, Arty. Haka and tangi;
Haka that’s what we do when we welcome someone who visits us.
Tangi we have when someone dies. A tangi isn’t celebrating. It’s
being sorry. You don’t understand. I’m not ashamed. We still do
those things up there, Arty. We’re proud of them. Down here …
my girl couldn’t even speak Maori till she met me. I’m teaching her.
It’s not what old Mum said, it’s the way she said it. What she
meant was she’s got past all that sort of thing. She’s a bloody
paakehaa now. She catches me when there’s no one to see, so she
steps down to my level, just for a minute. That’s what she meant.’
‘You’re too thin-skinned, that’s all,’ Arty said, and Joe forgot about it. He grinned. But Arty brought him back to the subject.
‘What do you think of Flora?’ he said, resenting having to mention her name.
‘Well, you take Flora as a white girl, she’s a very nice girl, I think,’ Joe said. ‘She’s always very friendly to me, at a dance if I go to Stillwater. But usually I go home to Arahura to the dance. She doesn’t talk down to me, just that little bit, like old Mum. She talks friendly, only she keeps her distance. She’s not a warm-hearted girl.’
‘She just turned me down,’ Arty said, looking at the wall away from Joe.
‘What’s that?’ Joe said, grinning as if he wasn’t sure if Arty had made a joke.
‘I wanted her to go out with me,’ Arty said. ‘She wouldn’t.’ It humiliated him to have to tell this to anyone. Yet if he’d told anyone but Joe he never would have felt safe that it wouldn’t be blabbed around the town.
Joe looked steadily at Arty, his lips open in sympathy. ‘She’s been listening to her mother, I think, Arty.’
‘She said we’d been brought up different. Our ways were different. She wanted someone with more money, I s’pose,’ Arty said bitterly. ‘The bloody Nicholsons aren’t good enough for the Palmers.’
‘You’re only a common old miner,’ Joe said gently. ‘I’m only a common old Maori, eh? We’re both common. We got that in common, eh? Yes, the Palmers are a proud family. Not Flora, I didn’t think. I thought Flora was better. That other girl too—what’s her name? Doris. Doris—she married Frank Lindsay at the mine. Yes, I thought Flora would be better. That’s a pity. She’s got ambitious like her mother.’
‘It won’t worry me,’ Arty said. ‘There’s plenty more fish in the sea.’
‘You’re sorry now, Arty. But tomorrow maybe, you’ll be a little better. Then the next day. In a week you’ll be happy again. Ah, Arty, you want the Maori girl to make you happy. She doesn’t think about money and what’s your job and are you good enough, as long as she knows you love her and you can keep her and the babies.’ Joe’s mouth opened wide in a smile, thinking of his own girl-friend. Then his expression changed to one of tender curiosity. ‘Flora hurt you, Arty. You got no one to tell. So you come to see me, eh?’
Arty nodded. ‘Yeah,’ he said reluctantly.
Joe beamed and leaped from his chair. ‘Then we’ll get drunk properly!’ he said. ‘You and me. We’ll forget our troubles.’ He got out more bottles of beer and filled the glasses for, already, the sixth time. From under the bed he produced a guitar and he began to strum and sing lazily and pleasantly, while Arty listened. The songs were mostly current American song hits, yet he gave them a peculiar lilt that made them seem more human.
‘This one was composed by a woman from the East Coast,’ Joe
said. It was Arohaina mai. Arty bawled the English words but he
only got as far as, ‘Love walked right in …’ because he didn’t
know the rest.
After a while Arty said, ‘Joe, when are you going whitebaiting?’
‘In August. Then I don’t come back to Coal Flat.’
‘I’ll go with you,’ Arty said impulsively. ‘There you go! I’ll go with you and we’ll go halves in everything!’
Joe beamed agreement and sang again. Now Arty joined in the singing, belatedly because he knew his coarse voice would be out of tune, but irresistibly because they were partners and were going whitebaiting together.
The noise of drunken singing brought chaps from the other huts
When Miss Dane applied for the position at Coal Flat she
had no idea where it was: ‘Grade V. Roll 162’ was all the
information the Education Gazette gave her. She hunted up an atlas
printed in England, but Coal Flat wasn’t marked. Finally she went
into the kitchen and looked at the A.M.P. calendar on the wall, and
there it was, a little circle on the West Coast, eighteen miles from
the circle marked Greymouth. She didn’t know what people did in
this town, but she had vague ideas of a ‘wild and woolly West
Coast’; she knew it rained hard there, that there was saw-milling,
that there had been a violent history of gold-rushes and canvas-towns and, she seemed to have read somewhere, remnants of the
Kelly gang and coach robberies in the nineteenth century. But she
was pleased she did not know too much about it: the prospect of a
leap in the dark was vaguely thrilling, it revived the expectations,
since disappointed, she had felt when she was preparing as a girl to
leave home for training college in Auckland. She needed a break;
she was becoming quite a stick-in-the-mud, she thought. For three
years she had been headmistress of this two-teacher school in
Taranaki, with a class of stolid and healthy farmers’ children and a
small proportion of Maoris, of whom she complained but who really
made her school life more interesting, since every day brought a
crop of episodes which, with the sense of humour for which she
imagined herself commended among the local people, she could
relate at the tea-table every night. The time Dickie wouldn’t eat the
banana she gave him because he thought it was poisonous; Henare’s
morning talk about the fight his parents had had the night before.
They helped to fill a hunger in her life: other people were doing the
things that fascinated her, yet she could still, as a member of the
Women’s Institute and a regular attendant at the Presbyterian
Church, look down on them. But she felt that the slow even
rhythms of life on a Taranaki dairy farm were enticing her into a
Gazette arrived she studied it, feeling guilty because the school got only one copy and Miss James should have
been applying for a job for the next year too. She put in for two
districts that appealed to her and missed. When the Coal Flat
position was advertised for a second time she applied immediately;
it was only after she had posted her application that she looked to
see where it was. She didn’t say anything about it to the O’Reillys
because she didn’t want people to be greeting her with, ‘I hear
you’re leaving us soon,’ at least not until she was sure she had been
accepted for the position: if it was known that she was trying to
leave but couldn’t find another job, people would automatically
think she couldn’t be a good teacher. Since the job had been advertised previously, she was reasonably sure of getting it and she was
eager to know more of Coal Flat, but she made no inquiries, apart
from locating the circle on the map, preferring to feel that she was
heading for strange country with the ghost of the spirit of the
pioneers, to a new life with unguessed prospects, perhaps even the
chance of ending her spinsterhood. Then—though she wouldn’t
allow herself any conceit as she called it, any complacency about her
popularity—there was the inevitable ritual of parting: the presents
from the children, the farewell at the institute, the church, the
school. It would all add up to one of those solid and memorable
emotional crests in which her life had been lacking.
And it did. The letter from the Canterbury Education Board
came; she guessed success before she opened it, she dropped her
done for did, the parson’s puns, Mr O’Reilly having to take
out his dentures to remove them from a treacle gem. (‘That was one
of Mrs Connor’s—she can’t bake,’ the whispers circulated.) Then
Miss Dane would slowly and deliberately unwrap the present and
lay down the wrapping paper and open the box and display the gift
while everyone gasped with pleasure though they had known what
had been inside the parcel, and Miss Dane would play at being
overwhelmed. It became so much of a habit after five times that she
felt hypocritical and wondered if she was becoming a cynic. Certainly at the end of her last week she was worn out. Then there was
her packing, and the records she had to wind up at the school, her
conscientious instructions to Miss James and notes for her successor. The new teacher was to stay at O’Reillys’ (the McPhersons had
tried to get her even at the risk of being thought greedy trying to
board both teachers, but rather to the disappointment of the district, it was rumoured she was a Catholic, and O’Reillys’ was the
only place for her) and local gossip was concerned with her now—Miss Dane was to do a quiet fade-out. Fortunately there was to be
no final leave-taking at the train because she was going by car,
calling first at New Plymouth to see her mother, then driving to
Wellington and shipping and railing the car to Greymouth. When
she had stowed all her cases into the boot and the back seat of her
Morris Eight she was genuinely overwhelmed and kissed Mrs O.
and they both cried, and Mr and the eldest son stood there silently
immune to, but approving, tears in womenfolk, and shook hands
When she got out of the train at Stillwater she had still hardly
recovered from her emotion on emerging from the Otira tunnel and
seeing mountains and bush: she couldn’t imagine country more
wild and she was surprised to find she was the only passenger in the
carriage who seemed to be affected. They took it so casually, yet she
couldn’t lay the fear that she had committed herself to two years in
a wilderness. She still felt a stranger in an unknown country when
she stood waiting where the railway porter had directed her, at the
side of the road, for the bus. When it came she struggled aboard
with the one case she had taken from the car in Wellington, and
found that the bus was full except for a side seat at the back. Everyone stared at her and she wondered: ‘Do they belong to Coal Flat?
Do they know I’m the new teacher?’ A young man rose and said,
‘Here,’ and took her case and stowed it on the rack. She was grateful
but wordless that he hadn’t asked her permission first. She sat
down, troubled a little by the tobacco smoke in this back part of the
bus. There was a lot of noise it seemed. People were talking loudly
across the seats and someone up front was exchanging cheeky remarks with someone in the back. ‘Wild West,’ she thought indulgently; and studied the people in the back seat. There was the dark
young man who had helped her with her case. ‘The strong silent
type’ she thought: it was part of her bright sense of humour to have
a label ready-made for every person or incident: she always liked to
know what attitude to take to anything. He sat smoking, not saying
anything, with a fugitive look of disdain, an animal masculine pride
‘Happy?’ she said involuntarily,
The young man studied her for a second with the facial equivalent of a shrug, ‘You don’t belong to the Coast,’ he said.
‘No,’ she said, shyly warming up to the prospect of introducing herself. ‘It’s my first visit.’
Holidays?’
‘Well no, not exactly’—she was recovering her familiar archness. ‘I’ve come here to work. I’m the new infant mistress at Coal Flat.’
‘Oh, a schoolteacher,’ he said with just a touch of indulgence.
People looked at her and stared and looked away without much comment. She was disappointed. When she was travelling for the first time to Roko, she had quietly mentioned to the woman next to her who she was; and then the woman self-effacingly turned round and whispered to the people behind her, and the whisper went guiltily round the bus, and she sat pretending not to hear it but glad to be the target of stolen stares. She began to doubt all she’d heard of West Coast hospitality.
‘You’ll like the Coast,’ the young man said. ‘Everybody does. Can’t keep away from it myself.’
This was better. ‘Oh, I always try anything once,’ she said with what she thought was the spirit of the pioneers; it usually impressed people.
‘You’ll like the Flat,’ he said. ‘It’s the nicest town I know.’
There was something in his bearing that fascinated her, a pagan independence; his eyes looking at her and frankly taking her in, recognized no don’t-trespass notices. She was used to knowing deep down that she was a woman and therefore desirable to a man, and she was used to being treated by men with politeness and distance. Since training college she had never known any man beyond exchanges that could be safely overheard in a train; this man cheated, she felt; he started where others left off, he established direct contact with people when he spoke. She felt awkward and shy, and was relieved when his eyes contracted out of the meeting, when he lit a cigarette and with sensuous thoughtfulness blew smoke-rings—or tried to, she thought, because the air wasn’t still enough.
The drunkard had fallen asleep and was breathing heavily. People seemed to have forgotten him. She turned awkwardly and looked out of the window; on one side of the road, bush and occasional small sawmills with fires of waste timber and piles of sawdust, on the other the railway line and the swampy skirts of the river. English willows and bulrushes and little pools with flax-clumps and stands of tall stark kahikatea and skinny young silver-pine. ‘There’s the Flat,’ the young man said, and she looked where he pointed, thinking, ‘It’s rude to point,’ and saw in the shadow of a mountain range a forlorn cluster of roofs and a halo of chimney-smoke perched on a terrace. ‘Flat?’ she thought, ‘I thought it would be a river-flat. That’s a terrace.’ They passed a gold dredge in a side-valley, sitting behind its tailings. Eventually they crossed a wooden bridge across a wide riverbed skirted with willows and passed through old tailings overgrown with blackberry and red with lichen. The road began to climb and wind and on one side she looked straight down into beech forest, and then the bus came out to the main road of Coal Flat, the cemetery first, then a long double row of wooden houses irregularly spaced, half of them without paint, with grey lichen on the wood, standing in untended sections wild with long grass and blackberry. The bus seemed to have no regular stops, the driver knew where anyone wanted to get off and stopped there; ‘Rafferty rules,’ she thought.
‘Will there be anyone to meet me?’ she wondered. ‘Where am I to board? Not in one of those shacks, I hope.’ She had guessed by
‘Excuse me, can you tell me please where I might find board here?’
The miner stopped and first looked hard at her face so that she was embarrassed. ‘Well, lady, the best place’d be the pub.’
‘The pub?’ she said nervously.
‘How long are you here for?’
‘Two years’ (she almost added ‘D.V. and W.P.’ but didn’t). ‘I’m to start at the school, you see.’
‘Oh, a schoolteacher. Well you’d best go to Palmers’, lady. The teachers always stay there. It’s the best place in this town, even if I do say it meself. I used to own the place meself.’
‘Is there no private board available?’
‘Well, there’s no one can be bothered with boarders here. And, I don’t mean any offence, but, ask yourself, it’s a bit hard on the kids to have a schoolteacher staying with you. There’s only the pubs, and believe me, the other two aren’t much; they’re all right for the likes of me, for a miner if he’s not too fussy, but for anyone that’s had a middle-class upbringing like yourself’ (Miss Dane looked helpless: she couldn’t cope with these comments) ‘Palmers’ is the best. Give us your case. I’m going over to have a few pints.’
Nervously she followed him across the road and entered the
‘Thanks awfully,’ she said.
‘Well, I’ll have my pint. You’ll have one of my boys. Don’t whack him too hard.’ He opened the bar door and she darted a glance at the drinkers and looked away again without letting herself see anything clearly enough to remember. Waiting with her suitcase she tried again, watching them through the slide. There were several men leaning on the bar, silent and stolid, just staring ahead of them. When they saw her they stared at her without great curiosity and without embarrassment. She heard the barman say, ‘One without a collar, Jimmy?’
‘Your boy’s home again, Don?’
‘There’ll have to be a bit of a spree tonight.’
‘Drinks on the house?’
‘Not too many of them, Jimmy. You ought to know that yourself.’
‘No publican ever got fat giving away the drinks.’
The door opened and a man with a silver blaze of receding hair came forward. He was dressed in an old suit and he had a black singlet on beneath the suit. He wore spectacles.
‘Miss Dane, is it?’ She was surprised; by now she didn’t expect anyone to know of her. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘My name’s Henderson. I’m the secretary of the school committee. Mr Cairns told me you’d arrived.’
‘Mr Cairns?’
‘Yes, he carried your case over.’
It struck her as funny that that man should be called Mr; but what else could she have expected? In any case she was attracted to this man: his voice and his manner carried her back into the habits she was familiar with—politeness, courtesy, the social decencies. She was prepared to forgive his being a miner—after all, it was a mining town, someone had to dig the coal, and it showed the parents took an interest in their school—and she was ready to show herself eager to be accepted in Coal Flat.
‘Is this where I’m to stay, Mr Henderson?’
‘Yes, Miss Dane. I spoke to Mrs Palmer about it and it’s all fixed
‘Well—I didn’t know where I was to stay….’
‘Oh, anyone would have told you. You’d only have had to say you were the teacher and they’d have sent you to Palmers’.’
She couldn’t help wrinkling her nose at his beery breath; she tried to suspend breathing; but she was prepared to make allowances now; ‘After all he’s not drunk.’
‘Oh well, I’ve found my future home and castle, that’s the main thing.’ Mr Henderson might be the bridgehead of her introduction to the town; she found her mind working in terms of the Roko pattern. ‘She’s a bright and friendly wee soul,’ was what she imagined people would say of her: she was careful to give the right first impression.
‘Oh yes.’ Arthur Hendersen was all smiles. He was acting in an official capacity; meeting a teacher like this made him feel his life was justified since he held so important a place in the community. She wondered why he hadn’t met the bus. The truth was he felt ashamed to meet her in the clothes he wore to the mine; yet he was afraid that if he left the pit early to change into a better suit, and a collar and tie, the other miners would jeer at him. ‘You’ll like us up here. I suppose you’ve heard about West Coast hospitality. Well, we just take people as we find them and we expect them to do the same.’ His broad but fussy smiling face jerked up at her with lips primly closed in a brittle simper: a diplomatic point neatly and triumphantly driven home, the lips and eyes seemed to say. ‘We’ve a nice school, the new one, it’s only ten years old now. Still, you’ll see it all tomorrow. And you’ll meet Mr Heath in the morning too —he’s the headmaster. Then there’s young Rogers stays here too, he’ll be professional company for you, he’s a great favourite with the Palmers. It’s a pity Miss Johnson isn’t still here, but then she was only relieving till you came; you’ll have her room. Oh you’ll get to know them all, Miss Dane; in a week’s time you’ll feel as if you’ve known the place the years, that’s how friendly it is.’
Miss Dane was reassured by the avuncular manner and the gold-rimmed spectacles. She gathered courage: ‘Mr Henderson, I’m afraid I’m not very keen on a hotel atmosphere. I wondered rather if there weren’t any private homes that offered board….’
Arthur Henderson contorted his face into the overdone and piggish pout with which, in any public capacity, he met a challenge. ‘Well, that raises a difficult question, Miss Dane. Confidentially, I’ve always felt the same myself….’
‘Yes, it’s hardly the place for a teacher, Mr Henderson. It looks bad to the children.’
‘I agree. I agree, Miss Dane. But when you know this town as I know it, Miss Dane’—his voice was lowered and rhetorically conspiratorial; and Miss Dane’s misgivings returned—‘no one wants boarders here, Miss Dane. They can’t be bothered with them. They just can’t be bothered putting themselves out. And to tell you the God’s honest truth, there’s only one or two houses here that would be worthy of you. But if you stay here in the meantime, perhaps later on we might he able to arrange something. Here’s Mrs Palmer now. Hello Mrs Palmer. I was just telling Miss Dane she’d be very happy with you.’
‘Thank you, Mr Henderson,’ Mrs Palmer said with cold politeness, then warmly, ‘How are you Miss Dane?’ and grabbed her
shoulders and rocked her. Miss Dane would in Roko, have expected her to kiss her, but Mrs Palmer didn’t hold with women
kissing one another. ‘Excuse me leaving you so long, but I’m all
excited.’ She picked up the suitcase and skipped in a circle, one
arm up as in Highland dancing. ‘My boy’s come home,’ she said.
‘When you’re a mother you’ll know all about it, Miss Dane.’ She
tried to sing the words of a Tin Pan Alley tune ‘My Guy’s Come
Home’, but she never could manage riff rhythms or any jazz
rhythms—they bear for a way of feeling different from hers. She
called through the slide, ‘Hullo, Jimmy. Hullo, Jack. Mum’s going
on the ran-tan tonight, eh? My boy’s come home….Hullo, Mr
Herlihy; what? Yes, we’ll kill the fatted calf all right, nothing’s too
good for my boy….Excuse me, Miss Dane…. Damn cheek,’ she
muttered.
Miss Dane was overwhelmed; a dark powerful big-built woman
had borne down on her and grabbed her suitcase and given her a
warm welcome and talked to a barful of boozers all in one breath,
almost: surely there was some Maori in her too? ‘Did you get off
the bus, Miss Dane?…. Then you must have come up with Don.
Oh he’s a fine lad, Miss Dane; he’d be any mother’s joy and pride,
Oh, you’ll like the Coast, Miss Dane. We’re very friendly people.
Mind you, not everyone in Coal Flat is up to much; but you can go
out on that street and ask anyone about Palmers’ and they’d tell you
it’s the best you’d get in Coal Flat. Mind you, I’m not that way I
blow my own trumpet. But I just wanted to reassure you, like,
when you’ve come all this way, you know, and coming to a strange
town, you like to know what sort of a place you’re moving into.
But anyway you can stay here for the two years if you want to,
Miss Dane, or if you don’t like it, you can leave any time you like;
‘You’ve got a son teaching at the school, Mrs Palmer?’
‘Well, I’m not his mother but we treat him as one of the family. We’ve known him for years.’ Miss Dane felt a slight touch of jealousy: she saw a school full of teachers entrenched in the affection of the community while she went unnoticed. ‘I’ll see if he’s about. Flor! Flora!’
From the far and of the passage an attractive girl came—Miss Dane was sure there was Maori blood in the family. ‘Hullo, Miss Dane,’ she said with unaffected warmth and shook hands with the slightest and most natural-seeming suggestion of a curtsey.
‘Flor, where’s Paul?’
‘He’s out just now, Mum. I think he went to see old Mrs Seldom.’
‘Never mind. You’ll see him at dinner. Dinner’s at six o’clock. you’ll hear the gong.’
‘Did you have a nice trip, Miss Dane?’ Miss Dane was attracted to this girl. She didn’t bear down on one like her mother, she was unaffected, and yet, it was evident to Miss Dane, she had deliberately improved herself according to good models: her speech, her manner were faultless. ‘You go back and talk to Don, Mum,’ Flora said. ‘I’ll show Miss Dane her room.’
When she had unpacked and washed, Miss Dane found there was
still a half-hour before tea. She didn’t trust herself to walk round
the town. Instead she took out a writing-pad and began a long and
archly humorous letter to Mrs O’Reilly telling her of her first impressions of Coal Flat. She had written six pages without stopping
when the gong sounded, and she was as yet only with Mr Cairns—‘as Fate disclosed was his …’ nomenclature? No, she shouldn’t
show off her education to Mrs O.; that would be intellectual snobbery: ‘as Fate disclosed was his title.’ ‘Really, I should write a
novel,’ she thought.
Flora was right; Rogers was visiting Mrs Seldom.
At the post office the main road of Coal Flat right-angled towards the hills flanking the Paparoas and a quarter-mile farther on it entered the gully of Coal Creek. Across the creek was the mine-mouth, at the end of a bridge that carried perpetual races of boxes to spill their coal into the bins by the road. Here too was the miners’ bath-house and the mine office. The creek at this point had eaten deep into soft soapy-looking grey-blue limestone; its course at some spell centuries before had become entrenched, every twist recorded twenty feet below its banks; twenty feet of smooth cliff prettily softened with moss and drooping with long crisp dripping fronds of blechnum fern, which glistened in the sun, with black dead fronds rotting underneath. The valley, however, was wide enough to allow the road to follow it till it petered out at Roa on the hillside. Between the mine-mouth and the houses of Coal Flat, thirty feet below the road in a little clearing in the kaamahi and fuchsia and young bush by the bank of the creek, was Mrs Seldom’s little house, reached by a narrow steep path from side of the road.
Mrs Seldom had lived alone for ten years. Old Ned Seldom had
been a deputy in the mine, a man respected amongst the miners for
his fairness, honesty and his propensity for hard work, but in his
time an obstinate enemy of the union and of all socialist movements
which he saw as rationalizations of laziness: I.W.W., he would say,
stood for I won’t work. They had had two children, a boy and a girl.
Nora grew up a thin sharp girl who kept to herself; Jack grew up
with a hard head and a refusal to agree with anything his own mind
couldn’t admit. Jack was the occasion of the Seldom strike, and his
stubbornness in that affair, when he was one man against a whole
town of 800 people, became the cause of his parents: when he lost,
and the company, reluctant to lose him but more reluctant to lose
time and money, sacked him, his parents turned against the town:
It was a duty call that took Rogers to see Mrs Seldom. When be was a youth his mother had been in hospital; Mrs Seldom had been in the next bed with a diabetic ulcer. She had taken one of her strange warm likings to Mrs Rogers and she was interested in Rogers as the son of his mother. He had used to visit her when he had—been in Coal Flat before going into the army; he had often delivered messages for her or bought small requirements for her in his week-end visits to his home in Greymouth. He still felt a little strange at visiting her because the Flat was so divided by enmities and feuds (she disapproved of socialists and he was friendly with the doctor; the Palmers knew of her only by reputation, as a queer old recluse, and they thought it strange that he should know her because they were used to judging a man by the company he kept). Still he called on her occasionally and he knew she was glad to see hints that gave him pleasure, though he accused himself of weakness.
Her kitchen was plain and dark from being in the shadow of the
slope, with a square window not very big. The walls were hung
with cheap prints, a series of illustrations cot from the grocer’s
Christmas calendars: a girl nuzzling a horse; three kittens with a
ball of wool; a baby in a bath; a bush scene. There was an Wine and Tennis; Rogers had to keep rubbing his teeth with his
tongue to remove the mushy coating the biscuits left on them:
Mrs Seldom had dentures. They drank from big wide cups of thick
china at least forty years old. On the mantelpiece was a bottle of
ink, a steel pen and a pencil, a writing pad, a pair of scissors and a
collection of bills and receipts from the grocer and the baker stuck
in the crack between the mantelpiece and the wall.
‘So you’ve got that bastard in your class,’ Mrs Seldom was slowly saying. ‘He is. He’s a bastard and I’ll never know him as anything else. He’ll come to a had end that one; my Christ, he will.’
Both Ned and his wife were descended from families from Northern Ireland; though they had been born in Tasmania and came from there as a young couple to New Zealand. She still had some of the harsh nasal way of speaking; and she swore habitually after a forgotten manner, though, if her grandparents had been Presbyterian, she had no belief herself; she hadn’t been inside a church since she was married (the children were christened at home) and she had never asked herself did she believe in God. If ever she had, Jack in his youth had demonstrated time and again that the church was a money-making racket, that priests and parsons were drones in society; to shoot them all would be a mercy to the world. The Seldom family feared hypocrisy worse than any other sin.
‘He’s not a happy kid,’ Rogers said. ‘He’s had a rough bringing-up.’
‘And it serves him right then. Ned and I knew no good would come of it. I’ll never know him; not if I saw him walk in that door now, I wouldn’t know him. When I was at the grocer’s Mrs Porter said, “There’s Nora’s boy, Mrs Seldom.” I said, “Let me close my eyes then, for I never want to set eyes on him.” And I did. I shut my eyes. “Tell me when he’s gone, Mrs Porter,” I said, “for I’ll not open them till he’s out of the way.”—“You’re a damn determined woman,” she said. She didn’t like it. No, she didn’t like it. “My Jesus, I am,” I said. “My Jesus, I’m determined.”’
‘I wish I could help him.’
‘You’d be wasting your time. That you would. Wasting your time on a bastard.’
‘But he can’t help it, Mrs Seldom. It’s not his fault.’
‘He’s got to pay the price. It’s the way things go, Paul Rogers. If
‘Mrs Seldom, you know what I reckon? You should forget—forgive and forget?’
‘Forget? I’ll be in my grave before I forget, Paul Rogers. Yes, In my grave. Who could forget a disobedient daughter? Not any of the Seldoms, oh no, not any of the Seldoms. We’re a stubborn lot, and you should know it. Nora was stubborn too, she thought we’d get soft and give in. Oh no, Ned and I wouldn’t give in; no, not Ned and I. So she packed all her things, she was a determined gel, she wasn’t strong but she carried her tin trunk by herself and stood by this door. We didn’t look at her. “Are you going, Nora?” Ned said, “Yes, Dad,” she said. She called him Dad right up to the end. She was Ned’s favourite too. And Ned just turned his back and said, “We’ll remember you up till this minute but not after.” And he said, “When you go, your name goes too. We’ll never bring up your name in this house again while I’m alive.” Oh, she was disappointed, I could see it: she thought we might have got weak then and given in. Oh no, we wouldn’t have given in; no, not Ned and I. So she put her trunk on her shoulder and she climbed up the path. Jack was looking out the window, and he said, “I reckon I ought to give her a hand with the trunk,” and Ned forbade it. “Jack!” he said. Just like that. “Jack!” It’s the only time I ever heard Ned speak sharp to Jack.’
How many times had Rogers heard this before, yet each time its
cruel and dignified austerity struck him as if it was fresh. He knew
what would come next: Herlihy was waiting for her at the railway
station. ‘“Skulking at the train. What sort of a man is he,” Jack
Doolan
on their tongues meant an Irish Catholic. Nora they had never
mentioned while Ned was alive; Ned took the photos that were
taken of her as a girl, her bangle and her school books, and cast-off
clothes and Mrs Seldom herself never knew whether he had hidden
them or burnt them or buried them. Nora showed up at Ned’s
funeral at Karoro, and for the first time in six years Mrs Seldom
articulated her name: ‘You’re a bad gel, Nora Seldom,’ she called
from ten yards off, in a voice that awed the few people who came to
the funeral. ‘You were a good gel, and what are you now but a
Doolan priest’s housekeeper?’ Nora, fierce and proud as ever,
bitter in her pride that could maintain an honest emotion in the
stares of a curious crowd, stared back at her through tears. Her
mother, tall and flabby-stout, didn’t budge; her face, blue and
blotched from diabetes, was as proud as Nora’s. ‘Ah, you’re a sorry
gel now you’ve brought your father to an early grave.’
Since then, in her house and to the few people she spoke to outside—mostly elderly people, to whom she always maintained the attitudes congealed during the strike—she had talked a lot of Nora, recurring time and again to Nora’s departure, and to their own stubbornness in their vow. It seemed that what was left of her life would be filled by a continual repetition of that story. Rogers read it as a mark of relenting; with Ned gone, she wasn’t so sure, he thought; she was trying to reassure herself. So he had come to her, vaguely in the hope of helping her grandson, the ‘bastard’, Peter Herlihy.
It had been on the second day of school that Peter had joined Rogers’s class. Truman Heath ushered him in, a skulking suspicious boy of eight years in a khaki cotton sunhat, and a navy raincoat (though it was a fine day). ‘This laddie’s name is Herlihy,’ Heath said. ‘He’s from a convent. They say he’s for Standard one. You’d best make sure of his reading and his number and see if he’s good enough for this class. Well, son, we’ll just put you in here for the meantime, and perhaps later we’ll shift you.’ Heath gave him a fatherly pat on the shoulders and Peter Herlihy shrank at his touch. ‘Don’t be too soft with him, Mr Rogers,’ Heath said. ‘He should be used to discipline, coming from a convent.’
Rogers gave him a desk to sit in, and helped him take off his coat.
It had taken him several days to accept his new surroundings. On his third day at school he was trustful enough to take off his sunhat, and to leave his coat on a hook outside the room. But he avoided his classmates in play, and soon Rogers noticed that the other children, scenting his loneliness like leprosy, had made him game of gang attacks and jeers. Once Rogers looked up to see a timid underfed little girl crying, and under her seat was Peter, pinching her legs, trying to pull at her bloomers. He was trying himself out in the strange freedom he sensed in this classroom; it was plain he considered Rogers soft. Mrs Hansen would look out of the staffroom window at morning-tea. ‘They’re chasing young Herlihy,’ she said. ‘I hope they give it to him good and proper. Plenty of leather for him, Paul. He’s a nasty unhealthy brat. The parents are both mad anyway.’
‘How’s that boy’s reading?’ Heath said.
‘His reading is had. He repeats it from memory, but he can’t recognize the words. But his arithmetic is ahead of the rest of the class.’
‘Well, we’ll leave him where he is for the meantime. Try and concentrate on his reading.’
‘I’d put him back with the babies,’ Mrs Hansen had said, for the sake of disagreeing with Heath.
‘Oh, there’s no need for that as yet.’
Then on another day Rogers had found Peter Herlihy pulling a girl’s hair. He had a ruler in his hand at the time and he impulsively hit him twice on the legs. It was part of his theory that slapping in anger was healthy, but deliberate and measured punishment was harmful. Peter cried, but in submission; he understood that treatment and he now recognized Rogers as master. Later Rogers asked him why he had done it. ‘I like making girls cry,’ Peter said. ‘Girls are mad. They’re soft. I can make any girl cry.’
He was a test case for Rogers’s theories. ‘What he needs is love
‘Yes, I’ve still got my wedding dress,’ she was saying. ‘It’s been
packed away from the moths all these years and never used again.
‘What will happen to your house, Mrs Seldom?’
‘It all goes to Jack. Yes, everything’s for Jack. If I thought that anyone in Coal Flat would get anything of mine I’d put a match to it, that I would. Yes, when I felt my time coming I’d spread some kerosene and I’d rake the coal out of the fireplace on to the floor, and then I’d go outside and lie down on the track and die there. And I’d die happy enough.’
She sat heavy and musing, her face calm in its proud malevolence, under the grey hair combed habitually into a loose and straggly bun. Diabetes had left her thinner, and except for a grotesquely paunchy belly, she was gaunt, her shoulders bent a little and supporting her long frock like a coat hanger; but when she stood the frock and apron hanging from her paunch gave an impression of stoutness and firmness. She switched the conversation. ‘How long are you here for then?’
‘I don’t know. Two or three years I think.’
‘Time enough to get sick of Coal Flat. Well, come and see me often, Paul Rogers, for I’ll always be glad to see the son of Nellie Rogers. Yes, I saw her die in the hospital—the nurses killed her and that’s God’s truth. Many’s the time I’ve seen them neglect her because she was too patient to complain. Yes, she was far too patient. Not me, I’d ha’ complained. Come another time. There’s not many in Coal Flat I’ll give a cup of tea to, but a son of Nellie Rogers can come any time he wants. Yes, any time you want.’
He climbed the zigzag track to the road and walked into Doris and Frank Lindsay. They lived across the creek near the mine-mouth, where there was a row of houses with their back to the hill, fronted by a tramline and stacks of silver-pine logs to be used as props in the mine.
‘What, do you know Ma Seldom?’ Frank asked.
‘Yes, I’ve known her for years. She was in hospital with Mum.’
‘She’s a funny old cuss, she is. I suppose she’s been telling you about Jack’s strike.’ And then Rogers realized that this was the first time he had visited her that she hadn’t talked about the strike, the first time she had talked only about Nora.
‘We’re going up to see Mum and Dad,’ Doris said. ‘Donnie came up to say Don’s home.’
‘Don is?’
‘Yes, he came on the five o’clock bus. And a new teacher too.’
‘He has an easy time, he does,’ Frank said.
‘Well, I’ll be glad to see him anyway,’ Doris said.
‘Well, he never settles anywhere. Off to Christchurch, got a good job, settled down, everything’s fine. Then the next thing you know he’s back again.’
‘It’s all very well for you to talk,’ Doris said. ‘You’re forgetting Don went to the war.’
‘I’m not forgetting, Doris. But the war’s been over nearly two years now. He’s had time enough to find his feet now, surely to Christ.’
‘Well, you’ve got to make allowances, Frank. And there’s not everything he can do with that arm of his.’
‘I know. I know. But it doesn’t stop him bending his elbow. Every time I see him he’s half-pissed.’
‘Well I don’t get up to see them much, and you’re not going to object if I go up when he’s home.’
‘I’m not objecting.’
‘I’ve never met Don,’ Rogers said. ‘I’ve seen his photo.’ He looked forward to meeting that frank-faced soldier who grinned easily from the mantelpiece in Palmers’ kitchen.
‘Well, that’s an excuse to get hooped up tonight.’ Doris was a vivacious girl; more like her father than her mother, she deliberately chose the bright side of things. Getting ‘hooped up’ for her didn’t mean getting drunk—she had at the most herself got a little tipsy and always with the family: it meant a family reunion.
‘Hooped up,’ Frank said. ‘There’ll be plenty of booze there without looking for it. You’ll get drunk enough without trying. I’ve got to start work at eight.’
‘Oh, Frank, don’t be such a wet blanket. This is an occasion.’
‘That’s all we ever do when we go up there. Drink booze and pay for it.’
‘Well they can’t give it away.’
‘No, but it’s not much of a set-up when every time you visit your relations it costs you.’
‘Well, we don’t have to drink.’
‘We’ll have to tonight.’
‘Are you just getting back for tea, Paul?’
‘I’ve had it. I had it at Mrs Seldom’s.’
‘Christ! You had tea at Ma Seldom’s. What did she give you?’ Frank asked.
‘I just had a cup of tea and biscuits. I wasn’t hungry.’
‘Well, I’ll be buggered. I’ve lived here myself for thirty years and I’ve never even set foot in her house.’
‘You’ll be ready to start drinking, then Paul.’
‘Well, not just yet. I want to call on the doctor first.’
‘The doctor? Is there anything wrong?’
‘He’s got boozer’s guts, that’s what it is,’ Frank said. ‘Too much of Palmers’ beer. Your sins’ll always find you out.’
‘No, I’ve got to call on him about one of the kids.’
‘That’s the parents’ worry, not yours,’ Doris said.
‘Oh, I just want to make some inquiries.’
‘What, playing the detective now,’ Frank said. ‘Of all the jobs a schoolmaster has to do. You’ll have your homework too when you get back. You’ll have to read up your lessons for tomorrow, so you’ll be a couple of pages ahead of the kids.’
‘He’ll be doing his homework in the bar tonight,’ Doris said.
‘I’ll see you in an hour or so.’
The doctor lived in the second best house in Coal Flat—the best
was the mine manager’s—a house twenty years old, with one bay
window in the corner of the sitting-room, and an octagonal pyramid
of corrugated iron above it: there was a laurel hedge and a lawn.
The house was the property of the Mines Department: it used to
belong to the company before the mine was nationalized: he was the
mine doctor. He and his wife had come to Coal Flat about ten years
before: before that they had been twenty years in the Far East—Singapore, Shanghai and Kobe. They left Japan when they saw the
way policy was moving before the war, and the doctor, a communist,
was mildly interested in the social-democratic legislation of the new
Labour Government in New Zealand. (They had not been back to
Australia since the time they left it thirty years before.) They had
The doctor and his wife had just finished dinner when he
arrived. Mrs Alexander was sitting with her tall thin and round
shoulders hunched, alert as a gibbon monkey, over a half-pound of
tobacco, rolling a canister full of cigarettes, her supply for the next
twenty-four hours. She was red-headed, with her hair cut rather
short; and she spoke with a slightly self-conscious and patronizing
gusto, rolling her phrases like wine on a connoisseur’s tongue.
Some of the local women, suspicious of airs and ‘palaver’ as they
called it, resented her manner, and she in turn felt ill at ease with
workers’ wives and tried to bridge the distance by making her
manner acceptable with an increase of the very approach, that
whimsical approach that they resented. At first her neighbours
smirked a little over their fences to see her struggling on Monday
Jimmy Cairns was there and Jock McEwan, the secretary of the Miners’ Union, a wiry man with red hair greying at the edges and a sharp intent Glasgow expression on his face. Ben Nicholson was there too. There was a small tough Canadian from a co-operative mine with his quiet wife, and two men from the dredge. The doctor’s wife sat down again to roll cigarettes and as Rogers entered the doctor turned off a radio which had been loud with Beethoven to the embarrassment of all except the Canadian’s wife.
Every Monday this group met, with a few other casual comers, usually to talk on a set theme, led by the doctor. There was a local branch of the Communist Party in the town, but though Rogers had been told he only had to ask and he could sit in on a meeting, he had no desire to. This group wasn’t a communist group, nor did it have any connection with the trade unions; it was a loose discussion group, and anyone who was interested could come.
They were just settling down to start when a big stout man with no hat and short fair hair came in. He was about forty and he wore sports clothes. He had the look of a representative footballer gone to fat. ‘I couldn’t make myself heard for that din,’ he said. Some of them knew him already, but Rogers didn’t.
The doctor introduced him as Alan McKenzie down from Auckland. McKenzie squeezed Rogers’s hand painfully but said nothing, just looked at his face, measuring him up. It made Rogers fell uneasy. He remembered hearing that there was an Auckland communist doing the rounds of the local branches, a member of the national committee; he’d stood as parliamentary candidate for an Auckland electorate the year before. Rogers offered him a cigarette but McKenzie shook his head and pulled out the makings in a way that seemed to suggest that tailor-mades were a stigma of middle-class ideology.
When he was settled the doctor began to talk. Tonight he reviewed the position of unionism in
‘Ay,’ Jock McEwan said. He had never forgotten his boyhood in
the Gorbals playing in squalid side-streets closed to traffic after
four o’clock because there was nowhere else for him, or his own
part in the
‘The lads are getting soft on it,’ Jimmy Cairns said. ‘They are getting so that they’re only interested in races and beer.’
‘Bought,’ Mrs Alexander said, ‘bought with beer-money,’ and relished the phrase.
‘I can remember when I was a lad,’ Jock McEwan said. ‘We studied in the evenings. We read history and economics in the Mechanics’ Institute and the public libraries; we wanted to make something of ourselves. All the modern generation wants is to play billiards and fill their guts with bloody poor beer. And go to the pictures.’
‘There’s a job for you,’ Jimmy Cains said. ‘Evening classes for the lads who’ve left school.’
‘You could do it, you know,’ the doctor said.
‘Well, that’s the job of the Union,’ Rogers said, hedging. The request was unexpected and it didn’t attract him at all.
‘We don’t get much time to discuss theory at union meetings,’ Ben Nicholson said. ‘Some classes in socialist theory would helps.’
‘Well I can’t say I’m keen,’ Rogers said. ‘I don’t mind working overtime but… ‘He realized his choice of phrase was unfortunate, as if he was trying to be slick with union language.
‘Why not?’ Jock McEwan said.
Rogers was conscious of the doctor’s stare, cold but not unfriendly, and his wife’s reassuring, slightly supercilious smile. He was even more conscious of McKenzie staring at him calmly like a detective waiting for an admission of guilt. The doctor and McKenzie between them made him feel that disagreement was, in some undefined way, a kind of betrayal.
‘Mr Rogers won’t scab on the other teachers,’ she said, but Rogers didn’t feel helped.
‘I’m not well up on theory,’ he said, ‘though I could read some more. But seriously, do you think they’d want it? Would they come along? Would anyone in this country want anything that threatens to improve him?’ He was proud of his last question: he told himself he was being realistic, but he was conscious of protesting too much.
‘It’s for our own good,’ Jock McEwan said, his puritan Scots
‘No one’s making anyone come,’ the doctor said. ‘If you’re a bit rusty on the theory I could lend you the right books.’
‘I’d do it myself,’ Jock said. ‘Only teaching is your line. It should be easy for you.’
‘He’s right though,’ Jimmy Cairns said. ‘Think of that young brother of mine. The only way to drag him to anything educational would be to put a woman at the end of it.’
Rogers was relieved to find support.
‘It depends on what subjects you take,’ the doctor said. ‘Obviously no one would come to a class on mathematics. But politics and economics concerns their lives.’
‘They wouldn’t listen,’ Jimmy said. ‘I wouldn’t have myself at their age.’
‘Well, we did in Glasgow,’ Jock said. ‘We read it up ourselves without anyone teaching us.’
The Canadian spoke for the first time: ‘You won’t do any good till they realize the need for it. These kids don’t know that the good times of the present are the result of our struggle, not only in this country—and our fathers fought before we did. You can’t make them interested till they wake up.’
‘They’ve certainly got to realize the need for it,’ Ben Nicholson said. ‘I’m sure my own boy doesn’t.’
‘I agree,’ Mrs Alexander said. ‘I think you’re putting the cart before the horse. Talking about the history of struggle, or the theory of Marxism won’t interest the younger generation till they see the need to know of it. We’re at hand to help them.’
‘We’ve got to help them see the need of it,’ her husband said, ‘so that they know where to come for it.’
‘Well, I can’t really see what I’m to do,’ Rogers said.
‘Something has to be done about these lads,’ Jock McEwan said. ‘At the union meetings they can’t get out quick enough. They raise their hands and say Aye and never give a thought to the business. Us old-timers won’t be in the mine for ever, and at the rate they’re going, they’d cave in at the first sign of trouble.’
‘You won’t be gone before the next attack on union rights,’ the doctor said.
‘But seriously,’ Rogers said. ‘Do you expect trouble?’
‘Not immediately,’ the doctor said. ‘But we have to keep ourselves in fighting trim in case it arrives.’
‘You see,’ Rogers went on, gaining confidence. ‘I often think
we’ve arrived at a state of socialism which, well, isn’t bad. The
‘Ay, I’ve heard all that before,’ Jock McEwan said.
‘You don’t realize,’ the Canadian said, ‘that at the first signs of hard times the worker’s wage is the first casualty.’
‘Well….’
‘The economic structure is still built on the profit motive,’ the doctor said. ‘The workers are getting a better rake-off just now, that’s all.’
‘Well, I mean, what’s wrong with that?’ Rogers said, feeling a little clever and worldly-wise. ‘Let them try to make money, we’ll tax them and direct it back to the men who produced their profit.’
‘It’s immoral,’ the Canadian’s wife said.
‘What is moral in politics?’ Rogers asked. In argument like this he was aware how unsystematic and sentimental his political attitudes were, how little he knew.
‘That’s not a socialist outlook,’ she replied.
‘It’s all very well for you,’ Jock McEwan said. ‘You don’t know the mess or the misery the capitalists have made.’
‘I do,’ Rogers said. ‘I’ve read about the oranges burnt in California, the coffee dumped in the sea, to keep prices up….’
‘You’ve read. You’ve never worked,’ McEwan said. ‘You’ve had a collar-and-tie job all your life. You’ve never been out of school, except when you were in the army. You haven’t experienced it. You’re an arm-chair socialist.’
‘I come from a working-class home,’ Rogers said.
‘I’d rather keep the argument off the personal level,’ the doctor said, ‘We do better to meet these arguments with better arguments.’
‘Seconded,’ his wife said, who often tweaked her own conscience with the thought that she was a parlour socialist.
‘Have you any comments, Alan?’ the doctor said. But McKenzie, rolling another smoke, shook his head slightly, leaving them to arrive at the right conclusion in their own way.
‘Your argument leads to sleep,’ the doctor said. ‘It’s a natural rationalization of the laziness of the welfare state. As soon as you fall asleep, the Tories see their chance, and it’s good-bye to all your security and Fabian evolutionary socialism. You’ll live to see it.’
‘Bread and circuses,’ his wife said, ‘is the Labour programme.’
‘Well there’s nothing wrong with bread, is there?’ Rogers said.
‘But I still think that what is needed is something more than just
unionism. I’ll agree with you the country’s going to sleep.
‘What other activities are you thinking of?’ the doctor asked.
‘I don’t know—I haven’t thought about it before. But let the people themselves work that out.’
‘What would be the purpose of it?’
‘Well, it would be something better than just thinking about wage increases and conditions on the job.’
‘That is bread,’ the doctor said.
‘As I see it,’ Ben Nicholson said, ‘it would take up a let of time and effort that could be used for other things.’
‘More important things,’ Jock McEwan said.
‘Surely culture’s important,’ the Canadian woman said, ‘otherwise you’ll just be having the bread without even any circuses.’
‘We’ve got more important things to think about than culture,’ Archie Patterson from the dredge said.
‘But what’s all the struggle for if it’s not to produce a better life,’
she persisted. ‘Wage increases are not an end in themselves.’
‘I agree,’ said Mrs Alexander.
McKenzie looked at his watch and sat forward on the sofa. ‘I’ll have to go in twenty minutes, so I’ll say something now.’ Mrs Alexander got up to get the supper and the Canadian woman followed her.
What I’ve heard tonight I would have expected to hear in bourgeois circles but not in a socialist discussion group in a West Coast
mining town.’ He spoke steadily and patiently, with the air of putting them right, though with no credit to himself. ‘Comrade
Alexander is right.’ The word, so foreign to English usage, made
Rogers sit up, and as McKenzie continued, he had the odd impression that he wasn’t listening to a real communist but to a student
parody of one. ‘The capitalist class won’t give up without a struggle,
and anyone who forgets that this is A capitalist society is fooling
himself and fooling the working man, he’s deserting the class
struggle, and that makes him an enemy of the working class. It is
incorrect to think that you can have any kind of socialism that does
‘Now on the second point Comrade McEwan’s point of view is
the correct one. At present and until such time—in the not very
distant future—when the working masses of New Zealand take over
control of this country’s resources, at the present time the only
justifiable activity is class struggle. On that alone every effort must
be expended. Culture and community centres and play-acting and
all the rest of it are all very well, but not till after victory. The
struggle now, culture later. Any sort of community centre at the
present time would fulfil the role of a palliative; it would not solve
the problems of the workers of Coal Flat. Besides this it would
divert their effort and their attention and their vigilance from the
one activity that is true self-help, true community activity, truly from
the people—not from headquarters or anywhere else—but truly of
the people and for the people and that is the struggle. It seems to
me that the second lesson to be learnt from this evening’s discussion, comrades, is that there must be A greater and A more correct
understanding of the great truths of Marxism-Leninism-Stalinism.
It seems to me that this group should consider ordering theoretical
pamphlets, and that it should make A determined effort to seriously
study and to fully understand the theory of socialism, by means of
those pamphlets and by means of the party press.’
When he stopped, with the expression of one who has made a good job of something that needed to be done, no one spoke for a minute. ‘Are there any questions, comrades?’
Rogers said, ‘Well, I’m not taking you up on any of that. But you still haven’t answered the question about evening classes.’
McKenzie fixed his patient, firm-jawed stare on him. ‘Classes in
socialist theory—true socialist theory—the science of Marxism-Leninism-Stalinism—would be a useful thing. Study groups studying the party press and its correct interpretation of current events.’
He switched off his meeting-hall manner and said directly to Rogers,
‘But don’t worry, comrade. We’ll look after that. And when they
start, you ought to go along to them—you’ll learn something to
your advantage.’ He finished on a smug slight smile and in the tone
of a youth leader or enlightened Borstal warder who speaks to a
delinquent bluntly but kindly from a sense of impregnable power
and rightness.
Mrs Alexander came in with the supper, and McKenzie turned to Jock McEwan and Archie Patterson. When it was time to go, Archie took him to Greymouth in the doctor’s car. Before he left he said to Rogers: ‘When the barricades are up, comrade, you’ll have to be on one side or the other. You can’t sit on them or you might get shot.’
Jimmy Cairns said to Rogers: ‘You’ve a lot to learn, my lad. You’re not hard enough. Too much high-flown theory.’
Jock McEwan said: ‘When I think of the families in the Gorbals, not knowing from day to day where the rent was coming from and the filthy closes at the back of the tenements, people going hungry, not clothed properly. In this country, you’ve got no idea of those conditions.’
‘Theory. What about his?’
‘Oh, that’s just Alan McKenzie,’ Jimmy said. ‘They get like that.’ ‘He’s just a steam-roller. How can you stand them?’
‘Oh, you read the theory, though.’ Jimmy said. ‘Not that I claim to understand it all. It’s got to be there and they always stand by you when there’s a dispute on. That’s why we stick to them.’
‘But his theory’s unreal to me. It doesn’t work in with reality at all. It’s like trying to force a track through the bush with a bulldozer.’
The doctor began to argue and suddenly Rogers felt tired. There
was so much to challenge, he didn’t know where to start when it
came to argument, he knew very little about politics. So he didn’t
argue further. He wondered if the doctor was right to say his attitude was a rationalization of sleep. Because that was what he wanted,
what this country seemed to induce, a mental sleep. Midday beer
snoring from the lungs, and the buzz of a bluebottle crashing
periodically against a window-pane. Noonday sun on the eyelids,
the sound of a far-off lawn-mower in the car. Saying, ‘Yes, that’s
not a bad idea. Have to think it over,’ saving it up to be looked into
Her jab reminded him of what he hoped to find out from the doctor. That was one thing that would keep him alive, his interest in Peter Herlihy’s mental sickness. The doctor invited him to stay a few minutes after the others had gone, and he agreed all the more readily with his arguments, so that he might start on Peter sooner. He explained the situation. ‘What I would like to find out, Dr Alexander, is whether the boy sleeps in his mother’s room or his father’s.’
‘Well, I can’t see what you’re worrying about. Granted the boy is a little nuisance, and he’ll probably grow up to be a delinquent and a liability to society. He’d be just the right material for a Fascist organization….’
‘Well, if I could help him I could prevent that.’
‘Saving souls,’ Mrs Alexander said. ‘You mistook your calling.’
‘But setting one boy right is a drop in the ocean,’ the doctor said.
‘It’s something, though.’
‘I know I sound hard. But can you do much? The little you can do in the daytime will be offset when he goes back to the home that made him such a mess.’
‘Even so….’
‘And even if you did set him right, there are enough conflicts in society to make him revert to his condition and undo all your work….’
‘I can’t believe that.’
‘Well, it’s an old argument. Which comes first, the unstable personality or the unstable society? Do you start by converting the individual, or transforming society?’
‘Mr Rogers, you’re a moralist not a revolutionary,’ Mrs Alexander said.
‘I don’t know what you mean…. Well, I’m going to go ahead with it,’ Rogers said. ‘It’s the only thing that will keep me awake. You said I was going to sleep on it.’
‘Do you have to maul a poor boy’s personality to keep yourself awake?’ Mrs Alexander asked.
‘I owe it to him. That boy has never known love. Something has to be done for him. His personality needs conversion.’
‘I’d hate to have you teaching my children,’ she said. ‘Really you’d be safer if you took to religion.’
‘Well, I’m going to bed,’ Alexander said. ‘But if you want to know, the boy sleeps in a bunk in the same room as his father. He must see him come in drunk a lot.’
‘Herlihy’s got religion,’ Mrs Alexander said. ‘In his own desperate way. Watch out that instead of you converting the boy, the boy doesn’t convert you. He comes from stubborn stock.’
Rogers got back to the hotel just in time to catch Doris and Frank about to leave. The family had been together in the sitting-room. Dad was in charge of the bar where there were half a dozen drinkers.
‘Paul!’ Mrs Palmer called in the passage. ‘Where have you been? Things have been happening while you were away. The new teacher’s arrived and Don’s come home.’ She took him by the upper part of his arm and led him into the room. Doris and Frank had their coats on. Flora was sitting at a piano holding a lemonade. A dark young man stood by her; he had thick black hair, glossy with Brylcreem and hanging in loose curls over his ears. He had been singing. ‘Don!’ his mother called. ‘This is the boy we’ve been telling you about. Paul, meet my boy Don, you’ve heard all about him.’
Rogers noticed the firm easy handshake, the lightly sullen hang
of the cheeks and lips, sensuous and cheerful. ‘Glad to meet you,
Paul,’ Don said in a tone that gave the impression of power withheld. Rogers liked him immediately, though his voice and handshake did not convey it. It was as if Don’s reserve was contagious
‘Oh I can see you two will be great pals,’ Mrs Palmer said. ‘Don, Paul’s got an eye on Flora.’
Flora and Rogers looked at one another, admitting and forgiving this revelation.
‘You’ve got good taste then, Paul,’ Don said. ‘I can’t see any as good in Coal Flat myself.’
‘Oh don’t you worry about him,’ Mrs Palmer said. ‘He’s got sheilahs by the dozen. It’ll be a bad day when you can’t get a girl for the asking, son.’
‘Oh, I’m not fussy just now. I’ve got the old girl to go on with.’ He gave her a cheeky peck and she was flattered and excited. ‘Here, Mum’s dry. So are you, Paul. Flora, will you get us all a drink?’
‘We’ve been celebrating while you were jawing,’ Doris said. ‘You missed all the fun.’
‘Yeah, the fun’s over now, Paul,’ Frank said. ‘Come on, Doris, I have to get up at six.’
‘Oh, you pair of spoilsports,’ Mrs Palmer said. ‘Your brother doesn’t come home every day.’
‘Well, we’ve seen him. We’ll see him again,’ Frank said. ‘Long as you’re not thinking of hopping off again after some Christchurch sheilah.’
‘Me,’ Don said. ‘I wouldn’t leave the old girl. Not for a while.’
‘Well, what’s stopping us?’ Frank said.
‘Here, have one on Mum before you go,’ Mrs Palmer said in a tone that meant, ‘I know you’re too mean to pay for any more.’
‘No thanks, Mum,’ Doris said. ‘We’ve got to be up at six in the morning.’
‘Let Frank get his own breakfast for once,’ Mum said.
‘Like hell….’ Frank said.
‘No, I’m not starting any of those habits,’ Doris said.
‘That’s right,’ Don said. ‘You marry a man, you’ve got to get his breakfast. I wouldn’t let my wife lie in.’
‘But she did, son.’
‘Oh her, I wasn’t thinking of her. I was thinking of the next one. Christ knows who she’ll be.’
‘There’s no hurry for that, son,’ Mrs Palmer said.
Flora came back with the drinks. Frank said to Paul, ‘Well, did you find out what you wanted about that kid?’
‘Yes, I did.’
‘What, you been working overtime?’ Don said. ‘Don’t do that. You’ll start ageing.’
‘Were you at the doctor’s?’ Mrs Palmer said with a tone of accusation.
‘Yes. I went to old Mrs Seldom’s first, then to the doctor’s.’
‘I don’t care for that man,’ Mrs Palmer said, with a hint of warning. ‘You can say what you like. When anyone starts talking communism I order him out of the house.’
‘Jimmy and Ben were there.’
‘Oh well, Jimmy, that’s just his nature to be argumentative. I don’t take any notice of him. And Ben, well he’s had a rough upbringing but he’s a hard worker. And he knows better than to talk bolshy in my bar.’
‘I wouldn’t let them in anyway,’ Doris said.
‘But Jimmy used to own the pub,’ Flora said. ‘It wouldn’t be fair.’
‘They’re good customers, anyway,’ Mrs Palmer said.
‘If you drove them away you might make them more bolshy than ever,’ Flora said. ‘We should try to break it down, not harden it.’
‘What I can’t stand is when a man in a decent position like the doctor talks communism,’ Mrs Palmer said. ‘He’s doing the dirty on his own class.’
‘Yeah, fouling his own nest,’ Don said with a slight unusual sneer. It was as if he never thought of politics, because he had made up his mind on them long ago.
‘But, Mrs Palmer, he’s got a right to his opinions,’ Rogers said.
‘Yes,’ Flora said. Since that night in the parlour, Flora had come around more to Rogers’s opinions. They often walked out together and he sometimes expounded his beliefs—social security, a fair day’s wage for a fair day’s work, every man as a member of society serving that society, nationalized industry. Flora said that if that was socialism, well—she wasn’t sure about nationalized industry—she must be a socialist herself, ‘But we’ve got those things already,’ she said. ‘Social security, good wages. The mines are nationalized….’ —‘I know,’ he said. ‘But we’ve got to keep socialism alive. It’s not just the legislation I want. It’s the harmonious society I want to see. Everyone working together, everyone like brothers.’ Politics were interesting when Paul talked about them, but she never talked about them to anyone else.
‘Well, let him keep his opinions to himself,’ Mrs Palmer said. ‘I never go near him. I go into town when I want to see a doctor. Old Dr Thomas is as good a man as ever walked the town.’
‘They say he takes dope,’ Frank said.
‘Well, wouldn’t you,’ Mrs Palmer said, ‘if you had to work as
‘So is Dr Alexander up all hours,’ Frank persisted.
‘Oh, him, he’s only fit for bringing babies into the world. That time I had the ‘flu and I couldn’t expect Dr Thomas to come up all this way, I had him in and he just said, “Stay in bed and keep warm,” and left a prescription.’
‘Here, Mum, don’t start arguing,’ Flora said. ‘It’s an occasion for a good time, not arguments.’
‘That’s right,’ Don said. ‘I’m home.’
‘Well, so am I going home,’ Frank said.
‘You’re right, kid,’ Mrs Palmer said. ‘We should be celebrating. Come on, Paul, drink up. Here’s to my son!’
‘Who was the boy you were asking the doctor about?’ Flora said.
‘Not Donnie?’ Mrs Palmer said. Don looked up and a flush of guilt crossed his face.
‘No, no. Young Peter Herlihy.’
‘Oh, him. What do you want to worry about him for?’ Mrs Palmer said, and in lower tones to Don, ‘You know, the boy from that house by the dredge. The mother’s—you know—’ She tapped her head. ‘The old man’s a bit peculiar too. We threw him out of here one day. He said something about me, and Dad wouldn’t stand for it. He always sticks up for me, your father does.’
‘I should hope he would,’ Don said.
‘Well, we let Mike Herlihy come in again. He apologized. I’d rather have Jimmy and Ben with all their bolshy talk than Mike Herlihy and his dirty mind. He’ll just have to watch his step, that’s all.’
‘Come on, Frank,’ Doris said. ‘It’s nearly eleven o’clock.’
Mr Palmer came in with a tray of drinks. ‘These are on the old firm,’ he said. ‘Free samples. Come in tomorrow and try some more.’
‘I haven’t paid for any yet,’ Rogers said.
‘You keep your money in your pocket, Paul,’ Frank said.
‘It’ll keep,’ Mr Palmer said. ‘We’ll get it in the end.’
Mrs Palmer drained a whisky in a gulp. ‘Here, Dad,’ she said. ‘I’m one behind.’
‘Oh, you,’ he said, and went for another.
She suddenly sparked up as she always did at the last stage of a
night’s drinking. She took Don’s arm and the two marched
brazenly side by side singing ‘Lili Marlene’ while Flora played; she
chose it because it was a reminder that Don had been a soldier in
Italy. She waved her free arm and invited the company to join in
Mrs Palmer sat down exhausted. Don leaned on the piano. Mrs Palmer took the whisky and drank it at a gulp. Then, as she always did after her last outburst, she sagged forward and cried.
‘Come on, Lil, that’s enough for you tonight,’ Dad said. ‘It’s past your bedtime.’
Don moved to help her to her feet, but his father said, ‘You stay here, son.’ He grinned. ‘It’s all your fault, you know.’ Flora helped her to her feet, her mother sagging and not looking at anyone, her eyes wet and tired, past caring to say good night to anyone.
‘Right-oh, folks,’ Mr Palmer said. ‘The show’s over. Gawd, it’s eleven o’clock. We’ll have old Rae along if we don’t watch out. You don’t want to go to gaol yet, do you Paul?’
Don palmer had never properly settled since his return from
the war. Before he had volunteered for the army, life had taken
a constant and self-evident direction. He had grown up in Central
Otago, never far from the silent treacherous force of the Molyneux,
playing among arid rocks, working in the summer holidays picking
apricots and peaches at local farms. After school he would watch
the gold dredge, where his father was winchman, sitting like a
strange water animal in its pond, constantly foraging and devouring
orange clay, constantly evacuating in neat barren rows its piles of
gravel. He would stand on the bank and wave to his father who
looked from the window of the winch-room. Sometimes his father
would lower the gangway to the bank and he would run aboard,
grinning at the men who were perhaps working on cables because
there had been a breakdown, or with great guns, like cake-icers,
were greasing the ladder which held the buckets. If the dredge was
working he would run up the iron stairs, thrilling to see the men
moving silently and expertly among the chattering machinery, the
valves near the jigs quickly opening and closing, the water and sand
flowing in channels beneath them; full of fear he would pass the
rotating perforated barrel which separated the boulders from the
fine soil, screaming so loudly that one could not speak above the
noise. Once the men were on the barrel when the dredge was
stopped, tightening its rivets, when without warning, it began to
turn. They all jumped off except one, who was killed. Don’s father
had been off sick that day, and another man had been winchman;
they said it would never have happened if his father had been on
the winch, he was so careful. Don could not pass this without
imagining himself caught on the barrel, thrown to the edge and—he would never follow the thought, whether he would be crushed,
or pulled out just in time. Up more stairs he would see his father,
who would continue to work without more welcome than a grin.
They were a close happy family. It was seldom that he and Doris and Flora fought, and if they did they always made it up in genuine repentance. At the centre of their world was Mum, with her husky voice, her deep knowing face, her inexhaustible energy. There were few times Don could remember her punishing him—Dad left that to her—because somehow the occasion never arose when any of them deliberately defied her.
They were never conscious of a great gap of years between themselves and their parents. Mum and Dad at home seemed to have
little interest outside it. They never read anything except the local
paper and a couple of weeklies, Truth and the Auckland Weekly.
Dad didn’t bother with a vegetable garden, though Mum had a
few lettuces in the summer—they preferred to buy their vegetables.
They occasionally listened to the new wireless set they had bought
—one of the latest: it had a separate loudspeaker like an old-fashioned gramophone. But for the main part their life was concerned with themselves. After his dinner Dad used to romp on the
floor with them; when they were smaller Mum used to give them
aeroplane-rides, spinning them round like a merry-go-round till
she was dizzy. Dad had funny names for them—Flora was ‘Dopy’,
Doris was ‘Drip’, and Don was ‘Muttonhead’. They had their playmates, of course, but Mrs Palmer preferred them to bring the
other children round to their place—she said it would train her
children to be hospitable, and seeing that this was at the beginning of the slump, and wages were getting lower and there was
The dredge did not close down, though the only other one in Central did. It was a bit too early doing that. When Britain went off the gold standard the price of gold rose and goldmining was the only industry that thrived. Unemployed from the cities began to appear living in tents, prospecting along the rivers. The local people began to be suspicious of strangers on the roads. People sold any old watches and jewellery that contained gold. The men on the dredge kept their noses to the job because the management could easily replace them with men from the dredge that had closed down. Assured market or not, the men’s wages, in line with those of workers in other industries, were cut, and Dad’s along with them. He said at the time the country was going through hard times and he didn’t mind going without a little if it’d help the country through, so long as everyone else did his bit too. The Palmers now kept more closely to themselves, though Mrs Palmer let the children have other children home for an occasional meal. They dared not entertain neighbours who were out of a job because inevitably there would be jealousy that Dad still worked on a good wage, and she wanted to protect her children from malice.
It was at this time that Don was first made conscious of why his mother’s face was darker and deeper than those of other mothers. Once he was running cheerfully into the crisp clear sunlight of an early summer morning when he passed the wife of an unemployed lorry driver who had sometimes used to give him rides. This man was working for the month at a local orchard; after that he would trap rabbits but they fetched so small a price it wasn’t worth sending them to Dunedin, and his family had to cat them themselves. Don was full of expectant energy and called cheerfully to this woman, but she sneered over her gate: ‘Don’t you start cutting airs round here, you Maori beggar. Just ‘cause your old man’s a winchman.’ The bottom fell out of the morning and Don climbed slowly to the top of a hill of bare rock, and pondered all morning, so that he forgot about the sun and came home so burnt that Mum growled at him with unusual severity.
Dad tried to ease the situation.
‘You’ll be as black as a nigger, if you don’t watch out,’ he said.
‘We aren’t Maoris, are we Mum?’ Don said,
‘Who’s been telling you that, son?’
‘Mrs Thomson. She said I was a little Maori beggar.’
‘That puts Jack Thomson last on the list for when the dredge takes new men on,’ Dad said, ‘if I have any influence with the foreman.’
‘Just don’t pay any attention to her, son,’ Mum said. ‘I’m the one who has Maori in me. And I’m proud of it. We owned this country before all the Thomsons and pakehas.’
‘Here, go easy. You’ll be saying I’ve got no right to be here, soon,’ Dad said.
‘Well, we believe in live and let live. We held out an open hand of friendship, son; we said, we’ll share this land. It’s just some of them go back on their word. Don’t you speak to Mrs Thomson again, son. There are some people who just aren’t worth bothering about.’
‘Can’t I play with Jackie Thomson?’
‘Not now, son. Mum knows best, I was of royal blood. My grandmother’s father was a chief. I can be as superior as Mrs Thomson if I want to.’
Don grew up a youth of outstanding good looks, with leisurely waving jet-black hair, big dark easy eyes, and soft masculine features set in clear light-brown skin. The slump was over in his adolescence, and their differences with the other workmen were buried. There was plenty of work now, and there were six dredges in Otago. Don joined a local pipe-band and Mum spent fifteen pounds on his pipes and his costume. The family went to Dunedin to see him march at the pipers’ contest at the Caledonian grounds. Their band only got highly commended, but as Mum would say, ‘It’s not the prize that matters, son. It’s the spirit of the thing.’
He began to go to local Saturday night dances. He learnt to
dance readily by watching the steps from among the crowd of
young men who couldn’t dance or were too shy, who always stood
occupying a third of the floor space near the door. His first love
was Jennie Thomson. Mum, strangely enough, encouraged it,
went out of her way to invite Jennie to meals, and by this strategy
they tired of each other. It was the fullest and noblest experience
Don had known. The home lost its attraction. He was a greaser on
the dredge now; and at work his mind was with Jennie, with her
auburn hair and shy ways. Of evenings they walked together, or
went to the local pictures; on Saturdays they danced, leaving early
so that they could stand for half an hour in tremulous rapture at her
gate, because she had to be in by quarter past eleven, standing
close, talking in murmurs, kissing with faint excitement and a
wondering joy because neither of them could think of the other
After Jennie he felt he was a man of the world. He began to flirt with girls, taking a different one to her gate every Saturday night; at the gate he had none of the shyness he had known with Jennie. He looked back in an assumed blase manner at that affair and thought he had been wet and green. He kissed and embraced passionately no matter whom. ‘They’re all the same in the dark,’ he once found himself saying, though he didn’t altogether believe it. He found himself sought after at dances: once one girl ran to beat another to him in the ladies’ choice. And that night was to be a landmark in his memory: the first time he had known a girl. Behind the hawthorn hedge round the cemetery on the edge of the town. He faced his mother with slight guilt in the morning, and he looked at Flora in her virgin freshness and he thought, ‘By Jesus, if anyone ever did that to her, I’d kill him.’ But his face alternated between a shallow uneasiness and a deeper sensual complacency, a sense of having done everything a man can do, of being initiated; and it was not lost on his mother. As if about nothing or everything in general, she said, with her back to him, washing the breakfast dishes: ‘Just take it easy, son. Don’t let it go to your head. Now for God’s sake be careful.’
He grunted, pretending not to understand.
‘There’s plenty more fish in the sea, son,’ she said, trusting herself now to turn and face him. ‘Jennie’s not the only one.’
‘I’m not worrying about her, Mum.’
‘You’ve got sheilahs on your mind, son. Mum knows. It’s only natural. But just go easy. I don’t mind you having a good time. Only be careful.’
‘Me. I’m always careful.’
‘I’m serious, Don. We don’t want any forced marriages. And for God’s sake don’t let on to Dad what you did last night.’
‘You know everything,’ he said resentfully.
‘That’s right, son. Mum knows.’ She took it as flattery.
Don went outside and for the first time since he was a boy he turned over the back garden with the spade that hadn’t been used since Mum dug a patch for lettuces the summer before.
Mum saw to it that Dad got more beer in the house. She encouraged Don to drink at home. Flora wouldn’t touch it, and Doris
Dad put his foot down once when Don was fined on a charge of drunken driving. He wouldn’t allow Don to drive to Dunedin any more; he said he would have to use the bus. Only Mum said that would make Don look small before his mates and Dad agreed that he could ride in the back seat of the car. ‘If there’s any more trouble, I’ll put a stop to you going to Dunedin altogether,’ Dad said. He would have done then, only he knew it would have meant convincing Mum it was necessary. He regretted later that he hadn’t because Mum said one Monday night, after Don had been away that week-end:
‘Dad, Don wants a word with you.’
‘What about?’
‘He wants to get married.’
‘Married? Gawd, what’s wrong with him—are you serious, Lil? Jesus Christ, he’s only a kid.’
‘He wouldn’t say it if he didn’t mean it.’
‘Who’s the girl?’
‘Some Dunedin girl.’
‘Why didn’t he tell me?’
‘That’s what he wants to see you about now.’
‘Can’t he ask me without doing it through you? I haven’t grown away from him that much, have I?’
‘Well, at that age, Dad, a boy always turns to his mother for advice.’
‘Well, he’s going to have this thing out with me, Lil.’
Mrs Palmer went out of the room when Don came in.
‘What’s all this your mother tells me, Don?’
‘I want to get married Dad.’ He swallowed a little uncomfortably.
‘What do you want to get married at your age for?’
Don was uneasy, ‘I think she’s the right girl for me, Dad.’
Dad blew. ‘You don’t get married just like that, son. What are you going to live on? What sort of a family does she come from? What do her parents think about it? That’s just some of the things I want to know.’
Nor did Don reassure his father. She was a girl from St Kilda, from a small wooden house on the flat, on a tram route. Her father was a tramway motorman; they didn’t have a lot of money because he had only been working three years since the slump, when he had spent most of his life’s savings. She was just twenty-one.
‘There you are,’ Mr Palmer said. ‘She’s older than you.’
‘Only a year.’
‘Well, it’s the principle. A man should marry a woman younger than himself.’
She worked in the Golden Grill as a waitress, and Don had met
her there one night as they went in to have a feed of oysters and
chips after the Town Hall dance. Cheeky with beer he had asked
could he meet her on her day off. Surprisingly she seemed to jump
at the chance, and since then he had met her every time he came to
Dunedin; and, as she had managed to change her night off with
another waitress, they went to the Town Hall dance together, and
later to other dance halls which were not so staid. She was dark and
plump with a pampered and rather pasty face. Don’s mates wouldn’t
have looked twice at her, but she had a baby-like manner which
appealed strongly to him. He had no doubt that she had known
other men, but that didn’t seem important to him. Wages were
better now in
‘How do you know you can afford to get married?’ Dad said.
‘Well, there’s my post office savings.’
‘We paid that, son. You’re not to touch that till you’re twenty-one.’
‘Well, I suppose we can live on my wage.’
‘You don’t realize, son, what a responsibility you’re taking on. You’ve got to buy a hose and a section. You’ve got to be able to provide for her and for your children. You can’t do that on love.’
He went to the door and called, ‘Lil!’
Mrs Palmer came in. ‘I’m against it,’ Dad said. ‘You haven’t even convinced me you really want to marry the girl,’ he said. ‘You’ve hardly mentioned her.’
‘Here, son, tell Mum,’ Mrs Palmer said. ‘Do you want to leave us for her? That’s what you’ve got to face up to, whether she’s worth leaving home for. Do you love her?’
Dad made an embarrassed noise and went out into the clear night air under the stars.
Don squirmed. ‘I like her, Mum. She attracts me. I want to be with her. I’m always thinking of what we’ll do next time. I’d like her to be my wife.’
‘Is it like when you were with Jennie?’
Don sneered. ‘That was calf-love.’
‘Well, I don’t reckon you really like this girl, whoever she is. I reckon it’s just her body you want. There’s plenty more fish in the sea, son. Can’t you wait a while? From what you say I don’t reckon she’s good enough for you. There’s a dozen girls in this town would be glad to have you. You’ll soon get sick of her body, son. You can’t spend all your time in bed.’
Don could not face such talk from his mother. He went to the door and found Dad. The air was sharp, and the stars were crisp and frail like frost patterns. The silence in the valley was active, almost audible. A faraway car murmured in a desert gully, and its lights occasionally searched the darkness over hills a long way off.
‘There’s something I’ve got to tell you, Dad,’ he said. The darkness gave him quiet courage. ‘I’ve got to marry her. She’s in the family way.’
He felt a blow and staggered on to the leafless rosebush by the gate.
‘You deserve a bloody hiding,’ his father said quietly. ‘At your age. I never thought a son of mine…. This generation…. Get up, or I’ll give you another. Come inside.’
Inside Dad told Mum to leave them alone and he started again to punish Don. He punched him in the chest several times and thumped his shoulder. Don made no attempt to oppose him. It was the first time in ten years his father had struck him.
‘It doesn’t do any good, Dad,’ he said. ‘You know I won’t hit you back…. It doesn’t get rid of the baby.’
Dad sat down by the kitchen range and said: ‘How far gone is she?’
‘Two months.’
‘That’s not so bad then.’
He looked up at Don with a cheated look, bare of all sentiment, and Don returned the look, equally stripped: two naked selves opposed. ‘It ’s a pity I didn’t put a stop to your Dunedin excursions altogether. It was only that your mother wouldn’t have it.’
‘It’s my fault. Don’t blame Mum.’
‘I was ready to let you go drinking and dancing. I thought you were a decent clean-living lad.’
‘Don’t rub it in, Dad.’
‘Christ Almighty, it needs rubbing in. It’s a pity we didn’t rub it in earlier. You might have been a decent boy still.’
They sat in silence for a few minutes.
‘Well, your mother’ll have to know.’
‘Oh, son,’ Mrs Palmer said when she knew. ‘Oh, Don. As if I didn’t warn you.’
‘Is she the first girl you’ve done it to?’ Dad asked.
‘No.’
‘How long has this been going on?’
‘About a year.’
‘Did your mother know?’
Mrs Palmer looked tense with her big powerful eyes. Don did not look at her.
‘Yes. She knew.’
‘Well, you get to bed. We’ll talk of this in the morning. Go in and tell the girls to go to bed.’
When Don had gone, he gave his wife the only thumping she
was ever to have from him. She took it submissively and making no
noise except gasps because she didn’t want the girls to know. She
collapsed and cried, not out of subterfuge but out of exhaustion;
At first Dad wanted to turn Don out of home. ‘It’d be a lesson to him. He’s always had everything he wanted. We’ve spoilt him. The girls have never abused us like this. It’d be a lesson for him to make him stand on his own feet.’ But Mum dissuaded him on the grounds that it would mean telling the girls, and that the neighbours would get to know of it. ‘Mrs Thomson’d scent it a mile away…. Wouldn’t she be laughing at us?’
‘Bugger Mrs Thomson. It’s the girls I’m worrying about. But
I’m warning you. No encouraging them to kick over the traces,
now.’
The girls were never told that the marriage was forced. Their eager excitement helped to offset for the Palmer parents the grimness of pushing through with the plans. Mrs Palmer wasn’t impressed with Myra. ‘Jennie was worth two of her,’ she thought. There was little mutual attraction between Myra’s parents and Don’s. Myra only had her glory-box and thirty pounds in the post office; her parents said it was all they could do to pay for the wedding-breakfast, but they were pleased to have Myra off their hands with a man whose parents had a bit more than thirty pounds in the bank. The Palmer girls welcomed Myra eagerly, and she was rather flattered; she tended to exploit their goodwill and boss them about, but Mrs Palmer put a stop to that with one or two of her well-placed words. On the whole Myra did well out of the arrangement, and at the back of her mind she congratulated herself on having done what Mrs Palmer had suspected from the moment she met her, on having manipulated Don into fatherhood, to make sure of him. It was a humiliating blow to Mrs Palmer that after all her warnings, it had been Don himself who had been seduced.
The wedding was in the Anglican Cathedral. Myra’s people
were Methodist and would have been happy to have the wedding
in their local church, though they never worshipped at it. But
Mum insisted that she take Don’s denomination, and that they
marry in the biggest Anglican church in town. She would have
insisted too on a reception at the most expensive hotel, offering to
pay half if Myra’s people couldn’t afford it, but the management of
the Grill offered to have the reception there, at a reduction, seeing
Myra had worked there five years; they were just entering the
wedding reception business and it would be a good advertisement;
and the idea appealed to Mrs Palmer. Myra’s people and the
Palmer girls got the most enjoyment out of it. Myra’s father and
They had hired a taxi from Dougalburn at quite an expense.
After they had seen the last of Don,
‘Well, it hasn’t worked out so bad,’ he said.
‘Dad! What’s wrong with you?’ Doris said. ‘Flor, listen to him! “It hasn’t worked out so bad!” Don got married. You should be happy.’
‘Yes!’ Flora said.
Mum said, ‘Let’s get back to the car,’ and rose quickly, her glass half full. In the car she gave in to a quiet fit of tears. ‘Twenty years we’ve seen that boy every day of his life. Now we won’t see him except on odd visits. I’m dreading going in to find his bed empty in the morning.’
Dad applied for a foreman’s job on one of the new dredges starting on the West Coast, and within three months they had moved to Coal Flat.
Dad had used his influence with an engineering firm in Dunedin
to get Don a job at their foundry. Myra went back to work temporarily at the Grill, sporting her wedding ring. They had a flat in a
drab street near Logan Park. Their married life was better than
anyone knowing them might have predicted. Dad had given Don
his £500 post office savings-bank account and he was looking for a
A few months later Donnie was born. Don was now anchored in his marriage. He was proud taking flowers to the maternity home, and for the first time since Jennie Thomson, filled with excited wonder at his own power when he stared at the little live being of his own breeding. For the first time he was aware of the consequences of the act he had sought with such grim devotion, performed so glibly, for a year before he was married. Mum and Dad were evidently proud too. They had forgotten their old anger when they came down from the West Coast. ‘It’s just what my life was wanting,’ Mum said.
‘Here, what about me? I had a hand in this too,’ Dad said.
‘Granddad,’ she said.
‘You’re a bloody old grannie,’ he said, ‘and you’re only forty-five.’
The baby gave Myra an advantage over Don in the house. She
Donnie was only a few months old when the war started. For three months the possibility of volunteering lay at the back of Don’s mind. He didn’t want to give up his home, yet he was a little afraid already of his domesticity, and he felt that Myra was not settled either, the way she went to her mother’s twice a week with the baby, leaving him to get his own dinner. He began to wish for the company of Fred, Tom and Bill, the three mates he used to drive to Dunedin with. One Saturday afternoon he ran into them at the Ranfurly Shield match at Caversham. After the match they went to a crowded bar and he stayed till closing time with them, and didn’t go home for dinner, but continued to drink after hours at another pub in Princes Street near the tram sheds. Two of the boys were going to join up. They wanted him to come with them. ‘If you don’t go now, you’ll have to later,’ one of them said. ‘There’ll be conscription soon. You might as well be with your cobbers.’ Don kept the thought to himself. When he got home Myra chipped him about staying out spending money; she insisted on the following Saturday that it was her turn to go out, and she went to a dance, leaving him to mind the baby. His twenty-first birthday was in November, and Mum and the girls came down for it; Dad said he couldn’t take time off. Mum asked him had he thought of joining up. She agreed it would be hard on Myra and the baby, but she said she’d be proud if a son of hers answered the call of king and country. ‘The baby will never want for a home,’ she said. ‘Not while Dad and I and the girls are alive.’ Fred, Tom and Bill were down from Cromwell and were already pretty tight; Don went to them and broached the topic, and on the spot the four of them made a boozy compact to enlist after the New Year. By now Don had already mentioned it to Myra, who strangely didn’t object. Her mind began to foresee a new source of esteem, having a husband overseas with the army. Don announced the decision quietly in his speech after Mum had presented him with a wristlet-watch. There were cheers and Mum led the company singing, ‘There’ll always be an England’, ‘We’re Going to Hang Out Our Washing on the Siegfried Line’, ‘Boys of the Bulldog Breed’, and ‘God Save the King’.
The four went into camp in January. The train was full of loud excited young men, kissing their girls and their wives on the platform, shouting, swigging beer from bottles to the connivance of a railway guard powerless to stop them, singing aggressively and playing cards.
They sailed with the Third Reinforcement. Myra gave up the flat and went to Coal Flat to live with the Palmers. She didn’t take kindly to the Flat. She found the people coarse and uncivilized, the town without night-life. She felt herself stifled by the Palmers. Mum was always in the background; even if she said nothing Myra knew she was supervising her, watching how she fed the baby, listening to hear if it waked. The baby became a family property. Dad dandled it; Mum rocked it in her arms, huskily singing old-fashioned tunes Myra had never heard before. The girls made a fuss of it. The only thing Myra could look forward to was a letter from Don. Even then Mum wanted to know how he was, and she couldn’t refuse to show her the letter. It irritated her that Mum was so circumspect in asking for the letters, and always handed them back with a look that said, ‘Mum understands. When a boy marries, his mother can only expect to come second place in his heart. I won’t mention any of this to the others.’ She wouldn’t have minded so much if the family had taunted her about Don’s endearments, but it was too much to have them in the careful safe-keeping of a mother-in-law. Yet she made the best of it. She liked Dad and she could occasionally go to local dances with the girls. Mum encouraged her to go, saying they were for a patriotic cause and needed support, and a girl with her husband away needed some entertainment. Myra felt she was being nursed.
The main event in those five years was Doris’s wedding. Frank
Lindsay was sullen and reserved, to Mrs Palmer’s way of thinking,
but she encouraged him, genuinely this time since she still regretted
how she had mismanaged Don and Jennie, and for a while congratulated herself that she had brought him out of his shell, for he
responded to their laughter and the taunts of Dad and Myra, and
became more talkative and frank than in his own home. ‘Oh, it’s the
home that counts,’ Mum would say. ‘He hasn’t been used to much
of a home.’ Yet she was all the time worried about Don—she had
started going to church again because of him, dragging Dad along
with her, though he hadn’t the imagination to take religion seriously
Don went first to Ma’adi. He cabled once for money and sent
home some tapestries and a tiny table with a design of inlaid pieces
of wood badly bargained for from some shrewd Cairo merchant.
Then he was in Greece and came whole out of Crete. Next they
heard from Syria, and before they knew it he was in Alamein. Tom
and Fred were killed on Crete, Bill had been wounded and was on a
hospital ship coming home. Don survived without hint of injury
till he was in Italy and there he was shot in the left arm. He arrived
home early in
He was, of course, a changed man. He was four years older. He looked far tougher. His cheeks were more drawn, and his manner was more distant and commanding. Myra abandoned herself to their first awkward embrace, tears streaming, holding Donnie in her arms, a fair-headed boy of five. Don took his boy in his arms, and Mum was at him and he embraced her with Donnie in one hand. Then Dad who grinned self-consciously as they put arms on each other’s shoulders. Then Flora, and Doris, who had come down for the welcome. It was for all of them a tantalizing home-coming. Everyone wanted to speak to Don at once, but most of all Myra. She could not get him on her own. To Mum and Dad it did not matter so much, they were used to sharing affections in front of the family and they thought they had colonized Myra long ago. On the first night back they had beer in, and though there was plenty of it there, Don said at about nine that he’d just slip up the road for a minute.
Myra went to put on her hat and coat, but Mrs Palmer knowingly called her back.
‘He’s just going up to Jimmy Cairns’s,’ she said. ‘He must want a bit of fresh air.’
Myra didn’t drop to it. ‘I could do with a breather myself,’ she said.
‘Oh, I know these returned boys. Leave him be for a bit, Myra. He hasn’t found his feet yet. He just wants to have a few with the boys.’
‘I didn’t know he knew anyone here.’
‘Oh, there’s one or two other soldiers came back with him. And he met Jimmy on his final leave.’
Ten minutes later, Don looked in again. ‘Oh, why did you take off your uniform?’ Myra asked.
‘Glad to get out of it, pet,’ Don said. ‘These new slacks are like silk on my legs.’
Mum had bought them. ‘Is that the first time you’ve worn a tie since you went away?’ Myra asked.
‘Yep,’ he said, fingering it. ‘I haven’t thanked you for it yet. And the shirt.’ He kissed her, and saw the withheld tears.
‘What are you crying for?’
‘Nothing. I’m not crying. What’s wrong with you?’
‘I won’t be long, pet. Are you coming for a walk, Dad?’
‘No, I’ll stay here. Someone’s got to look after the old woman. Myra’s been cooped up all day.’
‘Cooped up?’ Doris said. ‘We all had a ride to Stillwater! Cooped up. You’ll he hooped up soon, Myra.’
They went together but Myra never forgot that he hadn’t asked her without prompting. Even in the bar he kept drifting away and joining a group of young men, two of them in uniform. Once he leant over the bar and got deep in conversation with Jimmy Cairns —Jimmy Cairns of all people, while she sat moping over a gin and lime. It was only when someone began to play the piano in the front room that she drew him away and the two of them, arm-in-arm, sang with the crowd, she with emphatic gaiety, but he as if she wasn’t there.
She never penetrated him after that. Before he had gone he had
been just a simple, pleasure-loving good-looking boy, of an easy
frank nature and of tremendous satisfaction in bed. Now when he
possessed her she could feel the strangeness of him, a sort of
spiritual fumbling, as if he hadn’t accustomed himself to the idea
that she wasn’t some bint bought in the Birkeh, or an Italian mistress
repaying him for rations. He kept half himself out of it. Awake and
by day he took more notice of Donnie than of her, and Mum was
more expert in divining his moods than she was. ‘It won’t be long,’
Myra thought. ‘We can go back to Dunedin. Or he can get a new
job away from here, where we can be by ourselves.’
But he wasn’t sure that his arm would be strong enough for his
‘I’m no snob,’ he said. ‘I’ll see when I come out of hospital.’
He had to go to a convalescent hospital in North Canterbury for three months, to get something done to the bone. He would not promise to shift to another town. She could only argue in short spurts and quietly in their bedroom with the door closed. She felt she hadn’t had a chance to put her case to him. The morning he left she lay in bed all morning, dreading to face the family again without him. In an undertone, and only to Dad, Mrs Palmer said that evening, ‘She couldn’t even get up to see him off.’ Myra began to make bold plans. She would go to Wellington, start afresh in a strange city, she would find a job and a flat and have everything for when he was discharged from the sanatorium. He was just that type, she thought, who needed managing. If she made the decision he would follow her. How could he make up his mind here with his mother standing guard over him all the time? She wrote to Don saying she was feeling like a bit of a trip now that he was home; perhaps when he was well again they could have a holiday. However, she decided to leave on the following Thursday, and to write to him from Wellington. She broke it brightly at the meal table one evening.
‘I think I’ll have a bit of a holiday,’ she said.
‘Who are you running off with?’ Dad asked.
‘Oh, no one in particular,’ she said, glad at this turn of the conversation. ‘Just having a bit of a flutter.’
Mum looked serious. ‘Oh well, I suppose there’s a time comes when every girl wants to go back and see her mother.’
Myra lost her poise.
‘You haven’t seen your parents since Don went away,’ Flora said.
‘Why not wait till Don comes out? They’ll be dying to see him,’ Mum said.
‘Then you could take Donnie too,’ Dad said. ‘They won’t know him now.’
‘I was going to take him with me,’ Myra said.
‘Oh no, Myra,’ Mum said. ‘It wouldn’t be fair to the boy, taking him on a long trip like that just at this time of the year. He’s just got over his cold.’
‘I know,’ Myra said, straining to be bright still, and casual. ‘But he’s better now.’
‘You and Don can take him together, when Don comes out of the home,’ Flora said.
‘That’s the best idea,’ Dad said.
‘Well, I reckon a little boy’s place is with his mother….’ Myra said.
‘That’s what I say,’ Mum said. ‘A mother’s place is with her children, And I reckon you ought to wait till Don comes out.’
Myra was winded by the turn of the conversation. They had agreed where she had expected opposition, and opposed where she had expected deference. She didn’t dare say she had intended to go to Wellington. Once it occurred to her that the best strategy would be to wait till Don came back and talk to him about shifting as soon as they were away from the Flat. But she had waited long enough. After her schemes of release the thought of another three months in this house made her unreasonable. A mean stubbornness gathered in her, and on the Wednesday night she announced as brightly as her obstinacy would allow that she was leaving next morning for that holiday.
‘I’ve got to have a break,’ she said. ‘All these years of worry. They tell on you once they’re over. Donnie, you’ll be good while I’m away, won’t you. Mum’s going away, pet, just for a while. She’ll be seeing you soon.’
‘Are you going away, Mum?’ Donnie asked. ‘Can I come with you?’
‘Oh, the poor little chap,’ Mrs Palmer said. ‘His mother going away and leaving him. It’s a shame isn’t it, pet? Never mind, Donnie; Gran and Granddad will look after you, won’t we Granddad?’
‘Mum, I want to come with you,’ Donnie said.
‘I won’t be away long,’ Myra said. ‘I’ll be coming back to you.’ She hadn’t meant to say this. In anticipation of future accusations, she had told herself she wouldn’t tell any lies. She hadn’t yet actually said that she was going to Dunedin.
‘Mummy’s going to see her mummy too,’ Flora said. ‘She wants to see her mummy now and again. Don’t you, Myra?’
‘Yes, pet. I’ve got a mummy too.’
‘Mummy’s going on a puff-puff to Dunedin and then she’s coming on another puff-puff to see you again,’ Dad said. ‘Aren’t you Myra? Running off with the engine driver.’
‘I want to see the puff-puff,’ Donnie said.
‘You’ll see it in the morning, pet,’ Mrs Palmer said, ‘when you go to see Mummy off.’
After the meal Mrs Palmer said: ‘Myra, what’s your address in Dunedin?’
Myra told her her mother’s address, engaged in dim casuistry on whether or not she had yet told a lie.
At the train she cried as she kissed Donnie, and she said good-bye to Mrs Palmer and Flora with more intensity than was, to Mrs Palmer’s mind, warranted. That night she wrote to Don hinting at a mystery. ‘No doubt Myra has told you she was off to see her parents in Dunedin. I couldn’t see why she couldn’t have waited till you were out, and all three of you could go down together. Still, I suppose she knows her own mind best. I hope this doesn’t mean you’ll all be leaving us soon, son.’ Dad asked to see the letter and insisted on her altering it. ‘It’s not for us to make trouble,’ he said. Mum rewrote it: ‘We all thought it would have been better to wait and all three of you could have gone down together. Still, you can go down when you come out. Remember, son, you’re welcome to stay with us as long as you like. We are very attached to Donnie.’
Myra wrote Don from Wellington. She had a room, she had taken a job in the meantime as a waitress and she was looking for a flat. When he was ready to leave the hospital, she would come for him and they could go to the Coast to pick up Donnie and come back. ‘You know you might not be able to work with that arm, Don. I don’t mind working if my wages and your pension will be enough to keep us. I suppose you’re wondering why I did this. I just had to, Don. I think it’s time we started out on our own again and had a bit of privacy. Everyone was very kind to me at your place but I don’t want to feel dependent on them. I know you’ll understand.’
Don pondered the letter for a day and never replied. To him it was proof of what he had long and gradually come to suspect thinking about her in the army, that she was selfish and underhand. She hadn’t warned him that she was leaving home. She had told his parents she was going to Dunedin for a holiday. Her desertion gave Mrs Palmer the excuse both she and Don seemed to have been looking for. If anyone were to ask Mrs Palmer about Myra he would get the impression that Myra had left her husband. Myra came down the following Easter. Mrs Palmer faced her with accusing pity; it gratified her that Myra burst into tears when she hugged Donnie, that Donnie was embarrassed and (it seemed to Mrs Palmer) preferred her to his mother. Flora and Dad were polite and kind to her, but none of them made any reference to her going away, let alone a move towards reconciliation. Don stayed out at Jimmy Cairns’s pub all day. Myra asked Flora secretly if she would go and tell him she was home. ‘I think Dad slipped up and told him,’ Flora said.
‘Tell him I’d like to see him.’
Flora said she was going for the bread and, calling Don to the door of the bar, she whispered Myra’s request. Don didn’t reply and went back to his beer. Myra never saw him again.
Since then he had lived an unsettled life. Jimmy Cairns was making no profit from his pub; he drank some of the profits and he gave too many drinks away. He sold out—and he had to borrow money to pay off debts before he sold—to the Palmers. Don’s arm was useless for any manual labour except the lightest; if he was to stay at home there was no work for him in the district; his parents made him barman. Every now and again he would leave home: this last time he had got a travelling salesman’s job in Christchurch. But he always came back.
Dad said one night to Mrs Palmer when they were alone
in the kitchen and Don was helping in the bar, ‘I can’t say I’m
very happy about Paul and Flora, Lil.’
‘Oh, Dad! Why?’
‘Well! He talks too bolshy. You should hear him in the bar with Jimmy Cairns and Ben Nicholson. Jock McEwan was in tonight too, and the four of them gassing their heads off about socialism and Gawd knows what.’
Mrs Palmer looked wise and superior. ‘Don’t you worry about that, Dad. He’ll soon get that nonsense knocked out of him.’
‘I thought he’d have had it knocked out of him already. The army should at least have done that much for him.’
‘What I reckon is when a young chap gets married he’s got a damn sight more to think about than all that rot. He’ll have to face realities then. He’ll have to pay off a house, grow a garden, look after a wife and family. Oh, no, Dad; there’s nothing like marriage to bring a young chap to his senses.’
‘What’s your hurry? We don’t want to lose Flora yet, Lil. I didn’t know she was all that keen on him.’
‘Oh yes, Dad. I know the signs. That girl’s in love. I can see her, when she’s ironing or washing up. She’s got her mind on him.’
‘Well, I’d like to put a stop to it.’
‘It’s no use going against nature, Dad. She might—well, she might even get all the more set on marrying Paul if you went against it. And there’s not many young chaps in this town that are any good. If you put a stop to this, it’s only natural Dad, she’d start looking at one of the local lads. One miner in the family is enough.’
‘Well, I’ve got no objection to a working man, so long as I knew he could provide for her properly.’
‘He wouldn’t. They’ve got the money, the miners, but you can
see yourself how they throw it away in the bar every night. They
‘I can’t see what’s so special about Paul, anyway.’
‘He’s a fine young chap, Dad. He’s got a good job and he’ll go a long way that one, once he knuckles down and forgets all that political stuff. It doesn’t pay to have opinions like that in a government job. I’ve seen it all before. Not even with Labour running the country. No, he’s as good as Flora will get in this town and I reckon he’ll be a good steady husband and a kind father too.’
‘Well, he’ll have to bloody well give up all that nonsense before I’ll allow it.’
‘You leave it to me, Dad. Let them get married and you’ll see how he’s forgotten it all in a couple of weeks.’
‘There’s no guarantee he will forget it all. And the more he talks
to Ben and Jock and that lot the harder it’ll be for him to give it up.’
‘Don’s back now, Dad. You wait and see, they’ll cobber up in no
time. It’s natural for a young chap to cobber up with chaps his own
age. Ben and Jock and Jimmy are a lot older than Paul. All the
other young chaps of this town are a bit on the rough-and-ready
side for Paul—I know, Don’s more his type.’
Dad shrugged and went back to the bar.
Peter Herlihy brought some luridly coloured comics to school. They were published in Australia, but the spelling of the words in the balloons suggested they might have been drawn in America. Rogers asked Peter if he could borrow them because he wanted to know what Peter was reading. Not that he could read the words; he stared at the pictures and built his own interpretation out of them. Rogers was horrified when he studied them. There were close-ups of a rope tightening round the neck of a hanging man, of the neck of a criminal being strangled; in every second panel a button-nosed man with a small head and unnaturally thick neck (reminding one of the extinct saurians with their thick necks and peanut-sized brains) was brandishing a gun or launching out with a fist like a ham. There was a story of a jungle girl, a ferocious young woman with a Hollywood hair-do, who wore a leopard-skin and swung from tree to tree, and owned a troop of pygmy slaves around whom periodically she capriciously wrapped a long whip.
‘Why do you read these?’ he said to Peter.
‘Cause they’re good. They’re exciting.’
‘If you’d learn to read properly you could read better books.’
‘I don’t want to read better books. These are best.’
‘How do you feel when you read them”’
Peter hedged and under a fanatic grin Rogers could see him jealously guarding some personal secret. He knew he would never get this out of him.
‘These books are bad for you, Peter. They’re cruel, they’re nasty. It’s not right to hurt people like this jungle girl does-why does she whip those little men?’
‘’Cause they’re mad. It serves them right.’
‘Why? What have they done?’
‘They tried to steal something from her.’ He was making this up.
‘What did they try to steal?’
‘They wanted that skin she was wearing.’
‘Why?’
‘So they could whip her—and then the skin wouldn’t keep the whip off.’
‘Oh, Peter’ he said incredulously.
‘She’s not really a girl though. It’s a man dressed up. A girl couldn’t be boss like that.’
‘Let me keep these comics, Peter. You don’t want them.’
Peter clutched them. ‘No,’ he said retreating into his impenetrable defence. He went back to his seat. Later when he thought Rogers wasn’t looking he studied the jungle girl again. He came excitedly to the table and said, ‘I know this story now.’
‘What is it?’ Rogers said.
‘It is a lady. She’s their mother and they hate her. But they’re all gonna get together when she’s not looking and take the whip off her and then they’ll kill her. It’ll serve her right.’
It was obvious that, vicious as the comics were, he was reading
far more into them than was there. The boy was a case for a psychiatrist. But where would you find a psychiatrist this side of the
Alps?—unless there was one at the mental hospital at Hokitika; if
there was, would he be any good? Rogers was afraid to meddle with
Peter’s mind. Yet he had to do something. It was impossible to keep
the boy in his seat for long. Take your eyes off him and he’d be
torturing some little girl or carving on the desk with a knife.
Rogers searched him every morning now and took the knife from
him in case he hurt someone with it. In another school his responsibility would have ended if he’d told the headmaster, but Rogers
had no faith in Heath to deal with this. He resolved to call on the
boy’s father. He remembered Mike Herlihy’s appeal for his support, the first day he was back, and hoped Herlihy might listen to
‘Oh, Mr Herlihy….’ he said.
Mike straightened and looked at him in the half-light of dusk, then bent down again to inspect the contents of the grit-pot.
‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘What d’you want?’
‘I came down about your boy,’ he said.
‘What about him?’
‘He’s not a happy child,’ Rogers said. ‘He’s got something on his mind.’
Herlihy stood up, put his knuckles on his hips, and stared, saying nothing.
‘Well, I thought you ought to know, I reckon he needs treatment from a psychiatrist.’
‘Psychiatrist!’ Herlihy said and stared at him. ‘Holy Jesus! What next?’
‘He’s in a bad way mentally. There might be one at Hokitika.’
‘Are you trying to tell me my boy’s mad?’
‘No, not mad. But his mind’s not healthy. It needs treatment of some kind.’
Herlihy stood, getting his words in order. ‘Look here, young fullah,’ he said. ‘You want to go back to school yourself for a bit instead of trying to teach at one. Psychiatrist—in the name of Christ and all the saints!—What good, in the name of God Almighty, could a psychiatrist do for a boy? A man who’s probably as bad a sinner and as confused in his mind as any living soul. Have you never heard of the Devil, young fullah? That’s all that’s wrong with my boy now and again.’
‘That’s ridiculous.’
‘And not only my boy either. Some people entertain the Devil inside of them without ever knowing it. Nursing a snake in their own nest. Yes. And my boy’s no worse than any other boys, especially some of the scions of atheism of this’—he searched for another ironic phrase and proudly said—‘this citadel of iniquity and godlessness.’
‘Mr Herlihy,’ Rogers said, ‘I’m not starting any argument on religion. Your boy’s in a bad way and he needs treatment, and you’re the only one who can see that he gets it.’
‘And I’ll oppose it,’ Herlihy said. ‘A lot of bloody rot. The boy gets up to mischief and you tell me he’s mad. You haven’t even told me what he’s done.’
‘I didn’t say he was mad.’ Rogers didn’t tell him about Peter tormenting the girls; he didn’t know that he might not give him a thrashing. ‘It’s not what he does. It’s his whole attitude. He’s afraid of something, obsessed.’
‘So you’re telling me I don’t know how to bring him up, is that it?’ Herlihy said. He was getting angry.
‘Call it the Devil or what you like,’ Rogers said. ‘You haven’t been able to exorcise him. A trained mental specialist might.’
Herlihy said nothing for half a minute. Then: ‘I don’t believe you. I can’t see anything wrong with him, only a bit of mischief. You don’t know much about kids. You’ve never had any of your own. What’s he done? Tell me that!’
‘He’s a nuisance in the class; won’t sit still; won’t settle.’
Herlihy’s angry reply was like a sigh of relief. ‘Well, young fullah, if you can’t do your job properly and keep a couple of dozen kids in their places, there’s no need to come complaining to me. Blame yourself if you can’t do the job, don’t throw the blame on the children and call in a psychiatrist and Christ knows what.’
Rogers gave up. ‘Well, I’ve warned you. ‘That boy’ll turn out to be a delinquent. Don’t blame me if he ever ends up in a Borstal.’
Herlihy snorted with disbelief.
‘Well, there’s one thing you could do,’ Rogers said. ‘Cut out those filthy comics he reads.’
‘I read them meself,’ Mike said. ‘What’s wrong with them?’
‘They’re sadistic and cruel and vulgar. They’re evil. Surely you can see that.’
‘Then they’re not far wrong either. They don’t give a false glamour and—er, deceptive nobility to the nature of man. No, they depict man in his natural graceless condition’—his voice was rolling as if he fancied himself delivering a sermon—‘in the condition he was born to, as to a heritage, suffering and wickedness and servitude.’
‘Oh God,’ Rogers said.
‘Oh God indeed,’ Herlihy said. ‘Many an unbeliever like yourself has spoken the truth without knowing it.’
The chance to roll off these phrases seemed to have put Mike in a better mood. He clapped Rogers on the shoulder. ‘Psychiatrists and comics, indeed. Just go away and ponder on the condition of man, young fullah, and you’ll change your tune.
Rogers wanted to stay and argue even if he infuriated the man
Rogers walked away, and Mike called after him, ‘Drop down again and have a yarn. ‘There’s not many people in this town an educated man can talk to. Even if you do talk nonsense.’
Mike didn’t answer Nora, and Rogers didn’t answer Mike.
Sid Raynes kept a stationery and confectionery shop next to the
post office. Rogers called in the following afternoon. He bought
twenty Players which Sid produced from under the counter.
‘Sid,’ he said. ‘I wish you wouldn’t stock these comics.’
Sid was about thirty-five. He was just beginning to get fat. He had always worked in the shop which was his mother’s. Now she had retired and he can it, and knew he would inherit it when she died.
‘Why? What’s wrong with them?’ he said.
Rogers picked one from a pile. He opened at a page with strips of war scenes full of explosions. He pointed to a close-up view of a bayonet plunging into a man’s stomach.
‘Well, you wouldn’t call that healthy, would you?’
‘Arh, it’s only pictures.’
‘These pictures have an effect on kids. That’s how Nazi children were recruited, reared on war propaganda.’
‘Oh, garn. You political blokes read too much into everything. I’ve never took no interest in politics.’
‘Would you like your own kids to read this poison?’
‘They do already. Doesn’t do them no harm. I ought to know. I
see them every day.’
‘Well, it’s having a bad effect on at least one boy in my class.’
‘Who?’
‘I’m not mentioning names.’
‘Well, what d’ya expect me to do about it?’
‘You could stop selling them.’
‘You’ve got a blimmin’ cheek, haven’t you? Expect me to give up me own trade?’
‘You don’t want to trade on doing violence to children’s minds, do you?’
‘Oh, garn! Whatcha talking about? Kids like excitement. It doesn’t do them no harm. Look at the gangster films.’
‘Well, if I had my way I’d cut them out too.’
‘You’re just a bloody spoil-sport, that’s what you are. A bloody killjoy. Weren’t you a kid yourself once? I used to read comics and Deadwood Dicks myself. I bet you did too.’
‘The comics I read were different from these. They were like
Sunday school picnics compared with this. Sunbeam and Tiger Tim
and those. These are gruesome.’
‘You don’t know much about kids for a teacher. You oughta know kids ha’ got stronger stomachs than us. They lap it up. It doesn’t hurt them.’
‘Well, I know it does. It can’t help hurting them.’
‘Well, look, as far as I’m concerned, the argument’s closed. Ya
want me to throw away one of my most profitable lines. I don’t
come along to you and tell you not to do this and not to do that at
your job….’
‘You’d be within your rights, if you had any complaint.’
‘Well, I don’t! You leave me alone and I’ll leave you alone. That’s the trouble with this world. Too many people minding everyone’s business except their own.’
Next time Rogers went for cigarettes Sid looked bland and said,
‘No Players. Only South African.’ Rogers didn’t buy any. He knew
the hotel would have all he wanted.
Rogers didn’t hear any more of the proposal for classes in economics; but he had joined up with the local branch of the Labour Party. There was to be a public meeting at which the local M.P., Bernie O’Malley, would speak. It wasn’t often he came to Coal Flat. He had been member for the district for seventeen years, but since Labour had come to power he had held several ministerial portfolios, which didn’t leave him much time to visit his electorate. The local branch of the party considered it a triumph that they had seized the chance of his presence in the district, and that he had agreed to speak.
Rogers persuaded Flora to come with him. Her father wasn’t keen that she should go, but Mrs Palmer just looked knowing and said not to worry. When Rogers, trying to appear casual, asked Don if he would go, Don snorted: ‘Politics! At that time of day?’ and grinned as if to an offer from a swindler.
The Miners’ Hall was about a third full. ‘It’s full every Sunday
night for some lousy American film,’ Rogers thought. ‘Yet they
Bernie O’Malley arrived by car and walked up the aisle, a white-haired old man in a navy suit. There was a collective murmur but no clapping. The meeting started a quarter of an hour late, because Bernie was late and so were many of the audience. Archie opened up by saying that there was a lot of criticism these days about the way the Government seemed to be moving to the right. He made no secret of it, he was one of those who thought they should head hard left. He didn’t like the way the Gover’ment had been handling strikes the last year or two. The war was bloody well over now, and they couldn’t plead national emergency any more. Well, tonight they had their representative in the hall and he hoped he’d get a fair hearing while he explained to his electors why Gover’ment policy was heading that way.
There was loud clapping and Bernie got up. He started quietly,
but as he got into his stride he got into the platform habits he had
used since the days when he was a militant union organizer on the
Coast, striding and stopping in mid-stride, waving the notes he
never looked at, mopping his brow with them, thumping the air to
underline his points. He was glad, he said, to have this opportunity
to meet his old comrades of Coal Flat, and to have his old friend
Archie Paterson in the chair. Well, he was a great friend of Archie’s
old man, now passed away, and, well, he had a good lot of happy
memories of the old days—before the time of some of the audience
—when him and old Ted Paterson were organizing a saw-millers’
strike. They won too, and Labour would keep on winning. That’s
what Labour was in for, to keep on fighting. (Some of the men
called, ‘Hear, hear!’) Well, old Ted had taught him a thing or two
about the struggle, and though he could remember Archie here
when he was in short pants, p’raps Archie had picked up a thing or
two from him as well as from old Ted.
Well, that wasn’t what he’d come along here to talk about tonight, pleasant memories though they were. Questions had been
asked—and trust young Archie not to mince words—that was what
he liked, a man who spoke straight from the shoulder—no palaver—
Well, the Gover’ment had nothing to be ashamed of. It had a good record. (Someone called out, ‘Whitewash!’) Let the man stand up who could deny that the working man was better off than before Labour got in. A bloody sight better off too, and the people knew it; that’s why they continued to vote Labour. Friends, he had something to say to them. He wouldn’t deny that there was just now a slowing-down of the Labour programme. But there was a good reason for it. They lived in difficult times. They lived in a changed international situation. One of the biggest powers of the world had subjected its own people to a regime of tyranny—
Jock McEwan shouted, ‘Baloney!’
Not only its own people either, but half of Europe lived in terror of the iron heel, the secret police, forced labour, the knock on the door at three o’clock in the morning.
There were loud cries of, ‘Where’s your evidence?’—‘Which
capitalist paper do you read?’—‘Nonsense!’—‘Lies!’
‘Oh yes, ask yourselves,’ Bernie said. Did they ever get knocked up out of bed at three o’clock in the morning? Was New Zealand a police state? Well, did they want the world to be submerged in the system of atheistic communism—the system that denied God and Christianity—-
‘You’re supposed to be a politician, not a bloody missionary!’
—No doubt there were people in this country who were genuine
believers in the propaganda put out so skilfully by the hirelings of
the country mentioned. No doubt there were honest, sincere people
who thought that communism would be in the interests of the
working man. But these were the people he’d come to warn. They
were the ones who were being misled. What did the Communist
Party think of those people? They chucked off at them behind their
backs—sniggered at them and sneered at them, because the
communists were exploiting them to their own dirty ends. Dupes
they were, that’s all. He didn’t mince words. He was like their
chairman that way. Good old Archie—didn’t mince words. Hard
words, he’d admit, but hard words were needed in desperate times
like these—-
There were frequent interjections and Bernie looked to the side to see if Archie was going to order anyone out of the hall, but Archie didn’t move.
But if there were sincere, misguided weaklings, there was a lot of bloody rotters too! The communists themselves—they were the ones! Jockeying to get into power themselves, exploiting innocent fools to their own ends, acting like slaves to the orders of Moscow. ‘They were the ones that were fomenting all these industrial disputes. Would a working man kick against his own Gover’ment when he was ten times better off now than he ever was in his life before? All these strikes and disputes had one source—the bloody Kremlin, that was where. Oh yes—evidently there were some of old Joe’s boys in this very hall—oh, yes, they could kick and squeal and try to create disorder in this hall as much as they liked. But he had enough faith in the common sense of his old comrades of Coal Flat to know that a few power-hunting hirelings of Joe Stalin wouldn’t be able to break up a citizens’ law-abiding meeting which was evidently what they’d come along to do.
There was a loud outcry of interjections. But after one or two cries, ‘Give him a go!’—‘Give him a fair hearing!’, the interjectors sat listening, though half the audience was restless.
Oh yes, but did the audience know what they were squealing for? Because he’d tell them, then. Because these strife-stirrers and trouble-makers didn’t like to hear a few home truths, that was why. Yes, that was why. Well, he’d like to tell the audience that there were unions in this country that were affiliated to the World Federation of ‘Trade Unions—a known and proven organ of communist propaganda and Russian imperialism.—Yes, in the old days they had condemned British imperialism, quite rightly too, and they’d beaten it. (Shouts: ‘When was that?’) There was no British imperialism now. (‘Go to Africa and see!’—‘What about Malaya?’) But a man had to speak out against wrong whether it was done by his friends or his enemies—or by his enemies pretending to be his friends! He was that way that, he couldn’t help it, he had to denounce imperialism whether it came from Russia or Japan or England or the Fiji Islands—-
Jimmy Cairns called, ‘So do the Fijians!’
And the Russians were the new imperialists. When it wasn’t one
country, it was another; that was the way of the world. And the
World Federation of Trade Unions was a known agency for their
imperialism. And the New Zealand unions that were affiliated with
it were, wittingly or unwittingly, furthering the aims of the new
Tsars of Russia. Well, friends, what he’d been leading up to was a
That was what the Gover’ment had to watch. The domination of Moscow was a bigger threat to trade unionism in this country than anything the employers could do. ‘We tamed the employers long ago!’ Bernie thundered. ‘We’ve got to tame old Joe Stalin now!’
There was a loud outcry at this stage. Bernie didn’t speak against it. He was an old hand at managing stormy meetings and he hoped to ride triumphantly as the noise subsided. But it gathered and there were shouts, ‘Sit down! Sit down!’ Archie got up and thanked Mr O’Malley for his speech. Bernie looked huffed and sat down. Archie’s thanks were perfunctory and he invited questions.
Jock McEwan was first. He didn’t ask any questions: he made a short speech himself. He said the present Labour Government was betraying the working class, and trying to justify itself by trotting out the old red bogy. The Government needn’t wonder if it lost the next election because it was already carrying out a Tory policy and the Tories could do it better.
Jimmy Cairns disagreed with the last speaker; he didn’t reckon the Tories could carry out a Tory policy any better than Labour was already doing.
Ben Nicholson said it was sheer nonsense to say there was no British imperialism. The doctor cited recent reports from Malaya that trade unions were having a difficult time fighting the planters for elementary working rights.
Young Arty Nicholson got up and said: ‘What about our seven-hour shift?’
Bernie got up and said, ‘I thought it was about time I had a question instead of a speech. Well, son, I can tell you I’ve been pressing for that. The Gover’ment keeps to its promises. The miners’ll have their seven-hour shift by the end of the year.’
Rogers clapped loudly till he found that the miners themselves were so sceptical that they were clapping half-heartedly. Rogers himself got up.
‘Mr Chairman,’ he said. ‘I haven’t got a question, but I want to
protest against the tone of this meeting. As an ordinary rank-and-
file member of the Labour Party, I think we ought to at least listen
to what our speakers have to say. I don’t say I agree with everything Mr O’Malley says. I’m not a believer in red-baiting myself.
Arthur Henderson who had been quiet all the evening called out, ‘Hear, hear!’
Rogers carried on: ‘But at the risk of opposition I want to say that there is plenty of evidence to suggest that Russia has betrayed the principles of socialism.’ (Jock McEwan said, ‘What evidence?’) ‘I don’t see that socialism is helped by the knock on the door at three in the morning, by the secret police, and the grey monolithic state imposing itself on the lives of ordinary citizens—-’
‘Where the bloody hell did you read this rot?’ Jimmy Cairns said across the hall, more as a personal question than a public retort.
‘I’ve read Koestler,’ Rogers said. ‘Koestler’s book Darkness at
Noon. (‘You can’t argue from a work of fiction,’ the doctor cried.)
‘The experiences of several other ex-communists too. Like Silone,
the Italian. Their experiences are a warning to us. We’ve got to find
our own road to socialism. Not like the Russian brand.’
Ben Nicholson was obviously surprised at this declaration from one he had thought of as more or less an ally.
‘Then you don’t want socialism at all,’ Ben said, with more surprise than anger. ‘If you think Russia isn’t socialist.’
‘I do want socialism,’ Rogers said passionately. ‘But not the Russian kind. I believe in a middle road. Socialism without the dictatorship, without these bureaucrats corrupted by power. Because tyranny isn’t socialism.’
He sat down and Flora squeezed his arm to demonstrate her support.
Jock McEwan spoke again. He turned and pointed to Rogers. ‘If a man claims to be a socialist and talks about a middle road, he means one thing. He means leave the capitalist class in power. Then he’s not a socialist at all. He’s a traitor to the movement.’ Rogers was flushed with a sense of fight. The accusation exhilarated him, he felt as though he was a martyr for truth.
The doctor rose. ‘I’m sorry at the turn this meeting’s taken,’ he said. ‘We’re playing into the hands of those who want to betray socialism. I have no idea whether the main speaker intended this or not. But it’s always been the aim of the right-wing leadership to split the Labour movement, to set us fighting within our own ranks. And that’s what we’re doing now. Mr Chairman, I propose that we stick to questions and not speeches from the floor.’
‘Yes,’ Bernie O’Malley said. ‘The truth was coming out and some people don’t like it. So now after all this time, they want to stick to procedure.’
‘I’ve a question,’ the doctor said. ‘Does the Government propose any amendment of the Arbitration Act?’
‘That’s easily answered,’ Bernie said. ‘No. We believe that industrial disputes should go to the Arbitration Court, and if unions refuse to abide by the decisions of the court, we’ll take action.’
‘What action?’ the doctor asked.
Bernie did not want to be pressed on this. ‘Time will tell,’ he said. ‘We’re getting fed up with communist-agitated disputes.’
Rogers got up again: ‘Mr Chairman, there’s one other matter I’d like to bring to the attention of the meeting. It’s not strictly for a public meeting, but there won’t be another meeting for a month and I think it’s urgent.’
‘Go ahead, then,’ Archie said.
‘I think the local branch should take some action with regard to these children’s comics which are on sale in the town. They’re full of war and crime; sex, violence and cruelty. They’re bound to do a lot of harm to children’s minds.’
This took the meeting by surprise. Few of the audience had seen these new comics, or, if they had, thought there was anything to worry about in them.
‘Comics!’ Jimmy Cairns said. ‘What next? Let the kids have their fun, for God’s sake. Even if you are a schoolmaster.’
Ben Nicholson looked thoughtful and puzzled. The doctor seemed at a loss. Arthur Henderson got up and said: ‘As I see it, though strictly I’m not sure if I’ve the right to say this since I’m not a member of the Labour Party or any political party, what action can you take? You can’t stop a bookseller carrying on his lawful trade. And, anyway, a schoolteacher should be glad to see children wanting to read.’
Rogers said, ‘You haven’t seen them, then. You ought to read this.’ He waved a red-and-yellow covered comic.
Jock McEwan said, ‘I think Mr Rogers is drawing another red herring across our path. We came here to talk about the policy of the Government, and he gets up and talks about bloody comics. I reckon he’s out of order.’
The doctor moved that the matter be referred to the next committee meeting.
When the speaker had been thanked half the audience got up without clapping. Jock McEwan went to the doctor. ‘I’m bloody well surprised at young Rogers,’ he said. ‘I knew he was a bit of a waverer. But I never expected that from him—“grey monolithic state”. Where’s he get that from?’
‘He’s very muddled,’ the doctor said. ‘But it’s no good attacking anyone like that except when you’re sure they’re deliberately trying to split the movement. The thing is to unite on things we agree on. He needs to be reasoned with.’
‘He’s never done a day’s hard work in his life, that’s the trouble,’ Jock said.
Bernie O’Malley asked Archie who was the young fullah who had spoken so well; Archie said wryly that he was a new schoolteacher, Rogers by name, came from the town. ‘Oh yes, Harry Rogers’s boy,’ he said. ‘What’s his first name?’ So on his way out Bernie clapped Rogers on the shoulder and said, ‘Well, I didn’t know I was going to get such fine support from Harry Rogers’s boy,’ he said. ‘How are you, Paul?’ He shook Rogers’s hand vigorously. ‘I’d have recognized you anywhere—old Harry to a T, God rest his soul. You’re in the good old tradition anyway, son. Harry was one of my staunchest supporters. A true son of the Coast.’
He laughed. ‘I remember the time I was running late for a meeting in Hokitika. “Late, Bernie?’ says Harry. “Too bloody right I am,” I says. “Don’t worry,” he says, “we’ll get there on time. I’ll get the train in ahead of schedule for once.” And sure enough, we were there in time. The way he drove that engine, we must have hit fifty.’
Throughout this, Rogers grinned uncertainly, flattered at his attention, glad to have people so loudly reminded that his father was a working man. He didn’t attempt to say much himself, he expected Bernie to be whisked into conversation by so many others; but no one approached him, and Bernie talked on.
‘What are you doing now, Paul,’ he said. ‘At the school? … Well, more power to you. The old Coast won’t go far wrong if there’s enough left like yourself now….’ Then Bernie paused, as if something had just struck him. ‘Didn’t you have a bit of trouble in the war?’ he asked.
Rogers flushed. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I was a C.O. for a while—till I saw different.’
Bernie pursed his lips and said, abstractedly, ‘Ah, yes, I seem to remember….’ He looked about him, suddenly the preoccupied man again, and vaguely patting Rogers on the shoulder, drifted into the crowd at the door. Flora heard him say sideways to Archie: ‘Unstable type,’ but she kept it to herself.
But when Bernie was away in his car, Archie stopped Rogers at the doorstep. ‘Don’t take any notice of his electioneering manner,’ he said. ‘He had to ask me who you were before he talked to you.’
Flora looked angrily at Archie, and Rogers felt deflated and
Flora said, ‘Well, Bernie O’Malley isn’t much of a socialist.’ Rogers was disappointed. He had hoped she would congratulate him on the stand, challenging the public figures of the town.
‘What makes you say that?’ he asked.
‘Well, from what you’ve told me about socialism … nationalizing the land, the freezing-works and the shipping companies and all that.’
‘Oh, that,’ he said. ‘Well, the time’s not really ripe for that.’ He wasn’t sure if he was right; he wasn’t even sure if it mattered. Politics was a dirty game.
Flora didn’t comment. ‘What did you think of my speech?’ he asked. Flora smiled: in her smile was a touch of indulgence that irritated him. ‘You at least got a bit of opposition,’ she said. He was annoyed that she was so cryptic.
The doctor came up to him. ‘Oh, Rogers,’ he said. ‘You ought to come round and see us again. There’s one or two books at my place that would answer the questions on your mind. We’re having another meeting of our group next week. Why don’t you put any questions you like to us and we’ll do our best to answer them?’
But the prospect of being got at, persuaded, confuted, convinced against his will, ‘helped to overcome his weaknesses’, was humiliating. He recalled the night they nearly persuaded him to believe in the need for propaganda classes in economics. He might be convinced not only against his will but against his reason. Anyway, he had taken a stand and he must preserve his independence. What would people think of him if he changed his tune? It was a matter of integrity. He had been inconsistent for too long already.
‘I don’t think I’ll come,’ he said.
‘Well, remember,’ the doctor said. ‘If you ever have any questions or difficulties I’ll do my best to answer them. Even if we do disagree on some things, there’s still plenty of issues we can unite on.’
Rogers was suspicious and promised nothing.
‘Can I borrow that comic? I’d like to have a look at it,’ the doctor said.
‘Yes. Gladly. I did all I could about them.’ He gave it to him.
When Flora left him she went to the kitchen, and her mother asked: ‘Flor, what was that Labour meeting like? Dad was worried about you going.’
‘It was pretty rowdy,’ Flora said.
Mrs Palmer looked as if to say that was what you could expect at a meeting run by that crowd. ‘Flor,’ she said. ‘It’s only for a time. Don’t let Paul talk you into too much of that nonsense.’
Flora looked serious. She spoke firmly. ‘I’ve got a mind of my own, Mum. I’m not going to pretend one thing to Paul and act another to you. Mum, you ought to know me. I couldn’t do it.’
‘Dad’s worried about all those bolshy ideas of Paul’s.’
‘Oh, Mum,’ Flora said. ‘You’re exaggerating. Paul’s all right. You should have heard him tonight running down the communists. And Ben Nicholson and Jock McEwan getting annoyed with him.’
Mum looked surprised but willing to believe this, as if she had always known about Paul.
‘I know not to take too much notice now when Paul talks socialism,’ Flora said. ‘It’s just talk. His bark’s worse than his bite.’
‘You’re a sensible girl, Flor,’ was all Mrs Palmer said.
What Peter Herlihy’s mind threw up surprised even
Rogers. He decided it would be useless to try to teach this
boy how to read while his mind was obsessed with other things and
he concentrated on trying to bring to light all the fears and guilt
buried in him. He knew he was treading risky ground, but if Mike
Herlihy wouldn’t hear of a psychiatrist, someone had to do something for the boy. It wasn’t even practical to let him carry on without mental attention; he made it impossible to teach the other
children. Now that Rogers had become so disheartened about
political activity, his analysis of Peter became a mission with him.
If Peter was away from school for a day, he found normal teaching
tame. Daily he watched Peter’s progress as if it was the only part of
his job that mattered.
He had at least persuaded Peter to give up the comics he read. He said he would tell him better stories. But they didn’t interest Peter, and Rogers was afraid that he still read comics at home, as in fact he did. One day he asked Peter to draw on a portable blackboard anything that came to his mind. But at first Peter said he couldn’t draw. Rogers persisted and finally Peter showed him a drawing that shocked Rogers, though he disguised his reaction. It was a stick figure of a man with an exaggerated phallus. Surmounting his resistance, with a satanic glint in his eye, Peter explained the picture. ‘Draw me more pictures,’ Rogers said. He was disturbed, but having decided to bring out the boy’s obsessions, he had to continue, and he had to expect something as unhealthy as this. He had at least won the boy’s confidence; that was something.
Peter Herlihy spent a whole feverish hour one afternoon wearing out sticks of red chalk on his blackboard, drawing his stick figures, rubbing them out and drawing more. They became a bait for him; he was finished his arithmetic before anyone else, he even began to learn his reading at home so that he would have more time at school to draw red stick figures.
In a few days he had forgotten he wanted to draw them. He took
to drawing more detailed pictures of men and women with fuller
bodies and exaggerated pudenda in many weird postures conceived
by a boy precocious but without understanding. Rogers himself
was alarmed though he tried not to show it. What if Heath should
walk in, or Belle Hansen? Peter’s graffiti began to erupt on the
blackboards around the wall, though Rogers only allowed them a
few minutes’ airing, trying to disguise his impatience to rub them
off. Strangely enough, none of the other children noticed them.
They were too young, Rogers thought, and each too much interested
in his own drawing to be able to read another child’s; yet his misgivings became more serious. This sort of thing might be all right
in a special school.
Within a few days Peter became more aggressive, but he still shrank from boys’ company, and in the playground he was, as he had been since he started school, the quarry of gang attacks, a sullen sneaking boy running and hiding from other boys.
Once he was called for by the dental nurse, who had a room by the mine office. He left school but, afraid of the pain, he did not go to the nurse, and satisfied himself throwing stones at a dog, catching it and trying to open its jaws as far as he could. If he had been stronger he might have broken its jaws but his hand slipped and the dog bit him. He did not go back to school that day, he had his revenge on a little girl on her way home from school. He threw stones at her till some bigger boys chased him, and he ran till he came to the billiard room where he furtively pushed open the door and shouted, ‘Bugger!’ and ran off, leering, though the few youths at billiards were only amused. Then he did the same at Palmers’ bar, but his father was there and he stopped with open mouth till his father came to the door and clouted him and told him to get off home and went back laughing, rather proud of the spirit his son showed, while Peter went home silent and subdued, wondering. As he approached the house his aggressiveness returned. He summoned his energy and banged open the back door and threw down his schoolbag. His mother jumped from the chair where she sat every afternoon before the coal stove, in an overheated kitchen, brooding on God knew what wrongs, like her mother on the other side of the town.
‘You rough little bugger,’ she screamed. ‘Can’t you learn to come into the house decently. Cut it out now, cut it out! You heard me, didn’t you? Cut it out!’
Peter stared insolently at her but only because he wanted something to eat. ‘I want a piece,’ he said.
‘You pick up your schoolbag and put it in the corner where it belongs, or there won’t be any piece!’
He picked it up and threw it reluctantly to the corner.
‘Pick it up properly or by Christ I’ll thrash the living daylights out of you!’
He picked it up and put it down more gently.
‘Now say please before you get a piece!’
‘Please.’
‘Please what?’
‘Please Mum.’ He added the word like a puritan forced to take an oath.
She went to a pantry where she kept well-cooked shortbread hidden from Mike and the boy. She never had two visitors in six months, yet it satisfied her pride to bake and to keep a full pantry as if she entertained frequently. She had a small appetite herself. She carefully replaced the lid on the cake tin. ‘You didn’t wipe your feet, Peter,’ she said, relenting, not wishing to bargain further with his hunger; though she never believed he was hungry when he came in from school; she was sure it was just perversity or boredom.
‘No,’ he said, non-committally. She held out the shortbread gently, tentatively, as to a pet dog. He snatched it like an animal and in a second was in the doorway, only his head showing. ‘I’m glad I didn’t wipe my feet,’ he said.
‘Oh, Peter,’ she said with unusual tenderness, as if wounded reproof would appeal to his conscience. ‘You didn’t say thank you.’
‘I’m not going to either,’ he said. ‘You’d be too scared to thrash the living daylights out of me. I’d tell Dad.’
She pitched into her fury again. ‘Get out, you brat!’ she screamed. ‘For Christ’s sake take yourself out of my sight and off my mind. Christ alone can tell why I ever had you, for I can’t!’
‘Maddie! Maddie!’ Peter taunted her from somewhere in the yard and retreated into the scrub with his shortbread like a cat with a sparrow.
Nora Herlihy took up her post by the open gate of the coal range, and for the tenth time that afternoon she swept the hearth, though there was only a crumb on it, from the shortbread. She had an urge to cry, but she was too proud to cry.
Peter was skulking under some stinkwood scrub, watching the
road, tensing and silent when a car passed, or a dredge-hand biking
home from work, feeling profoundly cunning to be watching unseen, like a predatory animal ambushed for prey. When he had
After half an hour’s reverie he checked again on his possessions and slipped from his den. He took an arc-like track through the scrub and came to the fowl-run. They had twenty fowls, including a dozen new pullets bought two months ago. He slipped silently into the run gently making clucking noises to calm the hens and deftly grabbed one, and holding her tightly, snibbed the gate and retired to the scrub. He had a thick piece of wire, which he pushed through the bird’s throat. He pierced it several times and twisted her neck, but prolonged the death as long as he could. He wrapped the wire round her neck and holding the other end of the wire, swung the bird round and round till she was dead. When she was no longer protesting he kicked her about the ground to soil the feathers, then returned her to the fowl-run. After tea, when it was half-dark, and his father was drunk and not listening to Nora’s insults he would slip out to the fowl-run and then run in excited as if he had made a fresh discovery, saying, ‘Dad! Dad! A ‘possum’s killed another of the hens! I chased it away!’ And his father, half-drunk, would follow him into the half-dark and look at it. He would pat his shoulder and say, ‘Good work, son’, For the fowl’s death would have earned him from his father a kiss, an amulet through a night of bickering knives.
Rogers was taking the lower reading group at the blackboard: p
for pipe, with a drawing of a pipe, f for flag with a drawing of a flag,
and other letters. There were three girls in this group who were
very slow to learn. Day after day he had the same experience with
them: he would concentrate on three letters for several minutes,
then he would rub off the drawings and go through the letters again
and each of these girls would say the wrong sound. Peter Herlihy
was very erratic. Rogers would hold on to his patience with set
teeth. Why did Heath ever put me in charge of infants? he would
wonder. You wanted a stout motherly woman of early middle age
for infants, preferably a mother herself, a woman whose temper was
beyond ruffling. It annoyed him all the more that these children
were so keen to please him, bursting to say f when he pointed to
p. Truman Heath walked in and said, as if he was an inspector:
‘Just carry on, Mr Rogers. I want to see what you’re doing.’
Rogers knew well enough that Heath disliked him; he didn’t know
why, and there was nothing he could do about it. It was just one of
these pointless stubborn personal animosities with which New
Zealand is so rife. Rogers carried on, and the children’s recognition
of the letters did not improve. Heath intervened.
‘These children don’t know their alphabet yet,’ he said.
‘They’re the C group. I’ve been giving them extra time on this for weeks.’
‘Let me take them for a while.’
Heath did as Rogers had done, and he got no better results. Rogers watched for a minute and seeing that Heath’s method was no different from his own, he quietly went to the back of the room where the children of the other reading groups were printing words, each on his own section of blackboard round the walls of the classroom. He knew this would irritate Heath, but he didn’t want to waste time. He was giving one boy assistance when Heath melodramatically threw down the ruler he had used to point to the letters and walked purposefully to Rogers.
‘This isn’t good enough, Mr Rogers,’ he said. ‘These children are not making the progress they should be.’
‘I’m doing my best, Mr Heath.’
‘Well, it’s not a very good best.’ Heath’s face was flaring but weak. He only found the courage to remonstrate openly when he could harness anger. He cast for an excuse to stoke his temper.
‘Listen to the noise,’ he said. ‘Break down the noise there!’ he called to the class.
‘They’re only infants, Mr Heath. I don’t object to a little talking so long as they are busy.’
‘They’ve got to learn to be quiet,’ he said. ‘You might think of
the teacher who has to put up with them next year, instead of yourself. That boy!’ he called violently, and the whole class stopped in
their work, awed at this intrusion of anger into their normally mild
classroom. ‘That boy, come over here.’ It was Donnie Palmer.
‘Quickly now when I speak to you.’ Donnie had asked the boy next
to him for a piece of red chalk so that he could draw a red hen
where he had printed hen. He was not a bright boy in the class,
average in ability, orderly, willing and easy to manage. He took no
advantage from living in the same building as Rogers and meeting
him in the sitting-room at home, and Rogers had never had a harsh
word with him. Heath grabbed his shoulder and shook him. ‘You
were talking,’ he said. ‘You disobeyed me.’ Donnie stared up at
him paralysed with shock. Already Heath could feel detached from
his anger; in another second or two he might have shrugged and
walked away. But he had always promised himself that in future
he’d be tough, show them he was a disciplinarian. ‘Didn’t you?
Answer me now.’
‘Yes.’
‘Yes what?’
‘Yes sir.’
‘They don’t even know their manners, Mr Rogers…. Didn’t you hear me tell you to be quiet? Answer me now.’
‘Yes sir.’
‘And you deliberately disobeyed me?’
‘I don’t know sir.’
‘You talked, didn’t you? You said something to that boy?’
‘Yes sir.’
‘What did you say to him?’ He shook Donnie again.
‘I asked him for some red chalk.’
‘Well, you can come along to my office, my boy,’ Heath said. Donnie burst into tears. Heath looked afraid, but he marched the boy out of the room while the children stared with wide eyes and Rogers protested: ‘Mr Heath, Mr Heath….’ His protests only strengthened Heath’s flagging will.
Donnie came back a minute later crying in convulsions. He was holding a sore hand under his arm, and blowing warm breath on it occasionally. ‘Donnie, did Mr Heath give you the strap?’ Rogers said.
Short of breath, Donnie gasped, ‘Yes, he gave me two on the same hand.’
‘You sit down now and take it quietly,’ Rogers said, feeling useless. ‘Right-oh, class. All back to your seats and get your blackboards ready for some spelling.’ He bent over Donnie. ‘You don’t need to do any spelling,’ he said.
Donnie sniffled. ‘What’ll Grannie say?’ he sobbed.
‘Don’t you worry. I’ll tell Grannie what happened,’
‘It’s the first time I’ve ever got the strap.’
Peter Herlihy was agog. ‘Please sir, he’s the only kid that’s ever had the strap out of all us kids.’ Donnie sobbed harder.
‘You mind your own business Peter,’ Rogers said, resisting a
temptation to project all his anger against him. ‘Are your blackboards ready, class? The first word is rope. Jane lost her skipping-rope. Rope.—Donnie, you take out some plasticine and go on with
that. I’ll let you give out the milk tomorrow.’
‘Please sir, it’s my turn,’ a boy said.
‘I think we should let Donnie have another turn,’ Rogers said.
‘Oh, that’s not fair.’
‘You’ll get your turn the next day. I won’t forget you, Ray. The
next word is wall. Dad is papering the wall. Wall.’
The class was working intently now, and Heath walked in again. ‘That’s better,’ he said, ‘This is how they should be working. Quietly, efficiently.’ Rogers didn’t comment. ‘A little shake-up now and again does them a world of good. Oh, it’s be very nice to be easy with them like you Mr Rogers. Teaching would be very pleasant then. But it doesn’t pay. We’re here to work, I’m afraid, not to play.’
Rogers was calling the next word, but Heath interrupted him. ‘Attention, class,’ he said. ‘Hands on heads. Like this. Hasn’t Mr Rogers taught you to put your hands on your heads?’
Several voices said, ‘No-o.’ Heath looked sideways at Rogers. ‘Well, I’m showing you now. And every morning from now on when you come into school I want you to practise doing this. Because some day I’ll come in and ask you to do it to see if you’ve remembered. You won’t forget, will you, Mr Rogers? I want you to remind Mr Rogers just in case he forgets. We all forget things now and again, don’t we, boys and girls?’
‘Please sir, I forgot my hankie this morning and Mr Rogers lent me his.’
‘I forgot to take my spelling book home last night and I couldn’t learn my spelling.’
‘That shouldn’t be,’ Heath said. ‘There’s no excuse for that.
Heath’s eyes sought and found Donnie, his crying stopped, his face still blubbery with resentment. ‘What’s this? Why aren’t you doing your spelling like the others?’
‘I told him to go on with some plasticine,’ Rogers said. ‘His hand is too sore to hold a chalk.’
‘Right-oh, class. Put away your boards. Take out your reading books and no talking,’ Heath said.
‘Please sir, we’ve had our reading.’
‘I said no talking,’ Heath replied, his face flushed again. ‘You remember what, happened to the last boy who disobeyed me.’ Donnie Palmer began to cry again.
‘Look here, me boy,’ Heath said to Rogers. ‘We’ve got a little bit of business to discuss.’ He spoke in undertones while the children stared at their books, listening to him. ‘Why did you excuse that boy from his work?’
‘I said his hand was sore, Mr Heath. He’s not in a fit condition to do his spelling. We’ve got to consider how children’s natures work.’
‘What you mean is, you disapproved of my strapping him. That’s it, isn’t it?’
‘Yes, if you have to know, I did.’
‘So you let him off his work to show you were taking his part.’
‘That’s correct.’
‘You’re encouraging insubordination, Mr Rogers. I won’t stand for it.’ His voice was raised. His face was flushed, his eyes spurting the anger of a man publicly insulted. He was frustrated that Rogers didn’t answer. ‘Oh, it’s not the only time, Mr Rogers. Oh no. Don’t think I haven’t been watching you. Oh no, I’ve got a dozen complaints to make about you. But I kept them back because I’m not a hard man and I wanted to give you a chance. But the time has come, Mr Rogers, for a showdown.’
He looked round the room but the children’s eyes avoided him. He noticed that Donnie Palmer, without being told, had put away his plasticine horse and was reading.
‘For example, Mr Rogers, I’ve come into this room twice this morning. And each time the children looked at the door as I came in. They should have been concentrating on their work.’
Rogers laughed. ‘Isn’t it natural to look at a door to see who’s coming?’
‘Piffle!’
‘I would have thought that you’d have been disappointed if they hadn’t looked up at you.’
Melodramatically Heath raised his arm and pointed to the door. ‘Get along to my office,’ he said. Rogers dallied, thinking to refuse. But the children, he thought, had had enough emotional upheaval this morning. ‘I’m not one of the children, you know,’ he said. Heath followed him out of the room forgetting to tell the class, automatically, to be silent.
When they had gone the children heaved a communal sigh. Peter Herlihy grinned fiercely. ‘Mr Rogers’s going to get the strap!’ he said. ‘Mr Heath is going to give him a hiding!’
‘Is your hand still sore, Donnie?’ a girl asked. She went over to look while he showed a small red weal licking into his wrist. ‘Gee!’ she said, and the children gathered round to see. ‘That’s nothing,’ one boy said. ‘You should’ve seen the one my big brother got for smoking.’
‘Well, he shouldn’t smoke, so there!’
‘Donnie didn’t do anything naughty. Mr Heath’s not fair.’
Peter Herlihy was dancing in front of the class with Rogers’s ruler in his hand, pretending to be Mr Heath hitting Mr Rogers, slashing the ruler at his other hand which he pulled away just in time. ‘I wish I could see them,’ he said. ‘Hey, kids, let’s sneak along to the office and listen.’
‘No-o,’ several voices said.
Peter slid to the door, opened it slightly, and stood in his crime-film manner, hidden by the door-post and slowly sneaked his eye round it to look up along the corridor towards the office. His eye sneaked with a bump into Miss Dane’s cardigan, coming in to see what the noise was about. He ducked back to his seat sniggering.
‘What on earth is going on in here?’ Miss Dane said. ‘Everyone back to their places at once. Didn’t Mr Rogers tell you to be silent while he was out of the room?’
‘No-o.’
‘I’m sure he did. I don’t want anyone to tell me fibs. You know what happens to you when you tell fibs.’
‘Please Miss Dane, you don’t go to heaven when you die.’
‘Yes, you go to a very nasty place which isn’t very nice for little boys and girls at all. Where is Mr Rogers?’
‘Please miss, Mr Heath gave Donnie Palmer the strap.’
‘Donnie Palmer! Well I am surprised at you, Donnie. You must have been a very naughty boy.’
‘Please miss, he was talking.’
‘What’ll Grannie say?’ Donnie asked and sobbed again.
‘Grannie will say you’ve been a very naughty boy, that’s what Grannie will say. I’m sure your father will be very displeased with you too’—though she wasn’t at all so sure. ‘I always thought that of all the boys in this room Donnie Palmer would never get the strap. You must have been very naughty this morning.’ She brightened. ‘What went wrong, Don? Did you get out of the wrong side of bed this morning?’
‘No,’ he said. The children laughed.
‘Have you had a tummyache, to make you feel in a bad mood?’
‘No.’
‘Well, I’m sure there’s something radically wrong somewhere.
You’ll just have to learn to be a good boy and do as you’re told.
I’m sure that if I ask you to, you won’t let me down, will you?’
‘No,’ he said shyly.
‘Even if you have let Grannie down—and Mr Heath and Mr
Rogers.’
Peter Herlihy said: ‘Please miss, Mr Heath’s giving Mr Rogers the strap because he was naughty too.’
‘Peter Herlihy! Don’t you talk such rubbish. Mr Heath and Mr Rogers are very good friends. We teachers are always friendly to each other. You’ve no right to talk, Peter Herlihy. I know all about you. I’m warning you, I’ve been watching you. And if you don’t watch your step, you’ll be in trouble. You’re two years older than the other children and you should be setting them an example. You don’t think much of a boy of eight who’s still in the primers, do you?’ she said to the class, and they answered, ‘No’.
‘A boy of eight down among the babies,’ she said, and they laughed. She left them, warning them to get on with their reading, quietly. Peter Herlihy sat sneering and sulky. He did not talk to anyone.
When they got to the office, Heath said, ‘Oh, it’s easy to see you’re just the boy. You think you’re someone, don’t you? In big with the Palmers. Calling on the doctor talking a lot of rot about communism. Well you might be able to get away with it at Palmers’ or at the doctor’s, but you can’t get away with it here. I’m in charge here, not you or anyone else.’
‘I didn’t doubt it.’
‘Well, you’d better not doubt it. Don’t think I haven’t complained, Mr Rogers. I’ve let the board know my mind about you. And the committee.’
‘Thanks for telling me. You might have spoken to me first.’
Heath was a man who, in argument, fought with cheap verbal parries and thrusts. He said, ‘I might as well talk to that wall as to you.’
‘It’s common courtesy to warn me if you’re going to complain about me.’
‘I’m the headmaster. I don’t consult you on matters of school policy.’
‘What, if it isn’t too pertinent a question, do you find wrong with me?’
‘Everything. And it’s an impertinent question. It just shows you up. You think you know everything, that’s your trouble. All you young people today wont’ listen to the older generation.’
‘What’s that to do with my teaching?’
‘You’ve had no experience. Two years in a training college, one year as a probationer. Experience is what I look for, practical ability….’
‘How can you get experience if you can’t start without it?’
‘You get it from me from the older teachers. But you won’t listen to me. You forgot everything while you were in the army, anyway. You’ve got a damn cheek to call yourself a returned soldier anyway. You were a conchy. Returned soldier!’
‘Unlike you.’
‘I’ve got no time for conchies. I’d shoot them. Utter cowards and traitors.’
‘I’d rather be a pacifist than dodge any commitment one way or the other as you did in the war before, gathering up grading-marks while other men were dying.’
‘I’ll break your bloody neck if you’re not careful.’
‘So far you’ve taken me to task for the people I know, for being a know-all, for being a pacifist. What has all this got to do with my teaching?’
‘I’ve already told you. You’re inexperienced. You forget that men of thirty years’ teaching know a little more about it than you do.’
‘I’m learning.’
‘You’re incompetent. The insubordination in that room. The noise. You’ll have to learn to be harder on the children.’
‘I don’t believe in teaching by fear.’
‘You’ll have to learn. There’s enough cheeky brats in this town without you encouraging them. You’re not up to much if you don’t want children to respect you. Trying to be popular with them. Crawling to infants.’
‘You’d rather have me crawling to you, I suppose.’
‘Well, I’m warning you. I’ll be watching you from now on and I’m going to do my level best to have you shifted. Now get out!’
‘When you ask me civilly, I’ll go.’
Heath took Rogers by the neck and pushed him into the corridor. Rogers made a great effort to control himself.
A few minutes later Heath came to Rogers’s room and complained that he hadn’t yet marked the roll.
It was the day on which Rogers was on lunch-hour duty. When the children had gone he realized he should have given Donnie a note to Mrs Palmer, explaining how he came to be strapped. Miss Dane had gone, so there was no way of sending a message.
Half-way through the lunch hour a boy from Mrs Hansen’s class came to tell Rogers that Peter Herlihy was chasing his sister and twisting her arm.
‘I’ll speak to him,’ Rogers said. ‘If he does it again, fight him. I’ll see that you’re not punished for it.’
He went into the playground and called Peter.
‘I don’t think much of the boys that have to fight girls smaller than themselves,’ he said.
‘She’s the same size as me.’
‘Well, you shouldn’t have to fight any girls. Why don’t you fight boys? I think you’re frightened of them.’
‘I am not.’
‘Yes, I think you are, all right.’
‘You’re frightened of Mr Heath. You wanted to fight him this morning and you didn’t.’
‘Well, if you go fighting girls again, there’ll be trouble.’
He knew that this would provoke Peter to chase the girl again, and he was not surprised when a few minutes later Dick Cairns came again to say that Peter was twisting her arm.
‘Well, fight him, Dick. You’re both the same size, aren’t you?’
He called Peter, who was big for his age and a fair match for Dick. ‘You’re pretty good at hurting a little girl,’ he said. ‘You’re not so keen on fighting her brother.’
Peter cowered in a corner of the corridor. Rogers continued
cruelly to provoke him till he lunged savagely at Dick. They boxed
and wrestled for half an hour while Rogers supervised. Dick fought
gamely without malice. Peter fought with frustrated fury, but once
warm he was tenacious. Once he took off his belt and would have
lashed at Dick with the buckle, only Rogers stepped in and took it
from him against a flow of insults. Rogers’s hardest job was, like
that of a policeman at a street accident, to keep other children away.
They crowded at a few yards’ distance in the corridor, and though
To prevent her taking control of the situation, Rogers for a minute ignored her. ‘Right-oh, boys. Break it up,’ he called. ‘It was a fair fight. I think it’s a draw. You both won. Now go outside and get a breather before the bell goes. Peter, here’s your belt. Now shake hands on it.’ They shook hands, Dick not willingly, Peter glowering. ‘Don’t carry on fighting outside because the fight’s over. It’s a draw.’ In fact they were both too breathless to continue.
‘Have you gone crackers, Paul?’ Mrs Hansen asked.
‘No. I’m sorry I didn’t answer first, Belle. I wanted to finish it.’
‘Not before time, either. What was it all about?’
Rogers explained. ‘Don’t say anything to Dickie, Belle,’ he asked. ‘I put him up to it. It was about time Peter met his match.’
‘There’s no doubt about that.’ She turned and quizzed him coldly. ‘Aren’t you a match for him? Can’t you manage him yourself without setting other boys on him?’
‘He had to have it from someone his own size.’
‘I don’t get it,’ she said. She bellowed at the other children in the
corridor to go. ‘Whew! Just as well Truey wasn’t here. There
would have been trouble.’
‘I’m not telling him about it.’
‘Nor I. I hear you had a barney with him this morning. Tell us about it.’
He began to explain while she paced majestically beside him, listening critically, balancing between her enmity for Heath and her uncertain contempt for Rogers’s simplicity.
‘Donnie Palmer,’ she said. ‘I can’t see Gran taking that lying down. I think,’ she said with pleasure, ‘Truey has bitten off more than he can chew. Poor old Truey. Everyone’s against him. All the more the merrier.’
‘He says he’s going to get me shifted.’
‘How can he? You know, when you came he thought he was going to find an ally in you, against his rebellious staff. I half expected he would, too.’
‘What, me? Me siding with him? What made you think that?’
She didn’t answer. Suddenly she challenged him. ‘I thought you were a pacifist?’ she said.
‘Yes, I’m still against war.’
‘Well, Germany attacked Poland. What’s the difference between making Dickie attack Peter?’
He began to protest that it wasn’t a fair analogy, but she was striding off. She had scored her point.
It was the day when the school had half an hour of scripture after
lunch. The local parsons would come to the school, and two church-going women, to take classes on Bible stories while the teachers
marked books or gossiped in the staffroom. The few Catholic
children met apart in one room for catechism. Usually a local
woman led them, but once a month the priest came; he had a big
district to cover. He came along the corridor now, in a black suit of
a modern cut. He was young, fair-haired and handsome with a
modestly cheeky boyish grin. Local people who had seen Bing
Crosby as a priest in a film called Going My Way had said he
looked just like Father Flaherty. He was very popular in the district,
because of his easy worldly manner. Once at the school, he grinned
welcome at the Presbyterian parson but the parson turned his back
and stumped away. It was one of Father Flaherty’s favourite
stories: ‘I can tell you my fist very nearly met up with his nose.’
You were liable to meet him at the races or in a pub. On Sunday
afternoons, under an assumed name, he refereed league matches.
You were likely to forget he had anything to do with religion, and
that was the secret of his popularity. Even Rogers was attracted one
Friday when the priest was having lunch at the hotel, and Rogers
asked for fish, and the priest said: ‘It’s easy to see you’re not a
Doolan, preferring fish to meat.’ Then suddenly, almost with a
touch of shame, he contracted out of the talk to mutter his own
grace, then brightly, as if from a blackout, rejoined the talk. Today
he slapped Rogers’s shoulder.
‘Well, old chap!’ he said. ‘I bet your hand trembles when you sign your pay sheet. I don’t know how you have the cheek to take it, having half an hour off while us clergy do your work for you.’
‘It’s not my work,’ Rogers said. ‘I’m not a believer.’
‘You’ll be brought to your knees some day,’ the priest said, then brightly, ‘Why don’t you play football? That’d bring you to your knees.’ More seriously he said. ‘Football gives you as good a training in team-work and self-discipline as I know.’
Rogers grinned. The Father said, ‘It’s you that’s got young Herlihy in your class, isn’t it? Now there’s a handful for you.’
‘The convent couldn’t manage him,’ Rogers said.
‘There’s only one way to handle that kid,’ the priest said, ‘and
that’s to scare him. Oh, he’s very wary of me. Last time he played
up in catechism I said to him, “Look here, young fellah, if you carry
‘That’s hardly the way to teach him Christian charity,’ Rogers said. ‘Scaring him like that.’
‘Well,’ the priest said with that frank man-to-man look of his. ‘Do you know any other way?’
‘Love,’ Rogers said.
The Father laughed kindly. ‘I don’t think you know what the word means,’ he said. ‘You’re too innocent for this world. Don’t look so flattered. Innocence isn’t goodness. Innocent people never know the harm they do.’
Rogers went looking for Peter, determined to tell him he needn’t go to catechism, but he couldn’t find him.
When the class was reassembled neither Donnie nor Peter were there. Rogers asked the children if they knew where Peter was, and someone said that Mrs Hansen had called him to her room. Rogers feared the worst.
In a few minutes Peter came in glowering with wet fierce eyes holding one hand under his shoulder. He came to Rogers’s table and said, ‘I’m sorry sir.’
‘What for, Peter?’
‘Mrs Hansen said I had to tell you I was sorry. She gave me three cuts.’ He was trembling with suppressed anger.
Rogers was furious with her. He didn’t know what to say to Peter, yet he had to say something. He improvised. ‘That’s all right, Peter. I know you’re not frightened of boys now.’
It sounded better than he thought it would, and Peter took it well.
For the rest of the afternoon Peter sat sullen and withdrawn, engaged in some internal upheaval.
Rogers was reading a story to the class half an hour later (and he noticed Peter listening intently) when the door opened and Heath came in. Luckily, without prompting, the children stood up. ‘That’s the way,’ Heath said. ‘Mr Rogers, I want you for a minute please.’ He looked troubled.
Don Palmer was in the corridor with him. “Mr Palmer has a complaint about you,” Heath said.
‘Hullo, Don.’ Rogers said, pleased and troubled to see him.
‘Hullo Paul.’ Heath did not like the way they established a contact over his head.
‘I don’t know if it’s you, Paul,’ Don said. ‘It’s whoever gave Donnie the strap. Mum’s in a fit. We took him to the doctor.’
Rogers looked at Heath. ‘You’re not suggesting that I did it, Mr Heath?’
‘Of course not.’
‘Well, why didn’t you admit it?’ Don said. ‘We knew it was you. Donnie said it was you. He said Paul—Mr Rogers never uses the strap.’
‘Yes and that’s just why I had to do it. If Mr Rogers used it a little more often this wouldn’t have happened.’
‘I don’t see that I’m to blame.’
‘Oh, yes you are. You kept an undisciplined class, Mr Rogers, and I had to put it in order.”
‘I’m not interested in that,’ Don said. ‘I want to know who strapped my son, and why.’
‘I did, Mr Palmer,’ Heath said. ‘But the blame is with your precious Mr Rogers. If he won’t keep his class in order I have to. If I were you I’d try to have your son put in another class, or have his teacher shifted.’
‘That’s nothing to do with me, Mr Heath,’ Don said. ‘It wasn’t necessary to punish my boy like that. Mr Rogers says he’s been good in class. Isn’t that right?’
‘Certainly. He’s never given me any trouble.’
‘Well, he gave me trouble this morning. And I’m not going to take it, parents or no parents. Conchies or no conchies. I can’t see why a returned soldier like you should be so anxious to take the side of a conchy.’
‘That’s all right about that. I don’t think you’re the one to talk,’ Don said. ‘I’m not interested in that. My son came home with a weal two inches long and darn near sixteenth of an inch high.’
‘I can’t help that, Mr Palmer. He has to be disciplined.’
‘What did he do?’
‘He was talking when I called for silence. I won’t tolerate disobedience. And it’s a pity a few more parents aren’t the same. The modern generation, they don’t know how to bring up children.’
‘I’m not here to be insulted, Mr Heath. I’m here to talk about my son. If he had been obstreperous, I wouldn’t object. But you didn’t have to strap him for that.’
‘I’m the headmaster of this school, Mr Palmer, and I don’t take orders or advice from you.’
‘The kid’s not used to being punished like that.’
‘That just goes to prove what I say. He needs punishment.’
‘He’s a good boy without any punishment,’ Rogers said.
‘If you had to make an example of him you’d only have had to give him a tiny tap and that would have been enough to frighten him,’ Don said.
‘If you want to know, Don,’ Rogers said. ‘Mr Heath wasn’t punishing Donnie, he was taking it out on me. He hit Donnie too hard to get his own back on me.’
‘Well!’ Don flared. ‘You schoolteachers can fight as much as you like. Leave my boy out of it.’
‘I didn’t hit him,’ Rogers said.
‘You didn’t try to stop Mr Heath.’
‘I’d have got the sack.’
‘You might yet, young man,’ Heath said, pleased with this argument between them. ‘No, Mr Palmer, I’m afraid you’ve got no cause for complaint. I’m a father myself and I understand a father’s feelings’—he looked a little superciliously towards Rogers—‘but you must admit you want your son to grow into an obedient citizen. Oh, it’s not easy, I know. We have to be cruel to be kind.’
‘No cause for complaint,’ Don said. ‘Ask the doctor about that! He said that any teacher that hit a boy of six as hard as that wasn’t fit for his position.’
‘I know all about the doctor,’ Heath said. ‘A communist.’
‘Does that affect his doctoring?’ Rogers asked.
‘Just out to make trouble,’ Heath said.
‘Well, I’m out to make trouble,’ Don said. ‘No man’s going to hit my boy like that and get away with it. Even if it was you, Paul, I’d have gone crook.’
‘I wouldn’t blame you, Don. I wouldn’t have done it.’
‘Well, you two can talk about this over your beer out of school hours. I’ve got work to do, I’m afraid. And so have you, Mr Rogers. We can’t all lead a life of leisure.’
‘Meaning what?’ Don said.
Heath tried to smile blandly.
‘If you mean I’m loafing, Mr Heath, I’d remind you of my arm.’
‘Oh, no, no. I wasn’t suggesting anything personal at all, Mr Palmer.’
‘Well, just you be careful what you say.’
‘You see, Mr Palmer. It’s natural for you. It’s—well—your race. Your race lived in a land of plenty. They had no need to work. But nowadays your race needs discipline, and your son as well as anybody.’
‘Mr Heath,’ Rogers said.
‘You keep my race out of it,’ Don flared again. ‘I’m as good as
‘That’s a matter of opinion,’ Heath said, assuming his insecure superior smile.
‘I came here to talk about my boy.’
‘As far as I’m concerned the matter is closed. We can’t waste the Board’s time. Come on Mr Rogers.’
Rogers went back to the room. ‘Well, this isn’t the last you’ll hear of it. By Christ, it isn’t. Mum’s going complain to the Committee.’
‘Mum’s going to complain to the Committee. Well, the Committee will stick by me, Mr Palmer. This is a school, Mr Palmer, not a Sunday school. We’re here to enforce discipline and get results.’
Twice that afternoon Heath came back. The second time the class was modelling plasticine. Heath walked about smarming, patting children’s heads, encouraging and expansive.
‘This is the proper time for what you said,’ he told Rogers. ‘Self-expression, creativeness. Everything in its proper place, at its proper time. What I’m interested in is results. I don’t care how you get them as long as you get them. If you can get them your way, well and good.’
‘Do you mean that you don’t object if I carry on the way I’ve been doing?’
‘But you haven’t been getting results, Mr Rogers. There’s the rub. No, I’m afraid you’ll have to change your ways if you’re to do your duty by the parents and the children.’
‘See here,’ he said, taking from a boy a horse he was making out of plasticine. ‘Now, son, you look at that horse and then think of a real horse. Now, what’s wrong with your horse? It doesn’t look like a real horse, does it? You look at it and see where you went wrong.’
The boy took back his horse, looking cheated. When Heath had turned he broke it up and began to make a lorry.
‘You see, aim at the highest, Mr Rogers. Never let them be
satisfied; there’s always something they can do better than they
have done.’
‘Always find fault.’
‘Exactly, there’s always something wrong with what they’ve done.
That way you’ll get results. Some day you’ll thank me for this
advice, Mr Rogers. If you follow it, you’ll be a headmaster yourself,
and you’ll be checking young teachers who haven’t had experience
and argue back at you.’
Rogers didn’t comment.
Miss Dane was printing sentences on the wall blackboards in readiness for the morning when Mrs Hansen swept into the room.
‘I caught you,’ she said. ‘Doing overtime. Scabbing on the union.’
‘I was just thinking of those extra minutes I can have in bed in the morning,’ Miss Dane said.
‘You want to do all this in school time. I always do. Come up home for a cuppa?’
‘I really should finish this first, Mrs Hansen.’
‘Belle. Here, give us some chalk. I’ll help you.’ Quickly and
confidently she chalked sentences at the rate of two to Miss Dane’s
one, and Miss Dane, not satisfied with her printing, wondered if she
should come early the next day to print them again.
‘Truey’s been picking on Fred Lawson today too. He hasn’t been near me. He knows better.’
‘I must say he doesn’t treat me too badly.’
‘You’ll see.’ She put her head through the sliding wall into Rogers’s room. ‘Come up for a cuppa, Paul?’
‘I don’t think I ought to. The Palmers will be waiting to find out what happened to Donnie.’
‘I want to hear the rest about your barney with Truey.’
They walked down the road through a fine drizzle. Only the bottom of the hills showed through mist. Across the Grey Valley the ranges were lost in another bank of mist. Rogers recounted more of his argument with Heath while fine drops of mist settled on his hair and his overcoat, making it look shaggy with white bristles. Miss Dane didn’t say much.
‘I’m dying to know what’ll happen,’ Mrs Hansen said. ‘Gran against Truey. It’s not an even match.’
‘I do think she spoils that child,’ Miss Dane said. Rogers left them at the corner and headed straight home to the hotel.
Bounce raced up and leaped at Mrs Hansen and almost unbalanced Miss Dane. ‘Here, you’re too full of energy and the butcher’s best meat,’ she said. ‘You’ve been lying down all day. Not like us overworked teachers.’
Bounce kept leaping, dragging his wet paws down the front of
her raincoat. ‘Go away,’ she said, ‘or I’ll tell your teacher. What’s
your teacher’s name?’
‘He has private tuition,’ Mrs Hansen said. ‘I’m his governess, aren’t I, Bounce.’ She put her arms round his neck and nuzzled his jaw.
She let Miss Dane into the house and ran down to the fowl-house to pick up the eggs. ‘Three eggs for Belle and Jack!’ she whooped as she switched on an electric kettle. She had a kitchenette full of labour-saving devices that she had seen and admired in overseas women’s magazines. In the dining-room she flung her bag on to the table, pushing aside what was already there—a bag of oranges, some Fireside Library books from Greymouth, some sewing and some frock patterns of tissue paper. She opened tins and filled plates with bought biscuits and cakes. ‘About time I did some housework,’ she said. ‘No time for that and teaching too.’ When they were drinking tea Miss Dane said:
‘Sometimes I don’t think it’s right the way we talk of Mr Heath.’
‘Why not?’
‘Well, seriously, he is the headmaster. He is trying to do his best.’
‘To do his best for himself. You should have heard Sue Johnson on him. The way he was always on that girl’s tail just because she was a probationer and couldn’t fight back.’
‘But probationers shouldn’t want to fight back, should they?’
‘Or Fred Lawson. The hours he put in getting that art work out of his class, and then for Truey to show it to the inspector and make out it was his own work. It nearly broke Fred’s heart.’
‘Well, of course I don’t approve of that. But I think we should be prepared to co-operate. The children know we don’t like him.’
‘Oh?’
‘Yes. I went into Mr Rogers’s room this morning. There was a terrible noise, and Peter Herlihy had the nerve to say Mr Heath was giving Mr Rogers the strap.’
‘He’d like to have, too. Course young Herlihy’s a different matter.’
‘Mr Rogers isn’t severe enough with him.’
‘If I was Paul I’d thrash him. Instead of setting boys on to him, like at lunch-time today.’ She gave an account of the fight.
‘Really, I can’t understand it. And then this Donnie Palmer case.
I don’t think Mr Heath need have been quite so hard on Donnie,
but if Mr Rogers can’t keep discipline then Mr Heath has to step in,
and we shouldn’t object. He is the headmaster.’
‘I only hope those kids know some manners by the time I get them. First lesson for Standard I next February: Forget that you were ever in Mr Rogers’s room. Second lesson: Learn to do as I tell you.’
‘You see I’m afraid Mrs Palmer is determined to go on with it. She’s threatening to take it to the Committee. I don’t think we should let Mr Heath down.’
‘Well, I’m not taking sides. I don’t like Paul’s tripe about freedom and psychology and all that. But I like Truey a whale of a lot less.’
‘It’s unfortunate about that child. The child isn’t to blame. It’s not right for a child to grow up in a hotel. And the father doesn’t give him the discipline he needs.’
‘Don’t you like Don? I think he’s a nice type. A bit of Mum’s boy, I’ll admit. But Gran’s a good old stick. I like the Palmers, Maori blood and all.’
‘A child of a broken marriage. What else can you expect? The father hasn’t any sense of responsibility.’ She became passionate. ‘He’s a proper heathen.’
‘Well, aren’t we all?’ Mrs Hansen said with a shrug. ‘I’m no Bible-banger. My mother rammed it into me enough to last me a lifetime.’
‘Yes, but you wouldn’t call yourself an atheist?’
‘Me? I go to church now and again, just to pay my respects like.’
‘But young Mr Palmer just doesn’t acknowledge any Creator at all.’
‘Have another cuppa. You’re getting too deep for my liking.’
‘Time I surfaced, is it?’ She slipped into her familiar facetious
patter. She wanted to confide more in Mrs Hansen but she knew
she wouldn’t sympathize. Coal Flat had in fact disappointed her
greatly in the two months she had been here. She didn’t like the
hotel. It was lonely in her room, sewing or writing a letter, sitting
on the side of her bed—there was only a hard wooden chair. She
had tried spending her evenings in the parlour, sitting in a wide
arm-chair, careful to avoid the one with broken springs, but then she
would hear the men in the bar drinking and swearing. The swearing
hurt her most. ‘Sheer lack of vocabulary,’ she would say to anyone
else who was in the room, but no one seemed to understand her. It
made her think that the Palmers were fundamentally wicked—that
Mrs Palmer could cheerfully continue to talk to men who swore in
her presence, and not take offence, that so nice a girl as Flora could
ignore it. She found herself, when she read, forgetting her book and
listening for oaths, not catching the words between them. Occasionally Mrs Palmer asked her in to sit in their private sitting-room,
which was more comfortable, and pleasant so long as only Flora was
there, but once Mrs Palmer came in she had to listen to those
vigorous monologues about her own virtues, and sometimes Don
would come in unashamedly with a bottle of beer and study
The whole town disappointed her. It was deficient in the polite class of well-bred, comfortably furnished people she usually mixed with when she went to a new school. She usually sought out the doctor, other teachers, the postmaster, the policeman, meeting their wives at the Women’s Institute or the Red Cross group. But here was no institute, there was a Red Cross group, but only workers’ wives belonged to it. The doctor was a communist, the postmaster’s and policeman’s wives had never invited her round for an evening. It hadn’t seemed to occur to them. The mine manager’s and dredgemaster’s wives were patronizing even. Only Mrs Hansen had asked her round for a meal—and her husband, a carpenter at the mine, had the local rough manners, afraid like all the local men to be polite in case he should appear soft and effeminate. Even Mr Heath had never asked her, or any of the staff, to call. She had never seen Arthur Hendersen again except passing him, perhaps, in the afternoon as he made his way from the bath-house at the mine to the bar. He always smiled politely and perkily, bending his head because he had no hat to raise; and every time she saw him she was reminded how the hopes he had raised in her of meeting friendly people had not been seconded. She no longer believed in West Coast hospitality. She had already lost much of her bright arch manner, except when she deliberately remembered it. ‘I hadn’t the foggiest where Coal Flat was when I applied,’ she kept telling people, and was not aware that they did not like it.
‘Really this town was rather a disappointment for me, Belle,’ she said.
‘Oh?’ Mrs Hansen said. ‘Why?’
‘Everyone is so coarse,’ Miss Dane said. ‘So blunt and rude—and heathen.’
‘That’s the West Coast,’ Mrs Hansen said, proud of the distinction.
‘Oh, well, I suppose I’ll have to like it or lump it,’ Miss Dane said. ‘It’ll be an interesting experience to look back to.’
‘When you get back to civilization,’ Mrs Hansen said with blunt irony, ‘you’ll feel how brave you were, venturing into the wilds.’
They talked for a while of knitting patterns, till eventually Miss
Dane said: ‘Time I got back to the whare.’
‘Palmers’ paa!’ Mrs Hansen said. ‘If you hurry you’ll be in time
for the war council.’
As Miss Dane approached the hotel she saw the man who had
been pointed out to her a Mike Herlihy lurch out of the door,
As soon as she was in the passage Mrs Palmer called, ‘Is that you, Miss Dane?’ She went to the kitchen where the whole Palmer family except Doris was meeting. Dad had left the bar unattended. Donnie was sitting on a tricycle, eating a chocolate biscuit, with his right wrist bandaged. This, she thought, was quite unnecessary; they would be making the child feel too important altogether.
‘Donnie,’ she said brightly. ‘Have you been running over yourself with your trike? Really that wrist of yours is a naughty old wrist. I think we’d better buy you a new one. This morning it was sore and I thought it would be better by now surely, and now I see you’ve hurt it again.’
‘It’s still sore from the strap,’ Donnie said.
‘You take your trike outside and ride it in the backyard, pet,’ Mrs Palmer said. ‘It’s not as funny as that,’ she said to Miss Dane. ‘It’s all very well for you teachers. I’m not going to stand by and see my grandson bullied.’
‘I’m sure you don’t mean that I did it, Mrs Palmer?’
‘No, but you’re making light of it, Miss Dane. As I see it, it’s the parents’ job to chastise children, not any bullying teacher.’
‘Really, Mrs Palmer, I hope you don’t think that I bully the children.’
‘No, I don’t mean you, Miss Dane. I mean that worm of a headmaster you’ve got up there at the school.’
‘Easy does it, Lil,’ Dad said. ‘You’ll be putting up your blood-pressure. We don’t want you on the sick list too.’ Not that there was any fear of that.
‘Paul says Heath only strapped Donnie to get even with him.’
‘Well, as I said to Heath,’ Don said. ‘You teachers can have your rows but leave my son out of them.’
‘I wasn’t to know he’d pick on Donnie,’ Rogers said. ‘The whole thing needn’t have happened.’
‘He must have a cruel nature,’ Flora said. ‘The weal made me feel sick.’
‘The doctor said he hadn’t seen one like it before,’ Mum said.
‘Well, Mr Heath may have gone too far,’ Miss Dane said. ‘But I don’t think we should be talking about him like this. After all, Mr Rogers, you must admit it was time something was done about the discipline in your room.’
‘What’s wrong with my discipline?’
‘The chatter I hear through the wall.’
‘They’re infants, Miss Dane. I let them talk quietly so long as they’re working. I’m running a class, not an army.’
‘They have to learn to be quiet.’
‘Well, there’s no one quieter than Donnie. If Heath had to pick on someone he could have found plenty rowdier than Donnie.’
‘Donnie hasn’t got cheeky,’ Flora said. ‘If Paul’s class was rowdy, he’d have got cheeky. And he likes school now. He said so. And his reading is better.’
‘Well, Mr Heath wouldn’t have strapped Donnie if he hadn’t had good reason,’ Miss Dane said. ‘He isn’t a malicious man.’
‘He strapped him for asking another boy for some chalk,’ Rogers said. ‘How could he borrow chalk without asking for it? It’s manners to ask for it.’
‘He shouldn’t have talked while the headmaster was in the room. You must agree, they have to learn respect?’
‘I don’t disagree with that,’ Don said.
‘He didn’t know he wasn’t supposed to talk while Heath was there,’ Rogers said, ‘because I’d never told them that.’
‘Then that’s your fault, Paul.’
‘Heath could have growled at him. That would have been enough without strapping him.’
‘Well, as I see it,’ Dad said. ‘Heath is the representative of the Canterbury Education Board and he has to maintain discipline. And he has a right to interfere if you’re not up to scratch, Paul, and you just have to take orders from him.’
‘That may be. I don’t see why Donnie should suffer.’
‘Donnie suffered for your faults,’ Dad said. ‘If you’d told them to be quiet when Heath was in the room, it would never have happened.’
‘He should have told me off then, not Donnie.’
‘A man in any position of authority has to make an example.’
‘I don’t care what you say,’ Mum said. ‘Heath went too far.’
‘Yes, I’ll admit that,’ Dad said. ‘He went too far.’
Miss Dane went upstairs to her room where she managed by
sitting on the chair, facing the bed and using a leather case as a
table, to write. She had for three weeks solved her boredom by
starting to write a book. It was an arch novel set in Hawke’s Bay,
Miss Dane was at an early stage of the novel where Rosslyn drove
in to the railway junction to collect the mail from the store. The
store was kept nominally by an Irishman called Murphy though his
wife, ‘whose only contact with cold water seemed to be when she
was caught unawares in a thunderstorm’, did all the work. Murphy
sat on a sack of potatoes most of the day playing cards with the
railway porter—‘whose idea of a forty-hour week was one hour on
and thirty-nine on his I-beg-your-pardon, that is, the posterior part
of his anatomy’—and saying things like, ‘Sure, and it’s a moighty
‘There was a queue of local ne’er-do-wells and Maoris who had ostensibly gathered to worship at the newly-installed triumph of modern invention, the milk-shake fountain, but who actually came to feed their eyes on the ravishing charms of Miss Barbara Boggles, the chief dispenser of letters, milk-shakes, potatoes and clothes-pegs. Seeing Rosslyn enter the store, Miss Boggles deserted her admirers and rushed to attend him. She let her tresses fall in front of her eyes and essayed her best to raise a blush but unfortunately such an effort was beyond her ability.
‘“You were wanting, sir?” she said coyly.
‘“Ahem! Letters for the Barona station,” Rosslyn said. He actually
was blushing!’
Miss Dane put down her pen. She wanted to enter the mind of her hero. She wanted to make him recognize Barbara’s graces and immediately see through them as shoddy and calculating. He was never to look twice at her. But she found it difficult to know how he would feel. She had known so little of men. She wanted to give him some spark of mystery, hidden passion, of the animal magnetism she felt was in Don Palmer, but she was afraid to put it into words. So far, in the novel, her idea of love between a man and a woman had been one of mutual good-humoured taunting, playing jokes on each other, resisting recognition of love because people in love made such fools of themselves. Sandra and Rosslyn were to be good pals, good sports, having fun out of each other, the sort of fun with which they could regale their visitors. But she wished she could penetrate the mystery of masculinity which she had not trusted herself to hint at in Rosslyn. She sat by the bed brooding (as at that moment Peter Herlihy in his hideout was brooding on his imaginary hermit stronghold) when the gong sounded for dinner.
Rogers and Don quite naturally made friends. Rogers was
attracted by Don’s easy possession of those qualities he didn’t
have himself—his well-proportioned physique, his good looks, his
easy unquestioning confidence in his senses. Don in his intuitive
way recognized Rogers’s innocence and trustworthiness in personal
relations. He felt that Rogers would never do anyone at dirty trick,
and though he felt he was, in his knowledge of women, immeasurably younger and less experienced, and so tended to patronize him
for being, as he suspected, a virgin, he found it refreshing to be
able to confide in a man younger and of fresher outlook. It reminded him of his own youth, before he fell in love with Jennie.
At their first handshake in Palmers’ front room the evening Don
arrived the two young men had established a warm contact. They
felt at home with each other; and soon Rogers was thinking that
life had no greater happiness to offer than the love of a girl like
Flora and the trust and companionship of a friend like her brother.
It was in spite of Mrs Palmer that the friendship grew. ‘Oh, I can see you two are going to be great pals,’ she would say. ‘Well, so you should be. You’re more or less brothers anyway. I always tell Paul I’m his second mother, Don.’ She was glad that Rogers now seldom joined Jimmy Cairns and Ben Nicholson in the bar after school. Often he and Don would go to the hotel over the road, just to get away from the familiar company. Dad didn’t mind the small loss of custom; the publican over the road would see it as a small diplomatic gesture.
One afternoon, in Palmers’ bar, Don confided in Rogers the
reason for his return home. He had been going strong with a girl in
Christchurch, who worked at a women’s hairdressing salon; he had
been fairly obsessed with her and spent a hundred pounds on her in
three months, till his bank-book was down to fifty, yet he knew she
was selfish and calculating—‘Why do I always have to fall for that
‘She’s not worth worrying about,’ Rogers said.
‘You tell that to a man who’s bitten.’
‘Well, you can forget her.’
‘I would if I could. That’s why I came home.’
‘Did you tell your mother?’
‘No,’ Don said, warily, then seeing that no offence was intended, continued. ‘She knows there’s something up though. She won’t ask. But after that I had to come back to my own. Somewhere quiet to lick my wounds…. If I only knew where she’s gone, I’d follow her.’
‘You never think about anything else, that’s your trouble,’ Rogers said.
‘Well, what else is there, besides drink and women, and your family?’
‘Your life, your life’s work,’ Rogers said. ‘And other people.’
‘Other people. Other people are well enough to look after themselves. That’s the trouble with this world, too many people wanting to have a hand in everyone else’s business.’
Dad came to fill their glasses. Don threw him sixpence extra. ‘One for yourself, too, Dad.’ Dad filled a pony glass with draught beer and leaned by them. ‘Paul says there’s more things in life than booze and women.’
‘Oh, that’s just to put you off,’ Dad said. ‘He’s the biggest drunk in this town, biggest sheik too.’ He wasn’t implying any reference to Flora; in fact he didn’t mean anything: it was only a routine bar-room taunt intended as a compliment. With a hint of real accusation he added, ‘Though he’s got fair competition now.’ If Don took the hint he didn’t acknowledge it.
‘What do you reckon then, Mr Palmer?’ Rogers asked.
‘Well—money. Money’s the most important thing in life. It’s not the way we’d like it to be I admit. But the world is built on business, and in the hard commercial world, money talks. It’s just a fact and you’ve got to like it or lump it.’
‘Well, what’s the sense of living if everyone’s just chasing bits of paper? When you come into the world you haven’t got a fiver tucked into your palm.’
‘Circumstances don’t admit the question, Paul. You leave
school, you get a job. You leave home, you get married and then
Strangely Rogers didn’t take it as encouragement. It had never
occurred to him that there might be opposition from the parents,
or even that it would matter if there were. He was intent on this
argument. ‘But you don’t live for money,’ he said.
‘Well,’ Dad said. ‘Not all the time, I admit. But a chap’s got to make enough of it to be able to support his wife and family. It’s the least you can do. You owe it to them.’ Then, choosing his words, because he didn’t want to commit himself to any recognition of Rogers’s attachment to Flora, he added, ‘And any man that’s got a daughter owes it to her to make sure her husband will realized his responsibility and can give her the comfort she’s entitled to.’
‘I can see we’ll have to get you married off,’ Don said.
It was only in retrospect that the full meaning of Dad’s words came home to Rogers. He had never even thought of marriage; not yet. Nor had Flora, not to his knowledge anyway. But marriage meant buying a house, furnishing it, getting a garden in order—not a minute to spare before the family arrived, and then none till they were out of infancy. Was he ready for that yet?—was Flora? He didn’t even know exactly how much money he had in the bank. His army savings—deferred pay, overseas pay, mufti allowance; it must be about four hundred altogether. To him it had seemed a small fortune. To the Palmer family, it would only buy the furniture. It was a blow all right to think of that all of a sudden. ‘Christ!’ he thought, ‘Where do I start?’ It seemed that all the authority of the elders of the country was descending on him like an axe in vengeance for his flirting around with ideas and politics and things that, in their minds, had nothing to do with the facts of life.
In the evening of the same day Rogers was sitting with Don on
the bench outside the hotel. It was unusually mild weather for
April. They idly watched the occasional traffic on the road as the
dusk began; two boys bowling hoops in front of the post office, a
few youths who had not long been working in the mine, toughly
lipping cigarettes under the veranda of the store over the road from
Flora came out with a grey light coat over her wine jumper and a fawn gaberdine skirt. Her new nylons made Rogers notice again how pleasantly shaped her legs were. ‘Mum says I need some fresh air. Would you like to come for a walk, Don?’
Rogers jumped to his feet. ‘What about me?’ he asked, and simultaneously Don said, ‘Walk? I had enough of that in the army!’
Flora took Rogers by the arm. As they crossed the road a youth called from the billiard-room window, to show his new independence of schoolteachers, ‘Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do, Paul!’ Another shouted, ‘You watch yourself, Flora! He’s a fast worker in the dark!’
Don called back, ‘Shut up, Rusty Meadows. It’s past your bedtime!’
Rogers and Flora walked up the main street towards the deepening darkness of the hills.
‘I used to think it was terrible,’ Flora said, ‘the way these kids are so rough. Now it doesn’t worry me. Gosh, you’ve no idea how prim I was before I met you.’
‘You were never prim. It’s just that you’ve never been away from home. Everybody’s not like the Palmers.’
‘I must have had my eyes shut. You know Arthur Nicholson?’
‘Ben’s oldest boy?’
‘Yes. Just after you came back he wanted to start taking me out.
‘He’s all right. A bit young and headstrong. What did you have against him?’
‘I haven’t got anything like that against him now. If it wasn’t for you, I suppose if he asked me again, I’d say yes. He won’t ask again though.’
She didn’t sound sorry, but Rogers said, ‘Here, don’t let me talk you into it!’
‘There’s no fear of that.’
Rogers wanted to embrace her there and then; he looked back to see if there was anyone behind them. He saw a boy dart across the centre of the road and disappear into an open section where a grocer’s shop had been before it was (to Mrs Seldom’s gratification) burnt down five years before. It looked like Peter Herlihy. Rogers only squeezed Flora’s hand.
‘I didn’t know I had so much competition,’ he said. ‘A chap doesn’t realize how lucky he is.’
‘Or a girl, either,’ she said.
‘Flora, did you have any boy friends before me?’
‘I met plenty of boys at dances. But I never had anyone taking me out. Arthur was the first to ask. What about you, Paul? Have you been in love before?’
‘I thought I was. Nothing like I am now. Christ, I didn’t know I was alive then. That was years ago, at training college, before I had ever seen Coal Flat, before I was in the army. You don’t get much chance to fall in love with anyone when you’re in the army.’
‘When you were overseas, Paul….’ She stopped and fumbled for words. ‘I know soldiers aren’t angels. From what Don says, anyway. Did you….’ She squeezed his arm and pleaded, ‘No, p’raps I’d better not know. Don’t answer me, Paul.’
He said humbly and truthfully. ‘No, Flora, I didn’t. A lot of the chaps went after the women. I don’t know, it wasn’t because I thought it was wrong; I just couldn’t have made love to a woman I didn’t know…. I didn’t know it was better to wait. But I’m glad I did wait.’
‘Would it have made any difference?’ he asked.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I couldn’t have given you up. But it would have meant I’d have had to make excuses for you, and I’d have felt cheap about it.’
‘Flora,’ he said. ‘It’s never been like this before with me. I wake
happy, I go to sleep happy. All day at work, at meals, reading,
there’s that thought at the back of my mind—that you want me as
‘I often see you in my mind,’ she said.
‘But you don’t feel restless and impatient?’
‘No,’ she said, slightly puzzled.
‘Because now when you’re at the back of my mind, it makes me work better, I put more life into my job; everything I do better. It’s like a new dimension in living, all the time, in everything I’m doing.’
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘It is like that,… I like sharing our feelings, like this.’
‘We’re getting introspective,’ he said. ‘But, Flora, before I couldn’t wait; with you it seems I could wait for years, so long as I knew you still wanted me…. But do we have to wait? What do we get out of waiting?… Flora, I’ve never told you yet in plain English, I’ve never loved anyone the way I love you, and don’t believe I ever could.’
‘That’s mutual, Paul,’ he said softly and unevenly, as if not trusting herself to say these things in the open street in half-light. ‘As if I didn’t know. I feel the same, Paul.’
‘Some time, in a year or so, could we get married?’
‘There’s nothing I’d want more than that.’
‘Would your father agree? Flora, you see, I haven’t much money. My army savings, that’s all. I’ve got a cheek to ask you, when I’m not well enough off to buy you a house.’
‘Dad would help.’
‘Flora, I don’t want help from him.’
‘Right now it doesn’t seem to matter, Paul. These problems are far away.’
‘We have to think of them. And your father isn’t too happy about
me, either; I know it. Would he oppose it?’
‘I don’t think he will. Anyway, I’m twenty-one.’ Then she struggled from her mood of ecstasy. ‘But I don’t want to have any arguments with the family, Paul. Not if I can help it.’
‘If they opposed, would you still marry me?’
‘It’s not a fair question to ask, Paul,’ she said with sudden distress. ‘Why should they be against it? Mum likes you, she won’t oppose it….’ More gently she said, ‘You’re a beggar for asking questions. You’re always crossing your bridges miles before you get to them.’
‘Let’s get engaged then.’
By the pressure of her hand he knew she had consented. Once
Even though she had consented she said, ‘Dad doesn’t like your politics, Paul.’
‘I can’t help that,’ Rogers said, ‘What does he expect me to do—give them up?’
‘He thinks you ought to.’
‘It’s not a fair thing to ask of man,’ Rogers said angrily. ‘Flora,
I love you, you know that. But, ask yourself, I’ve got to respect
myself too. How could I throw myself away for anyone? If I did
that for you, you wouldn’t be getting the man you loved, you’d be
getting his shell. I couldn’t ever do it, Flora. I wouldn’t pretend to
do it, but even if I did pretend, how could I stop feeling and thinking the way I’ve been used to? I’d only hate myself for it, and I’d be
poor company for you.’ He had forgotten his first disgust at the
hypocrisy of Bering O’Malley, and he thought himself as keen a
socialist as before.’
‘I’m not asking you to do that, Paul…. It might have made things easier, that’s all.’
‘Well, I’ll never do it, Flora, I can tell you that.’ ‘Let’s forget it for now,’ she said, and they walked in silence. After a while she said, ‘It’d be better if we didn’t live in the Flat.’ ‘Why?’
‘Well, we’d get established by ourselves, away from the family. Anyway, I don’t like this town. Central Otago was better. Everyone’s squabbling and talking behind everyone else’s back here.’
‘I like it. They’re strong union folk.’
‘There you go. Politics again.’
‘I thought you knew me by now, Flora.’
She smiled. ‘Yes, I know you better than you know yourself… You won’t always be at this school. You’ve got education. You could get ahead in a bigger town.’
‘Education!’ he said. ‘I’m only a schoolteacher. And what’s education for if it doesn’t make you want to change the world?’
‘That’s not my idea of education,’ she said. ‘I left school when I was fourteen. I was good at English and history. I’d like to have gone on. But when Myra came up, Mum said she needed help. It would have been selfish of me to carry on… I could have got my matric., I think. I might have been a teacher, or a nursing sister…. I always envy educated people.’
‘Couldn’t Myra have helped in the house?’
‘There you go again, always asking questions,’ she said gently. ‘Myra had Donnie to look after.’
‘Well, education’s supposed to make you ask questions, to teach you to think for yourself.’
‘I don’t like to think what it would be like,’ she said, ‘to be like
that…. Once you start where do you stop? It’s like being a kid
always asking, “Why? Why?…” I’d be like a fish out of water, I’d
never be sure of anything.’
‘Not if everyone else was looking for answers too.
‘Well, everyone else doesn’t ask, “Why?” They say, “Because it
is, that’s why!” There’s no sense in being different to everyone
else.’
‘I thought you’d got over all that,’ he said with disappointment. ‘We’ve talked enough about things. I thought I’d changed all those well-bred ideas of yours.’
‘It’s like what you said,’ she said. ‘Habits don’t change overnight. I feel safe enough while I’ve got you to fall back on. But if I didn’t have you, I’d be thinking the same as everyone else.’
He said humbly, ‘I’d hoped that we’d be in agreement on these things. Flora, there might be difficulties later on if we don’t get these things straightened out first…. I had hoped you’d become a socialist.’
‘Oh, Paul,’ she said with gentle mockery. ‘Crossing bridges again before you come to them. If a woman loves a man, his beliefs are her beliefs.’
‘Then you’ll never be a socialist,’ he said. ‘If you keep on thinking that…. Well, I’m not going to stickle about that. Only don’t expect me to change.’
‘Let’s forget it altogether tonight,’ she said.
Again when Rogers turned round he saw Peter Herlihy peeping from behind a telegraph post.
‘We’re being followed, he said. ‘Peter Herlihy. He’s foxing us.’
Flora turned round. ‘The nasty little brat,’ she said. ‘That’s what I was saying. Some of the people in this town haven’t got healthy minds.’
‘They’re not all like him. He’s not to blame. He’s had a rough deal.’
‘You get away home, Peter Herlihy!’ Flora called. But there was no sign of movement in what could be seen of him behind the telegraph post.
‘Leave him,’ Rogers said. ‘You’ll only make him want to do it all the more. Just take no notice. As long as he knows that we’ve seen him.’
‘I don’t know how you can stand having him in your class.’
‘I feel sorry for him. I’d like to have charge of him for a few months. I’d make him healthy again.’
‘How?’
‘No one else will. His father’s not interested. I’d let him do everything he wants to. He only does it because it’s forbidden. He’d soon get tired of it.’
‘But he’d get worse.’
‘No. What he wants is love. He doesn’t get much from his parents. If he was loved he wouldn’t do these things to attract your attention. If he saw you took no notice of his mischief he’d get tired of it, and respond to your affection.’
Flora puzzled for a while. ‘You’ve got some funny ideas, Paul,’ she said. ‘If I start taking all my ideas from you I don’t know what I’ll be like.’
Rogers smiled. ‘I’ll be proud of you then,’ he said. ‘As long as you understand the reasons for them…. There’s his grandmother’s place.’ They were going downhill into the deepening shadow of the gully. The bins were dark grey against the sky which had turned the colour of unripe apricots over the hills. The side-hummocks of the hill obscured the tops, and the deckled outline of the bush was crisp and black against the green western light. Above them stray flecks of cloud were pink and behind them faint stars pricked in the slaty blue, like a scattered convoy at sea seen from a homing plane at lighting-up time. ‘She won’t recognize his existence.’ Below them Mrs Seldom’s house looked ambushed and hostile, except that friendly smoke rose tall and frail like the smoke of a forgotten cigarette. Oddly to Rogers the house appeared furtive and hiding like Peter Herlihy behind the telegraph pole. ‘She’s burning wood,’ he said. ‘The smoke’s blue.’ There were only a few rain-faded fragments of coal at the top of her path. ‘I wonder if the mine office know she’s run out of coal. I’ll tell them tomorrow.’
‘You’re always thinking of other people,’ Flora said gently.
They went as far as the bridge and looked into the dark fern-walled creek roaring twenty feet below them. Doris and Frank
lived a hundred yards along, across the bridge.
‘No,’ she said. ‘I don’t want to meet people tonight.’
Behind them there was a crash of coal on Mrs Seldom’s iron roof. ‘Peter Herlihy,’ he said. They turned back to climb again and as they passed a clump of broom Rogers heard quick furtive breathing. ‘Good night, Peter,’ he said, but there was no answer.
Below them, Mrs Seldom had come out of her house and was climbing the path. She held her hand over her eyes, incongruously, as if shielding them from the light. ‘Is that you, Paul Rogers?’ she called.
‘Yes.’
‘Did you see anyone throw coal on my roof?’
‘I heard the noise. I didn’t see anyone.’
‘Ah, they give me no peace. That they don’t.’
‘It was probably some boy.’
‘Ah, it’d be Nora’s bastard if it’d be anyone. He’d better not let me catch him. I’d beat the hide off him.’
‘Are you out of coal, Mrs Seldom?’
‘I’ve not a lump left, Paul Rogers. Only some slack. But I’ll not go and ask them up at the office for it. No, I won’t ask. It’s their place to ask me.’
‘I’ll tell them tomorrow.’
‘Ah, you always were a good messenger for me, Paul Rogers. You do that.’ She looked up to the road, where ten yards off, Flora waited. ‘Who’s the young lady you’re with?’
‘Flora,’ he said. ‘Flora Palmer.’
‘Oh,’ she said, ‘Dredge people. They’re new here. I wouldn’t know them,’ and went back down the track. From the clump of broom there was suppressed snickering and giggling. It sounded as if there were two boys laughing.
By the mine office, Rogers and Flora turned a corner, to coast the terrace and look over Coal Creek. Rogers turned once and saw two figures following them. Twice they passed people of the town who said good night, recognizing Rogers by his voice, and stared to see who was the girl he was with.
‘That boy,’ Rogers said. ‘He’s had a tough bringing-up. Nora screams at him. Mike’s drunk half the time. They sent him to a convent and the nuns tried to thrash the devil out of him.’
‘Then what sort of a man will he grow into?’
‘He’ll be a criminal, that’s a certainty. Unless someone helps him. I’m trying.’
‘What do you do?’
He wanted to tell her but he couldn’t mention Peter’s first drawings. She was an innocent girl and he respected her propriety. ‘He’s
obsessed,’ he said. ‘I can’t explain…. He did some funny drawings.
He wants to do everything he thinks is wicked. It’s like daring him.
Then when he does it he’s risking being punished. That excites
him…. He used to like torturing girls, but I think I’ve cured him
of that. He plays with boys now…. He sleeps in his father’s room.
‘Oh Paul! How do you know?’
‘They don’t do anything. They fight. Peter told me.’
‘What on earth do you talk about things like that for?’
‘I didn’t ask him straight our. It just came out. He was talking to me and he told me that.’
‘Well, he’s dirty-minded, Paul; I don’t care what you say.’
‘Don’t blame him. I encourage him to talk.’
‘You should give the kids something else to think about, I can’t believe it.’
‘The other kids don’t think about it. It’s only him. It’s deep in his mind. I want to bring it out and get rid of it. It’s like a boil. You’ve got to draw the pus out before it heals.’
‘I know you mean well,’ she said. ‘But I don’t understand it. You’re playing with fire. You ought to have more sense.’
‘Let’s forget it tonight,’ he said.
They stopped at a corner of the road where they could look, under prolific autumn stars, across Coal Creek to the terrace where the dredge gouged and scraped with weird screams. They could see its blatant Industrial lights to the left, behind the shapes of the dead trees in the swamp on the terrace. At the bridge down from Mrs Seldom’s they had been oppressed by a sense of overhanging from the close shadowy hills; they had felt like two lovers approaching a cave. But here they breathed a sense of expansion from the open space over the flat terrace across the creek, and the Grey Valley beyond the terrace, and the graded dim ranges behind, tailing off into Canterbury, under thick early April stars, brighter now in this evening in which every sound dropped its memory on the ear, in a silence distinct from the weird screams of the dredge gorging itself like an obsessed monster; like a miser, clumsily eking the stray infinitesimal grains of gold from the clay and gravel of thousands of years.
Below them they could see the white snaky gleam, like a snail’s track, where the creek purred over drifts of gravel. The dredge and the creek—there was no other sound, and the stillness of the evening made the scene somehow significant, as if the sky and stars, and the land and the creek and the town behind them were bursting to whisper some secret it was vital for the two of them to know, only they couldn’t catch it.
Rogers looked behind and saw Peter and another boy, still trailing them, suddenly crouch on a bridge across the water-race that
ran in front of the houses. He looked aside at Flora and saw again
‘I already knew it,’ he said. ‘I never had any doubts.’
At last they were free of public eyes and there in the dark they embraced, without lust or restlessness in their passion, so confident was their love. For a while it seemed that time had stopped, that their acts were no longer measured in minutes. They each only noticed, and that incidentally, how exalted the other looked in this promise of mutual loyalty. Rogers had no idea how long they had stood there when he heard a footfall some yards away, and a boy’s voice whisper resentfully, ‘No, I don’t want to’.
Flora dropped her arms and turned to listen. ‘I thought I heard Donnie. It can’t be. He’ll be in bed by now.’
‘It’s that Peter and somebody else,’ Rogers said. ‘Let him watch. I hope he finds it amusing.’
‘I’ll break it to Mum when I get home, Paul,’ she said. ‘I think she’ll talk Dad round. I bet she’ll want to have a party.’
‘That’ll be all right.’
The boy’s voice came again. ‘No! I won’t!…. Auntie Flora!’
‘Donnie!’ Flora called, stepping to the road. ‘What are you doing here? You should be in bed!’
‘It’s Peter Herlihy,’ Donnie said in tears. ‘He made me come with him to scout you. He said he’d show me a secret.’
‘Well, he’s a nasty-minded little brat!’ Flora said. ‘You keep away from him in future, do you hear? Of all the nasty things!’
‘I want to go home, Auntie,’ Donnie said.
Rogers could no longer resist acting against Peter. ‘You get along home, Peter!’ he called. ‘Or I’ll give you a good hiding!’ But there was no answer, only an animal scuffle and a swishing in the long dewy grass by the side of the road. ‘He’ll be hiding somewhere,’ he said. He noticed that the dew had made his shoes wet.
Flora looked at her shoes. ‘You see, it only makes him worse, the way you deal with him,’ she said.
‘You won’t tell Grannie, will you, Auntie? I didn’t want to go with him.’
‘No, pet. Only you’ve got to promise not to do it again, or I will tell her.
‘I won’t do it again.’
‘He’s corrupting Donnie,’ Flora said. ‘It’s not fair to the other children, your treatment.’
‘He’d be corrupting them worse if he was left the way he was
‘There’s Gran calling you now,’ Flora said. Piercing the fresh night air, haunting and dissolving, sounding abandoned like a radio left on in an empty house, Mrs Palmer’s voice kept calling, ‘Don-NEE! Don-NEE! Don-NEE!’
There were eight at the school committee meeting in Heath’s
office—Heath himself, Rae the policeman, Jock McEwan, the
doctor, Arthur Henderson, the dredgemaster, the mine manager
and Mrs Jimmy Cairns. Heath was not so sure of the support of
the committee as he had pretended in his argument with Don
Palmer. It was a new committee and had not met before. The
doctor and Mrs Jimmy Cairns were new members—Heath had
been opposed to their nomination on the grounds that the doctor
had no children at the school and that women should not sit on local
bodies. But he could not publish his objections because neither did
the dredgemaster or mine manager have children at the school—the dredgemaster’s boys were at the Tech. in Greymouth and the
mine manager’s two daughters were away at a boarding-school in
Christchurch. These two were practical men and looked on school
teaching as a woman’s job; they believed that every problem could
be met with a quick effective decision and they generally supported
Heath’s proposals without argument. Heath was especially resentful
that before the elections, Ben Nicholson, as president of the Miners’
Union had announced at a union meeting that those miners who
were entitled to vote at the school committee elections should vote
for the doctor and Mrs Cairns, as people they could trust to put
forward a socialist point of view. Previously Jock McEwan had been
the only regular dissentient at meetings; since he was also secretary
of the Miners’ Union, it seemed plain to Heath that he had engineered this further support for himself. Rae of course was quite trustworthy, being himself a public servant in a position of some
authority, and Henderson, though he dickered, usually came round
to the majority opinion.
Don Palmer waited smoking in the corridor. It was just a week
since Donnie had been strapped, and his first anger had died down.
But he was determined to complain and Mum had not let him forget
Henderson was elected secretary again and Rae was elected chairman. The doctor was nominated but he lost by one vote. Heath had intended to raise as a complaint the union president’s influence on the committee election, but he did not dare now that the doctor was in the room. Rae read a letter announcing that the school would be painted, inside and outside, commencing in the term holidays. Then he announced that the committee would receive Mr Palmer who had a complaint. Heath sighed with audible contempt.
Don entered and took a seat. He was a little uneasy, meeting men like this in public. He was used to personal informal contacts with people and here he felt out of his element, embarrassed by the air of importance of some of the members. But as he talked, with a restraint and sincerity that impressed them, his moral indignation increased and he forgot his uneasiness.
‘I’d like to put a question,’ Rae said. ‘Did you take a photograph of the mark on your boy’s wrist?’
‘I saw it,’ the doctor said. ‘I can vouch for Mr Palmer’s description of it.’
‘Well I have a question,’ Heath said. ‘Isn’t it a fact that your son had been getting very out of hand before I punished him?’
‘No, it’s not. Mum never has any trouble with him.’
‘When you say Mum, you mean Mrs Palmer senior?’
‘Yes.’
‘Then you admit that you don’t have much hand in bringing up the child?’
‘I was away in the war, four years, as you know.’
‘Oh, I know all about that, Mr Palmer. But don’t you think that seeing the child has no mother at home, the father should give it more attention and more discipline?’
‘I object to that question,’ Jock McEwan said. ‘It’s got nothing to do with the complaint.’
‘It’s none of your business who brings the boy up,’ Mrs Cairns said.
‘I don’t see that the question is necessary,’ Rae said.
‘Well, I have another question,’ Heath said. ‘Has your son been obedient since I punished him?’
‘Yes. He’s always been obedient.’
There were no more questions and Don went out.
‘There!’ Heath said. ‘He admits the boy has improved since he was punished.’
‘He said it didn’t make any difference,’ Mrs Cairns said. ‘I hope you never try anything like that on my boy, because I’ll tell you now he is obedient—obedient enough to do without your strapping.’
‘You’re getting off the subject,’ the doctor said.
‘We’ve got to come to some decision,’ Thompson, the dredgemaster said. ‘We don’t want to be arguing all night.’
‘Absolutely,’ Caddick the mine manager said.
‘Well, as I see it,’ Rae said. ‘It’s a case where the authority of the headmaster is challenged. What we’ve got to decide is whether the headmaster was right to punish the boy in the circumstances.’
‘I suggest that we should hear Mr Heath’s side of the question,’ Henderson said.
‘Well, gentlemen,’ Heath said, ignoring Mrs Cairns. ‘It was a
sheer case of disobedience. I went into Mr Rogers’ room and the
noise was something awful, I don’t mind telling you. That man
seems to have no idea of keeping order or getting results from his
teaching. I know about these things. As you know I’ve had thirty
years’ experience and I’m not going to have some damned whipper-snapper telling me my job.’
‘We’ve heard that before,’ Jock McEwan said.
‘Order please,’ Rae said.
‘As I said, I went into the classroom and tried to restore order. I was talking to the class and I had called for silence. This boy Palmer disobeyed me. He spoke when I was talking.’
‘What did he say?’ Mrs Cairns asked.
‘How do I know what he said? I wasn’t listening to him. He should have been listening to me.’
‘Well, it makes a difference. It might have been important what he had to say. He might have wanted to go to the lavatory or something.
‘Well, if you want to be comical….’
‘According to the boy he was asking another boy for some chalk,’ the doctor said.
‘There you are,’ Heath said. ‘It was quite a trivial matter. He shouldn’t have been drawing while I was in the room. Well, gentlemen, you must admit I was within my rights to correct him.’
‘You have to make an example,’ Caddick said.
‘Kids get too much of their own way nowadays,’ Thompson said.
‘That’s the first point then,’ Rae said. Caddick admired the method with which he ran meetings: there was only one person in the town better at it and that was the doctor. ‘Is there any disagreement on that point—that Mr Heath was within his rights to correct a boy who disobeyed him?’
‘Well, if I’m not allowed to do that I might as well shut up shop,’ Heath said.
‘Mr Heath, I’m putting it to the vote; don’t interrupt, please. Is there anyone disagrees?’
‘Are you sure you told the children to be quiet?’ McEwan asked.
‘Of course I told them. And anyway it’s Mr Rogers’ job to tell them they should be silent when I come in—even if he can’t get them to be quiet for himself.’
‘Did you actually tell them to be silent at the time of this incident?’ the doctor asked. ‘The boy said you didn’t.’
‘Well—I can’t remember if I actually said so at the time. But as I said, I expect Mr Rogers to have told them.’
‘Well, if you can’t establish that you told the boy in advance, you can’t accuse him of disobedience,’ the doctor said.
‘I did tell them. I must have told them.’
‘Did you or didn’t you?’ McEwan asked.
‘I don’t reckon Mr Heath’s memory is too good,’ Mrs Cairns said. ‘No one ever remembers things exactly the way they happened. What about getting Mr Rogers along to hear his side of the tale?’
‘It’s impossible,’ Heath said.
‘Why is it impossible?’
‘Do you want this matter deferred till the next meeting so we can hear Mr Rogers’ evidence?’ Rae asked.
‘No,’ said Thompson. ‘Get the matter cleared up tonight.’
‘Absolutely,’ Caddick said.
‘It’s half-past eight,’ Heath said. ‘We haven’t time to get Mr Rogers. I’ve got work to do.’
‘We all have,’ Rae said. ‘We can’t hurry the business because of that.’
‘There’s no need for delay all the same,’ Caddick said.
‘Well, send along to the pub and get Mr Rogers,’ Mrs Cairns said.
‘It’s infra dig.,’ Heath said. ‘Sending along for him.’
‘Why? We want his evidence, don’t we? I’ll run along for him myself.’
‘Order, please,’ Rae said. ‘I’ll put it to the vote. Do we need Mr Rogers’ evidence? If so, we’ll ask Mrs Cairns to fetch him.’
‘You don’t need his evidence. I protest that you’re insulting me. You’ve as good as called me a liar.’
‘We haven’t settled whether you warned the class to be quiet,’ McEwan said. ‘You couldn’t remember yourself.’
‘I’ve already told you, I do remember. I did tell them.’
Rae put it to the vote: only the three socialists wanted to hear
‘If he was disobedient,’ the doctor said.
Jock McEwan and the doctor abstained, Mrs Cairns voted against, but a resolution reaffirming Heath’s right was carried.
‘The second question is the important one,’ Rae said. ‘It’s a question of degree. Was Mr Heath justified in giving the boy the strap in the way he did?’
There was more disagreement on this. Caddick and Thompson argued that a taste of leather never hurt any kid, Henderson said children needed chastising sometimes but he didn’t think Mrs Palmer’s grandson was altogether a naughty child.
‘He didn’t use to be,’ Heath said, ‘before he went into Rogers’
class.’
‘It’s about time someone stuck up for Paul Rogers,’ Mrs Cairns said. ‘I don’t know him well. But my husband does. He says he’s a good young chap.’
‘In the bar, no doubt,’ Heath said. ‘But we’re discussing his ability as a teacher.’
‘We’re discussing no such thing,’ Rae said. ‘We’re discussing a complaint by Mr Palmer.’
‘Well, as I said before,’ Heath said. ‘Ask yourself. This boy has been brought up in an hotel. He’s the child of a broken marriage. You saw the father yourself. And well—I know I’m sticking my neck out—but, well, in my opinion he’s—irresponsible…’
‘Don Palmer’s a returned soldier,’ Mrs Cairns said. ‘Third echelon too. Alamein and all that. You’ve got no right to judge him. How do you know what he’s been through?’
‘Well, call him a war casualty if you like. The fact is, it’s had a bad effect on his child.’
‘That boy’s a perfectly normal boy,’ the doctor said. ‘He’s quite a steady little chap.’
‘Steady and lazy—just a bit too steady. He never makes any progress. You should see his work. And there’s another question, his race….’
‘There’s no bloody need to bring the Maoris into it too,’ McEwan said. ‘You’ve brought everything else in without that. You New Zealanders are always saying there’s no colour bar here.’
‘Let’s get this straight,’ the doctor said. ‘A boy of seven, who’s usually quiet and obedient, talks when you say you told him not to. You strapped him twice, leaving a nasty weal on the wrist. Do you usually strap children from the infant department?’
‘No,’ Heath said. ‘This is the first time in my life that I’ve done that.’
‘Why, then?’
‘Because it’s the most undisciplined class of infants I’ve struck in all my thirty years’ experience.’
‘Forget the thirty years,’ McEwan said. ‘It’s getting monotonous.’
‘Now, now, Mr McEwan,’ Rae said, and then, ‘It seems to me there’s a third party on trial here.’
‘Well, as I see it, it’s not fair to try a man in his absence,’ Henderson said.
‘Let’s get back to the point,’ the doctor said. ‘I’m not going to ask any more questions, and I’ll express an opinion instead. I think, in this case, if the boy was disobedient as Mr Heath said he was, that it would have been enough to reprove him by word of mouth.’
‘Hear, hear,’ McEwan said.
‘Donnie Palmer would jump if you said Boo to him,’ Mrs Cairns said.
‘I had to make a strong example,’ Heath said. ‘In the circumstances. That class needed drastic treatment. I was thinking of Mrs Hansen who has to have them next year.’
‘What’s wrong with that class?’ Mrs Cairns said. ‘My boy Russell is in it. He doesn’t say anything about it. He learns his reading at home, and he never used to. He says he likes school now.’
‘Well, that goes to show you,’ Heath said.
‘Do you mean to say you think kiddies shouldn’t like school?’ McEwan asked.
‘A teacher can’t expect them to like it, if he’s doing his job properly,’ Heath said. ‘Oh, I know, it’s very pleasant for everyone if you want to play all day. Unfortunately we teachers have work to do.’
‘I disagree strongly,’ the doctor said. ‘In my opinion Rogers has got some progressive ideas on education. I think they’re sound as far as they go.’
‘Progressive!’ Heath said. ‘I’ve had….’
‘….thirty years’ experience,’ McEwan said. His look was like a stone well.
Heath picked up the thread in spite of his hesitation. ‘Sound ideas! Wouldn’t the inspector laugh if I told him that!’
‘Let’s get back to the point,’ Rae said.
‘It’s nearly nine o’clock,’ Thompson said.
‘We’ve got other business to get through yet,’ Caddick said.
‘I’m going to frame a resolution,’ Rae said. ‘It doesn’t mean that I’m in favour of it. But it’ll give the meeting something to work on —“This meeting disapproves of the severity of the punishment inflicted on Donald Palmer in respect of the complaint of Donald Palmer, senior.”’
‘That’s old Dad, Donald Palmer senior,’ Mrs Cairns said.
‘Well, Donald Palmer, the father of the aforementioned,’ Rae said.
‘I’ll second it,’ the doctor said.
‘I have an amendment,’ McEwan said. ‘“And urges that the headmaster shall not in future use corporal punishment on children of the primer classes.”’
‘I’ll second that,’ Mrs Cairns said.
‘It’d be better to keep them separate,’ the doctor said. Take them one at a time.’
‘Take them both together to save time,’ Caddick said.
‘I warn you, gentlemen, you’re going to make my job twice as difficult,’ Heath said. ‘I could give you good reasons….’
‘Put it to the vote,’ Caddick said.
‘You haven’t heard my case,’ Heath said.
‘You’ve been talking all night,’ Caddick said. He decided now to vote for the motion: he had intended to support Heath.
The motion was put, and to the doctor’s surprise, was carried, even with McEwan’s amendment. Henderson couldn’t make up his mind and decided to vote with Caddick. Even Thompson voted for it, because Don Palmer, the grandfather, had been the best foreman he’d ever had. Rae abstained. Heath was the only dissentient.
‘Well, that’s over,’ Rae said.
‘Well, I’ve got a complaint,’ Caddick said. ‘It’s from the widow of a man now dead who used to be underviewer in my predecessor’s time, Mrs Ned Seldom. She sent word to me that a boy called Herlihy has been throwing coal on her roof.’
‘That’s her grandson,’ McEwan said. ‘Why can’t she tell him herself?’
‘She doesn’t recognize him,’ the doctor said. ‘The boy’s mother married against her wishes.’
‘She doesn’t see anyone,’ Mrs Cairns said. ‘She won’t hardly talk to Jimmy’s mother and she’s known her since they were brides together. It’s a wonder she went out of her house to tell you, Mr Caddick.’
‘She told the grocer’s boy to tell me.’
‘Well, as I see it,’ Henderson said. ‘It’s purely a family concern. It’s not for us to be chastising every damn kid in the district.’
‘I think it’s a matter for me,’ Rae said, ‘I’ll have a yarn with his father on the quiet.’
‘He’ll be too drunk to know what you’re saying,’ Mrs Cairns said. ‘Sin and damnation, that’s all he ever talks about. He was a priest or something.’
‘That’s another boy from Rogers’ room,’ Heath said. ‘You see?’
‘You’ll be blaming young Rogers for every unwanted baby in the district soon,’ McEwan said.
‘That’d be handy for some people,’ Mrs Cairns said with a smirk, since it was rumoured in the town that Henderson’s wife’s two children were by another man; some people said Mike Herlihy.
‘I’m being serious,’ Heath said. ‘I have good reason to know that Rogers is particularly soft with that boy. Miss Dane, the new infant mistress, told me that Rogers actually encouraged him to fight another boy in the school corridor the very day of the incident for which I’ve just been censured. Instead of suppressing the boy, Mr Rogers is encouraging him, I say. And if you knew who it was, Mrs Cairns, you wouldn’t be so keen to protect Rogers. It was your boy Dick he set Peter on to.’
Mrs Cairns looked amazed. ‘Well all I know is that Dick never said anything about it, and if he’s got a grievance he doesn’t usually keep it to himself. So if it was all right with him there couldn’t have been very much wrong. Who won the fight?’
‘I haven’t any idea who won the fight,’ Heath said. ‘As I said I only heard about it at second hand.’
‘Well, it all sounds funny to me,’ Mrs Cairns said.
‘Well, if there’s to be any complaint about that, it’s you that will have to make it, Mrs Cairns,’ Rae said. ‘You’ll have to ask your boy about it. But let’s get back to the complaint under discussion.’
‘It should be said that the boy is psychologically very much a misfit,’ the Doctor said. ‘He’s an exceptionally unstable child and might easily turn into a delinquent.’
‘Then he needs putting in his place, I can see that,’ Rae said. ‘I’ll give him a scare.’
‘Scaring won’t do it,’ the doctor said. ‘He’s had too much scaring. It only provokes him to do worse. Rogers has some hopes of using abnormal psychology to treat him and turn the boy’s energies to constructive ends. I myself think that only experience of a co-operative school or community would cure him.’
‘It seems that Mr Rogers has friends to represent him here tonight,’ Heath said.
‘The point is, you can’t blame Rogers for anything that Herlihy boy does. If you like, you can blame his dipsomaniac father, or his mother—she doesn’t give him any affection. He’s certainly a boy in need of affection.’
‘You wouldn’t let me blame young Palmer’s parents,’ Heath said.
‘The boy is half-delinquent already, Rogers or no Rogers.’
‘Well, as I see it, it’s a matter for Mr Rae,’ Henderson said.
‘Absolutely,’ Thompson said. ‘We waste our time on too many things already.’
‘Well, that’s that,’ Rae said. ‘Any more business?’
‘It’s quarter past nine,’ Caddick said.
‘Yes, I’ve got a complaint,’ Heath said. ‘It’s my turn to have to complain. I wouldn’t have brought this up, gentlemen, but you’ve forced me into it. You’ve forbidden me to use corporal punishment on infants; then I wash my hands of all responsibility for what happens to the children in Mr Rogers’ room. I tell you my only hope lay in the threat of physical punishment, and unless you get a new teacher, I disclaim responsibility.’
‘What are you getting at?’ McEwan asked.
‘I’m complaining about Rogers,’ Heath said. ‘I’ve told you before I disapprove of the Board’s policy in sending us inexperienced teachers….’
‘Well, they have to start somewhere,’ Mrs Cairns said. ‘You were inexperienced once.’
‘You wouldn’t think so to listen to him.’ McEwan said.
‘I listened to my seniors,’ Heath said. ‘Rogers doesn’t listen to me or anyone else. I’ve told him what I think of his teaching and he’s insubordinate.’
‘Well my Russell’s reading is all right,’ Mrs Cairns said.
‘Well I know the rest of the class is not all right. Gentlemen, I want to move that we send a strongly-worded letter to the Board, asking Rogers be shifted.’
‘I protest,’ the doctor said. ‘You can’t do that without hearing Rogers’s side of the matter.’
‘Not tonight for God’s sake,’ Caddick said.
‘Well I won’t condone going behind a man’s back,’ McEwan said.
‘Or me either,’ Mrs Cairns said. ‘That’s a scab’s trick.’
‘I won’t sit here and be insulted,’ Heath said. ‘If you were a man I’d hit you. Hiding behind your skirts.’
‘I’d take you on, skirts and all.’
‘Mrs Cairns, I must ask you to withdraw that remark,’ Rae said.
‘All right, I withdraw it. But I’ll still not go behind Roger’s back.’
‘Well I can’t see anything wrong with Rogers,’ Henderson said. ‘As a man I mean. He seems to be a likeable young chap. He’s a great favourite with the Palmers.’
‘Not only the Palmers,’ Heath said.
‘Well, I’m not saying you haven’t good reason to complain, Henderson said. ‘You must have or you wouldn’t suggest this course. But we can’t make fools of ourselves before the Board.’
‘Rogers is the right man for this town,’ McEwan said. ‘He understands the working man’s point of view.’ (Though since Rogers’s speech at the election meeting, he had his doubts.)
‘Well if you want to make a political issue out of it,’ Heath said.
‘There’s a bit too much socialism in this town,’ Thompson said.
‘Does he teach that in the school?’ Caddick asked.
‘I wouldn’t be surprised,’ Heath said.
‘Well, you’re supposed to know,’ Mrs Cairns said.
‘All this is beside the point,’ the doctor said. Politics has got nothing to do with it. It’s a question of teaching ability. In my opinion there’s worse teachers than Rogers.’
‘Well, I suggest we leave the question till we’ve got more to go on,’ Rae said. ‘I find it hard to believe the man is as bad a teacher as you say he is. Why not leave it to the inspectors to decide?’
‘I’ll soon put them wise to him,’ Heath said.
‘Yes, I’ve no doubt you would,’ Mrs Cairns said. ‘I reckon we should have a delegation ourselves to Rogers, to see for ourselves.’
‘Hear, hear,’ McEwan said.
‘Yes … yes,’ Henderson said. ‘That seems fair enough.’
‘Without warning,’ Heath said.
‘I think it’s only fair to advise him,’ Rae said.
‘That undermines the whole purpose of the visit,’ Heath said. ‘He’ll do a lot of window-dressing in advance.’
‘I don’t see anything wrong in just dropping in on him,’ the doctor said. ‘If we go with open minds, he’s got nothing to fear from us.’
The delegation was elected—Mrs Cairns, Caddick, Thompson and Rae. Before the meeting closed, Heath said, ‘Well, gentlemen, I must say, I haven’t had the support I hoped for from the new committee.’
‘You’ve had a fair innings,’ Caddick said. ‘Anybody would think you had to run a coal-mine. You’ve been talking all night. I believe in action, not talk.’
‘That’s what I say,’ Heath said. ‘If I’d had more support I wouldn’t have had to talk so much.’
As he left the school he told himself the time had come to apply for his next job—the one he could take for the asking.
When Don Palmer left the committee meeting he walked down the school corridor. There was light coming from one classroom and he looked through the window. Miss Dane was in there chalking sentences on the wall blackboards. Mrs Hansen had blown in after school to ask her to afternoon tea, but this time she had not helped her with the printing. Don watched her squatting at the wall. Caught off guard like this, she looked, in a worn way, attractive. Of course her features were prim and slightly wrinkled, and he knew that, close up, her face hung in petulant folds like wet washing. But her hair was a glossy black, and she had a trim pert figure and a cheerful personality. He pitied her that she was still unmarried and had apparently never had a boy friend.
He tapped on the window. She looked up startled to see his easy grinning face, like a peeping Tom’s through the glass. ‘Oh!’ she said, straightening herself. ‘You gave me a fright.’
He walked into the room. ‘Take pity on my engine,’ she said. ‘It’s been knocking a little too much lately. I think it could do with a few new piston rings.’
‘Working overtime?’
‘Yes, I just had a little to get finished. I slipped away early today.’
‘I’ll tell Heath on you.’
‘Oh, not before bell-time. Only I usually stay on for half an hour or so. It’s just that it’s so quiet up here.’
It was quiet; only the screaming of the dredge across the creek worried the stillness of the autumn night.
‘Do you like the Flat?’ he asked.
‘Well, it’s an experience if it’s nothing else,’ she said. ‘It’s not exactly my idea of heaven.’
‘You’ll get used to it,’ he said.
‘Have you been to the committee meeting?’
He nodded.
‘Do you think anything will come of it?’
‘It’ll make Heath uncomfortable if it doesn’t do anything else.’
She felt disloyal, as if she was sanctioning rebellion against her
She winced at the oath and ignored it. ‘Oh, there’s no reason to think that,’ she said. ‘Mind you, I do think it was time Mr Heath checked Mr Rogers’ children a little bit. But I don’t think he should have picked on Donnie.’
‘You wouldn’t have thought he’d need to give any kid that size the leather.’
‘Oh,’ she pursed her lips, like one who speaks not lightly from due authority. ‘You’d be surprised. Sometimes even the smallest children can be very naughty.’
Her face was again prim and, he thought, like that of any spinster schoolmistress. He wanted to undo it. ‘Christ,’ he said, ‘I wouldn’t have your job for quids.’
His stubborn disrespect for her maiden ears and the professional flattery she deduced from his remark combined to warm her subtly, like dry sherry. ‘It’s got its compensations,’ she said. ‘You’re dealing with children—even if they are other people’s.’
‘Compensations,’ he said with a light sneer. ‘Compo. You need compo for what it does to you. But they don’t give you any.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Well, you can always pick a schoolteacher. Go to any dance on a Saturday night in the country, and you can always pick out the woman who’s been teaching a couple of years or more.’
‘How?’
‘Well, Christ, they start to look drab, their faces droop with worry over promotion and little Johnnie’s writing and inspectors and all that. They forget to keep themselves presentable.’
She was deeply hurt. No one had ever talked to her like this before. When at last she realized that she was right in suspecting that he was deliberately hurting her, her first impulse was to say something spiteful, but she had nothing ready. She found it easier to pretend that his intentions were kind, but her face, sagging with a sense of injustice, gave her mood away.
‘You don’t look bad when you’re hurt,’ he said with a touch more mockery than she could stand.
‘Mr Palmer!’ she said, stamping her foot as if at a defiant child, ‘You may be able to talk to your dance-hall tarts like this but not to me.’
‘Oh, there,’ he said with easy soothing. ‘Don’t take it to heart. Christ, I was only teasing.’
‘Please remember that the committee is meeting at the other end of the school,’ she said.
He put his hand on her forehead and held her head back and looked at her face with open tender mocking. She pushed his hand away, and in his expertize of philandery he registered that there was not too much force in her push. ‘I wish you’d mind your language,’ she said, a little more subdued than she had been.
‘That’s the trouble with you schoolteachers,’ he said. ‘You take yourselves too seriously. Look at Paul—he never worries about having a good time. Flora’s his first girl. You don’t bother with men. You should enjoy life.’
‘I happen to have a conscience,’ she said.
‘Well, who hasn’t? I don’t believe in doing wrong. But there’s nothing wrong with enjoying yourself. You’re only young once.’
‘Mr Palmer, you ought to know better than that. You’re a returned soldier.’
‘Christ,’ he said. ‘You don’t think us boys were saints, do you? You didn’t believe all the patriotic speeches, did you? We liked a good time like anyone else. And we had to go through a lot of sticky patches for it too.’
She didn’t comment. ‘Well, I’m afraid I must go,’ she said.
‘I’ll come back with you.’
She didn’t talk as they walked o the dark road. She was pondering this sudden brutal contact with masculinity. That was what was missing from Rosslyn. She was still working on the novel and she had begun to take it seriously. It had began as a light-hearted lark; now she wanted to make it plausible and to show her own hand. Rosslyn was not warm-blooded. He wanted something of Don Palmer, some of his mocking male ability to hurt a woman and tease her out of her pouts. Of course in the end Sandra was to see Rosslyn in humiliation, tumbling on to terra firma from an unruly steed, and afterwards she was to know his mind and moods inside out and operate him like a switchboard, but to make the victory worth winning, he had to have some power of resistance. Miss Dane walking beside Don Palmer was subdued and fascinated.
‘You’re quiet,’ he said.
‘Just thinking,’ she said. ‘I often think to myself.’
‘You think too much. Thinking’s not good for you. It makes you uneasy.’
As they approached the hotel he said. ‘I don’t feel like going in
yet.’ He was very restless of late. He had been home two months
and without a woman. That had been one advantage of living with
Myra. Only he preferred the chase to its consummation, which,
since he had gone into the army, always left him, in the end, disappointed. In Christchurch when he felt as he did tonight he only
‘It is a nice night,’ she said. ‘I could do with a breath of fresh air myself. Just to blow the cobwebs off me.’
‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘You need someone to take you down off the shelf and dust you now and again.’
She wasn’t clear if by you he meant himself or her but she didn’t
ask. ‘Oh well,’ she said. ‘Perhaps if someone’s looking for a pot of
jam they’ll see you and rub you over with the duster. What’s your
label? Peach or strawberry?’
‘Sour grapes right now,’ he said.’ ‘I feel browned off.’
‘You do need some fresh air,’ she said. ‘Perhaps a change of scene is the remedy. You need to be somewhere else than Coal Flat.’
‘A change of scene,’ he said. ‘Jesus, that’s an idea. Hey, you’ve got a car, haven’t you?’
‘Yes, in Mr Heath’s garage.’
‘He’s at the meeting. He wouldn’t hear you.’
‘What do you mean. Mr Palmer?’
‘I mean I could take you for a drive.’
‘Well—really, it is rather late.’
‘It’s not half-past eight.’
‘Won’t your mother wonder?’
‘No. You go up and get the car out. I’ll have to nip in and tell Mum about the committee meeting. Then I’ll catch you up at the garage in five minutes.’
‘Where will she think you’re going?’
‘I’ll say I’m going to see Doris and Frank, Frank won’t give me away.’
Ngahere was a small saw-milling town at the other side of the
bridge that crossed the river. Miss Dane sitting beside Don as he
His easy blasphemies excited her dimly; coming from his full, relaxed lips, lush and resonant from his throat, they fell on her like music, subtly tempting music. As she looked sideways at him she had a premonition that he was evil.
‘You know you should watch your language,’ she said.
‘What’s wrong with it?’ he said.
‘Well, the way you take the name of the Lord in vain.’
‘That. That’s just habit. I forget I’m saying it. Christ!—There, you see, I said it again.’
‘Of course I’m broadminded about it myself. But it does sound common. And I hope Donnie never hears you.’
‘I heard him say it himself the other day.’
‘That’s nothing to boast of. There. It just goes to show.’
‘Well, I can’t help it. It comes natural to me.’
‘You don’t need to worry in my presence.’
‘Thank Christ for that,’ he said. She giggled slightly.
There were two pubs in Ngahere, both rather quiet of a week night. At the ‘Railway’ there was a room where they could drink away from the bar. As he pulled up outside she said, ‘Oh I say, Mr Palmer. Where are we going?’
‘Inside,’ he said. ‘I’m thirsty.’
‘No,’ she said. ‘I’m quite firm about this. I don’t drink.’
‘Oh,’ he said. ‘One won’t hurt you.’
‘You don’t understand. It’s a principle with me. No, no, Mr Palmer. We’ve had our fun. I think it’s time we turned round and went back home.’
‘Call me Don. Come on, one drink won’t hurt. Well, you wait here and I’ll go inside.’
‘How long will you be? I don’t want to be seen waiting here outside a hotel. I think I should drive farther up and wait.’
‘Then come inside. You can drink lemonade. That’s not against your principles, is it?’
They went inside and Don got her lemonade, only there was gin
in it too. She said it smelt a little, it was a little oily, but he said, oh,
that was just the kind of lemonade they were making nowadays.
She was ready to be aggrieved, feeling that at least he might respect
‘No tales out of school,’ he said.
They talked. She asked him obliquely about Myra and why the marriage had broken up. He answered, skimming the truth casually, as if he were cavalier about the whole thing, without telling her more than she could have picked up from any Coal Flat gossip. She talked, with unusual self-revelation, confessing some of her secret dissatisfaction with living in the pub. He deflected her from her complaints and got her to confide some of her hopes, to talk of happy memories. He was surprised in a boy-like way that her happiest memories were so innocent, little episodes with Maori school children, private jokes about Mr O’Reilly, the scrapes she had got into when she was a schoolgirl. He noticed her eyes were sparkling, her cheeks glowing and her voice was easier. She was animated.
He was gratified; he felt he had done her a good turn to have taken her out of her rut for a night. He got her a fourth gin. ‘Oh dear,’ she said. ‘It’s half-past nine. We must go, really. They’ll wonder where I am back at the hotel.’
‘Mum thinks you’ve gone to bed early.’
‘Does she?’
Miss Dane was strangely and fatally excited; she felt no specific lust for his manly body, since she had trained herself for so long to see men and feel nothing; but her body was shot through with a sensuous thrill of expectancy, and she was ready to surrender herself to anything he might ask. She had no defences after four gins.
He drove back over the bridge and did not climb to the Flat. He
took the road that led to the dredge and stopped. His unsettledness
was relieved by the night’s events. He had had cheap entertainment and it flattered his pride that he had coaxed her to have a
drink against her principles. He had already decided that he
wouldn’t try to have his way with her. She wasn’t all that attractive,
and her innocent confidences had fended him off; he felt that he
had to respect her. He just wanted to talk to her for a while, to idle
‘Oh Jesus Christ, what’s your hurry?’ he said.
She didn’t answer for a second. She said with a touch of awe:
‘Say that again.’
‘Say what?’
‘What you said.’
‘What’s your hurry?’
‘No, the other words. The swear words.’
‘Jesus Christ. What do you want me to say that for?’
‘Fancy being able to say that,’ she said. ‘You don’t seem to realize how wicked it is.’
‘Wicked! Jesus, I said before, it’s second nature to me.’
‘You’re wicked,’ she said. ‘I’d never say it.’
‘Why do you want me to say it then?’
‘It fascinates me. That anyone could be so evil. I’d never say it. There’s a lot of things I wouldn’t do. Sometimes I wonder do you get any thanks for it’ She moved close to him. She was shivering. he noticed.
‘You’re not cold, are you?’
‘No. I’m not cold. Say that again.’
‘Why?’
‘I used to think every time anyone took the Lord’s name in vain it hurt him, like a thorn in his side. You’re taunting him.’ He was too stubborn to satisfy her strange request, but inadvertently he said ‘Christ Almighty! Don’t get religious. I never think about it.’
‘You’re wicked, Don. You said it again.’
‘It’s just a word.’
‘It’s a swear word. I like to hear you say it. It’s like wicked music.’
He looked at her with an odd mixture of pity and contempt. She was trembling. Her hand was warm and her eyes and mouth were wide. In his psychology of women her state meant one thing. He said: ‘Come into the scrub.’ She followed him fascinated. She had an exquisite sensation of sinking into a tropical swamp. He said, ‘Have you had it before?’
‘I don’t know what you mean,’ she said, and he believed her. ‘She doesn’t even know that she wants it,’ he thought.
They pushed through scrub till they were completely in the
dark. There was a solid mass of leaves around them, some creeper
or other. He kicked something and struck a match. ‘What’s this?’ he
said. ‘A bike pedal. An old ‘possum trap too.’ There was a sheet of
paper at his foot. He picked it up and saw an obscene drawing of a
She was timid and trembling. ‘Are you sure you want it?’ he asked. He didn’t want to be accused of rape.
‘I don’t care,’ she said. ‘Even if it is a thorn in his side. I don’t care. Do anything to me. Anything you like,’
In the fading light of the burning spool of crumpled paper it occurred to him that the woman looked wicked herself. He proceeded to take her, feeling that he was doing her a favour. When he had finished and she no longer seemed to be able to help herself—so that he had to support her to the car—he said, ‘Now for Christ’s sake remember, as soon as you get back, give yourself a wash-out. Have a bath or something.’ She didn’t answer. They had neither of them seen Peter Herlihy behind the clump of muhlenbeckia, listening and watching with his night-trained eyes.
Rogers was impressed with the change in Peter Herlihy after
his fight with Dick Cairns. Within three days Peter had become, instead of the victim of boys’ gangs, a leader of a gang. He
no longer chased and tormented girls, he led boys against other
boys. He stopped his obscene drawings. His challenge to authority
was more open, and, Rogers thought, more dangerous in that he
might provoke other teachers to punish him. Mrs Hansen noticed
the change in him. She looked out of the staffroom window and
watched him yelling commands to his followers. ‘Quite a little
gangster,’ she said. ‘He doesn’t run away snivelling like he used to.
He’s not worrying girls now. That strapping I gave him must have
done him a bit of good.’
Heath looked at Miss Dane. ‘I hear you’ve been too easy on that boy, Mr Rogers. He’ll have to learn to be quieter. If his reading doesn’t improve he’ll have to be put down a class, I’m afraid.’
‘I’m sure I won’t thank you for him,’ Miss Dane said. ‘He’s older than my children. He’d be a thoroughly disturbing element in the class. He said something most rude about you when I went into your room last week, Mr Rogers.’
‘You see you don’t get any thanks for being soft with them,’ Mrs Hansen said. ‘That right, Fred?’
Fred Lawson grunted. He was no believer in gentle handling of children but he didn’t want to be caught agreeing with Heath. He had never forgiven Heath for raking off the credit for his art work.
Rogers, however, encouraged Peter’s new confidence. He would call him to the table and ask him to make a story out of a picture on the front cover of his reading book. It was a picture of a crowd of baby-faced infants by a tree: one of them sat on a branch and the others danced excitedly with open mouths beneath it. Some of them had flung their books into the air. ‘That’s you up on the tree,’ Peter said. ‘The kids are all laughing at you. Look, they’re shouting at you.’
‘What are they saying?’
‘They’re saying, ‘Maddie! Maddie! Mad Mr Rogers!’ His eyes shone with forbidden excitement. ‘See, those two have got their arms up. They’re throwing their books at you.’
‘Books won’t hurt me.’
‘These are heavy books, but. They’ve got hard covers. They’ll hit you in the eye.’
‘I’ll put my hand up to catch them.’
‘No, ‘cause you’ll fall off the tree if you do. And then the kids’ll all jump on you and trample all over you.’
‘Why do they want to do that?’
‘’Cause they say you’re mad. You’re the maddest teacher they ever had.’
‘Why am I mad?’
‘’Cause you’re soft. You let the kids do anything.’
‘What would you do if you were the teacher?’
‘I’d make them do everything I told them. I’d hit them. I’d say, “You come out here!” and I’d sneak up to Mr Heath’s room and steal his strap and I’d go bash! bash! bash! “Now you sit down and stop your crying or I’ll give you some more.”’
‘Do you want to be a teacher?’
‘No. I wouldn’t be a teacher for anything. Teachers are mad. All the kids are going to kill them.’
‘Why?’
‘’Cause they don’t like teachers. They give them the strap.’
‘But you said you’d give them the strap if you were the teacher,
‘They might want to attack you then.’
‘I wouldn’t let them, but. ‘Cause I’d know. I’d be clever and watch them.’
‘Wouldn’t you ever want to be nice to them?’
‘No. I’d yell at them, like Mum does, like you yelled at me that night you were with Donnie Palmer’s auntie.’
‘What were you following us for?’
‘’Cause.’
‘’Cause what?’
‘I wanted to see if you’d do that what you told me about.’ He paused. ‘Mum and Dad used to do that. I used to get scared when Dad came into the room. He used to try to do something to Mum. Mum screamed at him. I wanted to see him give her a hiding. But they just fought without anyone winning. You and Donnie’s aunt didn’t fight.’
‘You shouldn’t take any notice of a man going for a walk with a
woman. It doesn’t mean he’s going to fight or do anything. They
‘Why can’t I do it now?’
‘Because you don’t want to.’
‘I want to know what Dad tried to do to Mum.’
‘When you grow up you’ll know.’
‘I want to find out.’
‘Just you forget about it. You play with your gang and you’ll never think about it. Why do you have to think about it so much?’
‘’Cause it’s a secret. I want to know every secret.’
‘Well, there’s a hundred and one other secrets for you to think about.’
‘What secrets?’
‘What it says in this reading book.’
‘Oh that. I don’t have to read it myself. I can ask Dad and he’ll tell me straight away. It’s mad stuff in this book. It’s not worth knowing.’
‘But when you grow up, how will you read when your father isn’t there?’
‘I won’t want to read. I’ll be in my hut in the bush, with my Alsatian.’
Rogers couldn’t find any way to convert him from his obsession with his dirty secret. Yet it was already more open than it had been; in making it articulate, he seemed to be freer of it; perhaps it would be eroded by exposure to the light. And Peter was now more concerned with defying authority; that was a healthier sign. He hoped that that too might work itself out, and Peter become more of a normal boy. If only he could get free of the home that had made him what he was. And now the other teachers were beginning to come down on him. Heath came into the room the morning after the committee meeting. ‘I’ve had a complaint about this boy Herlihy,’ he said. ‘He’s been reported for throwing coal on people’s roofs. I’m not pursuing it myself because I’ve informed the police. He’ll hear from Constable Rae.’
‘I’ll speak to him,’ Rogers said.
‘I wish you would speak to him a bit more often,’ Heath said. ‘He’s becoming well known. Even the doctor says he has the makings of a criminal. Remember that if he becomes a criminal it’ll be partly your fault.’
‘Yes,’ Rogers said. ‘I know that.’
Heath looked at him, wondering. Was the man coming round to
At lunch time that day Peter came up to Rogers and said. ‘You told me a story.’
‘When did I tell you a story?’
‘You told me people only do that thing when they’re married.’
‘Well, they’re not supposed to if they aren’t married.’
‘I saw someone do it and they weren’t married.’
Rogers was bewildered. He hoped he wouldn’t name them. He didn’t want local scandal to get drawn into his battle for Peter’s soul. ‘Don’t tell anyone about it, Peter.’
‘Why?’
‘Because it’s their business. Anyway, you shouldn’t follow people like that. Some day some man will give you a hiding for that.’
‘I wouldn’t let him see me.’
‘Why do you have to follow them?’
‘I want to watch what they do.’
‘I told you weeks ago what they do.’
‘I couldn’t see much. It was too dark. Why do they only do it in the dark?’
‘Because it’s not something to do in the daylight. Only dogs do it in public. If you have to watch it, watch dogs. Or Mrs ‘Thompson’s bull near Ngahere. Don’t follow people.’
‘I didn’t follow them last night.’ He was suddenly resentful. ‘They walked in just near me. I was in my hidey-hole.’
‘Where’s that?’
‘I’m not telling you. It’s my secret. They came right by me and I was frightened to move.’
‘Well, you’ve got your secret. Why don’t you let them have their secret? That’s why they do it in the dark. It’s their secret.’
‘He burnt my drawing,’ he said.
‘You can draw another.’
‘I don’t want to draw any more like that now.’
Rogers was pleased to hear this. ‘Then why do you care if he burnt it?’
‘Because it was in my hidey-hole. I know who they were too.’
‘I don’t want to know who they were.’
‘I’m not telling anyway. It’s my secret.’
‘Well you keep it a secret. And don’t tell anyone else.’
Donnie Palmer, after Heath’s punishment, had become less frank
and trusting. He was a member of Peter’s gang and Rogers noticed
He was to have worse worries. Peter told him one day that one night after school he and two boys from Mrs Hansen’s class had gone with two girls of the same age, into the scrub where they had exposed themselves with guilty and studious curiosity. Rogers wanted to say, ‘Don’t do that again,’ but he did not. He didn’t dare reveal his concern to Peter or it might confirm his suspicion that it was worth being obsessed with because it was secret and shameful. Of course, he told himself, this sort of thing was a routine affair in the psychology books; it was natural curiosity and had no vicious implications. Yet what if anyone else knew? Or if Peter told anyone that he had told Rogers? He was making his treatment of Peter secret and shameful itself. ‘Well, now you know all about it,’ he said. ‘There’s nothing more to find out.’
Peter went away looking very pleased with himself. Perhaps, Rogers hoped with excitement, that was the end of his quest; perhaps it was all over, except his defiance of authority, which was a simpler matter.
Next morning Donnie came with animation to him from a long exchange of car-whispering with Peter. ‘I just thought up a story about you,’ he said, sniggering as if at his own temerity.
‘What story, Donnie?’
‘Peter and some boys went behind the bushes with some girls, And you were there too.’
Rogers turned pale. ‘Donnie Palmer.’ Then he spoke lower. ‘Look here, Donnie! That’s not true now, is it? You know it’s not true. Did you see me there? Do you think I would want to do a silly thing like that?’ He was holding Donnie by the upper arm.
‘No,’ Donnie said more shyly, as if he had dared too much.
‘Well, you know it’s not true, Donnie. Why do you say things like that?’
‘I don’t know. I thought it was a funny story.’
‘Well, don’t tell stories unless they’re true. Don’t make up any stories like that. And don’t you repeat that story to anyone. Because it’s not true. You’re telling lies!’
Peter Herlihy was listening intently to this and when Rogers told Donnie to go out to play until the bell rang for school to start, he caught him up. ‘That made him wild, Donnie!”
Donnie withdrew from him. ‘He only laughs when you tell him
stories,’ he said. ‘He doesn’t talk to you like that. You’re his pet.
I’m not playing with you.’
Miss Dane woke to a strangely excited state the morning after
she had been to Ngahere with Don. It was as if she was hesitating
on the doorstep of a strange house that was hers for the asking, that
would answer all her dreams and give her rest and security. For a
few seconds she tried not to wake, so that she could hold the excitement, but the effort itself woke her. And then the memories of the
previous night came bashing on her conscience and she was flooded
with guilt. She dressed hurriedly and furtively as if she was dodging
somebody’s eye. Fear struck her so suddenly that she had to steady
herself against the bed-post; there might be a child. How was she to
know? She had done what he had told her, she had had a bath
when she got in. She couldn’t remember it clearly; she had been so
weary that she had forced herself through the motions, trying to be
quiet about it in case she should wake people and set them wondering where she had been. How could she know before a month or
two? The possibility was too dreadful to contemplate, the
She was relieved that Don wasn’t at breakfast; he was probably lying in; his mother often gave him breakfast in bed. After breakfast she did an unusual thing. Sitting on the bed, she forced herself to study her situation as objectively as she could. She excluded the possibility of a child and looked at her guilt in its full acid rancour. She was a woman who had a strong sense of purpose working through all events. Whenever she read a woman’s paper her eyes and fingers sneaked awesomely to the astrology column and memorized the destinies predicted for those born under Aries, or if the paper was a week out of date, found correspondences between the predictions and what had actually happened to her during that week. It was an emollient necessary to her nagging puritan conscience, to be able to pass the responsibility on to the stars or God. And now the idea flashed to her like a revelation that there had been a purpose in last night’s events. They were inconceivable otherwise. Wasn’t it obvious that God had planned them? It was His way of saving Don Palmer. She realized suddenly how little love there had been in her surrender, in her lust to dare damnation; but now like a weeping sore her heart oozed love for Don, for God, for the world, that she was chosen to be a vehicle of grace for Don Palmer. ‘At heart he isn’t evil at all,’ she thought. ‘I could have a great influence on him. I could lead him back to a life of goodness.’ It was true she had taken a short cut to intimacy with him, she had cheated, yet out of this evil might come great good. Only there must be no more cheating, she would have to teach him that he had to respect her; his self-denial alone would help her to convert him to a life of goodness and respectability. She prayed that it would happen like that; in her prayer she offered genuine repentance for her sin, yet she felt it was only token repentance because she was applauding the divine purpose that had brought it off. How could God have let it happen to her if He hadn’t contrived it Himself?
Before she left for school she patted her hair attentively before the
mirror; she wondered if she should change her hair style, perhaps
let it grow longer. She noticed that her face was more animated.
She would have to do something about her complexion; it really
was a little coarse. And then she looked at her watch and almost
trotted to school because she was later than usual, thinking, ‘It’s
just as well I chalked up those sentences last night, seeing I’m so late.
She was bright and good-tempered to her class that morning. At lunch time she walked tremulously to the hotel, and hearing Dad and Don talking she popped her head through the slide. ‘Peep-bo!’ she perked. Don was wiping glasses. He turned his head and for a second looked puzzled. ‘Oh, hullo,’ he said.
‘Just getting my own back,’ she said.
‘What’ll you have, madam?’ he said. ‘Bottled or draught?’
‘I think I’ll just have a spot of Adam’s ale,’ she said. ‘I’m off for my lunch. Flora will be my barmaid.’ She said more quietly, ‘How are you?’
‘Me? I’m all right.’
As she left, the disappointment didn’t sink in: she was congratulating herself that she had been able to rise to his banter.
Don turned back to Dad. Dad said, ‘She’s bright today. She’ll be sinking long ones with the boys next.’
Sometimes there were a few old men in the bar at that time of day; but today there were no customers. Dad had spectacles on. There was a letter opened out on the bar.
‘I can’t see they’ll have anything to complain about,’ he said.
‘Well, they won’t like it much.’
‘The cost of living’s going up all the time. It stands to reason beer has to go up too.’
‘The trouble is it’s such an odd amount.’
‘That’s our worry, not theirs. We have to get the change. They
only have to pay. It isn’t as if they can’t afford it. If there’s anyone
in this country in
‘Are you sure the trade won’t go off?’
‘Awh,’ Dad said, meaning No. ‘Even if it did, we don’t lose by it. What we lose on the roundabouts we picks up on the swings. Anybody’d think everyone else in the country wasn’t paying sevenpence already.’
‘When did it go up, exactly?’
‘While you were away. Oh, I dunno for certain, about
‘Well, I suppose they’ll get used to it, Dad, same as everyone else did.’
‘Conditions have changed now. What you could buy for sixpence five years ago you can’t buy now. And they’ve had rises. We’re entitled to something out of their rises.’
‘I was just thinking of the boys.’
‘Oh, the boys. It’s a hard commercial world when you get down to tintacks, and the boys have to pay for their pleasure just like everyone else.’
The letter announcing the decision was headed Licensed Victuallers’ Association: Westland Branch. Mr Palmer put it in a drawer under the till.
After school Miss Dane tried again. She saw no harm in buying a packet of cigarettes. She poked her head through the slide with an air of amused tolerance, and self-consciously asked Don for them. He looked at her quizzically and said, ‘You’re going gay, aren’t you?’ She was flattered and blushed. ‘Coming out of your shell,’ he said. ‘Dad says you’ll be in here with your foot on the rail soon.’ It hurt her that her gestures in his direction had become common property. Nervously she opened the packet and clumsily offered Don a cigarette. ‘I’ve just put one out,’ he said. ‘Oh, go on,’ she said. ‘Just to show there’s no ill feeling.’ He took one casually. ‘Why should there be ill feeling?’ he said.
She saw Rogers at the bar. Don had been talking to him before she came. She felt jealous of men that they could so easily and openly get into Don’s company. ‘I think the kids must be wearing you down, Miss Dane,’ Rogers called, ‘if you’re taking to smoking.’ He meant it as a friendly taunt but Miss Dane did not take it kindly. ‘I think that you should be a chain-smoker in that case,’ she called with sprightly acidity.
As Don lit his cigarette he murmured, ‘Did you make sure you did what I told you when you got home last night?’
Miss Dane flushed and said: ‘Yes…. You’d be surprised at what I’d do for you,’ and overtaken by her own temerity she ran up the stairs to her room where she smoked with a sense of abandonment and wrote another passage of her novel. Archly, coyly and tenderly she brought Rosslyn and Sandra together where their chirrupy efforts each to outscore the other were underlain by soft stale adolescent awakenings of romance. She wondered whether she should make Rosslyn dark instead of fair.
Mrs Palmer shoved her head through the slide and called softly
‘Well, Mrs Palmer, as you know, what goes on at the meeting isn’t supposed to get out, but….’
‘I understand, Mr Henderson. But I know how to keep a secret. I just want to know what happened to Heath over strapping Donnie.’
‘Well, I can tell you this much, Mrs Palmer. He didn’t get let off too lightly.’
‘What happened to him?’
‘We censured him, Mrs Palmer. We said straight out he’d exceeded his duty. We’ve forbidden him to use the strap on infants again.’
‘I should think so too.’
‘We thought it best to leave it as it is, Mrs Palmer. We aren’t going to write to the Board about it. We thought it was enough to give him fair warning this time.’
‘I’d like to give him a bit of leather, just to let him know what it feels like.’
Henderson laughed complaisantly, patting her on the back as if to say, ‘You are a one for your jokes’. He went back to the bar and sidled heartily into conversation with Rogers. ‘What I always say, Paul,’ he said, ‘is that a young chap has to look after himself. Now when I was your age—oh, things weren’t easy then, I tell you. I was in a sawmill then. There were more chaps looking for work than there were jobs for them. You daresn’t speak out of place then or you’d get the sack. The unions didn’t have the power they have today. Well, I always found it paid to ask no questions and do your job and mind your own business. Oh, you couldn’t tell me. I saw it all. Chaps getting the sack for being a bit too independent. Pride’s poor consolation to an empty stomach.’
‘Did you get the sack?’
‘Me? No. That’s what I’m saying. If a chap minds his own business he’s always on the safe side.’
‘You’d better not let Jock McEwan hear you talk like that.’
‘Oh, well, Jock now. Jock’s a damn good chap, one of the best. But he carries things too far. He’s got one thing on his mind—class struggle and all that. I believe in live and let live. Life’s too short for all this arguing. Don’t you think so, Paul?’
Rogers shrugged. ‘It may be, I don’t know.’ He didn’t agree, but he didn’t want to be drawn.
‘There, you see. You’re not convinced about it yourself. What I say is a young chap like you’s got to look ahead. You’ve got a fine career ahead of you. I only wish I’d had your opportunities when I was a boy.’
They swallowed in silence for a minute.
‘There’s other things in life besides bargaining with the bosses. Anyway the Government is our boss now. There’s pleasures to be got out of life. Company. Good fellowship. Well, friendship. I always reckon if a man has a good job and a good mate he’s well off…. You don’t mix enough, Paul. What I say is you should get out and meet people more. A fine young chap like you shouldn’t go to seed. I’ll tell you what, you could come up home some evening. Just for a yarn and the company and perhaps a beer or two….’
‘Well, thanks. I can’t promise. Would your wife mind?’ He was flattered at the invitation; yet he wanted his evenings free to walk with Flora.
‘No. Not at all. She’d be glad to have you. Anyway, if you came around on a Wednesday she’d be at the Red Cross group. The kiddies’ll be in bed. We could have the place to ourselves. Women are all very well in their place but I always say there’s nothing finer than male company….’
His patter seemed to be exploratory; every assertion trailed off as if it implied a question. Surely, Rogers thought, surely….? He had heard the vague rumours about Henderson, that he had a weakness for young men, that his children were not his own; but he had never believed them. Perhaps they weren’t true, perhaps he had generated the rumour by talking to young men of the town as he had talked to Rogers. Oh God, what a life, he thought; how stupid and unintelligible life can be. The man was to be pitied. Would Peter grow up like this? Perhaps he’d be worse.
‘I can’t come Wednesdays,’ he said. ‘Perhaps I’ll look you up one day. Anyway I can always see you here.’
‘Yes, yes. There’s nothing like a bar for good company. Never mind. But what I was saying, a chap like you has to be careful. You see I’m not supposed to mention this, but what I say, it’s not fair to a young man to come at him without warning.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Well, as you know there was a committee meeting last night and I’ll tell you, just between ourselves, mind, that your boss is after your blood. Oh, if you knew this town as I know it, Paul. All the squabbling and backbiting and slandering. You’ll have to watch out.’
‘What’s he going to do to me?’
‘Well, I don’t want you to so much as whisper a word of this to anyone….’
‘I’ll keep it quiet, whatever it is.’
‘Well, there’s talk of a delegation from the committee dropping in on you some time soon. Just to see if your class is as rowdy as your boss says.’
‘Oh, the bloody fool!’
‘Well, just so you won’t be caught unprepared, like. But my advice to you is keep your mind on your job and don’t be independent. You could easily get along with your boss if you wanted to.’
‘More drinking and less talking, you two,’ Don said. ‘Magging away like a couple of old maids. Drink while you can get it for sixpence. It’ll be sevenpence in a month’s time.’
Rogers looked up, resenting Don’s intrusion. Already in the two months he had known him he could see a change in him. It was somehow a change of stance. There had been moments before when unconsciously he had been upright in spirit. Now as he leaned over the bar or bent to draw the tap, his shoulders seemed rounded, his butt hung on his lip; he had the stand and the expression of a street-corner lout. Rogers checked his train of thought. He was his mate: a funny sort of mate he’d be to be picking faults in him; you couldn’t expect everyone to be a hero.
As the days passed Miss Dane became obsessed with Don. She went to bed holding in her mind an image of him that soothed her into sleep. But later she found it harder to sleep. She lay awake plotting elaborate schemes by which she could inveigle him into intimate talk. She drifted into fantasies in which Don emerged from his casual callous shell and exposed himself a tender sensitive serious young man relenting the pain he had caused her; they were dreams of tender static reconciliation in an atmosphere of exotic calm and warmth. It now seemed imperative that she should save him. Since that was the obvious purpose of her surrender to him that night, it would be meaningless unless she did. She wanted to tell him that the way he was heading he would end in hell. Surely he could be made to recognize one who loved him in his best interests; surely he would notice her air of patient unobtrusive love and awake to gratitude. She prayed for him.
But when he spoke to her as occasion threw them together, he
Dear Don,
There is one person who knows your secret. You are not the callous trifler you pretend to be. At heart you are good and I know it. You need the care of a woman who understands you as I do. I would do so much for you.
Please remember I am always waiting. You do not notice me as you did once. But I do not care about myself, only you.
From Your Ever-loving
You Know Whom.
Surely he would be touched by the self-sacrifice explicit in the last sentence…. She was careful to be vague in case the letter should get into someone else’s hands; she addressed it carefully to Mr Donald Palmer, Junior, and underlined the last word.
But Don didn’t know whom. When he read the first sentence he thought he was being blackmailed. When he got to the end of it he wondered if it was from the girl who had run out on him at Christchurch. But she wasn’t likely to use phrases like ‘callous trifler’, and anyway the letter had a Coal Flat postmark. Perhaps it was some local girl who was admiring him from a distance. Why didn’t she show herself then?—perhaps they could use each other. He didn’t show the letter to anyone till the afternoon when he passed it to Rogers. ‘Know this handwriting, Paul?’ he asked.
Rogers read it and laughed aloud. ‘You bastard, Palmer. You shouldn’t have shown me this,’ he said. ‘Someone’s pulling your leg. How do you know I didn’t write it myself?’
‘I wouldn’t put it past you either,’ Don said. ‘The way you were magging away to Pansy Henderson the other night.’
‘Are you sure it wasn’t addressed to me?’ Rogers said.
‘Who the hell would want to write love letters to you?’ Don asked.
It just didn’t occur to Don that Miss Dane would want to write him a letter like that. But when she slipped a note over the slide one day, and he recognized the handwriting, he was knocked off balance. ‘Christ, the woman’s getting too serious’ he thought; ‘she’s putting the nips in; a man doesn’t want to be trapped a second time, not to her, anyway.’ The note asked him to see her in the lounge after dinner. When he looked in, she was sitting there alone.
‘Oh, Don,’ she said. ‘I hope you didn’t mind my writing you that note.’
‘No. What do you want?’
‘You’re sure you’re not offended with me?’
‘No. Why?’
‘I haven’t done anything to offend you, Don. You never seem to want to speak to me.’
‘I’m always busy in the bar.’
‘One word—she had prepared this but it sounded flat and ridiculous in her ears—‘One word would mean so much.’
‘Well, hello,’ he said, with mock sheepishness, ‘will that do?’
‘But seriously,’ she said, and realized that seriousness was the worst tactic she could use. ‘Have a coffin-nail,’ she said. As he lit, she said, ‘What about a drive tonight? You can have the use of my car.’
‘I was thinking of going to Stillwater in the bus.’
‘Why not take the car?’ she said.
‘Christ, that’s an idea,’ he said. ‘Thanks.’
‘Is there a dance on there?’ she asked.
‘Yeah,’ he said.
When he came down after shaving and changing she was waiting in the sitting-room in a light frock.
‘Oh, you meant—you’re coming too?’ he said harshly.
‘Of course,’ she said. ‘What did you think? You want me to, don’t you?’
‘Yeah,’ he said, his harshness casing glibly, ‘I just wanted to see your face drop.’
She laughed gently. He said, ‘Just a minute,’ He wondered for a
minute. He took it that she was offering herself to him for a second
time. He didn’t want to be tied to her while he watched younger
and better-looking women dance past them. He knocked on
Rogers’s door. Rogers was reading. ‘Get your nose out of a book
‘What for?’
‘You’re coming to a dance with me. Hurry.’
‘Wait till I ask Flora to come.’
‘No. She’s doing some ironing.’
‘I know. I said I’d see her later. But she’d put the ironing off if I asked her to the dance.’
‘I’ll tell her you’re going with me. I wouldn’t ask you, only it’s important.’
The mystery was a little exciting. As they went down the stairs, Don said, ‘She thinks I’m taking her to the dance.’
‘Who?’
‘You’ll see.’
It came clear to Rogers when he saw Miss Dane that he was being used. He felt like turning his back on them and going back to his book, to wait for Flora, but already Miss Dane said, without much welcome, ‘Oh, are you coming too? I didn’t knew it was to be a party.’
‘I was going with Paul in the first place,’ Don said.
Rogers felt he couldn’t make the lie obvious. He excused himself and went back to the kitchen where Flora was ironing. He explained the situation without giving away Don’s trickery. ‘He’ll wait if he knows you’re coming,’ he said.
‘No. I want to get this ironing finished. You go with Don, Paul.’
‘I’d rather go with you. I should have thought of it before.’
‘I’m tired tonight, Paul. I want an early night. You go on and enjoy yourself.’
‘I’ll try to,’ he said.
The dance was held in a hall of corrugated iron from which the
cream paint was flaking. There were several buses from other
mining and milling towns in the district. There was the usual
crowd of young men near the door looking over the prospective
partners lined up in seats along both sides of the hall as if on approval. The band played clumsily a dilute saccharine jazz dominated by a smoogey saxophone. There were the usual dances—every alternate one a one-step or foxtrot, and the others the
Maxina, the Valeta, the modern waltz, the Boston two-step, the
Canadian three-step, the Gay Gordons. Rogers danced the Destiny
with Miss Dane, but that wasn’t successful because there was a
special local way of dancing the steps and she wasn’t familiar with
it. Don left them and didn’t come back to them except at supper,
held in a back room—sandwiches and shop cakes and tea. They
‘Well, Paul, my boy,’ Jimmy said, ‘Enjoying yourself?’
‘Oh, not so badly.’
‘Where’s Flora?’
‘She didn’t feel like coming out tonight.’
‘Meet the missus.’
‘I’ve been hearing a lot about you,’ Jessie Cairns said. ‘You just watch yourself, young chap. Old Heath has got his knife into you.’
‘Oh, I know that.’
‘What, Pansy Henderson been talking?’
‘Well, I knew anyway. Heath’s never hidden it.’
‘Well as long as you know. Who are you with?’
‘Miss Dane. Well, Don brought her really. Then left her.’
‘That’s dirty trick.’
‘So you’re holding the baby,’ Jimmy said.
‘She’s no baby,’ Jessie said. ‘She’s not much younger than me. Tell her to come over here. She looks lonely over there. What’s wrong with you anyway? Why aren’t you dancing with all these young sheilahs?’
He hedged, ‘I’m a bit lazy, I suppose.’
‘Lazy! What’s come over you youngsters today? You’re all lazy. Jimmy says the young ones are too lazy to do anything except hold up their hands, at the union meetings.’
‘Paul’s like me. He likes his beer too much. You can’t drink beer and run a woman too.’
‘Well, you seem to manage,’ Jessie said, ‘Too much beer-money. That’s the trouble with the younger generation. We had some fighting-spirit in the hard times.’
‘Well, it’s really because I’m going with Flora,’ Rogers said, annoyed that they hadn’t realized it.
‘Cripes, I can’t see Jimmy missing the fun just because I’m not there.’
‘How do you know?’ Jimmy said. ‘I only pretend I enjoy myself then.’
‘Shall I ask Miss Dane over?’ Rogers said.
‘Yes. Tell her we’re all going for a drink.’
‘I don’t think she drinks.’
‘She can have a lemonade,’ Jessie said.
There had been a timber hotel a few yards up the hill from the dance-hall but it had recently burnt down. At the back there was a temporary bar in a corrugated iron shed erected in a hurry after the fire so that the hotel would not lose its licence. It was just a long bar with kegs at the back of it. There was nowhere to sit. Miss Dane would not have joined them, only she had seen Don leave the hall in a crowd. She was glad of an excuse to enter the pub to see who he was with. The bar was crowded. Jimmy pushed to the bar for drinks while they stood jostled among young men swallowing beer fast to get enough spark up to enable them to be bold with the women at the dance. Miss Dane looked about her. Don was in a corner with a girl who was leaning against the wall, with a gin in one hand. She had a sort of turban on her hair, her face was garishly rouged and she grinned a pampered grin that Miss Dane could only read as triumphant. She smoked from a long cigarette-holder, and her shoulders were rounded. Miss Dane took in all this in a second. She quickened to impotent fury and only checked himself from stamping her foot and spurting tears. She trembled in fear that he might see her there and pretend not to see her, or even wave to her casually. ‘Mr Rogers, you don’t object if I go now,’ she said. ‘I’m awfully sorry. But really this crowd and this smoke will make me ill.’
‘I can get the bus if you like,’ Rogers said.
‘Yes, you’d better, I think.’
‘Where’s she going?’ Jessie asked.
‘Back home, I think.’
‘I don’t blame her. I don’t know what she’s doing wasting her time on Don Palmer. He’s not her type. Anyway I never did believe Myra left him. She wasn’t a bad sort, Myra.’
‘Drink up while you can,’ Jimmy said. ‘It’s going up to sevenpence three weeks Monday. We might be boycotting the pubs yet.’
Don grinned when Rogers told him that Miss Dane had gone and he’d have to get the bus back. ‘I’ll be able to take Tess back to the Flat now,’ he said. ‘Meet Tess.’ Later he said, ‘So the old girl went off in a huff? You know, it was her that wrote me that letter.
‘Well, there was no need to tell me that,’ Rogers said angrily. ‘Keep your smelly secrets to yourself.’
‘Are you jealous too?’ Don said. ‘If that’s the way you are, old Pansy will fix you up.’
Rogers could hardly restrain his fists. ‘That’s the last I’ll stand from you!’ he almost shouted, shaping up to him. People coming out of the dance turned to watch.
Don put an easy palm on Rogers’s shoulder. ‘Calm down, big boy,’ he said, ‘Can’t you stand your leg being pulled?’
‘It’s an insult to your sister,’ Rogers said in an undertone so that people watching wouldn’t hear. ‘I don’t care what you say about me.’
‘You don’t think I meant it, Paul?’ Don said with that glib humility that usually won people. But the appeal was lost on Rogers. ‘If I thought it was true, I wouldn’t know you.’
Sullenly Rogers said, ‘Forget it. You still didn’t need to be so hard on the woman.’
‘Well, what do you expect me to do?’ Don said. ‘Encourage her? It couldn’t have come to anything. It’s better to knock it on the head at birth, isn’t it? Like a snork you don’t want.’
All Miss Dane’s objections to the hotel came back. If she sat embroidering in the sitting-room the swearing of the men in the bar offended her. Don’s voice irritated her, talking to them so casually, oblivious of her. In her room she felt cooped up; she hadn’t been able to settle down to the novel for several nights. And lately she had taken to watching herself for any first warnings of a child, with the same worry as a seaman, a few days out from his last port and the woman he picked up in a dock-area dive, watches for signs of gonorrhoea. At school the children found her crabby. Rogers found her distant, as if she blamed him for Don’s insolence. Belle Hansen said, ‘The place is getting her down.’
Her worry was intensified by the rain. It had been a dry lingering autumn, and had broken lately into patchy weather with dull days, fits of shine and sharp showers. But on the Sunday after the dance it broke into a steady West Coast downpour that lasted without a stop for two days. For three weeks there wasn’t a fine spell longer than four hours. The Grey river was swollen and muddy and ate into the bank near the bridge; old branches and trunks were freed from gravel-banks and careered fiercely towards the sea. The hills were lost in fog and shower and for Miss Dane it was worse than Taranaki; life was hemmed in by raindrops, a low grey sky, continually wet feet, and the tattoo of rain on iron roofs. The children could not go outside and spent playtime and the lunch hour in their classrooms. The corridors hung with dripping raincoats and sou’westers. The school heaters were hung with wet socks.
She knew she had made a fool of herself over Don. She looked
On the Tuesday she called on Mr Rae. Mrs Rae answered the door. She was middle-aged but looked younger, she was soft of flesh and stout, and placid in her manner.
‘Oh, hullo, Miss Dane,’ she said as calmly as if she had been expecting her. ‘Come in and take your wet coat off.’
Miss Dane stared at her with a challenging look; she was pumping herself with determination not to give way on what she had resolved. ‘Thank you, Mrs Rae,’ she said. ‘I came to see your husband.’
‘Oh, you’re just in time,’ she said. ‘He was just off to see Mr Herlihy about that boy of his. Someone else has been complaining about him throwing stones at cars.’
Rae was in an oilskin and sou’wester and gumboots. ‘Good afternoon, Miss Dane,’ he said, looking her straight in the face from inside his outfit of oilskin. ‘We don’t often see you here.’
‘No, Mr Rae,’ she said. ‘I’m afraid it’s rather important. It’s about my position at the school.’
‘Oh?’ Mrs Rae went out of the room. Miss Dane reached forward and warmed herself in front of the fire that bubbled and spurted fiercely from the gassy local coal.
‘It’s really more than I bargained for, Mr Rae.’
‘Oh?’
‘Yes, as I’ve said before. I had no idea where Coal Flat was when I applied for the job.’
‘Well, you can hardly hold us responsible for that, Miss Dane.’ But really it’s quite unlike what I’ve been used to. It’s an ugly heathen town, Mr Rae.’
‘Oh, no, no, Miss Dane. It’s not as bad as that. Goodness me, I’ve lived here these seventeen years and I’ve never had any trouble, not since the Seldom strike.’
‘I’m afraid you don’t see what goes on, Mr Rae.’
‘Oh, now, now, Miss Dane. You’re not accusing me of neglecting my duty? It’s the first time anyone’s said that.’
‘Well, every night I can’t sleep for the noise in the bar at the hotel. They’re drinking after hours, Mr Rae. And the language.’
‘Oh, well, Miss Dane. I trust Mr Palmer to see that everything is
‘I’m not wanting to complain about anything, Mr Rae. I’ve come to tell you that I simply cannot continue to stay at that hotel or any hotel. It’s not fair that any teacher should be expected to stay there. What about the effect on the children? I have to connive at all that drinking and swearing. I’ve come to tell you that if I can’t find private board I’ll give up my position at the school.’
‘But you know, Miss Dane, that you can’t apply for another teaching position till the two years are up.’
‘I don’t care. I’m quite decided. It’s not fair that there should be towns like this where they expect decently brought-up women to come and teach.’
Her eyes watered and Mr Rae was embarrassed.
‘Well, I don’t know where you’ll get private board in Coal Flat…. Perhaps I’d better see Annie, Annie! … Annie, do you think we could make an effort and take Miss Dane in with us? She’s not very happy at Palmers’.’
Mrs Rae stared at Miss Dane with mild surprise. ‘Oh,’ she said. ‘Don’t they give you enough to cat?’
‘It’s nothing like that,’ Mr Rae said. ‘Miss Dane isn’t used to a hotel atmosphere.’
‘Oh, well, I think we could manage all right. You haven’t got any food fads, I suppose? As long as you’re prepared to put up with plain simple cooking. We don’t go in for fancy dishes here.’
Mrs Palmer said, when Miss Dane told her, ‘Of course, we don’t go in for fancy dishes, Miss Dane, but it’s good plain food. No buying cheap with me, oh no; no serving up the scraps from the last meal. You were quite satisfied, Miss Dane?’
‘Perfectly, Mrs Palmer. Only, it’s just as I said, I really do find a hotel atmosphere too much. I’m not used to it, Mrs Palmer. I hope you’ll understand.’
Mrs Palmer shrugged. ‘Oh well, I always say it takes all sorts to make a world, Miss Dane. Live and let live, that’s my motto. But when you’ve gone, drop in and see us now and again just to show you haven’t forgotten us altogether. Come and have a cup of tea, since you won’t be having many more with us,’ she said as if she was heaping coals of fire on Miss Dane’s head.
When the day came for leaving, Flora helped her put her luggage
in her Morris Eight. ‘I’m sorry you’re leaving us, Miss Dane,’ she
said. ‘I hope you’ll feel easier at Raes’. It’ll be more like a home for
you, won’t it?’ Miss Dane warmed to Flora as she drove into the
The party to celebrate Flora’s engagement to Rogers was held on the Friday night in the Oddfellows’ Hall, the same night as Miss Dane left the hotel. Mrs Palmer had invited most of her customers except Mike Herlihy and some of the younger lads who, she was afraid, might kick up rough. She said to Flora, ‘We’ll show some of these people how a party should be run. We’ll make it a real do.’
Dad had been hard to convince that Rogers was in a position to provide for Flora in the way she deserved. He had a long and serious talk with him.
‘Four hundred and thirteen pounds in the bank,’ he said. ‘That’ll only buy the furniture and the carpets. You’ve got a bloody check, haven’t you?’
Rogers flushed. At that moment he had no idea whether he was presumptuous or ambitious, he only knew that he and Flora were set on marriage and her father’s opposition was one of the hurdles he had to get over. If Dad wouldn’t give in, he was prepared to marry in spite of him, scratch along with Flora for a few years. Was it so presumptuous to ask her to do that? She wanted to marry too; if they shared a lean time, hadn’t he a right to expect it of her? Did her father expect him to wait for years so that he could come to her with a tidy bank balance? Was Flora going to find it so hard to part with the family?
‘We both want to marry, Mr Palmer,’ he said. ‘We love each other.’
Dad looked coldly at him. ‘That’s all very well, Paul. Love doesn’t
make a marriage. It’s got to be there, I admit. But you’ve got to
have a bit more to offer a girl than you’ve got.’
‘We aren’t even asking to get married yet. Only engaged.’
‘Well it’s going to lead to marriage. And I don’t want you getting our sanction to the engagement and then forcing your way on us, popping a bloody kid inside her.’
‘Mr Palmer! Flora and I—we’ve never … I never had any thoughts of doing that.’
‘I don’t doubt you hadn’t, Paul. But I’ve got to see this thing
‘I don’t intend to take advantage,’ Rogers said.
‘So much the better then. How long will it be before you get married?’
‘We thought, about a year.’
‘How much can you put away in that time?’
‘About two hundred if I stint.’
‘That’s six hundred. Well, I’ll have another yarn with Flora and if I’m convinced she’s dead set on it, I’ll think it over. How long will you teach in the Flat?’
‘About two years.’
‘Then where’ll you go?’
‘It depends where I’m appointed. Probably a bigger town. Perhaps Canterbury.’
‘Well, if you’re still here when you marry you can stay here. That’ll save board and give you a chance to save another hundred or so. There’d be no sense in buying any furniture here; you’d only have to pay for it to be shifted. Mind you, all this is conditional; I’m not yet in a position to make up my mind. Then you’d have to get a house. I don’t want you just renting a house. You’d have to own it yourself.’
‘If I get a sole charge in the country, I’d get the school house.’
‘What about when you leave there?’
‘I hope we’d have saved enough by then.’
‘You’d have a family by then. It wouldn’t be so easy to save.’
So it went on, Rogers had to give an account of his insurance policies, the history of his health and what diseases he had had. He had to get a medical certificate from the doctor to convince Dad he wouldn’t die early and leave Flora a widow. Though he never would have permitted the match without Mum’s intervention, now what Mum said didn’t influence him. Finally one night he told Rogers that he would give his consent. He would lend them £500 towards the house when they needed to buy one; to be repaid within ten years of the loan; this to augment the loan Rogers could raise from Rehab. Of course in the end Flora would get it back, from his will; but Dad didn’t believe in making things easy for the younger generation. They had to stint and struggle the same as he did when he was a young man. He didn’t want to encourage Rogers to think that he was a goldmine. In fact, if it had been anyone less transparent than Rogers he would have suspected that Flora was being courted for his money.
After all the interrogations and the uncertainty, Dad’s announcement left Rogers rather flat. He had smothered his rebellion for some time and the only reason he hadn’t said, ‘To hell with your humming and ha’ing! We’ll manage together!’ was Flora’s reluctance to fall out with the family. At least it was something that Dad hadn’t, as he had expected, asked him to pull out of the Labour Party.
All the same it was a great relief to know that that hurdle was crossed. Dad and Rogers shook on it and they drank a whisky together to toast the engagement. Then Mum was told and they all drank another. Mum called Flora and she and Rogers locked arms while Mum, Dad and Don were all cheer.
The party when it came was a great success. Mrs Palmer asked Mr Rae to be Master of Ceremonies: that way there’d be no fuss if there was a bit of drink in the hall, so long as everything was kept orderly, and Mr Rae could be trusted to see to that. She told Rogers to ask any friends, but most of them were regular customers and she had already asked them. He invited the school staff and the doctor, only the doctor said he was too busy. Rogers was a little relieved at that.
Mum had ordered the cakes from some caterers in Greymouth. She would have preferred a catering firm to have run the whole party, but Dad said, ‘Cut it out, Lil. This isn’t the wedding yet.’ So she got in touch with the social committee of the Red Cross group, and by inviting the right women she was able to get free and willing assistance with the supper and washing-up. Jessie Cairns ran a busy group of women who cut sandwiches and prepared the tea in a back room. In a side room Don attended a bar where there was beer for the men and wine for the women. There was a keg on the table made of boards on trestles, several dozen bottles of beer, and a dozen of wine imported from Australia and bottled by a brewery in Christchurch. The women preferred the bottled beer. To prevent the men from staying in the bar, the arrangement was that no drinks would be served during dances. Dad hired a four-piece band, made up of local players, at a quid apiece.
Mum had thought that it was Dad’s right to be master of ceremonies, but it was more politic to ask the policeman, and if you
looked at it another way, it made Dad seem more important having
someone else to announce the dances. The two of them stood by
the door, host and hostess in a style to which Coal Flat was not
accustomed. Dad in a newish double-breasted suit stood back,
modest and informal, grinning as if apologizing for his wife’s
formality while really approving it. Mrs Palmer stood in a long
décolleté but only two inches below the
shoulders, and backless. She had let her hair down and she did have
a fine pair of shoulders to show off; altogether, as she knew, she cut
a fine figure in her gown. The way she welcomed her guests she
made them feel at home as soon as they came in, yet her manner
was almost regal; it was as if she was saying, ‘Don’t take any notice
of my bearing. I can’t help acting like a duchess.’ It was a compromise that suited the function.
Constable Rae announced the dances in a tone of neighbourly pump; he kept an eye on the bar, slipping out after each dance had begun and saying, ‘Come on ladies. Come on, gentlemen, the Valeta’s begun. Let the barman have a dance too.’
Rogers and Flora felt as if they were only the excuse for the party, They didn’t seem to have any recognized place in it, and were slightly surprised every time somebody came up and congratulated them. They led off the early dances; Rogers had never been much of a dancer, yet tonight his feet seemed to have wings. It was a whirl from start to finish and they were both happy because they were in love and the whole town knew it and everybody was their friend. Through the evening they agreed that it was selfish to dance together all night and Flora accepted other invitations while Rogers danced with Belle Hansen and with Doris. Doris and Frank were enjoying themselves too. They tried to keep back among the crowd away from the Palmer parents, because, though Frank in any case hated the limelight, he couldn’t rise to the easy stateliness of Mum at the door. Jimmy Cairns was there, and Ben and Maggie Nicholson, and Jock McEwan and his wife, Rogers spoke to them all. Jock said to him, ‘Well, this is the last time we’ll be all in together enjoying ourselves like this for a while, Paul. There’ll be divisions when the boycott starts.’ Rogers grinned in assent, hardly knowing what Jock had said, because he was in a mood to agree with anyone and there wasn’t a dispute in the world that wasn’t trivial. Sid Raynes came up looking sourly benevolent, and a little sheepish. ‘Well, even if you did spoil me trade, I’ll wish you good luck,’ he said.
‘You mean, you’re not selling comics?’ Rogers asked.
‘I didn’t do it for you,’ Raynes said. ‘The Miners’ Union told me. I couldn’t risk them putting a boycott on me.’
All his efforts seemed to be running to success.
Mum and Dad were doing an old-time waltz—Dad spry but formal and Mum flowing, when Flora saw Arty Nicholson look through the door, sceptically, as if reserving his judgement. ‘Arthur!’ she called. ‘Come in!’
Arty was torn between curiosity and the fear of being called a gate-crasher and a contempt for the exclusiveness of the function. ‘I’m not really invited,’ he said.
‘I’m inviting you,’ Flora said. ‘Come in and enjoy yourself. There’s a bar out the back. Only you’re not allowed to get tight.’
‘I’ve got Winnie here,’ he said. Flora looked out and saw Jimmy’s eldest girl—she was seventeen and had just started working in the baker’s shop. She was fair headed, with a shy pouty face that could break easily into confident laughter once she was with friends; she was very attractive in an immature way. In a year or two she would be lovely. She was medium-sized, with a figure so soft and attractive yet so dormant, as if unaware of its beauty, that men admired her at the same time as they recognized she was only a child yet. It was in her face, too, that unconsciousness of beauty. Flora was pleased to see that Arty had found a new girl, one with the same background as himself.
‘Bring her in too,’ she said, ‘Come in Winnie. I ought to be congratulating you. You’ve got hold of a decent boy. Can I steal him off you a minute? It’s probably the last dance I’ll have with Arthur.’
Rogers saw Winnie looking shy and unwanted at the door, conscious of her short frock, though very few of the women wore long ones, and he led her to dance. She had been at the school when he had been there five years before. ‘Gosh, Winnie,’ he said. ‘I forgot old Jimmy had such a pretty daughter. You just about make me change my mind. I wonder if Flora will mind.’
Winnie grinned: it was strange to hear a teacher talking like this.
Heath was there too. All the school staff were there. Heath had accepted Rogers’s invitation gracefully. He and his wife mixed with the other guests and generally showed that they knew how to conduct themselves on occasions like this. It was rumoured that they didn’t hit it off too well, but, if that was so, they didn’t reveal any signs of it. Rogers seeing them felt as benign to them as he felt to anyone else, particularly when he introduced Flora to Heath, and Heath his wife to the both of them, and congratulated them. That night everybody was their friend.
Flora dancing with Arty said, ‘I really owe you an apology, Arthur. I must have been pretty snobbish that night.’
‘That’s all right, Flora, I’m glad now anyway.’
‘So am I,’ she said. ‘But you don’t know how near you were. If you hadn’t gone off the handle about only being a miner, I don’t know what I would have done.’
Arty’s face was a mixture of flattery and the memory of insult.
‘I’d have broken you away from your family.’
Her face clouded. ‘No, Arthur,’ she said. ‘I doubt if you would.’
‘Forget it,’ he said. ‘I’ve got no regrets now.’
‘Me either,’ she said.
‘I’m going away in August,’ he said.
‘Where to, Arthur?’
‘South Westland. Me and Joey Taiha. Whitebaiting. What I make on that’ll pay for setting us up. I’m going to get married too.’
‘To Winnie? … Congratulations, Arthur!’
‘It’s not official yet. Don’t say anything. I haven’t even asked her old man…. We will, though, sooner or later.’
As the dance finished and they moved towards Rogers and Winnie, she said, ‘Good luck, Arthur, all the very best.’
‘Thanks, Flora. Good luck to you, too…. You’re all right, Flora,’ he said and she knew he had forgiven her. He was proud of that small secret understanding with her, something her own husband would not know.
Don saw Miss Dane chatting to Heath and his wife. She had just left the Hansens and the Lawsons because she sensed that they found her poor company. The worry of shifting had made her tired. She kept remarking, in her effort to join in the swing of things, that really it was terribly well run considering there was drink in the hall; she hadn’t seen anybody that looked in the least tipsy except the blessed couple and she was afraid they looked more intoxicated with romance than anything else. Don came to her; at this function there was nothing extraordinary in his being seen asking Miss Dane to dance; it was to be expected that a son of the household should attend occasionally to the women who were seldom asked to dance. Miss Dane didn’t dance often. Yet her feet slipped automatically into gear and she followed his movements gracefully. She thought it better to say nothing to him, just to let him guide her and abandon herself to being close to him though she knew it meant nothing, nothing at all. Don, finding that she was not trying to foist herself on to him, took pity on her and spoke to her without contempt.
‘How do you like your new digs?’ he said.
She only smiled, a faraway smile.
He said nothing for a while, and she lost herself once more to the
sensation of moving at the will of another, close to his arms, his
chest, his legs. A suppressed memory of desire ached in her, but she
kept it out of her consciousness, losing herself in the moment and
its sensation of mindless movement. Then, as if they had always
known each other and spoken from heart to heart, he said, ‘You
take things too seriously, that’s your trouble. Life’s not all that
serious.’ It was the only time he had ever addressed her as a person
Then for Rogers and Flora, there was the Destiny and supper. They helped Mrs Jimmy and her women helpers to pass round the tea and sandwiches and cakes. Then there was the event of the evening. Dad took over the floor and he made a speech that was solemn and good-humoured at the same time, with a joke against himself and one against Rogers. It was just the right speech, there wasn’t a word about politics, not a word that would offend anyone, a lot about the serious step the young couple were contemplating, the great undertaking they had promised to begin, and the future before them in their respective careers, Paul yelling at other people’s poor bloody kids and Flora perhaps wiping the behinds of her own. Well, that was in the future, and he felt he could safely predict that in a year or so they’d all be back in this hall to celebrate a more serious and joyous event. He presented them with a parcel which when Flora opened it, turned out to be a set of cutlery.
Then Rogers felt in his pocket and produced the engagement ring he had bought in town and slipped it on Flora’s finger and they kissed. There was clapping and the band led off for the last dance. Miss Dane who had slipped into the hall again was reminded of her farewell at Roko. She slipped out again to the car to wait for the Raes, her teeth clenched against crying.
Then there was ‘Auld Lang Syne’, and ‘God Save the King’, in
which even Jimmy and Ben and Jock participated as a gesture of
good-fellowship, a fact of which Mum took notice; then as the
The next evening Mum said, ‘I’ll bet they’d never seen a do like that before.’ The school had broken up on the Friday of the party for two weeks’ term holidays, Miss Dane went home to New Plymouth to her mother, and Rogers stayed on at Palmers, helping in the bar and doing add jobs for the family. Everyone said he was really one of the family now.
Jock McEwan got off the trolley and followed the other
miners down the slant dip. With familiar boots they picked their
way over the rails, along planks at the side, down again on to the
rails, dipping their lamp-lit helmets where the cross-beams were
low, making their long sullen way to the coal face.
In spite of the brash cross-barracking of the men and lads on the
trolley, each of them entered the pit, as on every morning, with an
initial response of sullen resignation. Going underground was putting the sunlight behind you for eight hours, your headlamp your
only feeler in a day of barren dark. It was a grim and heartless place
to work in—rough grey walls, a floor of coal dust deadened with
stone dust and caked with oil, stacks of timber and rails in side-cuttings. There was no life below—only the rats that lived on crusts
from the men’s cribs and a white mould that might appear on all
timber surfaces one moist might in January and die a week after.
Down below you took on the mentality of citizens whose sleep
might at any time be disturbed by an air-raid siren, who had lived
like this for years. Extracting the earth’s frozen power, you lived at
enmity with it. At any time it might fall and bury you. A random
spark might strike off an explosion, or a race of boxes run loose
downhill. You were always on the alert; though you had worked
here without a scratch for twenty years and though you hardly
acknowledged the thought you never knew that you would see the
sun again that afternoon. The town that lived off raiding the earth
carried its casualties—Alec, carpentering on the surface, limping
because of his heel torn to the bone by a winch-cable; Sandy with
three fingers bitten off where two trucks collided, reared from their
bumpers and kissed where his hand tried to hold one of them back;
Fred with an eye torn out when a badly-aimed sprag flew back from
the spoke of a downhill truck; and the graves in Karoro, from falls
of stone, and explosions. Underground you had to settle your habits
into realizing that you were a cog in a lumbering inefficient machine
In the last cavel Jock had been paired with Ben Nicholson. Ben had immigrated from Scotland twenty-seven years before as a lad of twenty. Motherwell had no work for him, and the whole of Lanarkshire was hard pushed to provide work for youngsters. He grew up to play on slagheaps, and between the mean grey rows of company houses; Dad drunk on pay night, Mum with fingers worn and blackened with work, bent and nagging, driven by worry; bath-night on Saturday for church on Sunday. Ben had weathered his upbringing with surprising kindliness. He was a good mate at any cavel and any miner was glad to be paired with him. New Zealand had made him benign and tolerant; his eyes twinkled with a kindly Scottish understanding, his face was stern enough and lined, but ready to ease into a wry shrewd smile. He was a man confident that socialism would come but perhaps not in his time; he would work for it, but like a man taking time off for a smoke, he would enjoy himself between efforts. Jock was narrower. He had a single-purposed zealot face that seldom relaxed. He hadn’t forgotten the years of youth he shuffled away in broken boots among the sullen tenements of the Gorbals, with the smell of rotten plaster and cooking fat and open drains, his mother scratching up the next meal from his father’s slim pay packet, his eldest sister who walked out on the family to take up a stand in Sauchiehall Street. In those enforced hours of leisure he had conscientiously read bitter political tracts and cold outlines of economics and he formed his mind to a purpose. If life was easier here in New Zealand it could not cuddle away the memory of the time when he had strength for hire and no one would buy it, and people still drove in cabs, ate fully and slept warm, who could have employed him. He was afraid of Ben’s easier approach, and he was more afraid still of the apathy of the lads who had been born here. They had grown up to good times, a bigger demand for coal than the mines could satisfy, a forty-hour week, bank-to-bank shift, and all the extra emoluments for difficult working conditions —sweat-time for working in a moist atmosphere, wet-time for working ankle-deep in water, dust-time for a dusty atmosphere. They took it for granted that they had these conditions; they didn’t acknowledge that they had them only because the old-timers had fought for them.
At the face they had to wait till the trolley was hauled up again, so that the trucks could start running.
‘Don Palmer says they’re putting up the beer,’ he said.
‘Oh ay,’ Ben said. ‘Prices are going up still. It’ll get worse before it gets better, I think.’
‘A man should refuse to pay it,’ Jock said.
‘Well, there’s nothing to stop us, if we want to do that.’
‘You mean boycott it?’
‘Ay. If we boycott it, we’ll force the price down.’
‘It’ll be a hard thing to do. There’s too many of us like our beer.’
‘Well, you’re always saying these lads don’t know what discipline is. I like my beer myself and I don’t care that much about an extra penny. But I’ll give it up if everyone else will.’
‘It’s not the extra penny. It’s the principle. Everything is getting an extra penny tacked on to it.
‘Table a boycott, then. Put it to the union. It’ll not be only us. I bet once we start we’ll have the whole Coast out. The dredge fellows, the sawmillers, the other miners, the wharfies in town.’
‘It’d be a bit of a change for the publicans to be without work. Will you call a meeting this afternoon and we’ll see what the lads think?’
When the trucker brought some empty boxes they filled them and Jock began to work with fierce energy. ‘Easy on it, man,’ Ben said. ‘You were like that last time I was with you. I believe in working at a good steady pace. You get more coal out that way. If you carry on like that you’ll be buggered before you’re fifty.’ But it was hard for Jock to relax. They got ahead of the truckers and had to stop for a while. ‘Come on, you lazy buggers,’ Jock called. ‘We want to get more coal out than this.’
‘Oh, stop your moaning, Jock,’ the youth called. ‘It’ll only go in income-tax. You don’t expect me to kill myself.’
‘The trouble with you youngsters today is you’re frightened of a bit of sweat.’
‘He’ll learn,’ Ben said. ‘He’s only new. You’re a bloody slave-driver, Jock. He’s pouring sweat as it is.’
‘There’s one fault I’ve got no sympathy with,’ Jock said, ‘and that’s laziness.’
‘Who has?’ Ben said. ‘You’ll be getting like old Ned Seldom. He was a proper slave-driver. I hope you’re never underviewer over me.’
‘I’ll never be an underviewer,’ Jock said. ‘I’ll always stay on the same level as the lads.’
The underviewer came; he must have been satisfied with the trucker’s pace because he had no comments. Just before crib-time the manager came by. ‘You’ve got plenty to keep you going there,’ he said. ‘It’ll be a while before this face is worked through.’
‘Mr Caddick,’ Ben said. ‘I’d like to call a meeting this afternoon.’
‘What about?’
‘Beer’s going up. We want the lads to boycott it.’
Caddick laughed. ‘That’ll annoy old Don Palmer. I don’t believe you could do it. Some of the chaps have been drinking twenty years and more. You can’t tell me they can knock off a habit as easily as that.’
‘You’d be surprised,’ Ben said, ‘what you can do when you set your mind to it.’
‘Well, you don’t have to have your meeting this afternoon. I want to be getting more coal out.’
‘We haven’t been slacking,’ Jock said. ‘We got more out last month than any month before.’
‘I know. I know. I’m not casting aspersions.’
‘We can hold the meeting anyway,’ Jock said. ‘You know that.’
‘I know. But I’m asking you if you can hold it another time. What about a bath-house meeting first thing in the morning? You’ll lose less time.’
‘I see no objections to that,’ Ben said. Jock faced Caddick, on his guard for a trap. ‘It’s three days yet before the price goes up.’
‘Well, thank God it’s the publicans and not us you’re against this time,’ Caddick said. He had been manager in the company days and hadn’t accustomed himself to the nationalization of the mine. ‘What happens if anyone breaks your boycott?’
‘We’ll see to that,’ Ben said.
‘Well, I hope there’s no strikes come out of it, that’s all.’
In the bath-house the following morning the miners sat on benches with their pit-clothes on, their batteries on their belts and lamps on their helmets. Ben put the plan to the meeting and Jock spoke for it. ‘There are some individuals in this union,’ he said, ‘who are taking things too easy. I’d remind those individuals that it’s a great temptation for a working man to go to sleep in good times. Us older ones have got enough fights behind us to know that the fight isn’t over. There’s a lot of younger individuals here who haven’t had that experience. All they know of working-class unity is that it’s a phrase we’re addicted to using at union meetings. The doctor’s wife said once they’d been bought off with beer-money. Well, you’ll still be earning your beer-money but if the motion’s carried you won’t be able to buy beer with it. Some of you may think it’s a hardship. Well, I’d have you remember the times when workers have had to go without proper food for months on end because they were on strike or on the dole, and they didn’t have any beer-money.
Jimmy Cairns got up. ‘Well, speaking as an ex-publican myself,’ he said. There were calls, ‘Capitalist! Exploiter!’ and Jimmy continued: ‘Yes, I’ve had my foot in both camps. The only thing I couldn’t do in the victualling trade was to make money. I came out of that pub a poorer man than I went in, in spite of all the coin that passed through my hands.’
‘Think of the beer that passed through you.’
‘You’ll have to work a few Saturday morning shifts to make it up, Jimmy.’
‘Was it true they put an extension of the winch-line to the pub, to haul you down to the face in time in the morning?’
‘Order, order,’ Ben said. ‘This is a meeting.’
‘What I say,’ Jimmy said, ‘is that the quickest way to bring a publican to heel is to stop his trade. If he’s not selling he’s not making money. And that’s the only reason he’s there, to take your money off you. If I do say it myself.’
‘Now you’re showing your hand, Cairns, Robber.’
Arthur Henderson got up. ‘What I’d like the lads to consider,’ he said, ‘is the gravity of the decision they’re undertaking. Well, I always say, a man is a creature of habit, and if a man’s been drinking regularly for nearly forty years as I have, it’s no light matter to say you’ll stop. I get a lot of pleasure out of my beer, and I must say I value the friendship of Mr and Mrs Palmer….’
There were interjections, ‘Sit down!’—‘Count him out!’—‘Time, please, Mr Henderson. We’ve robbed you enough for one night,’ in an imitation of Mrs Palmer’s voice.
‘In a working-class struggle your only friends are in the working class,’ Jock said, ‘besides an occasional intellectual like the doctor.’
‘And not all of them are friends either,’ Ben said. ‘Remember the
Seldom strike. One worker against the rest. We don’t want any
scabbing in this thing. Either we’re all boycotting the beer, or we
take no action at all. Not some in the pubs and some out.’
The motion was carried with a loud chorus of ayes, though the younger ones were glib about it. Arthur Henderson knew he would be the only No, so he voted Aye. And they knew they would have to abide by their decision now.
The last two nights before the boycott, the Saturday and the Sunday, Palmers’ bar was as busy as if it was Christmas. Dad knew why, because Ben had told him of the decision. Rogers was helping Mum and Dad behind the bar. Mum served with great courtesy as she always did, only she emphasized it, as if to say, ‘Your union decisions don’t affect us. We’re friendly to all customers. We’re above politics.’
On the Monday morning Rogers, returning to school for the winter term, was still living in a mood of elation: the future was his own, the world was his friend and he had Flora’s love. He loved the children that morning and nothing they could do could ruffle him; perhaps because of this, they did nothing to ruffle him, they were quieter than usual at their work. Peter was advancing rapidly now. It was six weeks since he had fought with Dickie Cairns and become a leader of a gang of boys, and he hadn’t tormented girls since then. It was nearly three weeks since he had said, when Rogers asked him to draw some pictures, ‘Not like I usually draw. I’m sick of those mad pictures.’ Now he drew cowboys on horseback; once he even drew a train. He hadn’t mentioned again the man and woman who had invaded his hidey-hole. His mind now seemed to be completely off that track. He looked healthier too, freer; his eyes were franker, more eager, more like any boy’s of his age. He was still unsettled, still defiant and occasionally moody; but for Rogers the worst part of his cure was over, there were no risks now, either of making him worse or of getting into trouble with other teachers. ‘It won’t be long now,’ Rogers thought. In fact now if he could get Peter away from his home he would be cured. Now he only had somehow to develop some kind of resilience that could withstand the effects of his parents. But since that wasn’t possible, Rogers supposed Peter would always be, to some extent, an unhappy and resentful boy, till he grew up and could leave home anyway. He might improve a little more with time. Now he was learning to read, too, and fast catching up with the other children. His arithmetic had always been ahead of theirs. Soon he would outstrip them. Soon perhaps he could go up to Belle Hansen’s class. But would that be a good idea? She might drive him into himself again with her bullying. It might be better to let Peter learn more slowly so that he could have at least a year of comparative emotional freedom.
Rogers met the doctor on the main road on his way home from school that afternoon. The doctor got off his bike. ‘I say,’ he said. ‘I don’t know if you know but Raynes has stopped selling comics.’
‘Yes, I know,’ Rogers said. ‘He told me at the party. He didn’t sound too pleased.’
‘I read that one you gave me,’ Dr Alexander said. ‘I was amazed. I had no idea. I’m sure no one else had either at Bernie O’Malley’s meeting. You should have read us passages.’
‘Well, you all treated me as if I had a bee in my bonnet. You weren’t in a mood to listen.’
‘Anyway I gave it to Jock McEwan. He brought it up at a union meeting. They took action. It would have been more suitable if he’d taken it to the school committee. But Jock said the school committee couldn’t boycott a shop, but the union can.’
‘Well, that’s one thing I’ve done for this town,’ Rogers said.
‘How are you getting on with young Herlihy?’ the doctor asked.
‘Oh, good,’ Rogers said. ‘It was difficult at first. It was like setting off a carefully-laid fuse to blast away some fear or fixation and having it cross-connect with another fuse you didn’t know about—if that’s possible. You see what I mean? It might explode in the wrong place. It might backfire.’
‘Well, what did you expect? I warned you. You can’t do a lot to alter people till you alter the social conditions that cause their problems.’
‘But I have succeeded. Peter’s over the worst of his trouble anyway. It was a combination of good guess and good luck. I tremble now when I think of the risks I took.’
‘You’re lucky.’
‘Anyway, how is Peter Herlihy a result of social forces? Every boy in Coal Flat isn’t the same as him.’
‘No. Certainly not. But every night you send that boy back to his home and expose him to the parents who made him what he is.’
‘Well, I know that myself. It’s a psychological problem then. Caused by the home he comes from. So it has to be cured by psychological methods.’
‘Only up to a point. You have to cure Mike and Nora too before you can cure the boy properly, so long as he lives at home. And if you wanted Nora a happy woman you’d need to have started on her mother thirty years ago. And you’re forgetting the social forces that made them like they are.’
‘What social forces?’
‘Old Mrs Seldom and her hatred of Catholics. Originally it was a class hatred, in Ireland. The Scottish Presbyterian squatters reciprocating the hatred of the Irish tenants. Here it’s meaningless, like a vestigial organ.’
‘But there are plenty of other people in this town with ideas just as unreal. There are Catholics here and people who hate Catholics. Their kids aren’t like Peter. It’s the parents themselves—their personalities—who are responsible for that boy. He’s been starved of affection.’
‘I agree with you there. But why? Because his mother was turned
‘Other children are satisfied.’
‘They’re more or less normal already. Our society makes a
‘Well, that’s not the reason for the handicap. It was there before society started on him.’
‘In a better society boys like Peter could be cured by a social atmosphere of encouragement…. You said once he was obsessed with sex. A boy who’s the odd one out like that has a nose for all the weaknesses and rotten parts of his society. It’s people like that, provided they’re gifted, who are the writers and artists of western society nowadays. Have you known a community that, deep down, is more obsessed with sex, than puritan New Zealand?’
‘What about America?’
‘We’re only a stage or two behind, the way we’re heading. We’re swamped with their culture already…. Anyway, it’s more important to work for a healthy society through good, normal people than to cure a few isolated people who might never be very co-operative.’
‘It would have been cruel to throw the boy away.’
‘He’s not the only one. There are others being thrown away now
all over the country and you can’t stop it because you’ve never seen
them and never will. In every town in this country you’ll find the
outcasts of an earlier generation—old widows, old men, two or three
in every small town living in shacks at the edges of the town, on the
beach, off the road, each one a joke among the children of the town.
Mrs Seldom’s become one herself, whether you blame her or blame
the town…. It’s better to bring in a society that won’t make a
rubbish dump of children who’ve been starved of love. The only
way to cure boys like young Herlihy is to take them to a camp run
on lines of co-operative activity, where they are encouraged to share
things and build things together. But they need a constructive
society to be released into or all your work goes to waste. I saw a
Soviet film about that once. The Road to Life. It was excellent. I’ll
try and get the book for you.’
‘Thanks. But I tell you, I’ve succeeded with Peter. Do you think it wasn’t worth doing? Christ, I had to do something.’
‘No. I’m only saying your effort would be better directed towards changing society.’
‘That’s abstract, unreal. I could see results, dealing with Peter. I’ve saved him from gaol, I can tell you that.’
The doctor looked unconvinced. ‘I hope so,’ he said. ‘It’s a bit early to say. There’s still a lot of harm can happen to him yet in that house.’
‘Well, he’s better prepared for it now…. Forget it. We’ll never agree on this….’
‘Anyway the boy’s name came up at the committee meeting and in spite of my doubts I defended your methods.’
‘Thanks. I heard Heath is on my tail. The committee’s going to pay me a visit.’
The doctor looked up. ‘Well, I don’t know anything about that…. You’ve got nothing to fear anyway.’
‘I’m not worried. Are you coming for a beer?’
‘I hardly ever drink. Anyway there’s a boycott on; it started today.’
‘Yes, I heard. But I’m not worrying about it.’
‘You’re not serious, I hope? It’ll go hard on you with these people.’
‘Are you serious? I’m not in the Miners’ Union. If I was, I’d stand
by a union ruling. The teachers haven’t come out against the increase.’
‘Now you know better than that, Rogers. The teachers never will. The people of this town won’t expect them to. But you’re a man of good reputation amongst the miners. A professed socialist. And you won’t even support a peaceful communal action.’
‘Well, I say good luck to them. But I can’t take it seriously. The whole thing’s comic. Where’s all the drama and the glory? A beer boycott. A town sulking over an extra penny a glass.’
‘You don’t think socialism is all slogans and flag-waving and speeches, do you? It’s just these patient determined efforts that win.’
‘Look, doctor, when the union has a just cause for a strike or any other action I’ll support them. But this is just comic. It’s a matter for the individual conscience. If I’m willing to go without something else for the sake of dearer beer, that’s my business. I can adjust my own sacrifices. If the miners don’t want to pay more, let them give up drinking. That’s what they’re doing. Well, no one’s trying to force them to buy the beer.’
‘Well, I understand you’re in a difficult position, but I never thought when you got engaged to the Palmer girl you’d let the family have your soul too.’
‘Aw!’ Rogers demurred.
‘I know it’s difficult in your situation just now,’ the doctor said.
‘But seriously, men have done a damn sight more before today than
will you do?’
‘Rogers watched the doctor bike on to visit a patient, and he
walked into the hotel. The doctor’s words had stung him, yet he
was completely unprepared for any difficulty with the Palmers. In
the last few days he had been taken right into the family. He didn’t
want to be accused of ingratitude, because he was grateful. Dad had
offered to lend them money for a house when they needed it. Mum
had given that party for them and then there was the present. But,
damn it, could they buy him like this? They knew all along he was a
socialist. They must expect him to take a stand. But what stand?
Over a bloody penny. Jesus Christ. A bloody penny. It was comic.
As he went in he had no plan. He would let instinct guide him.
Flora was the only one that mattered. If he made a stand, she’d
follow him. Well, he’d see. What would happen would happen.
Mrs Palmer called him from the kitchen. ‘Come in and cheer us up, Paul,’ she said. ‘The good times are over for a while, I reckon. It’s going to be a bad time for all of us. First Miss Dane walked out on us and that’s no advertisement for the hotel. And now this damn boycott. They don’t expect us to give the beer away.’
‘No,’ said Rogers, thinking twice before he said it, ‘They don’t expect you to give it away.’
‘Well, that’s what we’d be doing if we didn’t put it up. Have a cup of tea, Paul.’
‘What, are you boycotting the beer, too?’ he asked, ‘Drinking tea.’
‘Well, I always say a cup of strong tea is a good stand-by.’
‘Do you think the boycott’ll last?’ he asked.
‘No,’ she said with contempt. ‘You can’t tell Mum that those chaps can go without for long. We’ll hold out. They’ll come creeping in a few days with their tongues hanging out, looking sheepish. Mum knows. You can’t tell me.’
‘No, one can’t tell you,’ he thought, but did not say it.
‘The doctor’s behind this, I’ll bet,’ she said. ‘I wondered why he wouldn’t come to the party and him supposed to be such a friend of yours. They’re good chaps most of the miners. They don’t go starting trouble. I don’t know why they listen to these damn communists.’
‘It’s a union move,’ Rogers said.
‘Well, Jock McEwan and Ben Nicholson. Mind you, I’ve got nothing against Jock. He’s a good chap. But he can’t forget his upbringing. I reckon a man should forget unpleasant things like that, He should be ashamed of them, and keep them to himself.’
‘Ashamed, what of?’
‘Oh, the home tells, Paul,’ she said. ‘He came from a home that wasn’t up to much. In the slums, somewhere in Glasgow. He told me once he had a sister that set herself up for sale on the streets. Fancy boasting about it!’
‘I don’t think he was boasting.’
‘Well, he couldn’t have been ashamed or he wouldn’t have told me. I couldn’t hold my head up if I had a sister like that.’
‘How do you account for Don’s affairs?’ he felt like asking but didn’t.
‘And Ben Nicholson. I thought he’d grown out of all that bolshy stuff. Sometimes he comes in here and you couldn’t wish for nicer company. Always got a laugh in him, drinks hard and knows how to hold it. Married men with families and better homes now than they were brought up in themselves. I thought they’d have grown out of this kids’ talk.’
‘Well, it’s a union rule,’ he said. ‘If a motion is carried all members have to stick by it.’
‘Oh, Paul, now don’t you start talking unionism. You see too much of the doctor, that’s your trouble. What about Jimmy Cairns? He was a publican himself. He ought to be able to see our side of it. I don’t like people ratting on their own class.’
‘What is my class?’ Rogers thought. His father was an engine-driver. There were still people in the district who remembered him.
Rogers could remember going barefoot in the slump because his
mother had to make his boots last; he only wore them on Sundays
in the summer. But then he preferred going barefoot. He could
remember taking a dozen eggs to the grocer to barter for a pound of
butter because her purse was empty. He got a penny a week for
spending money. It was a lot to him. It wasn’t so silly that they were
squabbling over an extra penny. A penny a week had been his taste
of economic independence, his freedom to choose between an ice-cream and a chocolate bar. And he had been luckier than most kids
because his father kept his job: they had never gone hungry in his
home. There were kids at school who went barefooted all the time,
winter and summer, with fathers on the dole. But then, he thought,
a penny was worth a lot more then than it was today. But it would
be exaggerating to say he had suffered in the slump. And even if he
had would that have made him any better a man? Was it something
to prize, like a military decoration? And was it real in New Zealand
in
‘He had his chance,’ she said. ‘He had a chance to improve himself. He could have left the mine and concentrated on the pub. He
‘Flora came in with a basket full of washing. ‘It’s a little damp, Mum,’ she said, ‘but it wasn’t a bad day for drying. The first fine day for three weeks.’ She smiled at Rogers. How could they expect it of him? he wondered. He wouldn’t consider it, breaking with this girl who had given his whole life a new meaning, for the sake of a penny, for the sake of a union decision that didn’t bind him. If it did bind him that would be different; she would have expected it. But did it mean breaking with her? He hadn’t even asked her. What he would do depended on her answer. But that was giving in before-hand. Why not give in now, then? And watching Flora at work at home, he had come to see how much her family meant to her, far more than his own had meant to him. Her home had been the whole meaning of her life until she met him. Could he ask her deliberately to mutilate one of the things that was dearest to her? To mutilate herself, in fact? He knew he would hardly be responsible for his actions if he were to see anyone deliberately hurt her. Then how could he? Perhaps she would do it if he asked her, perhaps she would follow him out of the family. But it would be cruel to ask her. Look what it had done to Nora Seldom. But that was no analogy; he and Flora could never live like a cat and dog like Mike and Nora. But he couldn’t deny it would hurt her.
‘I’ll have a cup too, Mum,’ she said. ‘I’ll get it, you sit down. If I was a drinking woman I’d be up in the bar now, just to help Dad out.’
‘That’s how much socialism I taught her,’ Rogers thought.
‘Don’t worry about Dad, dear,’ Mrs Palmer said. ‘He’s been through worse trouble before this. Paul, there was one thing. I wanted to mention. How’s Donnie in class these days?’
‘Well, he always was a good kid in class,’ Rogers said. ‘He’s a bit more restless lately. But if you ask me, that’s a direct consequence of Heath giving him the strap.’
‘That twisting rat of a man. I’d like to smack him across the face.’
‘Donnie’ll get over it,’ Rogers said. ‘He’ll forget it in time. I’m taking good care Heath never has another chance to pick on him.’
‘He’s in safe hands then.’ Rogers was flattered. ‘He’s talking too much of that young Herlihy kid, though, Peter Herlihy this and Peter Herlihy that. I don’t like that boy. He’s a nasty-minded brat. I can read it in his face.
Rogers caught Flora on the tip of saying something, probably
‘He’s not a healthy kid I know,’ Rogers said. ‘But I’m trying to make him better.’
‘Paul’s got some ideas about him,’ Flora said. ‘He was telling me the way he hopes to cure him. Tell Mum, Paul.’
‘Rogers was not pleased with her helpfulness. Mrs Palmer looked at him searchingly. ‘Well, I think he hasn’t had enough love and attention,’ he said. ‘I hope to give him that. It stands to reason if a kid isn’t loved he won’t trust other people, he’ll hate them. His parents don’t give him much attention.’
‘Mrs Palmer looked knowing and superior. She nodded like a tribal elder. ‘Oh, you can’t tell me,’ she said. ‘Mum knows. The home. The home always tells. It’s not much of a home, Herlihy’s.’
‘Well, I think there’s a chance to save the kid. He’s improved a hell of a lot lately. You couldn’t have seen him lately,’ he said.
‘I saw him the other day…. Every mother should make her children the centre of her life. When I had these kids I idolized every one of them when they were babies. Old Dopy here you never heard her cry, she was better than either of the others.—Here, Flora, be a pet and slip up to Dad for a couple of beers for Paul and me.’
This was where, if he was to refuse, he should refuse, Rogers thought; and with every second the opportunity seemed to have passed. But so far he hadn’t committed himself; he wasn’t paying for the beer; she wasn’t paying sevenpence herself, she was getting it at cost price, which was less than sixpence; no profit was being made on the deal, except by the brewers, and they hadn’t raised the price. He stalled. ‘I’m not really thirsty,’ he said.
‘You’re not going to join this boycott too?’ Mrs Palmer said. ‘I thought you’d stick by us. We can’t run this hotel at a loss. Oh, Paul’—she looked at him accusingly—‘you’re not stopping drinking for those bolshies?’
Flora looked concerned. It obviously hadn’t occurred to her that he might be affected by the boycott. ‘Paul always sticks up for what’s right,’ she muttered, as if ashamed to have to say aloud what she thought of him. ‘Innocent girl!’ he thought; she automatically identified their cause with right, and he thought he’d explained socialist principles to her. And yet he loved her; it made him want to protect her, hearing her talk with such political innocence,
‘We’re supposed to be saving now, Flora,’ he said.
‘I’m getting this one!’ Mum said, with relief.
‘We were agreeing on Peter Herlihy,’ he thought, ‘fumbling our way to agreement. That’s important to me. To convert people to more understanding of children, A generation of happy children and we’d have our socialist revolution, naturally, peacefully, If only there are enough people helping the children to be rid of fear and guilt and malice, It’s my job to make people see that kindness is better than punishment. If I fall out with Mrs Palmer now, she’ll turn against those ideas I was explaining. She’ll forbid Donnie to play with Peter, she’ll help to push Peter back in the direction I’ve turned him from. That boy’s future is more important than an extra penny on a glass of beer.’
Yet, though he thought all this, at the end he didn’t believe it, It
was fantasy; the real reason was Flora looking at him, waiting for
his answer, expecting him to crusade for righteousness, for their
extra penny. He saw her now with immense pity—he had never
before felt pity for her. How could he disappoint her?
‘No,’ he said finally. ‘It’s nothing like that. I’ll have one just to show you it’s not that,’ And he thought, ‘Anyway, I still haven’t bought one myself.’ Flora went out to the bar.
‘What were we taking about?’ Mrs Palmer said. The time Rogers had taken to give a clear answer had disconcerted her.
‘I was saying I’m curing Peter Herlihy,’ Rogers said. She listened with pursed lips. ‘I’ve tried to bring him out. He needed companionship. He needed to be shown he can trust people.’
It was difficult at first to tell her reaction. She said it in the same tone of voice she had used years ago when he told her he was a conscientious objector. ‘Well, I reckon it’s the home that tells. I don’t care how much you try to bring a child out, you can’t eradicate the home influence. As far as I can see that child doesn’t want bringing-out so much as checking. If he’d had a proper home his mother would have starred to check him before it was too late. It’s a bit on the late side now, Paul. He’ll never be up to much that boy. I want you to keep Donnie and him separated.’
‘Well, kids form friendships, then break them off.’ He argued more passionately. He had given in for her, even if she didn’t know it. She ought to concede something to him. ‘Let it take its course, it’ll finish soon enough. It’s not fair to the kids not to let them pick their own playmates.’
‘It isn’t fair to them to see them coarsened by other boys and not interfere. You’re young yet, Paul. I’m older than you think, in the head if not in looks. Mum knows about these things. She’s seen too much, Paul.’
Flora came back with glasses, ‘Dad says it’s a bit on the flat side,’ she said. ‘He’s not opening a new keg till the boycott’s over or it’ll go bad. You can have bottled instead if you like, but he wants to use this up first.’
‘We can take it, can’t we, Paul?’ Mrs Palmer said. ‘It may be flat but our spirits are light. Here’s how.
It was flat, almost undrinkable. As Rogers swallowed it he thought,
‘I threw away a principle on a hope I couldn’t have believed in.
How could I have expected her to understand about Peter? But
have I thrown away a principle? I haven’t paid for this. And anyway is it a principle I accept?’ But why pretend all this? It was for
Flora that he had that beer. Hell, he was getting to the stage where
he couldn’t recognize his own motives, let alone tell the good from
the worthless. He made up his mind to speak to Flora.
He followed her into the wash-house where she was taking the empty basket. ‘Flora,’ he said. ‘I don’t want to drink while the boycott’s on.’
‘Oh, Paul!’ she said. ‘I thought you’d be one for sticking up for
the right side.’
‘I don’t know that it is the right side, Flora,’ he said miserably. ‘I’m a socialist. It’s a union decision, the boycott.’
‘But you’re not in the union.’
‘I’m in sympathy. I must be. I can’t help it.’
‘I always thought you’d stick by the family, Paul. Just when we’re in trouble.’
‘Flora, I love you, you know. I want to stick by you, not the family.’
‘Well, if you mean you want me to quarrel with them at a time like this, Paul, I can’t. It wouldn’t be fair to Dad. What if we left? We couldn’t expect him to help us then…. I can’t understand it, Paul.’
‘Then you’ve never understood me, Flora.’
‘Oh, Paul, forget it. I don’t understand you when you’re like this.
I did before, I knew you like the back of my hand…. Think of the
happy times we’ve had, Paul. It’s just at these times we’ve got to
stick together.’
Rogers squeezed her hand grimly and walked away, a man at odds with himself feeling like a dog with its tail between its legs.
He was going down the passage intending to go to his room when Don poked his head through the slide. ‘Hey, boozer!’ he called. ‘Aren’t you going to keep us company? We’re a bit short of bright company tonight.’
He looked at Don sullenly. There wasn’t any point in refusing him now. ‘Cheer up,’ Don said. ‘For Christ’s sake.’
‘Ah,’ Dad said. ‘That’s two tonight.’ The other was Mike Herlihy. ‘The dredge chaps are out too. I thought they’d have kept coming here. I treated them fair when I was on the dredge. I saw old Arthur Henderson go past before, looking thirsty. He looked back twice…. Didn’t have the bloody guts to come in. It’s a wonder he didn’t slip in the back way. No one would have seen him.’
‘I don’t want him making passes at me,’ Don said. ‘It’s bad enough having this beggar around.’
‘Who? Mike?’
Mike made a snarling sound.
‘No, the schoolmaster here,’ Don said and grinned an apology at Rogers. There wasn’t much need. There was hardly a phantom on Rogers’s face of the anger that had taken hold of him the night of the dance. Rogers knew it was meaningless, that Don only said it now because it annoyed him and that Don found it funny to make people annoyed and pacify them before they lost their tempers. But he only looked tired and said, ‘I don’t know why you keep saying that, Don. It’s a stupid thing to say.’ At least Dad didn’t take Don’s remark seriously.
‘We’ve all got our sinful natures,’ Mike said.
‘You’d believe every bloody slander that you hear,’ Rogers said. He didn’t want to renew the religious argument of the last time he’d spoken to Mike.
‘Sure,’ Don said, ‘I’d sin every night of the week if you’d find me the women.’
‘Arh, don’t listen to him, Mike,’ Dad said. ‘He’s all talk. The beer’s flat, Paul. I only serve it to the mugs like Mike here. You’d better have bottled.’
Mike was drinking bottled too. ‘Gassy stuff, Don,’ he said. ‘It’s bad for the stomach.’
Dad took sixpence and left the penny on the bar. ‘It’s only sixpence, Paul.’
‘I thought it was sevenpence?’
‘That’s draught beer. There’s no alteration in the price of bottled beer. Not yet anyway.’
Rogers was relieved. ‘But why aren’t the miners drinking bottled?’ Dad shrugged. ‘Oh, the principle of the thing, I suppose. Boycott one, boycott all.’
‘Bloody rot,’ Don said. ‘If a man wants anything he’s got to pay for it. Beer, women, smokes, everything you’ve got to pay for.’
‘My boy was telling me about you,’ Herlihy said to Rogers. ‘He hasn’t got much respect for you. He likes school, though. First time I’ve ever known him to like school.’ Rogers was flattered. ‘You must be soft on him at that rate. Oh, you’ve got a handful there, young fullah. By God, you’ve got a handful there. It’ll take more than you to keep him down.’ He chuckled over his glass. ‘You and your socialism. It’s a case of the blind leading the blind, you trying to teach my boy anything.’
Rogers didn’t answer.
Heath looked in for a drink. ‘You’re a stranger,’ Dad said, a little coolly.
‘Well, I thought I’d show my independence,’ Heath said. ‘The miners think they can run this town. I’m showing them they aren’t going to control my drinking habits.’
Rogers didn’t speak. He watched Don draw a glassful from the tap. Don winked furtively.
‘That beer’s flat.’ Heath said.
‘Well, it’s been lying,’ Don said. ‘No one drinking it.’
‘We’re not opening a new keg to let it go bad,’ Dad said. ‘It’s not worth it.’
‘Well, I expect a little co-operation,’ Heath flared. ‘You should be grateful for my custom.’
‘Here,’ Dad said and emptied the glass into the slop-bucket. ‘Will you have bottled?’ Heath accepted the new glass with a stance of wrong put right.
Mum looked in and looked out quickly. She hadn’t expected to find Heath there. When she saw him her first impulse was to smack his face, but on second thoughts she thought it better not to drive away custom.
The next day painters arrived to paint the inside of the school.
The rain had delayed their programme and they were a fortnight
late coming from another school. They started on Rogers’s room
first. He and his class spent the first hour moving their chairs and
tables into Miss Dane’s room, which was big enough to hold both
classes if the tables were spaced more tightly. As a result there was
that atmosphere of novelty and restlessness and the class was in
little mood to work that day. It was strange for Rogers too, and
irritating. The two teachers had to talk against each other’s voices
and in the end worked out a dovetailed timetable, so that their
voices should clash as little as possible. But Miss Dane, being infant
mistress, automatically took control of discipline. She often interfered in Rogers’s class; she treated the two as one under her eye.
Rogers had warned the children that they would not have the same
freedom in a room short of space; but he hadn’t expected her to act as his overseer. Yet there was nothing he could do; there would be
no good in breaking the united front teachers always kept up in
front of children. It would have been no use complaining to her;
she would simply have said, ‘In these conditions your children will
have to be much quieter,’ and she would have been right. If he
were to take her aside and insist that he should have the discipline
of his own class, it might cause a continual friction between them
that would unsettle the children. And of course she might take it to
Heath and that would give Heath the chance he was looking for. He
could only resign himself to her rule and hope that the painters
would finish soon. But when they had done his room, they would
start on this one, and the two classes would have to move into the
other.
Till he was back on his own he had to give up hope of getting
further with Peter Herlihy. There was no room for children to distinguish themselves in this room, except in getting their sums or
spelling right. You couldn’t let any child outdo the others in movement or talk, and you couldn’t favour any child. Rogers hoped that
by now he had helped Peter along enough to make do for a month
In the playground Rogers would catch remarks from the older
children. ‘He’s a scab,’ they would whisper and he would ignore it.
Jimmy Cairns’s boy, Russell, said with frank innocence: ‘My dad
says you’re a scab.’ Miss Dane said: ‘Russell! Don’t you ever let
me hear you say that again! It was a very cheeky thing to say, and
Mr Rogers is very hurt. I’m sure you didn’t mean it, did you,
Russell?’ But later she said to Rogers: ‘What do you expect? If you
will drink, you can’t expect the children to respect you? I’m quite
in agreement with the miners over this. I hope it’ll break them of
the drinking habit. I think publicans are in a wicked trade.’
The second day of the boycott Jimmy Cairns had stopped Rogers on the road. ‘What’s this I hear about you breaking the boycott?’ he said. ‘I told the boys when I heard, it was a mistake. “He can’t help going into the pub,” I said, “because he boards there. But I’ll bet he’s not drinking.” Then the doctor said you weren’t in on the boycott.’
‘I had a beer last night,’ Rogers said. ‘I drank bottled. It hasn’t
gone up in price.’
‘Ah, now,’ Jimmy said. ‘We’re boycotting all drink till the draught beer comes down. If you drink bottled beer you’re playing into the publican’s hands. He doesn’t care what you drink so long as he makes a profit out of it.’
‘Anyway I reckon it’s comic,’ Rogers said. ‘A penny. It’s not worth the trouble. That’s not socialism.’
‘Well, every man to his own mind,’ Jimmy said, ‘but you know what you’re doing. You’re liable to find yourself boycotted as well as the beer. This town hasn’t much sympathy for people who act against the union.’
‘Are you serious? You say every man to his own opinion. Can’t I have mine?’
‘You can think what you like, but you can’t do what you like.
Not if it goes against the good of the rest of us. You’re like a
‘Scab?’
‘Yes. You’ll never live down a name like that. We don’t use it lightly. But once we do it sticks.’
‘Well, if you use it you will be using it lightly. I can’t take this
thing seriously. What about the other teachers?’
The other teachers talked of the boycott in the staffroom. It was
an interesting piece of gossip but it didn’t greatly concern them.
Fred Lawson didn’t drink, Belle only at home when there was a
party. Her husband never went into a pub, so he wasn’t affected.
Apart from Miss Dane, the staff took the side of the publicans, on
the grounds that the miners had too much say in running the town.
Rogers found himself a minor hero in the staffroom because he was
defying the union he had formerly upheld. Even Heath was more
conciliatory: ‘I must say I agree with you on this stand, Mr Rogers,
whatever our differences in other respects. I’m not going to be
dominated by the president of the Miners’ Union.’
So that when the delegation from the school committee dropped in on Rogers, though he had forgotten them, he found them affable. The children were of course more strictly ordered now that they were under Miss Dane’s eye: Miss Dane had offered to take the backward group for extra coaching in letter-recognition, and they had improved; and Heath at the moment was not concerned to victimize Rogers. The delegation itself approached the visit with a sense of inadequacy; they didn’t feel that they had the right to criticize, and they didn’t know what faults to look for. They milled about the room smiling vaguely, making polite comments, disturbing the class in spite of trying not to, so that a restless atmosphere persisted after they had gone. Only Rae was judicial in manner; Caddick, though he obviously was a little disdainful of Roger’s job, was friendly to the man who had shown his independence of the union. So was Thompson. Only Mrs Cairns was hostile. ‘I’m sorry I stuck up for him at the committee meeting,’ she told Jimmy before she went to the school. ‘If I can find anything wrong with his teaching I won’t try to hide it, now.’
‘Being a scab doesn’t make him a poor teacher,’ Jimmy said.
‘I’m not saying that,’ she said. ‘I’m just not going to stick up for him any more.’
But she found no fault; she only said aside to Rogers, ‘I thought
you’d ha’ known better. I really did. You don’t think of the bills us
housewives have to pay. It’s not only beer that’s going up.’ Rogers
didn’t answer. None of the other delegates complained of anything,
But Rogers wasn’t concerned greatly whether the delegation was well or badly disposed to him. He was corroded by the town’s enmity. Heath and Belle and Caddick and Thompson might admire him but they weren’t his friends. The people in whose company he had felt easy were against him. On his return to Coal Flat they had welcomed him and trusted him, they had given him the charge of their children with a goodwill not given to the other teachers, because he was one of themselves and had not forgotten it; and even at the height of his popularity he had only been riding their goodwill. Of course he would continue to do his job, and on the surface nothing would seem to change except his own self-esteem which owed so much to the criticism of his neighbours. He wasn’t happy in his present position, hadn’t been happy about it from the start. But what could he do? If he did switch sides now, join the boycott after having repudiated it, he would have no friends on either side. He thought that Flora would follow him if he made up his mind to do that, but it would make things hard for her, and there was no guarantee that she would, and he couldn’t take the risk.
Of course he had slipped into this position by a series of prevarications and compromises: postponing the moment when he would offend Mrs Palmer; surrendering to Flora’s false image of him, even without trying to correct her; fooling himself with an idea he hadn’t even believed, that Peter’s future among these people hung on his choice; acquiescing like an obedient child when Don asked him to drink. Flora had misjudged him: then there would always be unspoken misunderstandings between them. There was no one in the town with whom he could share his mind without reserve….But before these events his mind must have been unconsciously prepared to defy the boycott. Because he hadn’t believed it could have any value, whether or not it might be successful.
It was comic. He couldn’t abide by a majority decision if he
couldn’t agree with it. The union had no control over him, he knew;
but he believed too that where the union went, so long as Ben and
Jock were in office, went socialism, and that way he should go. But
he didn’t accept their decision. At back, then, he allowed himself
final authority; but why shouldn’t he? What else could a man do?
‘If I agree, I’ll join you,’ was his stand, ‘If I don’t, I’m not with you.’
That was the difference. Their line was, ‘I may disagree before the
vote is taken, but if the vote is against me, I stand corrected and do
what the majority agrees on.’ And hadn’t they a point? Weren’t
there so many examples of individual consciences being mistaken
were involved. But if he couldn’t follow the majority
decision, at least he shouldn’t hinder it. All the same he wasn’t going
to give up his independence. If he lost that he would have lost
everything. He had his integrity and he had his stubbornness too;
he couldn’t give way now and make a bloody fool of himself.
He was walking down the corridor at school, and Heath was following him when Dick Cairns whispered, ‘Scab!’
‘Here, that boy!’ Heath called. ‘What did you say’.
‘Please, sir, I said scab.’
‘The utter cheek of you!’ Heath said. ‘That word’s swearing. You ought to have your mouth washed out with soap for that. Get along to my office. You see, Mr Rogers. They might stop me from strapping infants but they can’t stop me strapping the older boys. Oh, I’m with you over this. I won’t have any children insulting their teachers. If any other child whispers that word to you again, just send him along to me. Cheeky brats! What can you expect with parents like that?’
Rogers wanted to defend Dick but he knew it might make Heath punish Dick harder. Of course, Heath thought he was helping him. This was where his conscience landed him, supporting acts that violated it.
Peter came to his table one night a after school. ‘Something’s going to happen to you,’ he said. ‘I’m not telling what.’
‘What, Peter?’
‘My dad’s going to set a ‘possum-trap next time you go to get the bus to Greymouth. You’ll get caught and you won’t be able to get out.’
‘Why?’
‘’Cause you’re not fair. When you’re in the trap all the kids’ll come round and throw stones at you and you won’t be able to chase us away.’
‘Did your father say this?’
‘All the kids’ll call you scab!’
‘They’re calling your father that too.’
‘My father’ll chase them if they call him that.’
‘Well, I’ll chase them too.’
‘You won’t be able to. You’ll be caught in the trap. You’ll be crying because it’ll hurt.’
‘Did your father say this?’
‘No. I’m going to tell him, but. He’ll do it if I tell him.’
‘I’ll be careful where I walk. Then I’ll see the trap and dodge it.’
‘Then he’ll do something else. We’ll get an Alsatian and sool it on to you. It’ll bite you and knock you over and savage you.’
‘Why do you want to do this to me?’
‘’Cause you’re not fair. You let Miss Dane growl at us and you don’t stick up for us.’
‘Miss Dane’s in charge. I have to take notice of what she says.’
‘You’re as big as her. She’s only a lady. You could tell her to be quiet or you’ll hit her.’
‘Teachers don’t act like that.’
‘No, ‘cause teachers are soft, they’re mad. They’re always growling. You didn’t use to growl at me. You don’t stick up for me now. I’m wild with you.’
On top of everything else he had let Peter down too. But what else could he have done? How could he oppose Heath and Miss Dane and the union all at once? Now that he knew that Flora had misjudged him, he felt alone and bewildered, completely alone.
Nora Herlihy primly sat brooding in front of her coal
stove. Since her one gesture of reconciliation towards her
mother at her father’s graveside, she had hardened herself in her
isolation, her bitter pride her only defence against loneliness. There
was no one in Coal Flat, no one in the world, with whom she was
any longer friendly. She hadn’t seen her brother Jack since her
father’s funeral and he hadn’t spoken to her then. The marriage for
which she had broken with her family had itself become a source of
deeper bitterness. Mike was not for long the tender lover he had
seemed before she had left home, a man who understood so much of
the world to which she had been brought up hostile. Half her
reason for marrying him had been the challenge offered by her
parents’ opposition; when that had gone she expected him to treat
her with respect because she had a sharp sense of her own inviolability. She expected him to wait till she was ready. For a week she
had held out till Mike could restrain himself no longer from what
he looked on as his marriage bonus, already a week overdue. To her
it was rape. The indignity bit deep in her memory. When she was
sure that no baby was coming her fierce chastity recovered and grew
over the wound and after that she refused him.
A man more gentle than Mike might have coaxed her into physical tenderness, but surrender to force was an act impossible for Nora. That night, a week after the weeding, their marriage died. She had never forgiven him for what to her was, short of murder, the supreme act of disrespect; because to her love was respect. Afterwards he often tried again but she fought him off, tooth and nail, with an energy fiercer and more lasting than his own. Then he had reverted to his beer. For her he had promised to give it up, but, since she had cheated him, he released himself from his vow. Nora could never respect a drunkard and she grew to hate him bitterly and continuously.
She made him buy another bed and she slept in another room; she gave him his meals in silence except when she nagged in her shrill acid voice; every second Friday she held out her hand challengingly for his pay-envelope, cursing him for having already taken his share for beer and tobacco. For eight years they lived like that. Then one night when she was weak with worry he came to her room and took her. The fruit of that night was Peter. She carried him with resentment, weak and disgusted at her morning sickness, frightened at her weight which slowed her normally quick nervous movement. Her muscles were not limber to his delivery and she had a long congested labour. She weaned him after a few days, since breast-feeding disgusted her. Mike softened towards the baby and used to tickle it and talk nonsense and she used to take the baby from him. Not that she had much love for it; she was contemptuous of its helplessness, irritated by its crying; but she fed it and clothed it efficiently because its preservation was a challenge. She took a pride in training he boy. By the time he was eleven months, before he was walking—she made him practise while she held his arms—she had him trained to use the pottie; soon after he was two she had trained him not to wet his nappies. She slapped him when he used his left hand and at twenty-one months he was sitting at his high chair, eating with his right hand careful not to spill his food. It was a matter of pride that her child should be earlier and better trained than anyone else’s. She protested if Mike played with the boy or danced him round the room or dandled him on his knee. Father and son developed a clandestine relationship, and she became their censor. And even after all this Mike would occasionally surprise her in bed but she was determined against it, and she fought him off. Peter who slept in a cot in her room used to wake screaming, and the crying made Mike desist. When he was five they sent him to a convent, and he was away a good two years. Since then he slept in Mike’s room, and even now they had their occasional struggles about eleven o’clock; they had come to need them, even to look forward to them, as a necessary climax to their relations; for her the struggle was a release of her pent-up hate, for him there was not much lust in it, mostly a desire for revenge and the reassertion of an unjustly rejected claim, like a further process in an endless lawsuit.
They sent Peter to a convent because by five he was restless and
disobedient: one of the first words he had learned was no, and he
would shout it at her in defiance before he was two, when he knew
only a dozen words; she would slap his legs determined to beat his
damned pride out of him, but she never won. Once he turned the
that she
anticipated with a high sense of justice. When they brought Peter
home, because Mike said they couldn’t afford the fees—she had
used that as an excuse to cut his beer-money—he was more subdued, shiftier, more sullen, but his mischief now was secret and
Nora had to trail him to catch him at it, which was more worrying
than his open defiance. The only time he cried now was when his
father left the bedroom to fight with his mother in the dark and
come back muttering curses.
Sitting brooding Nora heard Mike’s boots on the path. She twitched automatically to the alert, and said as he opened the door, ‘Wipe your bloody feet now. Take those muddy boots off before you walk on the mat.’
Mike wiped his boots carefully but didn’t take them off.
‘I told you, take your boots off!’ she said.
‘Oh give me some peace, woman,’ he said. He began to unlace them.
She softened and looked alarmed. ‘Mike, what’s wrong? Why are you home at this time? Why aren’t you up at the pub boozing your pay away like you usually are?’
He didn’t answer. ‘It’s bloody pity you don’t take notice of this boycott,’ she said. ‘It’s the best thing that could happen to you. Christ knows it was bad enough your paying sixpence without having to pay more.’
‘I’d go mad without it,’ he said. ‘You wouldn’t wear the pants then, woman. You’d be sore with bruises. What Don Palmer gets out of me is your protection money.’
‘Christ Almighty!’ she said. ‘Listen to who’s talking. Do you think you could lay a finger on me and get away with it?’
‘I’m not going to Palmers’ tonight,’ he said.
‘What’s come over you? Is anything wrong, Mike?’
‘Trouble at the dredge,’ he said. ‘The union says I’m scabbing. How long they’ll last out I’d like to know. After a week they’ll be sorry. They’ll be sneaking into Greymouth at week-ends for it. They talk about will-power. Will-power. I ought to know about will-power after the vows I was going to take.’
‘It’s a bloody pity you don’t try to use some will-power for
once,’ she said. ‘Even if you weren’t strong enough for your vows.
‘Stop it!’ he shouted. ‘Or I’ll clout you one.’
‘It’s bloody time you laid off the beer.’
‘You talk like the union. They’ve put me out of the union. They reckon the boss’ll have to sack me now.’
‘What’s that?’
‘Sack me, woman, that’s what they say.’
‘They can’t do that!’
‘They say the company can’t employ a man if he’s not a union member. Bloody socialists!’
‘That means the union’s sacking you. The union can’t sack you. They don’t pay you.’
‘That’s what they say.’
‘Bloody unions,’ she said. ‘They’ve caused more trouble than enough in this town already. Look what they did to Jack.’
‘Arh, Jack,’ he sneered.
‘We had the whole town against us!’ she said. ‘We held out too. We would have won if the company had had more guts. The lawyer said we could have sued them for damages. We were determined. They couldn’t beat the Seldoms.’
‘Arh, the Seldoms! Your old man was determined too. I beat him.’
‘You,’ she sneered. ‘It’s a bloody pity you did. If I’d known then what I know now you wouldn’t ha’ beat him.’
‘Oh, you’re sorry, are you?’ he said. ‘Nora Seldom giving in. Nora Seldom admitting she’s wrong.’
She turned fiercely. ‘Stop it!’ she screamed. ‘Or I’ll hit you one. Stop it!’ She said more quietly, ‘What are we going to do if you lose your job?’
‘They won’t sack me,’ he said. ‘They can’t. If they do, I might get into the mine.’
‘You gutless wonder,’ she said. ‘You crawler. Giving in already. Where’s your pride? If you don’t fight them, I will. I’ll take on the whole town and God Almighty too.’
‘Stop your blaspheming, woman,’ he said and chuckled. ‘You fighting God Almighty. I know who’d come off worst.’
‘The union can’t sack you. Who the hell cares if you’re not a
member of the union? The company’ll have to stick by you. You’ve
never lost a day yet. We’ll go to law about it if they do. We won’t
let them get away with it this time. We should ha’ gone to law about
it over Jack.’ Her voice was quieter and she continued talking while
Mike sat not listening. ‘Jack beat the bloody union,’ she said, ‘even
‘Oh, shut up woman,’ Mike said. ‘You’ve got a vile tongue.’
‘And don’t I bloody well need one in this town?’ she asked. She stared at him. ‘Get your dirty boots off.’
‘I might as well. I’m not going to the pub.’
‘You gutless bastard,’ she said. ‘You’re giving up drinking because these union bastards told you. You’d never give up for me. Why should you start now? Eh? Answer me that.’
‘Don’t tell me you want me to drink, woman?’
‘If you stop drinking it’s got to be for me. Not for any bloody union. Get up now and go to Palmers’. It’s a matter of principle. Get up and show them.’
He chuckled. ‘I don’t need much prompting, woman. But don’t blame me if I lose my job.’
Peter came running in and flung his bag on the floor, then stopped in surprise at seeing his father. ‘Hang that bag up in the right place,’ Nora screamed. ‘Do you hear me now?’
‘Shut up, woman. You’re worse than the dredge with your screaming,’ Mike said. ‘Peter, there’s no need to aggravate your mother.’
‘Oh, her,’ Peter said. ‘I don’t care about her.’
Mike patted his shoulder and laughed. ‘See, woman, he’s got you taped. He’s not cowed yet, nor like his old man.’
‘Stop encouraging him,’ she said. ‘He does that every night to annoy me. Just because you’re not here to see. You’ll tempt me too far one day, my lad, my Christ you will.’
‘I want a piece,’ Peter said, and when she went out, complaining
about his manners, saying that he wasn’t really hungry, to bring our
some shortbread from her horde in the pantry, he made faces at her.
‘Well, not too much of your bloody cheek, son, or Mrs Palmer’ll bar me from the pub.’
‘She will not. She hasn’t got enough customers now. Donnie Palmer said they were glad you still went there.’
Mike looked glad, and Nora who had listened said, ‘That’s enough of your bloody cheek now. It’s had enough Rae coming round a couple of weeks back about you throwing coal on your grandma’s roof without you having him come round again.’
‘Arh, Rae,’ Mike said. ‘The law. It’ll take more than law to keep the human heart in order.’
‘You and your Doolan tripe,’ she said. ‘We don’t want to fall out with Mr Rae too,’ she screamed. ‘He stuck to us in Jack’s strike. You might have need of him yet. Get out and have your stinking beer now.’
When the company refused to suspend Mike Herlihy for so long as he was suspended from the union, the union called for a strike. Thompson could not at first believe it. ‘It’s the publicans you’re fighting, not us,’ he said. ‘Or is it the brewers? We didn’t put your beer up. We have to pay more for our beer too.’
‘Then you should be boycotting it,’ the union secretary said—Archie Paterson, the man who was president of the local branch of the Labour Party.
‘I don’t drink,’ Thompson said. ‘But if I did I’d pay up like a man. If the brewers put up the wholesale price, the publicans have got to charge more too.’
‘We’re not working while you employ a scab,’ Archie said. ‘The men are determined.’
‘I can’t see it’s got anything to do with the company,’ Thompson said. ‘I’d understand if you were striking against the company.’
‘That’s an improvement,’ Archie said. ‘The time was when you bosses didn’t even understand that.’
‘Well, why penalize us? We can’t stop Herlihy having his beer if he wants to. We’re not making him break the boycott.’
‘It’s the only weapon we’ve got,’ Archie said. ‘Our labour’s our only bargaining power. If we had a more suitable weapon we’d use it in this case.’
‘Well, I’m not sacking Herlihy. He’s never missed a day. He knows the dredge backwards.’
‘He never was a keen union man either, if that’s what you mean.’
‘I don’t care whether he’s a keen union man or not. It’s about time the union was taught a lesson anyway. You’ll come off worst this time. I’m not budging. You might all be sacked yet.’
‘Where would you get replacements from? And every dredge in the South Island would come out in sympathy. The miners too. You don’t take me for a fool, do you?’
‘Well, we’ll fight it out. Herlihy’s staying.’
The town was weirdly silent when the dredge stopped. Of a fine night there seemed to be silent mockery in the stars and ancient brooding in the hills. To Rogers, when it rained there was insidious despair on the roofs. Boxed off from the rain the dredge families waited in their houses; it was unlike previous strikes because they could not go to the pubs—they met each morning in the secretary’s backyard. They held out two days and then the miners struck in sympathy. Caddick argued with Ben, and Ben simply said: ‘Save all that for the publicans. Send delegates to the victuallers’ next meeting.’
Only the shops and the school continued. Rogers noticed the strangeness of the children living as if time was interrupted and eternity had broken through, while their parents stayed at home and waited. For the town was still, waiting in the rain, camped in a bush clearing on a terrace under the mountains that had stood before pennies were thought of, and stood now, Rogers thought, under shifting grey fog, impassively as if waiting for the energy to shrug off this colony of men who made mountains out of pennies, breaking their necks on their own artifacts, marshalling like gamblers on one side or other of a penny. He felt above the struggle, and for that moment it seemed pathetic and amusing.
But it wasn’t comic for long. A strike was a strike and Rogers was now in secret sympathy with the men, though he didn’t admit it to himself. He was a displaced person, standing of a late afternoon in the bar with Dad and Don leaning by, and Heath and Mike for company. Cheerless company they were; Heath skiting about discipline for the miners and independence for himself, Mike harking back to original sin and the folly of this world.
Mum would come in with sandwiches as a token of gratitude for
their custom, ‘We’ll hold out for months,’ she said, ‘even if it ruins
us. They’ll find out.’ But she and Dad were worried; the pub was
running at a loss, the few beers they sold to their three customers
didn’t pay their overhead expenses, and they didn’t make much out
‘Would you like to come back to the dredge for a while, Don?’ he asked. ‘We’re short-handed, even for the repairs we’re doing.’
‘You’re short-handed all right,’ Dad said. ‘Why do you need me?’
‘There’s some riveting of buckets to do. Frank and I are busy on the cables. You and Mike could be on the riveting. Then there’s the drum to be overhauled.’
‘A bit of a come-down, isn’t it, Andy? Me heating rivets?’
‘Well, it’s got to be done, Don. You’ll be on your old wage.’
‘I don’t like to leave the pub, Andy. You don’t know what might happen. They might attack us.’
‘Awh, they won’t do that. Your boy’s here anyway.’
‘Tell you what, Don could work for you. He’s got a crook arm, you know. Heating rivets is a light steady job for him. It’ll be a change for him.’
‘Okay. If he’ll agree. On ordinary wages though.’
‘Oh yes.’
Mum talked Don into it. ‘You go out and show them, son,’ she said. ‘You did it once before. It’ll shame them to see a returned soldier doing their work for them. A man who was wounded while they were skulking in the mine.’
‘It’s the dredge you want me to go to, Mum, not the mine. There’s three returned men on the dredge.’
‘Well, this might win them back. They’ll see you’re answering you country’s call again.’
‘Aw, Christ, Mum, go easy. It’s only the company’s call’.
‘No, Don,’ she said patiently. ‘You don’t understand. It’s industry that keeps the country going. Industry and business. And if there’s a stoppage the country suffers.’
‘I don’t want to provoke them, Mum. There’s no sense in risking your popularity for a few quid in wages.’
‘Well, we aren’t making anything out of the pub,’ Dad said. ‘If you weren’t my son I’d have you put off. Redundancy.’
‘It’s not that, Dad,’ Mum said. ‘Don knows we’d be only too glad to have him stay all the time even if he wasn’t working in the bar.’
‘Well, he doesn’t went to be molly-coddled,’ Dad said.
‘You still talk about me as if I was a kid,’ Don said. ‘Do I have to remind you I’m a father too?’
‘You’re not fair, Mum,’ Flora said. ‘The strike’s got nothing to do with Don. You’re exposing him to trouble.’
‘Don’s been exposed to more trouble than those loafers can cause him,’ Mum said. ‘Bullets and mines and bombing.’
‘Well, it’s time he had a rest from it,’ Flora said.
‘There was one thing I learned in the army,’ Don said. ‘You had to stick to your mates.’
‘They aren’t your mates,’ Mrs Palmer said. ‘It’s the public of New Zealand who are your mates. Respectable people all over the country. These people aren’t New Zealanders. Half of them are immigrants. The scum of Scotland.’
‘There are more of them than us,’ Don said.
‘We’re an outpost, if that’s what you mean. It’s up to us to show the flag for respectability and order and every man pulling his weight.’
‘Arh, stop talking rot, Mum. Andy Thompson wants me to do a job for him. I could use the wages. But I don’t reckon it’s worth it.’
‘If there’s any trouble, I’ll get Mr Rae to protect you. He might need extra police here.’
‘I don’t want a bodyguard.’
‘He’s got a mind of his own,’ Dad said. ‘I can’t say I’d be very keen if I was in his shoes. I’d go myself because Andy’s an old workmate, only I don’t want to leave the pub to you womenfolk. Don wouldn’t be any good in a scrap with his arm.’
‘That’s why he can go,’ Mum said. ‘Only a rat would attack a disabled man. Well, son, I thought I’d be able to hold up my head and say, “My son is a man, doing his duty without fear or favour,” but it looks as if I won’t.’
‘All right, I’ll go then,’ Don said, ‘if you want it that way. But I’m not keen.’
‘Make sure you wear your returned soldier’s badge,’ Mum said. ‘Haven’t you got a wound stripe?’
‘Who the hell wants to wear a wound stripe?’ Don said.
As people approached Rogers in the street they would stare and
then look away when he said hullo. Yet the more he felt their scorn
the more he felt in sympathy with them. Because he had no hope in
The other pubs in Greymouth were carrying on with trade only halved. Carpenters and plumbers, electricians and shop-assistants didn’t like to think that the miners were going to direct their habits, and they were very willing to pay the extra penny to assert their independence. It was rumoured that some of the publicans were likely to put a match to the sixpenny pub; it was unlikely because it could have set the whole block on fire and there were other pubs in the block; but anyway the police watched it at night. It was rumoured that the victuallers had done such things before. Years before, a police inspector who bothered too much with after-hours drinking and a magistrate who fined offenders too severely had had home-made bombs thrown at their houses to warn them. It was rumoured too, among the people who objected to the power of the Miners’ Union, that they hired cars and drove secretly farther south where they drank and paid sevenpence. A carload of youngsters from another mining town did go to a roadside pub near Kumara one Sunday, and demanded beer at sixpence; the publican refused, there was a fight, and the miners were fined.
The victuallers were holding out. From the headquarters of their
association in Wellington they were receiving subsidies from a
‘strike fund’ to which publicans all over the country were contributing. But they saw that their main threat came from the striking
The dredge company had British and Australian capital. All the gold went to America. The directors in Wellington considered the possibility of sacking this man Herlihy—what was he to them?—but some of them said they should stick by the manager, he was a good man; and they met a delegation from the victuallers who asked them not to give in. Since they all agreed that it was high time the workers of this country were shown a lesson, they agreed in the meantime to take no action except ask the Minister of Labour to settle the dispute by whatever means he could.
Rogers was having tea in Mrs Palmer’s kitchen when she told him Don was to work on the dredge.
‘That’s the worst thing you could do,’ he said.
‘Oh, no, Paul,’ she said. ‘You don’t understand.’
‘You’re exposing him to trouble.’
‘We’re going to show we can fight back, Paul. They can have their unions. We’ve got our union too.’
‘They’ll call him a scab.’
‘It’s them that’s scabbing, not him. Scabbing on the country. We’ve got our union, and you might say, in a way, Don belongs to it too, so he’s being loyal to it by working on the dredge. He’s helping his family out.’
‘I don’t see that you’re helping him out.’
‘You shouldn’t be talking like that. You belong to us yourself. Oh, those silly ideas the doctor used to feed you with, son, you’ll have to grow out of them. You’ve got to take sides, one way or the other. You’ve finished with the doctor, haven’t you? There’s one thing we have to do now and that’s stick together.’
He found Don in his room. ‘Is it true what your mother says, you’re starting on the dredge tomorrow?’
‘Why not?’ Don asked.
‘You’re a fool, man. You’ll never live it down.’
‘What do you care?’
‘I’m your friend.’
‘Friend? My family means more to me than any friend.’
‘Your family aren’t treating you right then. Your mother’s using you.’
‘She’s got a right to, hasn’t she?’
‘I used to think you were a grown man. I used to envy you. I thought you were independent.’
‘Don’t try to come that friendship stuff. It won’t work.’
‘I’m not asking you to do anything for me. I’m thinking of your own interests.’
‘Well, think of yourself for a change.’
‘They’ll call you a scab.’
‘Who are you to talk? They’re calling you that already.’
‘Yes, and I’m beginning to be sorry for it. I didn’t worry about their boycott. But there’s one thing I do know and that’s that if a man takes the job of a man on strike he’s a scab and it’s the lowest thing he can do to his own mates.’
‘They’re not my mates. I don’t blame them for trying to get their beer cheaper. But you can’t blame us for trying to get more out of them. You can’t expect us to go against our own interests.’
‘You’ll be sorry yet, Don.’
‘Look. You don’t think I’m keen to do this, do you, Paul? Mum wants it. That’s why I’m doing it. She’ll think I’m yellow if I don’t. I can’t let her down.’
‘What did I see in you? I thought you were a man. You’re not loose of your mother’s apron strings. Haven’s you any will of your town?’
‘Who are you to talk? A dreamy ——t like you shooting your head off about being tough. You want to lie low, fellow. You’re in a man’s world and you might get hurt.’
‘You wait and see what happens to you in your man’s world. If you go to the dredge, don’t expect me to back you up.’
‘As if I’d care, Paul,’ Don said wearily. ‘There’s no mates in this life, that’s one thing I’ve learned. None you can depend on. The only ones I had got killed at Alamein.’
‘If you stuck by what you thought was right, your mates would stick to you,’ Rogers said, feeling that the remark might apply to himself too.
‘Look, you’ve got no hope of talking me round!’ Don said angrily. ‘F—— off and leave me alone—for Christ’s sake!’
Rogers found Flora in the wash-house. ‘Can’t you make your mother change her mind, Flor?’ he asked. ‘She doesn’t know what she’s letting Don in for.’
‘I tried, Paul,’ she said. ‘It’s not fair. She’s got her mind made up.’
‘Flora, I’m changing sides. I didn’t think it mattered about the boycott. Your mother says you’ve got to be on one side or the other. Now it’s a strike, I’m with the dredge men and the miners.’
There was challenge in her eyes as she turned with dripping hands in mid-air. ‘You’re not going to break it off?’
He clasped one wet hand unconsciously hurting her.
‘How can you say that?’ he asked. ‘I’ll never break it off. It’s up to you.’
‘Then you’ve considered it?’
‘I didn’t know what you might do. Flora, you knew what I was when you started going around with me. You know I’ve got principles about things like this. I tell you, I never hid my beliefs.’
‘You were never on our side, all along, were you?’ she said.
‘Don’t sound so disillusioned, Flora. You might have expected this. I tell you, I never hid my beliefs.’
‘I thought you’d think we were in the right,’ she said. ‘What have we done to them?’
‘It’s not a personal issue, Flora. The miners have got nothing against your family. It’s a social struggle, Prices are going up all the time, and someone’s making profits, and the wage-earners and consumers are protesting.’
‘You don’t want to see us run the hotel at a loss, do you, Paul? Now that Dad’s going to help us, you ought to be interested in seeing him well off.’
‘We could manage without his help if we tried. Your father could still make a profit out of sixpenny beer, anyway. He wasn’t losing three weeks ago, why should he be losing now?’
She said wearily, ‘I don’t know, Paul. I don’t understand these things. I only thought we were in the right.’
‘Well, you’re not. It’s a selfish move of the publicans to put the prices up. It’s only to line their own pockets.’
‘Then go away if that’s the way you feel! Go away and leave me alone.’ She turned back to the washboard and bent over it. Rogers could see that she was putting a brave face on it, sniffing and rubbing hard on the corrugated glass.
‘Don’t think it’s easy for me,’ he said. ‘The strikers won’t welcome me. They’ll say I’m a turncoat. But I’ve got to do it before it’s too late…. God, Flora, do you think I’d he any company for you if I gave in on this, sneaking round like no one’s mongrel, begging for scraps of sympathy. Do you think it would be fair to offer you that sort of life? You’d be marrying the remains of me.’
‘You know what you’re asking me to do, Paul. It’s not fair. I can’t walk out of the family at a time like this.’
‘I’m not asking that, Flora. Not yet. Later you might have to.
But you’ll have to make up your own mind about that. I’m just
She didn’t turn or raise her head. Resentfully she let him kiss her forehead. She said, ‘If you want to get in touch with me, leave a message with Doris.’
He found Dad in the bar. There were no customers.
‘Mr Palmer,’ he said. ‘Can’t you stop Don going on the dredge?’
‘Well,’ Dad said. ‘Don’s got a mind of his own, hasn’t he?’
‘He’s not keen to start, Mr Palmer. It’s Mrs Palmer who wants him to go.’
‘Well, Paul,’ Dad said in that flat wooden voice of his. ‘We may treat you as one of the family but that’s so long as you remember your place. You haven’t the right to get mixed up in family matters yet.’
‘I was thinking of the trouble Don will get into.’
‘Don’s taken on trouble before, and more willingly than you did, in the war.’
‘Well, I have to tell you, I won’t be backing you up, Mr Palmer.’
Dad paused, looked at him and then turned his back.
‘You’re what you might call a fifth-columnist, then. You always did have to be a bit different to everyone else.’
‘I may have to leave the pub then.’
But Dad wouldn’t allow him even that amount of independence. ‘That’s for Mum to decide,’ he said.
Don started at the dredge the following morning. It was a light job. With long tongs he held rivets in a furnace till they were a yellowy-red; then he held them in holes in dredge buckets while Mike Herlihy hammered them down. The hammer blows jarred on his bad arm, but he enjoyed, on this frosty morning, being near the fire, with the flush feeling of all active outdoor work. Mike was not good company. He treated Don as if he was a lad just starting. Occasionally he would hesitate with his hammer and tell Don to push the rivet in more tightly, and then it would be too cold and he would have to heat it again. Don couldn’t keep a conversation going, because often Mike didn’t answer him. Thompson and the foreman came to them at knock-off time.
‘I’ll run you home in the truck,’ Thompson said. ‘There’s a welcome party on the shore.’
As they stepped up the gangway Don saw a group of about twenty of the dredge-hands.
‘Take it quietly,’ Thompson said. ‘Ignore them. They won’t
‘Let the young fullah ride on the back,’ Mike said. ‘Seniority counts too.’
‘I don’t want a ride,’ Don said.
‘You’re not going to walk by yourself?’ Thompson said.
‘I’m not scared,’ said Don.
Mike and Frank and Thompson climbed into the cab to the jeers of the hands, and drove off. The men followed Don as he started on the mile he had to go before he would be home. They jeered at him till he couldn’t ignore it. ‘Come on then,’ he called. ‘I’ll take any one of you on.’
Someone offered to take the challenge.
‘Hold it,’ Archie Paterson said. ‘He’s got a bad arm.’
‘I’ll take you on one-handed,’ Don called.
But no one would fight him on those terms. Don called them scared; one of the men offered to fight with one hand tied behind his back. But Archie made a speech: ‘No violence, boys. We’d be playing right into their hands. They’d have the cops up in no time. The papers would turn it into a riot. You’ve got to fight with your head as well as your hands.’
Don had never felt so sour before. He had always felt the world’s goodwill as a natural extension of his family’s. It had never turned against him. Now, even though he felt better for having challenged them, he hated himself as he walked ahead of them, and they tagged on behind like a nagging conscience. On the main road of Coal Flat, other people stopped and stared or joined in to jeer; the hunted look in his eyes roused looks of triumph, contempt and accusation in the eyes of everyone he could face out. What hurt him most was the children joining in.
When his mother called him in the morning he rolled over and said, ‘I don’t reckon I’ll go today, Mum.’
‘Why not, son?’
‘I can’t go through that again.’
‘You stood up to them all right. You told me.’
‘You try it, Mum. Kids making a fool of you. They’ll be picking on Donnie at school.’
‘Paul’ll put a stop to that. Or if he won’t Heath will. I’ll catch him on his way to school.’
‘I’m not going, Mum. You try it and see.’
‘All right, boy, I will. They won’t beat the Palmers. I’ll go down
He jumped out of bed. ‘Go out. I want to get dressed,’ he said. ‘You’re not doing anything of the sort. Go on, close the door.’
Against his protests she accompanied him to the dredge. Outside, against the front window of the bar a crudely-painted notice read: ‘Palmers for Black Beer and Black Wages.’ Mrs Palmer put it in the passage, face against the wall.
The dredge-hands were waiting at a corner a few hundred yards down the main road.
‘Look, he’s got an escort. It’s a convoy,’ one of them called.
‘True enough!’ Mrs Palmer called. ‘Rats might leave a sinking ship. But we’ll man it. My boy and I.’
‘A proper old battleship, Mum? The H.M.S. Dreadnought.’
‘Watch how you go down the gangway with those high heels, Mum.’
‘Are you opening up a sixpenny bar on the dredge?’
‘You’re taking the wrong turning. You want to take your boy to the doctor. He’s got scabs all over him.’
‘It’s you’re the scabs!’ Mrs Palmer called. ‘Think of your wives and children. I’d be ashamed to be the wife of any of you. Where’s their guts? Letting their menfolk loaf.’ It would be difficult for any woman to keep her poise in such a situation, but Mrs Palmer, in spite of her high heels on the macadam road, managed to look aggressive and dignified, flicking jibes back at them over her shoulder like a dirty dish-cloth. But Don didn’t speak to her or the men all the way to the dredge. When Mike Herlihy arrived in Thompson’s truck, they hooted him. Don hardly spoke to Mike all day; he was thinking, ‘I won’t do it tomorrow, even for her.’
‘Oh, I tell you, I stood up to them. You’ve got to show you can fight back,’ Mrs Palmer told Dad when she was home.
‘Don’t try to do it again then, Lil.’
‘Why, Dad? Someone’s got to see him home tonight.’
‘This is a man’s affair. You keep out of it.’
‘I’m equal to it, Dad. You know I am. They wouldn’t lay hands on a woman. Not on me and get away with it.’
‘I said stay home. You’re making a fool of the boy.’
‘How? I stuck up for him.’
‘Showing him up in front of those men, like a little boy with his mother to look after him. He’ll never live it down.’
‘Oh, Dad, you don’t understand. What do we care what they think?’
‘Well, you’ve put the lid on it, Lil. He’s not going to the dredge again.’
‘But Dad, that’s giving in.’
‘You can blame yourself for that.’
‘Oh, Dad, sometimes you make me sick,’ In the kitchen she sagged in a chair and wept.
Later she rang Mr Rae and insisted that he should escort Don home after work.
Rogers came late away from the school that afternoon and came on to the main road to see a group of miners standing in the road outside the pub. He stood by the crowd. They were mostly younger men and some lads. He looked for Jimmy Cairns and Ben Nicholson but they were not there. He sensed that the crowd were itching for action.
‘We ought to go in and demand a sixpenny beer,’ one youth said.
‘Like those chaps at Kumara. They got fined,’ another said.
‘It’d be worth it for the fun.’
‘Someone ought to throw a stone through the window.’
‘You’re fools if you try that,’ Rogers said.
They turned to him. ‘Listen to who’s talking. The school teacher.’—‘Whose side are you on anyway, Rogers?’—‘I hear you don’t drink black beer any more.’—‘Watch out we don’t throw a stone through your window.’
‘Don’t be such fools,’ said Rogers. ‘I bet if Ben Nicholson or Jock were here they’d tell you the same.’
‘Who are you to speak for Ben and Jock? Last thing I heard about you, you were a scab,’ Arty Nicholson said.
‘Here comes another scab,’ one of them said, and they saw Don Palmer coming up the road with the policeman.
‘Christ, he’s got his uniform on. He’s getting official now.’ Behind Don and Rae, the dredge-hands walked jeering.
‘Let’s join in,’ a mining youth said.
Don and the constable turned to face the crowd by the door of the hotel. Rae said, ‘I warn you now. If there’s any trouble it’ll go hard on you.’
‘Oh, go and lock yourself in your gaol, Rae. Remember the Seldom strike. The union beat you then.’
Don spoke for the first time since he had left the dredge. His eyes were hunted: ‘What I like about you blokes is the way you fight one man against one.’
‘We haven’t started fighting yet,’ a dredge-hand said. ‘We’re tickling your conscience.’
‘Forty to one,’ Don said. ‘If you count these lads.’
‘I’ll take you on,’ Arty Nicholson said. (The Palmers that were too bloody good for him.)
‘You hold your tongue, son,’ Rae said.
‘You’re not the only returned man in this town,’ a dredge-man said.
Don was preparing to fight. His parents and Flora and Heath had just come to the door. Flora was shocked to see Arty Nicholson threatening Don; she would have thought that Arty would be different from the others. Rogers pushed forward to keep Don from his challengers. ‘Get inside, you fool,’ he said. ‘Aren’t you in trouble enough without looking for more?’ Don resisted but Rogers pushed him forcibly while Don released his frustration in several blows in Rogers’s chest and chin with his one good arm. His mother ran out, pushed Rogers off and pulled Don inside.
‘Just be careful, young man,’ Rae said. ‘That could be called assault.’
‘I did it for his own good,’ Rogers said. ‘Did you want to stand by and see him injured?’
Arty stared angrily at Rogers. ‘I can manage my own bloody fights.’ Rogers thought he was going to start on him instead.
Heath stepped forward in a sudden fit of rage. Half of these miners were youths he had taught at school. ‘Go on, go back home, you boys,’ he called, pointing one arm. ‘You should be working, not hanging around the streets.’
He was answered by catcalls. ‘You didn’t used to be a drinking man, Mr Heath. Paying the extra penny just to show us, eh?’
‘Neither should you be drinking,’ Heath said. ‘Half you boys aren’t twenty-one yet. You ought to have put a stop to this a long time ago, Mr Rae.’
‘Well now,’ Rae said. ‘One thing at a time. There’s an ugly situation here without you criticizing me.’
‘It’s time someone complained,’ Heath shouted, talking to everyone and no one in particular. ‘The constable should be reported and the publicans too, for serving youngsters. When the boycott’s over, I’ll make it my business to see that a stop’s put to it.’
‘Putting the whole town to school, aren’t you?’ Archie Paterson sneered.
‘It’s about time it was put to school,’ Heath shouted. ‘This town has had too little discipline, and the proper sort of discipline will do us all good.’
The lads of the miners’ group were spoiling for a chance to
attack this man who had bullied them and humiliated them at
‘This is a working-man’s town,’ a dredge-hand called. ‘We won’t need any schoolmaster telling us what to do. Or any cop either.’
‘It’s time you learned,’ Heath said. ‘We aren’t going to allow the rabble of the country to push us around.’
There were cries of, ‘Who’s we?’ but already there were shouts of, ‘Rabble?’ and the youths were moving towards Heath. Rogers rushed into thoughtless action; he ran to Heath, pulled his hat from his head and threw it on the grass at the side of the road. It was a stupid action and he couldn’t have said why he did it.
‘Here, you!’ Heath said, taken by surprise, but his eyes followed his hat. Rogers ignored him and stepped forward.
‘Listen, you chaps,’ he shouted. ‘Can’t you see that you’re playing right into their hands?’
They weren’t listening, they were jeering at him.
‘I’m not one to talk, I admit,’ Rogers shouted. ‘I’m on your side and I don’t expect any welcome, either.’ They began to listen, but only tentatively. ‘I’m trying to tell you what your Ben and Jock would tell you if they were here. You’re doing the very thing the publicans want, you’re playing right into their hands. If you start a fight the papers will blow it up into a bloody riot….’
But their attention had left him. They were grinning. Heath had gone after his hat, which was perched on long grass on the side of the water-race, ready to fall into the water. It was as if property was more important than dignity the way he chased it, saying, ‘Get that man, constable!’ He saved the hat from wetting, but he slipped, and in trying to balance himself he planted one leg in the race, and then, fell in. He climbed out, his hat crumpled, and his face red and foolish, his suit covered in mud, stamping his muddy shoes. The crowd burst into laughter. Even Rae was tempted to grin. The four youths who had planned to rush him, rolled, leaning on one another, laughing loudly. Heath danced from one foot to the other while he took off his shoes and emptied water from them.
‘You’ll be sorry for this, Rogers,’ he called. ‘It was assault, constable, assault.’
Rogers went to the youths. ‘Can’t you see he was only trying to provoke you into attacking?’ he said. ‘Then they’d have had you where they wanted you.’
‘He’s right,’ Archie Paterson said, taking control. ‘Where’s your union officials? They should have put you wise to that trick. We’d have had police reinforcements here.’
‘You’ll have them anyway,’ Rae said. ‘This thing’s getting out of hand. What did you do that for?’ he asked Rogers.
‘I saved the peace,’ Rogers said. ‘You couldn’t have managed if there’d been trouble.’
‘Well, that’s as may be… I can’t say Heath’s remarks were helpful either to public order or to me…. And I don’t see any sense in one public servant hounding another,’ Rae said. ‘Very well, I’ll let this go. But I warn you, don’t try anything like that again.’
‘That was a near thing,’ Archie said. ‘They shouldn’t have needed a wavering schoolteacher to tell them that.’
‘They’re only boys,’ one of the dredge-hands said. ‘The miners could have warned them not to start anything on their own.’
Heath was walking with all the dignity he could rouse. The crowd broke up laughing. Rogers spoke to Jimmy Cairns who was arriving attracted by the noise. He told him what had happened. ‘Whose side are you on?’ Jimmy asked.
‘I’m on yours,’ Rogers said. ‘I told the Palmers I couldn’t stick Don’s scabbing.’
‘You’ve woken up then,’ Jimmy said. ‘Just as well. It might have been too late. But you can’t blame the lads if they’re suspicious of you. I can’t make out why you were against the boycott in the first place. You were too comfortable at Palmers’ I think…. Frank Lindsay made bloody sure he didn’t marry the whole family.’
‘Next thing I know they’ll be kicking me out.’
‘If you’re stuck, Jessie’ll take you in. You see what I meant about the boycott. One small step to the right and the next thing you know you’re supporting scabs and profiteers and policemen. You’re not used to union discipline, that’s your trouble.’
‘You’re talking like Heath now, Jimmy. Discipline this and discipline that.’
‘He means keeping people down. We mean keeping ourselves in fighting trim. Self-discipline.’
‘You still don’t allow anyone much independence.’
‘If Palmers kick you out and you’re stuck, try Jessie.’
Miss Dane made herself comfortable at Raes’. She could
look forward to going home after school, to afternoon tea in
front of a coal fire, and then, gossiping, to helping Mrs Rae with the
dinner, and in the evenings reading in a comfortable arm-chair by
the fire. Mr Rae was at first a little put out at having to give up his
favourite chair; she had, of course offered to sit on the couch but he
wouldn’t hear of it; in the end he used Mrs Rae’s chair and she sat
on the couch. Miss Dane thought of taking up her new novel again
but now it didn’t seem so important: it was easier to read one from
the Country Library Service. She felt safer in the policeman’s house,
now that the strike had started. You never knew what might happen
at Palmers’ with that young man working on the dredge. She admired his courage, of course, yet she felt a secret hope that he would
be beaten—he had had too much of his own way in this world already, and though a little hard work would do him no harm, a little
unpopularity might make him just a little less conceited. And she
hoped the Palmers would be beaten because they had no conscience
about the trade they lived by. But she was worried too by Mrs
Rae’s reminiscences of the Seldom strike.
‘We were a lot younger then, of course,’ Mrs Rae said. ‘It was nearly twenty years ago. Oh, it’s a shock to think of it—it makes me feel so old. Fred was new here then. It was his first sole charge. The miners started to meet that Jack Seldom at his gate every morning and fellow him to work and after that Fred had to take him to the mine in the morning and bring him home at night. And the Seldoms had to go to town to do their shopping except for the groceries. And Fred had to ride with them. Oh, the things those miners did. They strewed tacks on the road to give their car a puncture, and Jack Seldom had to drive through the blackberries on the side of the road. And then Jock McEwan’s wife pushed her pram in front of the car and there was her baby three months old in it—that’s their boy Trevor who started in the post office the year before last. Oh, it’s terrible to think of. She just pushed the pram in front of the car. It might have been run over. And Jack had to stop. And Fred said he should have driven right on—-’
‘Surely not,’ Miss Dane said.
‘Yes, he did. He said she would have brought it on herself. The law’s the law, he said, and Nellie McEwan would’ve had no kick coming. She could have been charged with murder and Fred said he’d ‘ve been just the one to put her up for it too.’
‘It’s just as well Mr Seldom stopped,’ Miss Dane said.
‘Yes, I suppose it is really. And then they came one night and I sat up in bed with a jump when I heard it; it woke me out of my sleep. They’d thrown a brick through the front window. And there was broken glass all over the carpet. And it broke my aspidistra. It never looked up after that. I had to throw it out. And Fred had to get six extra constables up to help him. And I had them on my hands. The pubs wouldn’t board them. Oh, there were three sleeping on the floor here, and one in the goal at the back, and two in the spare room. It’s just as well they didn’t have to arrest anyone because there was no room in the gaol. And I had to cook for them. And the shops wouldn’t serve us, only the grocer. And Fred had to get the police in town to send up our bread, and in the end they sent up things for the Seldoms too. Oh, and the cooking I had to do. I hope there’s nothing like it this time. I thought the town had settled down since then.’
‘And after all that Mr Seldom lost.’
‘Yes, it does seem strange, when you come to think of it. Still, if the company had no use for him, he couldn’t complain. The Seldoms weren’t ones to attack the company. Not till after the strike, anyway. They say old Mrs Seldom put a curse on it. I wonder if she knows the mine’s nationalized now. P’r’aps she’d think her curse had come true.’
This conversation frightened Miss Dane. She did not leave the house at night and she kept her window locked. Though she told herself she couldn’t be in a safer place than the policeman’s house, she slept lightly. She had no sympathy for the strike: but she hoped the publicans would give in before it got any worse. Normally she would have found the whole episode exciting, telling herself that strange experiences were still open to the teacher who was prepared to venture to remote townships. She wrote long letters to Mrs O’Reilly and her mother about it: the letters were bright and excited, but the two women who read them were just as alarmed as she was.
But she was more deeply soured over Don. She tried not to think
of him; she was ashamed to think what a fool she had made of herself over a man who patently wasn’t worth it. For a month, lapped
by Mrs Rae’s placid conversation, she was able to forget the evening
‘Because, brethren,’ he was saying, ‘each of us has his secret temptation. Oh, don’t we all know them! The shoddy tricks we play on our neighbours, the lies we tell, the bad language we use. Oh, you don’t have to go far from this building to hear that. Even the children use it. The innocent mires of whom He said, Suffer little children to come unto Me. And the only way, friends, to stop it is to set an example, to purify our hearts in the blood of the Saviour and follow the true way of life.’ He paused and muttered, ‘Watch yourself, be careful, son…. For He is always with us, friends. By night and by day He watches over us…. Easy now…. Over men at their work and children at their play…. Oh, I knew the little bugger’d do it: he’s fallen off.’
Like most of the congregation, Miss Dane was jolted out of her Sunday-morning piety. Henderson’s periods had soothed her into a sleepy mood of complacency. But that sudden swear-word made her want to accuse him, say: ‘Mr Henderson, please mend your own ways before you have the effrontery to get up and preach to us about purifying our hearts.’ But the accusation was a boomerang. It recalled the subtle, sinuous way she had tempted Don to swear, to give her a secret thrill of rebellion when she had only protested in order to make his indifference conscious and deliberate. And she remembered what followed from her rebellion.
Arthur Henderson stopped and blushed at the congregation’s inadvertent gasps. He fumbled for words and said: ‘I beg your pardon, friends. You see, you see how easy it is. Like what I was saying. The temptation is never far from the surface. Oh, how easy it is, brethren, to slip up. How watchful we must ever be. You see what I mean. Oh, brethren, my example should be a warning for you.’ But the men in the church were grinning and children were whispering to their mothers, ‘Mr Henderson swore’.
For the past month she had palmed off her conscience with her
return to regular comfortable habits; besides, the boycott and the
strike had taken her mind off her own worries. But now she was
shocked to recall the argument she had used to fool herself—that
It brought back to mind an unusual and disconcerting novel she had read once, in which a tired complacent country took to civil war for the sake of a change, and the peaceable village girls strung up the mayor and revelled in the puffy cowardice of his face, and the soldiers forced their officers to run naked through the ranks while they lashed them with their web-belts: the country, the author said, could never be the same after; after the peace the people had to expiate through suffering a Fascist tyranny. It was a strange and confusing novel. Yet wasn’t she like those people in revolt against themselves, bringing down punishment on their heads? She desperately wished she could turn to someone; she even wished for a second that she was a Catholic and could confess; but then, she was not at all sure from all she had heard that the same thing might not happen to her again in the confessional. And then that terrible fear came again that she didn’t know yet if there might be a baby—but she pushed it out of her mind. It was too terrible. This fear was only God’s way of punishing her.
She forgot where she was and Mr Henderson had to prompt her to play for the last hymn. Leaving the church, she didn’t stay to gossip, she didn’t shake hands with Mr Henderson, who thought she was snubbing him for swearing. She heard him say to one of the men: ‘By God, I made a blue this morning, Ted,’ and he sniggered heartily.
At school, Miss Dane became more impatient with the children.
The two classes had been moved into Rogers’s room while hers was
being painted. Rogers’s class was now as subdued as hers and no one
talked out of turn. Only Peter Herlihy sat sullenly, occasionally
poking a face at either of the teachers when they weren’t looking,
occasionally hitting another boy with a ruler. Rogers could only hope
that what progress Peter had made would survive, like a chrysalis
waiting for the spring, till he was on his own again. Now Miss Dane
began to pick on Donnie Palmer. She saw him as a potential Don.
Perhaps years from now when he had forgotten the existence of
The Monday after the church service she looked at Donnie and began to wonder. Perhaps he had taken his father by surprise…. She looked up his birth date in the register. She wished she had asked them at the hotel how long Don had been married. She asked Mrs Rae. Mrs Rae wasn’t altogether sure: wasn’t it just before the war?
‘Well, it must have been before that, surely. Donnie was born on
the
‘Well, let me see,’ Mrs Rae said. ‘The Palmers came up here in
‘It was born in August, I know that.’
‘Well, I’m not sure, but I think Don and Myra got married just
before—only a month, I think—before old Don came up here. So
that would be about—when was Easter that year? About February
or March they must have been married. Oh yes, I remember, Don
never said his first wedding anniversary at home. ‘Cause Myra told
me. He was somewhere at sea on his way to the Middle East. So it
must have been later on in
‘Oh, nothing. I was just wondering,’ Miss Dane said, thinking, ‘Really, the woman is slow.’ Though, ten minutes later, Mrs Rae said to herself, ‘Funny, I never thought of that before.’
She looked harder on Donnie the next day. Born five months
after the wedding. What must that wife of the young man’s have
looked like, four months gone and not even married? They evidently hadn’t counted on Donnie. They had thought they could
sport under the stars—or more likely in some sordid hotel—without
retribution. But they hadn’t got away with it. For here was sin come
alive to taunt them, this fair-haired—you might have said—angel,
Wasn’t it in the Bible that illegitimate children couldn’t go to heaven? This child of six might not be to blame, yet he wasn’t the same as the other children born at a respectable distance from the dead-line of legitimacy. There had to be some discrimination; it wouldn’t be fair to the legitimate. And if it was terrible that the child should suffer eternally for what he had no hand in, what else could you expect God to do? The parents would suffer worse—how foolish she had been to think she could win Don to virtue: he was damned to hell already. No wonder he sinned so much. You couldn’t altogether blame him; he might as well make the most of his time and earn his sentence. She was tempted to pity him but why should she? What about his son? He had to suffer from an act beyond his complicity.
She studied Donnie quietly. Yes, he was his father’s child after all: so much of Don was there in bud. Those easy sensuous lips were implied in that innocent pout; those frank plumbing eyes were there in that open appealing stare that Donnie could win you with. His grandmother was spoiling him, as she had spoiled his father before him, encouraging the cavalier in him. Well, cavalier would meet puritan.
Then that thought hit back. What if she were to have a child from that night? What if every sin of Don’s were to populate? No, no, it was impossible: there must have been other times he had got away with it—why not this time? And she must have known by now. No, it was God’s way of punishing her. It was one of the consequences of her sin to be prickled with retribution like a drunkard waking from sleep in a gorse bush. There was some memory nagging at her that she had put away for future reference, that she had refused to look into at the time. Whatever it was she quickly put it out of her mind.
‘Miss Dane’s crabby today,’ the children said. And when Donnie nudged Peter Herlihy and whispered to him, Miss Dane called him out.
‘Donnie Palmer!’ she said. ‘Whatever do you mean by talking in class? Haven’t I spoken to you before about this? Didn’t Mr Heath punish you for that? Mr Rogers has been too easy with you. He’s far too good-natured I’m sure.’
‘Donnie’s been more restless since he was strapped,’ Rogers said quietly.
‘Yes, I know,’ she said, raising her voice even louder. ‘He’s
‘I don’t think so,’ Rogers said, just as loudly. ‘He doesn’t talk very much now.’
Miss Dane looked as if she could have stamped her foot at Rogers.
‘I think I’ll tell your grandmother on you,’ she said. ‘Would you like that?’
Donnie was already in tears as he came to her table. ‘No,’ he said.
‘Please miss, you don’t live at Donnie’s place any more,’ Peter Herlihy said.
‘Peter, he quiet,’ Rogers said.
‘Peter Herlihy! You hold your tongue!’ Miss Dane said. ‘Now, Donnie, sit down and promise me you’ll be a good boy from now on, I’ve just about had enough of you.’
Donnie went hack to his seat snuffling. Peter was grinning at him. Then Donnie’s snivels turned into a peculiar combination of snuffle and giggle. Peter leaned to him, whispering. Then he rolled some plasticine into a small ball and threw it, secretly, at Miss Dane’s table. She heard the thud and the giggles. Rogers walked over to Peter and said, ‘Build that hut of yours in the bush, out of plasticine. I’d like to see it’. But Miss Dane looked for the cause of the disturbance.
‘Where did this come from?’ she snapped. ‘Who threw this? Was it you, Peter Herlihy?’
A girl said, ‘Yes it was, I saw him, Miss Dane.’
‘Oh, Mr Rogers,’ Miss Dane said. ‘Really your class can be very trying. Peter Herlihy, I’m not going to let Mr Rogers punish you. No, I’m going to punish you myself. Another time, it’ll be Mr Heath who’ll punish you. But I’m going to do it this time. Because Mr Rogers is far too patient with you, far too patient altogether.’
She kept Peter behind after school, when Rogers and the other children had gone. She had only meant to give him a talking to, but when he only looked furtive, answering as he thought she would expect him to, hiding a grin from his face, evidently proud of the honour of being kept behind, it made Miss Dane furious. ‘You’re a wicked boy,’ she said. ‘I have no idea what sort of man you’ll grow into. You’re a wicked, wicked boy. Isn’t that a terrible thing for a child? If you carry on like this you’ll be put in a home. You’ll end up in a Borstal yet, my boy.’
Peter sneaked a look at her eyes and was afraid. He didn’t know it
but they had the same secret intense gleam Rogers had noticed in
Peter when he first showed him his drawings. ‘Oh, the wickedness
She shook him roughly and Peter said. ‘I know something about you anyway.’
‘You’ll hold your tongue and you will not answer me back,’ she said.
‘I saw you one night,’ he said. ‘You were in my hidey-hole with Donnie Palmer’s father.’
‘Peter!’ she cried. ‘You awful boy! You wretch!’ She hardly knew what she was doing. She undid his belt and pulled his pants down to his knees and forced him to lie across her knees while she slap, slap, slapped with a tingling chalk-hard hand and he struggled fiercely, tears spurting on to her rayons so that she felt the damp on her legs. She didn’t know where she got her strength to hold him down, but her energy seemed to flow as fast as his tears while she slapped bare male buttocks and knew from the stinging of her hands how much she hurt him. Then she reached for a ruler and hit him with the flat side half a dozen times. He was bawling loudly and she had to dodge a kick aimed at her face. She stood him up roughly and said, ‘Now make yourself decent’. He pulled up his pants and fixed his belt, crying more softly. He went out the door, then his head appeared and shouted, ‘You bloody bugger!’ and his footsteps defiantly raced down the wood floor of the corridor. But the insult didn’t hurt her. She felt immensely relieved, as from an abscess drained. She noticed with surprise that she was crying herself.
When Rogers went inside the hotel after throwing
Heath’s hat away, Mrs Palmer stopped him in the passage.
‘I’d like a little word with you, Paul,’ she said in a voice over-charged with apparently calm moral authority. ‘There’s just one
thing I want to know, that’s all. Whose side are you on? Ours or
theirs?’
‘I’m with the strikers, Mrs Palmer.’
‘Well, of course,’ she said quietly, ‘people are welcome to turn their coats if they want to. But they can’t expect to be very highly thought of.’
Rogers didn’t say anything.
‘But you kept on drinking,’ she said. ‘You paid sevenpence. What made you change your mind?’
‘Don,’ he said. ‘I wasn’t worried about the boycott, but I can’t stick up for a scab….I pushed him out of the way because I used to be his mate.’
‘It’s a funny sort of friendship that, pushing him around.’
‘I wanted to get him out of the road out of trouble. He’s only got to show his face and he’s a provocation to the strikers now.’
‘They wouldn’t dare touch him. So that’s friendship. They mean him harm and you take their side. What made you change?’
‘There’s one thing I can’t support and that’s a man stepping into another’s man’s job when he’s on strike.’
‘It was only for while the strike lasts. The other man could get his job back tomorrow.’
‘Your son’s helping to break a collective action, and I can’t be with you there. So I’m with the dredge-hands.’
‘Well, Paul, you make your bed, you’ve got to lie on it. There’s
one thing I admire and that’s loyalty. Oh, it only takes a bit of
trouble to sort out your friends from the passengers. It isn’t often
I’m wrong, but this time I was. I thought you were a sticker. I
‘I’m loyal to my principles,’ he said, resenting having to sound self-righteous.
‘Well, all I can say is they’re funny sort of principles that make you turn on your friends. If there’s one thing I admire it’s gratitude and now I’ve got to stand and see all my kindness thrown back in my face. We took you in and gave you the best of everything—
‘Well, I paid my way, Mrs Palmer.’
‘I never thought we’d ever come to putting a price-tag on kindness, Paul. We gave you better than you’d have got for your money anywhere else. We never made any profit out of you. I never thought you’d throw that up in my face—’
‘I didn’t, Mrs Palmer.’
‘We treated you as one of the family. And you shouldn’t need any
telling Palmers is a very tight family. We don’t take anyone into the
family like that. Well, I’ve got to admit my judgement was wrong in
your case.’
‘You didn’t buy me, Mrs Palmer. I know you’ve treated me well but you didn’t buy my independence.’
‘There you go again. Talking about the money side of it. There’s lots of things that money can’t buy—you’ll have to learn that—’
‘One of them is me,’ he said angrily. He felt that at any minute he would lose control of himself.
‘—and there’s lots of things no money in the world can buy for you and one of them is guts. If there’s one thing I admire it’s guts, Paul, and that’s a thing I’m very sorry to say you seem to be a bit short of. If you haven’t got the guts to stick to your friends how will you ever stick to anyone? Deserting a sinking ship because you find you’re unpopular with a few damn loafing strikers. A straw in the wind has got more principle.’
‘It looks as if I’d better leave, Mrs Palmer.’
‘Don’t think you’re giving notice, because I’m just getting in ahead of you. I’m giving you notice to go. You’ve got a week to go. My God, it’s just as well this happened to show you up in your true colours. Flora can see what you’re made of now. She might ha’ been taken in. We don’t want another Doris-and-Frank kind of marriage.’ She was no longer looking at Rogers; her big glassy eyes were staring straight ahead and she seemed dangerously worked up. ‘Get out of my way,’ she said, and pushed him aside with a contempt that was unfamiliar to him. She staggered to the slide. ‘Dad!’ she called, with panic in her voice, but limply, ‘Get’s a whisky. A double one. For God’s sake.’
‘Here, Lil, what’s wrong?’ Dad said and, seeing Rogers, called, ‘Paul!’ He gave her the whisky and she gulped it and revived. ‘Support her till I get round to her,’ he said.
‘Oh, get away!’ Mrs Palmer said, and staggering, pushed Rogers away.
‘What’s the trouble? Is it you that’s the cause of the trouble?’ Dad said. ‘Flora! Look here, young chap, if you’re going to try making trouble here about the strike you’ll be flung out and no concern for dignity either. I think you’d better get going.’
‘I just gave him notice,’ Mrs Palmer said. ‘Hold me, Dad.’
‘I can’t see why you take it so badly,’ Rogers said. ‘You don’t own me. I never led you to believe I’d be with you right or wrong. You take too much for granted.’
‘Bottle that up,’ Dad said. ‘Save it for your new friends. You can sell it sixpence a glass.’
Flora came up the passage. ‘Mum! What’s wrong?’ She supported her mother down towards her bedroom. ‘I’m leaving, Flor,’ Rogers said. She looked at him, but didn’t speak. Her look was pleading but bewildered and distant.
He went out on to the road again and walked to the doctor’s. The crowd of youths had dispersed. The doctor didn’t ask him in. They talked at the front door.
‘I’m glad about this,’ the doctor said. ‘I was thinking of coming up to ask you for the last time to think again. It’s not that the strikers need you. Your support can’t make any difference one way or the other. But you need them. If you were to condone young Palmer’s scabbery you’d never live it down.’
‘Yes. I realized that.’
‘It wasn’t before time that you found the courage to break with that family.’
‘She made me feel like a worm all the same. I still feel it. She almost collapsed. I felt it was my fault. It was too.’
‘You should have made your position clear earlier.’
‘The same thing would have happened. Only this was worse.’
‘Well, if you’ve got to shift, where’ll you go? I suppose we could manage.’
‘Thanks, but Jimmy Cairns said he’d take me.’
‘Yes, you’d he better off there. You won’t be looked after so much as at Palmers’. You’ll have to wait on yourself.’
‘I don’t need pampering!’ Roger said indignantly.
‘You’ll be in the thick of it there. It’ll do you good to live with a decent working family. It should correct all those individualist tendencies of yours.’
The jargon made Rogers wince but he wasn’t game to protest; yet as he walked back he felt as if he had taken a deep breath of clear fresh air. He wouldn’t have to compromise any more, or try to gloze a conflict of principles to ease the moment and grease away the future. But he couldn’t compliment himself on his stand, because he hadn’t made it soon enough.
Flora was at the door of the pub. ‘Oh, Paul,’ she said. ‘Everything’s going wrong. Mum’s in bed and she’s already been crying half the day. I gave her some sleeping tablets. Don’s a mess. I’ve never seen him so irritable. He’s shut himself in his room with some bottles of beer. Dad’s moody. And you’ve made it worse. Oh, why did you have to do it, Paul?’
‘I had to, Flora. I warned you I would. I can’t stay here now.’
‘Don’s not going to the dredge again. Dad said. You could stay.’
‘Not now. Your mother and I had a row. That was why she nearly collapsed. Didn’t your father tell you?’
‘She says things when she’s wild. She doesn’t mean them.’
‘Your father does. It wouldn’t do anyone any good. It’d be just as hard on them as on me.’
‘Where are you going?’
‘To Jimmy Cairns’s.’
‘Mum won’t like that. After you’ve been here. And after we took the pub from him. Oh, Paul, I’m sick of all this. I can’t leave them while they’re like this. Paul, we’re still engaged.’ It was half-question, half-protestation.
Now that he had established his independence again he saw her more clearly, as attractive as ever, and as lovable now that she made no demands on him.
‘Of course,’ he said. ‘It’s up to you, if you want to break it.’
‘You sound as if you don’t care much.’
‘Don’t be silly. It’s no time now to talk about that. I’ve been taking all that for granted.’
‘It’ll blow over soon, Paul. It must. Then we can be happy together again.’
‘Only if we make up our minds to be.’
‘Paul, don’t forget. Leave word with Doris, when you want to see me.’
Next morning, Dad said to Rogers, ‘I hear you’ve arranged to shift already. There’s no hope of Mum getting better while Don’s moping around the house and you’re still here. You don’t need a week’s notice. Here’s your last week’s board back.’ He gave Rogers £2. 10s. 0d.
‘I don’t want this, Mr Palmer,’ Rogers said. ‘I’m meaning that I want to leave this afternoon.’
Rogers pushed the money back on the slide, but Dad threw it at him again. Rogers picked it up and threw it on the floor of the bar. As he went to school he thought, ‘It would have served him right if I’d taken it for the strike fund.’ But a quarter of an hour later Flora found the money and put it in the till. Her father who had left it on the flour never thought of it again.
Mrs Palmer was up on the following day. She was more settled but more subdued and the family were worried about her. Don was helping in the bar. He was moody, and spoke seldom and sourly. At half-past seven in the morning they had heard the party of dredge-hands calling out that he was too windy to show his face. The family felt besieged. They had been our little in the last few weeks. When Mrs Palmer said that evening that she was going up to Doris and Frank’s, Dad said, ‘A bit of fresh air will do you good’. Flora went with her. They didn’t talk much. When they passed anyone in the dark Mrs Palmer was silent in case her voice should be recognized.
‘That’s where old Mrs Seldom lives,’ Flora said. ‘Down there.’
‘That’s Mike Herlihy’s mother-in-law. What I say is she can’t have much go in her or she would have won him round long ago. Fancy a family splitting on itself. It’s not natural. If any mother told me her sons or daughters had turned on her I’d tell her she only had herself to blame. She hadn’t kept in touch with them.’
‘It was Mrs Seldom who turned on Nora.’
‘Oh, this is a mad town, Flora. I wish to God we could get out of it.’
She had brought a bottle of whisky. Doris got glasses. Frank wouldn’t have any.
‘Now, Frank,’ Mrs Palmer said. ‘I’m tired of all this rot about the
boycott. Don’t say you’re going to turn on your own.’
‘Frank’s stuck to the boycott all along,’ Doris said.
‘It’s a union decision and I’m sticking by it,’ Frank said. ‘I want to keep my job.’
‘Well, you’re not working now,’ Mrs Palmer said. ‘That’s a fine way of keeping your job, being on strike.’
‘We’ll be back before long,’ Frank said. ‘I’ve got a duty to Doris to keep my job.’
‘Why couldn’t you be like Don? Go on working? You’ve got a
‘Oh, Mum, don’t start more trouble,’ Flora said.
‘Well, I’m having a spot,’ Mum said. ‘And I’m not drinking on my own. You can have a whisky. It’s only beer that the trouble is over.’
‘No,’ Frank said. ‘If it came from the pub it’s black.’
‘Well, I’m having one, Frank,’ Doris said. ‘Not that I want it. But I’ve got to keep Mum company.’
‘You please yourself,’ Frank said. ‘But leave me out of it.’
‘That’s a good girl, Drip,’ Mrs Palmer said.
‘Don’t call her that, Mum, it’s a silly name,’ Frank said.
‘We’ve called her that since she was a baby,’ Mum said. ‘Before you had heard of her. When you were running round this damn town with dirty legs in tom pants.’
‘Mum, stop that,’ Doris said.
‘Don’t get yourself worked up, Mum,’ Flora said.
‘Look what happened to Don anyway,’ Frank said. ‘Scabbing didn’t get him far. You should have known better and kept him at home.’
‘Don’s got a mind of his own,’ Mrs Palmer said. ‘Who’s his old mother to stop him from doing his duty?’
‘I’ll bet you had a hand in sending him to the dredge,’ Frank said.
‘Oh, you, I didn’t come here to talk to you. Doris, I want a word
with you. You haven’t been up to see us all through this trouble.
You should think of your old Dad more. He’s not well. Don’t say I
didn’t warn you. Don’t be surprised if something happens to him
suddenly. And then you’ll be sorry you never came to see him and
it’ll be too late….’
‘Oh, Mum,’ Flora said. ‘Dad’s not ill. It’s you that’s ill.’
‘Well, I’d like to see you too, Doris. We might as well be pushing up damn daisies for all the times you come to see us. It’s not right that Flora and I should have to come up here. We can entertain you at our place.’
‘Can’t we entertain you? What’s wrong with my place?’ Frank said.
‘If you want to know why we haven’t been up,’ Doris said, ‘it’s because every time we come the first thing you do is push a beer down our throats, and Frank said it’d only mean trouble if we refused you.’
‘So you’d turn on your Mum and Dad for the sake of a damn union. My God, Doris, we never brought you up to that line of philosophy.’
‘I’m married now, Mum,’ Doris said. ‘My first duty is to Frank.’
‘And Frank’s first duty is to you. He should he working right
now to pay for your clothes and groceries. You should be enjoying
life, drinking our health and us drinking yours, instead of worrying
about union decisions. The union won’t let you live. I believe in
life.’ She held up her glass, as if toasting.
‘I can’t stick this. I’m off to bed, Doris,’ Frank said, and left them.
Mrs Palmer lifted her head and puffed out of her nose. ‘Doris, I tell you for the second time, remember your poor old parents. We’re in trouble, Doris. Everyone’s turning against us. First Miss Dane walked out. Now Paul’s left us. Why, I thought he was one of the finest young fullahs you’d lay eyes on, just a match for Dopy here….’
‘Oh, Mum, stop it,’ Flora said.
‘Don’t worry, pet. He’s shown his true colours now.’
‘What did he do?’ Doris said.
‘He’s left,’ Flora said. ‘He’s staying at Cairns’s.’
‘Said he couldn’t stick Don working on the dredge,’ Mum said. ‘It took the heart out of me. I had to go to bed.’
‘Paul didn’t bother about the boycott,’ Doris said. ‘Frank said the miners were wild with him. Fancy Jimmy taking him in.’
‘Then he’s got no friends anywhere,’ Mum said. ‘Serve him right. They aren’t his friends. They’re just using him. I’ll bet Jessie Cairns tips him out when the boycott’s over.’
‘Why, Mum?’ Flora asked.
‘They aren’t his friends. He’ll find out. He’s turning on his own class.’
‘Oh, Mum,’ Flora said. ‘We’re all the same in New Zealand. There aren’t any classes.’
‘Doris, I’m telling you,’ Mum said, ‘it’s time we saw more of you. We’d like some recognition, to show that everyone’s not against us. Don’s moping round looking sick on it.’
‘Well, I’ve no sympathy with Don for what he did, Mum.’
‘Doris, you’re not going to turn on your own brother?’
‘Frank’s right. I know you too well. You made him do it.’
‘Oh, Frank, Frank. Frank this, Frank that! Forget that damn union slave of a snarling husband you got hold of when your eyes must ha’ been out of order!’
‘Now, Mum, don’t come up here to start trouble.’
‘I am going to make trouble, Doris. It’s time you came home to
us. Forget that surly rough, that bloody guttersnipe. What sort of a
home did he come from?’
‘Stop it, Mum! Stop it!’ Doris said.
‘Mum!’ Flora said.
‘What do you stick to him for?’ Mrs Palmer said. ‘How many babies has he given you, tell me that?’
‘Mum!’ Doris screamed and ran to her mother and slapped her face. ‘You know very well. You know very well it’s not Frank’s fault I can’t have any. That’s a dirty thing to say. My own mother!’
Flora separated them. Mrs Palmer had sagged and was crying, ‘My own daughter slapped my face,’ she said. ‘My own Drip to hit her Mum on the face.’
‘Doris, you shouldn’t have done it,’ Flora said.
‘Well, she shouldn’t have said what she did!’ Doris said. ‘I’d do it again if she said it again.’
Frank came out in his pyjamas. ‘Here, what’s all the barney about?’
Doris said, ‘Oh, we’ve been scrapping. Now, no more of that, Mum. I won’t stand it. I think you’d better go home.’
‘Give us another whisky, pet,’ Mum said. Flora poured a glass.
‘No. No more. You’ve had enough tonight,’ Frank said. ‘That’s what’s making you so bitchy.’
‘He won’t even let me drink my own whisky,’ she whimpered; and Doris said, ‘Let her have it, Frank. It’s small consolation.’
‘Come on, Mum, it’s time you were home in bed,’ Frank said.
‘She’ll hardly be able to walk home,’ Flora said. ‘Let her rest for a while.’
Mum sat brooding. After a while she said, ‘I never thought our little Drip would turn on her mother. Someone’s been poisoning you against us, and I know who that someone is. You, Lindsay! You poisoned Drip against us!’
‘Mum!’ Flora said.
‘Oh, don’t be silly,’ Frank said. ‘And don’t call her Drip.’
‘You keep your damn sticky beak out of our family affairs,’ Mrs Palmer said. ‘Our private family affairs. We were a good family till you all grew up and started getting notions. Don found out his old Mum and Dad were worth twenty Myras. And Doris’ll find out yet how much good to her you are!’
‘Mum, go easy,’ Flora said. ‘You’ll be getting yourself worked up again.’
‘Loafer! Loafer!’ Mrs Palmer said, standing up. ‘My daughter married a loafer!’
‘You’ll have to take her home, Flora,’ Frank said. ‘The whisky’s gone to her head.’
‘Mum,’ Flora said, ‘You be careful or I’ll lose my temper too.’
‘You didn’t even give me any grand-children. You couldn’t do
‘Stop it,’ Frank said. He held the heel of his hand poised as if for a rabbit-punch. ‘Take her home, Flora,’ he said. ‘We can’t have her carrying on like this all night.’
‘I’ll stay and make your night miserable,’ Mrs Palmer said. ‘I’ll be the prick of your conscience. If Don couldn’t go to work without the dredgies yapping at his heels I won’t let you stay on strike without putting a sting in your tail.’
‘Come on, Mum,’ Flora said and pulled at her arm.
‘Now, don’t you start, Dopy,’ Mrs Palmer said. ‘Or I’ll have no one left to stick up for me.’
‘I’ve never seen her like this before,’ Doris said. ‘She can’t walk home. We’ll have to get a car. Would the doctor take her home in his car?’
She went into the house next door and phoned Dad. Dad said he wasn’t going to be under any obligation to the doctor. The policeman didn’t have a car. There was a taxi in the town, but he doubted if the owner would agree because of the boycott and he wouldn’t give him the chance of refusing. He said he would ring Rae and ask Miss Dane to drive up for Mrs Palmer.
Dad and Don waited outside the hotel as Miss Dane drove up. ‘Good evening,’ she said pertly, ‘Whatever is the trouble, Mr Palmer?’
‘Mum’s in a bad way,’ Dad said. ‘I’ll come with you.’
‘Are you coming too, Mr Palmer?’ she said coldly to Don. She saw with satisfaction how dispirited he looked. He looked about him to see if anyone was coming.
‘If you need me, Dad.’
‘Flora’s there. There won’t be room in the car,’ Dad said.
‘I hear you’re on strike yourself,’ Miss Dane said, already half-relenting her cattiness. Don didn’t answer.
‘Oh, really, Mrs Palmer,’ Miss Dane said as they helped Mum into the car. ‘You do hit the bottle too much.’
‘Mum only had three whiskies, Miss Dane,’ Flora said. ‘She’s run down with worry. Oh, Dad, she said some awful things to Doris. I think I ought to stay with Doris for the night.’
‘It’d be better to come home and look after Mum,’ Dad said.
‘Don’t you walk out on me too,’ Mrs Palmer said. ‘Everyone’s walking out on Mum. Miss Dane and Paul.’
‘Now, Lil,’ Dad said. ‘Miss Dane was good enough to come out on a frosty night to drive you home.’
‘Don’t take any notice of me,’ Mrs Palmer said. ‘I get like this occasionally, just for the fun of it. So would you if everyone walked out on you. Drip slapped my face, Dad. Flora, I left the whisky behind. Go back and get it, there’s a good girl.’
Mrs Palmer was herself again the next morning. Flora was surprised to find her up before anyone else, bustling with the breakfast
in the kitchen. She served the two remaining boarders with unusual
cheerfulness; clerks at the post office and the mine office—
Flora told Don about her mother’s performance the night before.
‘Mum isn’t fair,’ she said. ‘She said some rotten things to Doris.’
‘Doris shouldn’t have hit her,’ Don said.
‘I might have done the same myself if she had said that to me. About not having babies. She knows very well it’s not Frank’s fault.’
‘Mum’s not well these days. You can’t blame her for going over the edge.’
‘You should talk, Don. Look what she made you do. She made you look a fool in front of the dredge-hands.’
‘If you can buck Mum’s will, Flora, you’re stronger than I am. She’s the strongest-willed woman I know.’
‘Well, it’s not fair if she expects to get her own way with everyone. Other people have got wills too. What about Myra? She didn’t get a fair deal.’
‘Forget Myra. Don’t open old wounds, Flora. I’ll never speak to her again. She tried to make trouble between me and Mum.’
‘Well, you had to make the choice, Don.’
‘We could have all lived together and been happy. There was no need to make a battle out of it.’
‘I’m beginning to wonder about that, Don.’
‘Well, I don’t blame Doris for sticking up for herself. But I’ll never fight Mum. And if anyone’s to settle these troubles it’s Dad. You shouldn’t worry about it. Doris isn’t your concern.’
‘It might be my concern, too. What if I wanted to get married? I’d want to be free.’
‘You don’t mean you’re going to walk out on us for Paul, do you? He’s caused enough trouble in this house. He hasn’t got a friend in the world now.’
Flora didn’t answer.
That evening she knocked on Jimmy Cairns’s door. Russell Cairns answered. ‘It’s the girl of Palmer,’ he called.
‘Well, Flora,’ Jessie Cairns said. ‘It’s a surprise seeing you.’
‘I know what you want,’ Jimmy called. ‘You want me to buy the pub back because you’re losing on it. I can’t afford it.’
‘Is Paul in?’ Flora said.
‘Come in then and sit down,’ Jessie said. ‘He’s helping the kids with their homework. I don’t know what Heath’d say if he knew. I said he’d need to do it to make up for Heath giving Dick the strap for calling him scab. I’m bringing that up at the committee meeting tomorrow too.’
Russell was sitting on the floor in front of the coal stove saying his reading. Rogers was sitting at the table helping Dick with his arithmetic. Two girls, younger than Dick, were squabbling over possession of a pencil.
‘Hullo, Flora,’ Rogers said. ‘You’ve caught me working.’
‘It should be interesting, Paul,’ she said. ‘You make me jealous, being with children all the time.’
‘You try it for a while,’ he said. ‘Especially with little ruffians like these ones.’
‘Here, you,’ Jessie said. ‘Don’t you start insulting our kids. They’re the apples of my eye.’
‘You never said that when I wanted to go to the pictures last week,’ Dick said.
‘I am not a ruffian,’ one of the girls said.
‘Now, Betty, I only meant the boys,’ Rogers said.
‘He called me a ruffian. I know a name to call him,’ Dick said. ‘I can too. Mr Heath gave me the strap for it.’
‘Now son. Cut that out,’ Jimmy said. ‘We’ve had enough of that. Your teacher’s on our side now.’
‘He’s not my teacher.’
‘Well, he’s one of the teachers. You can show a bit of respect for him anyway.’
‘I’d like to have a chat with you, Paul,’ Flora said.
‘Okay, Flora,’ Rogers said, getting up from his chair.
‘Take a seat, Flora,’ Jessie said. ‘Here, Betty, get up and let Flora sit down.’
‘I won’t stay long,’ Flora said. ‘I’ll stand.’
‘Old Don didn’t send you, did he, Flora?’ Jimmy asked. ‘Or your mother?’
‘No, Mr Cairns,’ she said. ‘They don’t know I’m here.’
‘Well, look,’ Jessie said, ‘you won’t get much of a chance to talk
‘We have not,’ said Betty. ‘We can keep secrets.’
‘Well, you won’t get a chance,’ Rogers said. ‘We’ll go for a walk instead.’
‘Go into the front room if you like,’ Jessie said. ‘There’s no fire. Dick can make a fire for you.’
‘No, thanks, I’d just as soon have a walk,’ Flora said.
‘You might run into Winnie,’ Jessie said. ‘She’s out somewhere with Arty Nicholson.’
It was a dull night threatening rain. The mist was low on the hills but you couldn’t see much in the dark. There was already a fine drizzle in the air.
‘I’m glad you left, now, Paul,’ Flora said.
‘Why?’ he asked.
‘Mum gets too much of her own way,’ she said. ‘We went to Doris’s last night. She tried to turn Doris against Frank. It’s not right. She said something Doris’ll hardly forgive her for.’
‘What?’
‘I shouldn’t tell you. Can you keep it to yourself?’
‘Course. If you think I ought to know.’
‘Doris can’t have children. Mum said Frank was too mean to give her any.’
‘Oh, surely?’
‘Doris slapped her face. Mum broke up. We had to get Miss Dane to drive her home in her car.’
‘What did Don think?’
‘Don lets Mum rule him. He could have been happily married if he’d had more independence…. Paul, Doris and Frank are happy enough, even without children. I’ve thought over what you said the other afternoon, in the wash-house. I want to go ahead with it, Paul. I don’t care what happens. I feel terrible doing this, behind Mum and Dad’s back, just when they’re in trouble. But I’ve got to. They think I’ve broken off the engagement now. They didn’t say so. They just take it for granted.’
‘It’s hard for you, Flora…. But don’t worry about it. Because you know I’ll do everything I can for you.’
‘There’s something else, Paul, you mustn’t tell anyone. I think Dad’s thinking of moving. He’s looking for another pub, away from the Coast. He didn’t say anything. But I can tell. If they go, Paul, I’m not going with them. I’ve had to face it, Paul. I can’t spend all my life with my parents. I’ve got to think of my own future. I want a home of my own, too.’
‘We’ll manage together, Flora. Whatever happens.’
‘Oh Paul, I know I’ve been silly. I shut my eyes to a lot of things…. You don’t know how it hurts me, Mum and Dad have been everything to me, before I started with you.’
‘Don’t think twice about it, Flora. Once you’ve made your mind up, you’ll have to stick to it. But there’s something else, Flora.’
‘What?’
‘You’ve lived such a sheltered life. There’s so much you don’t understand. I talked politics to you. I thought you understood. But I didn’t even understand, myself. It was just talk. Airing opinions that were a bit different. It was the blind leading the blind. I’ve learnt now, you’ve got to stick by working people. Flora, all these troubles you and I have had, they might happen all over again. If you leave home and we marry, you won’t be leading the same kind of life you were used to….’
‘I don’t care about that, Paul.’
‘There’ll be other occasions in the Flat. Disputes and strikes. All sorts of political issues. Your whole upbringing will make you see things different from the way I see them. You’ve got to know what you’re letting yourself in for.’
‘I don’t pretend that I understand these things, Paul. I’ll just have to trust you on them.’
‘That’s not good enough, though, I’ll explain and explain. I don’t ask you to swallow everything I say just because I say it. I mean, we don’t want to have arguments later on. You know what I mean?’
‘Doris managed. She doesn’t have any arguments with Frank. The only time they argue is when they see Mum.’
They stood together by wet blackberry bushes at the side of the
road for several minutes. Rogers put his arms tenderly around this
girl who had taken the hardest decision of her life. It wasn’t like the
night when they stood overlooking the creek and Peter Herlihy was
foxing them, when they had been so deeply confident and happy.
Now they saw each other as two independent people, needing each
other if they wanted to establish their independence and self-respect so that they could live fruitfully among their neighbours.
The night was silent without the dredge; only an occasional drip
from a blackberry leaf. He saw the vitality in her glossy hair tinily
beaded with mist, in the clear skin of her tender ripening features
and her frank devoted glistening eyes. Her face looked stronger,
now that she had made up her mind. ‘I won’t let you down,’ he said.
She felt his strength and knew then that with him she could face
most things, and her older problems dwindled. They felt a strong
physical desire for each other, but neither wanted to act on it, not
‘I’ll have to get back,’ she said. ‘Or they’ll be wondering where I am.’
When they got back, Flora’s face was glowing, the glow emphasized by the wet, and by the mist on her hair like dew on a spider web. Rogers, too, though he didn’t know it, was animated. The children were in bed.
‘Here, you two, have you been drinking?’ Jessie asked. ‘You look so fresh, both of you.’
‘Ah, Flora sneaked him up home for a couple of sevenpennies,’ Jimmy said. ‘You have to watch those Palmers. All publicans are the same.’
‘We’ve only been for a walk,’ Rogers said.
‘Stretching our legs,’ Flora said.
‘Ah, what it is to be young,’ Jimmy said. ‘Do you remember, Jessie, that pozzy we had under the birch at the top of old Ned Seldom’s? He came out one night with a stick. He thought it was Mike Herlihy. You should have seen his face when he found it was us.’
‘The names he called us,’ Jessie said. ‘It makes me feel old to think of it. Will you have a cup of tea, Flora?’
‘I never used to drink tea at this time,’ Jimmy said.
‘He never used to be home at this time, that’s why,’ Jessie said. ‘He was always up at your pub before the boycott, Flora.’
‘We had a pozzy in the scrub where the new school is,’ Jimmy said. ‘Money was short then. You couldn’t take your girl to the pictures. You made do with the entertainment nature gave you.’
‘Here, don’t tell everyone,’ Jessie said. ‘Flora’s blushing.’
‘So is Paul,’ Jimmy said. ‘Anybody’d think they didn’t know what it was.’
Flora and Rogers began to laugh. There were tears in his eyes as he laughed.
Heath stopped Rogers in the school corridor the morning
after Rogers had thrown his hat away. ‘Would you come into
my office, Mr Rogers?’ he asked. ‘I’ve got to have a word with you.’
Inside the office he said, ‘There’s no doubt you thought yourself very clever last night, showing off in front of the crowd. The things a man will do for popularity.’
‘I did you a favour, Mr Heath,’ Rogers said. ‘Some of those lads were ganging up to attack you.’
‘A funny sort of favour, Mr Rogers, making a fool of a man. They wouldn’t have dared to attack me.’
‘I heard them planning it. In another minute they’d have been at you.’
‘Really, Mr Rogers, do you think I’m frightened of a few larrikins from a coal-mine? It’s a pity they didn’t attack me. They’d have been in trouble then. I’d have had them up for assault.’
‘That’s what I was trying to prevent.’
‘So you’re on their side now. Well, I’ve been called many names, Mr Rogers, but turncoat’s not one of them.’
‘You were provoking those lads, and the men too,’ Rogers said. ‘How can you call them rabble? Who are you to call them rabble?’
‘I was giving them a lesson on their place in society,’ Heath said.
‘They don’t seem to know it. Pleasing themselves whether they’ll go to work or not. What would happen if I thought I’d stay home when I felt like it? What would those men say if we went on strike and their children weren’t getting the education they’re entitled to?’
‘The men are striking for a purpose. If we had a purpose in a strike I think they’d sympathize with us.’
‘Purpose you call it! To cheat a publican out of a penny profit. You didn’t think much of the purpose yourself a few days ago.’
‘I’m not condoning one man scabbing when other men are on strike.’
‘Well, you’re not so pally with your precious young Palmer any
‘I’m not arguing about that, Mr Heath. I tell you I saved the peace last night.’
‘I could have had you up for assault. I saw the constable again this morning.’
‘Mr Rae said he was letting it go.’
‘Yes, and he’s not doing his duty properly. Only because he’s got so much else on his hands. But there’ll be extra police up here soon, and you’d better not try anything like that again. And I warn you, I’m gunning for you now, Mr Rogers. I’ll do everything I can to get you removed from this school and no holds barred. No one’s going to make a fool of me and get away with it.’
‘How will you do that?’
‘I’ll turn the teachers against you, the children, the parents. I’ll complain to the committee—’
‘It wouldn’t be the first time.’
‘How do you know that?’
‘You warned me yourself. And you ought to know there’s not many secrets in this town.’
‘Some of your friends have been talking. Well, I have friends on the committee too. And then there’s the Board. I won’t have a good word to say for you when the inspectors come.’
‘At least you’re honest,’ Rogers said, unconvinced of the threat. ‘But I wouldn’t give you many marks for fairness.’
‘I was fair for long enough. It’s war now. All’s fair in love and war.’
With the superiority of a young man happily in love, who cannot believe older people were ever in love, he said, ‘I wonder how much you know about love.’
‘Get out!’ Heath shouted. He took this as a reference to his strained relations with his wife. How did Rogers know? But Rogers didn’t know. He only knew that from now on he would have to be careful in his dealings with Heath. The first casualty of the cold war would be Peter Herlihy. It would be as much as he could do in the meantime to protect him from Heath.
Heath kept coming into the classroom without any pretexts.
‘Excuse me, Miss Dane,’ he would say, ‘just carry on,’ and without
apology or introduction would watch Rogers teach, ask children to
let him see their printing, test them at reading, see if the register
was marked. Every day for three days he asked for Peter Herlihy,
but Peter Herlihy wasn’t there. He hadn’t appeared at school since
the afternoon Miss Dane slapped him. Rogers asked the children
did they know if he was ill. A boy said no, he wasn’t because he’d
The third morning that Heath inquired for Peter, Miss Dane said, ‘I must say the room is a lot more peaceful without him. Really he was most insulting to me the other day. I’m afraid I was rather severe on him.’
‘That’s the way,’ Heath said. ‘He’s had more than enough of his own way with Mr Rogers.’
‘I’m wondering if that’s why he’s staying away from school,’ she said. ‘Do you think his parents know? They haven’t complained, have they?’
‘I’m not going to stand any more parents interfering with school discipline,’ Heath said. ‘That’s the trouble with this town. Even the parents don’t understand discipline. I’d like to see martial law in this town.’
‘Really, Mr Heath, you’re not serious? We’re overcrowded now, with three extra constables. I’m having to sleep in Mrs Rae’s room.’
‘Well, if they’re here to protect Herlihy, we’ll have to see that he sends his boy to school. If he stays away long enough I’ll report truancy. There’s nothing wrong with the boy. Some of my class saw him with his father on the dredge yesterday after school.’
‘Then perhaps his parents do know. I hope they’re not going to complain.’
‘I’ll do nothing just yet,’ Heath said. ‘It’d do that boy good to be dealt with by the law. Then I’ll put him up for truancy.’
‘But his father will have to pay the fine.’
‘It’ll teach his father to send the boy to school. Herlihy might be the only man working at the dredge, but he’s got to learn to bring that boy up the same way. Otherwise he’ll just be a law to himself like the strikers.’
Rogers overheard this conversation. He made up his mind to try to get Peter back to school. That evening he went to see Mike Herlihy. As he approached the house he heard a gentle rustle in the scrub and an intermittent scuttle of feet. ‘Is that you Peter?’ he called into the dark. There was no answer, only an intense silence. He was still unused to the heaviness of the silence since the dredge stopped working. But there was a slight movement, the snapping of a twig and a rustle of leaves as from a sudden withdrawal. ‘Peter!’ he called. ‘Come on out. I know you’re there.’ Then he saw a pale patch in the leaves, and knew it was Peter’s face watching him. There was a suppressed snigger. ‘I won’t bite you, Peter,’ he said. ‘I want to talk to you.’
Peter didn’t move. ‘I’m not coming back to school again.’ he said.
‘Why not?’
‘’Cause it’s mad. You all growl at me. You’re just the same as Miss Dane. You only pretend you’re not crabby.’
‘We’ll be back in our own room in a week. Miss Dane won’t growl at you then.’
‘Mr Heath’ll come in and growl. You never say anything when they do. You should fight them.’
‘I can’t fight them, Peter.’
‘You’re scared of them. I wouldn’t be scared of Miss Dane if I was as big as you. I’d hit her. I’d make her take her pants down and I’d put her across my knees and I’d hit her behind with a ruler.’
‘Oh Peter, don’t be silly. Is that a thing to be proud of? You can fight boys, you don’t need to fight girls.’
‘She did that to me.’
‘When?’
‘That day I threw the plasticine at her.’
‘That’s why you didn’t come back to school?’
‘I’m not coming back either. They won’t find me. I hide. No one knows my hidey-hole.’
‘You shouldn’t have thrown the plasticine, Peter.’
‘I’m glad I did. I told her that secret.’
‘What secret?’
‘The one you said not to tell. About the man and lady that did that thing in the scrub. They were in my hidey-hole. The man burnt my drawing. I’ve found another hidey-hole now. It’s a better one. They won’t find it. You don’t know where it is.’
‘I don’t want to know. You keep it a secret. Why did you tell Miss Dane your secret? I thought you didn’t like her.’
‘’Cause it was her. It was her and Donnie Palmer’s father that were in my hidey-hole.’
‘Peter! Is that true?’
‘Yes, and I told her and she made me take my pants off and she hit me on the behind. I’m glad I told her too.’
‘Well, you’re not to tell anyone else, understand, Peter? You have to keep that to yourself. Don’t tell anyone. Or you’ll get mixed up in all sorts of trouble.’
‘You should’ve stopped her,’ Peter said. ‘You shouldn’t ‘ve let her hit me.’
‘I wasn’t there.’
‘When she said she wasn’t goin’ to let you punish me she was goin’ to do it herself, you should ‘a’ said, “No! No! Miss Dane. Peter’s in my class. You be quiet or I’ll hit you!” That’s what you could ‘a’ said.’
‘I thought she’d only growl at you.’
‘You only pretended to he kind to me. You never stuck up for me when Heath growled at me. You didn’t stop old Ma Hansen giving me the strap. You let Miss Dane nag-nag-nag at me all day and hit me. You’re not fair.’
‘I’ll try to do better next time, Peter. Come back to school and you’ll see.’
‘No.’
‘I’ll have to see your father, Peter. He doesn’t know you’re wagging school.’
‘Don’t you!’
‘Your father won’t growl at you.’
‘Mum will.’
‘They might growl a little now. If you stay away longer they’ll growl a lot more. Then the policeman will come, not me.’
‘If you tell my father I’ll tell that secret.’
‘Don’t talk silly, Peter. If you tell that secret you’ll be hurting yourself, not me.’
‘I’ll say it was you. Miss Dane and you.’
‘Don’t be mad, Peter. No one would believe you.’
‘I’ll say it was you and the kids like Donnie Palmer said to you that time, and you got wild.’
‘No one would believe you, Peter. I’m going up to your place now.’
‘Then Mr Heath’ll give you the strap and the policeman’ll take you to gaol.’
‘Peter!’ he called. ‘Come here.’ But there was a rustle of leaves, a few soft footsteps and Peter wasn’t there; he was hidden somewhere in his new retreat.’
There was a young policeman outside Herlihy’s house. He stopped Rogers. ‘What is it you want?’ he said.
‘I want to see Mr Herlihy.’
‘What about?’
‘That’s my business.’
‘It’s not in connection with the strike, is it?’
‘No.’
‘What’s your job?’
‘I’m a teacher at the school.’
‘You can go in then. Excuse me being so strict, but we’ve had instructions. We’re frightened some of them might try to get at Herlihy.’
‘I don’t think you know this town very well,’ Rogers said.
‘You’d be surprised. They put a brick through Rae’s window in the last lot of trouble here. They’ll stop at nothing, these bloody miners, you know. I’m not taking any chances anyway.’
‘What made you join the police force, anyway?’ Rogers asked.
‘Well, I reckoned New Zealand’s a peaceable country and a chap’d never be in any trouble except looking up drunks that got a bit nasty. I’m a peaceable man m’self, and I’m not one to go badgering my own. But, bugger me, these bloody miners and dredgies come along and spoil it. If it wasn’t for them we cops’d be on peaceable terms with everyone. If they’re going to knock people about they deserve to be knocked about. And no one’ll enjoy doing it more than I will either.’
‘Perverse people,’ Rogers said, ‘spoiling your soft job.’
‘There’s nothing too soft about it,’ the policeman said with a slight whine. ‘You ought to try it yourself and see.’
Rogers knocked on the door and it half-opened. Nora Herlihy’s face peered intently at him. ‘Is Mr Herlihy home?’ he said.
She continued to stare at him. ‘What were you wanting?’ she asked.
He hesitated: he did not want to talk by her doorstep. ‘It’s about Peter,’ he said. ‘I’m his teacher.’
‘What’s the little bugger done now?’ she asked.
‘Is that for me, Nora?’ a sour voice called. ‘Bring him in, whoever he is. Don’t leave him standing out in the frost.’
She looked at his feet and he was careful to wipe them on the mat. She did not offer to take his overcoat. She took her place by the stove and watched him from over her shoulder. They did not offer him a seat.
‘Oh, it’s you,’ Mike said. He was bleary and sodden from beer and his eyes were more sullen and shifty than usual. ‘What’s the trouble?’
‘No trouble really,’ Rogers said. ‘I thought I ought to let you know Peter hasn’t been to school for three days.’
‘The little brat,’ Nora said. ‘Where does he get to? He takes his bag with him every morning.’
‘I believe he was riding with the grocer one day,’ Rogers said.
‘You’re a bit late, young fullah,’ Mike said. ‘Heath told me this afternoon in the pub.’
‘Why didn’t you speak to him?’ Nora demanded. ‘You should have had it out with him at tea-time.’
‘It’s time the boy had some peace,’ Mike said. ‘There’s too many people nagging at him as it is. There’s no need for you to be on his tail like a dog worrying sheep.’ He addressed this last remark to Rogers.
‘I’m not,’ Rogers said. ‘Peter’s a good kid. He’s no trouble if you understand him.’
‘Understand him!’ Nora said. ‘The devil himself wouldn’t understand him.’
‘You seem to know a lot about kids for one that hasn’t any himself,’ Mike said.
‘I don’t know a lot,’ Rogers said. ‘But I like to encourage them, not to restrain them.’
‘You encourage that boy and you’ll find you’ve encouraged just a bit more than you can handle,’ Nora said. ‘You remember my words now.’ She turned and muttered, ‘Bloody teachers they have nowadays.’ She screamed, ‘I don’t want him going to school to learn to be cheeky!’
‘Peter’s got a lot more talent than anyone in the class,’ Rogers said.
‘He’s got a talent for getting into trouble,’ Nora said. She turned back to the stove.
‘I like him,’ Rogers said. ‘I’d like to see all his vitality turned to good instead of nastiness.’
‘Oh, so you like him, do you?’ Mike said. ‘So he must be good if you like him. It’ll be more than you can do to turn evil to good. When anyone starts talking like that I tell him to look at the evil in his own heart.’
‘More of his bloody Doolan nonsense,’ Nora said.
‘That’s no excuse to give up trying,’ Rogers said.
‘Why did you come here then?’ Mike said, ‘If you say you’re not nagging at the kid?’
‘Because if I hadn’t come to warn you, Heath was going to report him for truancy.’
‘Ah, that’s caught you out!’ Nora said, turning round. ‘Liar! You reckoned Heath told you Peter was wagging school. He hadn’t told you at all. You just wouldn’t let on to the schoolteacher that you didn’t know.’
Herlihy snarled.
‘He’d have had the policeman round,’ Rogers said.
‘We don’t want to fall out with Rae,’ Nora screamed. ‘Not at a time like this. I’ll make sure the little bugger goes to school tomorrow.’
Mike didn’t comment. Rogers was awkward standing. There was no third chair or he would have helped himself. He noticed the inhuman tidiness of the kitchen. He wanted to plead with them to treat Peter better but where could he start?—They would resent his interference, and Nora might even be harder on the boy if he did. He wondered how Mike felt now about the strike.
‘Mr Herlihy,’ he said, ‘why can’t you give up the beer for a few days? The strike’d end then and you wouldn’t have to rely on police protection. The publicans’d be beaten then and they’d give in, You’d get your beer cheaper.’
He was surprised that it was Nora who answered him. ‘You keep your sticky beak out of this,’ she screamed. ‘We’re not giving in to any damn union.’
‘Who are you to talk?’ Mike said. ‘You used to be very thick with the Palmers yourself once. I seem to remember seeing you coughing up sevenpence in the bar. Or was it my eyesight troubling me?’
‘I was wrong,’ Rogers said. ‘They had no right to send Don to the dredge.’
‘You mean I have no right to be working, is that it?’
‘You’re not doing yourself any good,’ Rogers said.
‘You mean I have no right to be working, yes or no?’
‘Frankly, I do mean that.’
‘Then you can get out!’ Nora screamed. ‘Go back to your bloody schoolbooks and keep your nose in your own business.’
There was a knock and the door opened. ‘Everything all right?’ the policeman asked. ‘I heard your voices raised.’
‘Yes, we’re all right,’ Mike said in a surly way.
‘Tell this schoolteacher to get out and leave us in peace,’ Nora said.
‘I’m just going,’ Rogers said. The policeman watched him with a close puzzled look as he held the door open for him.
At first Mike Herlihy didn’t believe it. He was not a man who tried to read other people, yet Rogers hadn’t seemed the man one would have suspected was capable of it. But it was just as inconceivable that his son could think up such an accusation without some prompting from fact. Peter had come home late that night. His mother had gone to bed; she usually went to bed early. His sandals were wet with dew and he was shivering from the cold night air. He knelt by the stove to warm himself while his father opened the grate and poked the coal into a blaze.
‘Why haven’t you been going to school?’ Mike said.
‘I have,’ Peter said. ‘I have so. I was there every day.’
‘Now don’t start lying to me,’ Mike said. ‘Your teacher’s just been to see me about it.’
Peter gave him a hunted look. His lips quivered—from the cold, Mike thought. ‘I was frightened,’ Peter said. ‘I was frightened of the teacher.’
Mike gave a conciliatory sneer. He did not like arguing with his son but he was even more afraid of demonstrating sympathy. ‘What teacher?’ he asked. ‘Rogers?’
Peter trimmed his argument from an instinctive desire to appease his father by collaboration. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Yes. He growls at me.’
To surmount his resistance to expressing any attitude to his son, either of scorn or affection, Mike had to force himself. ‘You can’t tell me you’re frightened of a bit of growling.’
‘He hits me too,’ Peter said. He was afraid of his father’s taciturnity. He now felt that his father’s goodwill stood or fell by his ability to justify his story.
‘He didn’t talk like that,’ Mike said. ‘He sounded as if he’s got a lot of time for you.’ He couldn’t exclude a sneer.
‘Oh, he has not,’ Peter said. ‘He growls at me. He tells me things too.’
‘What sort of things?’
‘Secrets. He tells me secrets and I’m not allowed to tell anyone.’
‘What sort of secrets?’
‘He told me a story about a man and a lady in the scrub. It was Miss Dane and Donnie Palmer’s father. And Miss Dane hit me. It was all Mr Rogers’s fault. He could have stopped her.’
‘You’re making it up.’
‘I am not. He did so tell me.’
Mike became more articulate. ‘What did he tell you that for? It wasn’t true?’
Peter continued steering his course by his father’s assumptions. ‘No, it wasn’t true. Mr Rogers tells lies.’
‘What did he tell you that for?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘What is it you’re scared of then?’
‘Mr Rogers. He went into the scrub too. Just before. He talked to me in the scrub. He said, “Show me your hidey-hole, Peter.”’
‘What are you talking about, son?’
‘He did so. He followed me into the bushes. I was scared.’
‘Is that why you’re so late home?’
‘Yes. I’ve been hiding. I thought he’d find me.’
‘What did he do?’ Mike asked quickly.
‘He caught me,’ Peter said. ‘He made me take down my pants. He tried to put me across his knees but I kicked. And he hit me with a ruler. He slapped me hard. He made me cry. Dad,’ he said, ‘Dad, don’t let me go to school tomorrow.’
‘I thought you said you ran away from him,’ Mike said.
‘I did. I struggled and got away and I hid in my hidey-hole and he couldn’t find me.’
Mike questioned him more intently and more fiercely, and Peter improvised just as fiercely with scraps of fantasy and memory taken from what Rogers had told him, from his memory of Donnie Palmer’s story and from his humiliation on Miss Dane’s knees. He saw quickly that his father was probing for proof of some guilty act and he supplied what he thought was wanted without himself realizing what act it was or why his father should look for it. He didn’t actually allege what his father suspected because he had never heard of it, but his answers hinted at it, and he rose in the end, surprised that his father had been so easily satisfied with his story. Yet at the beginning he hadn’t counted on having to justify at such length or with such energy his original lie.
Mike didn’t tell Nora. Even if he had wanted to he would have
found it difficult to phrase his suspicions. All night he thought about
it. If the boy couldn’t have invented it all there must be some truth
in it. And if Rogers didn’t appear capable of such a thing he had
only to remember his theology. Why should it be impossible? There
was no sin man was not capable of. He had heard of worse sins
when he was studying. It was people who showed a clean face to the
world who were most likely to surprise you with some secret shameful sin you would never have guessed—people like Mrs Palmer who
imagined there was no sin in her, like Rogers who believed he had a
Hadn’t Rogers claimed a liking for Peter? What sort of a liking? Young Palmer had hinted at such a thing in him; at the bar on the first day of the boycott, hadn’t he mentioned him in the same breath as Arthur Henderson?
At least there was one thing he could do for his son; he would send him back to the convent again.
But when he woke it was harder to believe. He kept Peter home from school, though Nora nagged and said he was giving the boy too much of his own way and they’d have Mr Rae down to see them again. He took him to the doctor’s that morning and the rumour got round that Mike had given in at last, because when the escort party had waited for him as usual he hadn’t shown up. The doctor would not believe the story but he examined Peter and found no signs of violence. Mike questioned Peter further but by now Peter had told the story so often that he had created the incident in his mind end come to believe it. Mike concluded that if there was no act of violation there had been some attempt: there was certainly something obscene in making a boy take his pants down to hit him with a ruler. The trouble was that the boy was not consistent about the place and the time. Once he said it happened at school on the afternoon before he stopped going to school, but then he corrected himself and said no, it was in the scrub that night near his hidey-hole.
‘Why did you stop going to school, if it only happened then?’ his father asked.
‘Oh, he chased me before,’ Peter said, ‘He told me what he’d do to me. He said he’d catch me one day after school when the kids had gone home.’
Mike didn’t comment, Peter’s explanation would be believable if the rest of it was true. But did Rogers on his visit to them that night look as if he had come fresh and unashamed from a crime? Mike did not go to work that day or the next. He stayed at home brooding, irritating Nora who cursed him for letting that fool of a schoolteacher talk him into stopping work. He did not go to Palmers’ either. He needed a drink, but he didn’t trust himself to keep silent. He wanted to go there to make some inquiries from old Don about what sort of a chap Rogers was, but it wasn’t likely Don would say anything relevant unless he was to name his suspicion. Young Palmer knew something, but young Palmer didn’t like him. At the end of the second day he was so worried by his confusion that he made up his mind to tell Rae and have the thing aired in court.
Bernie O’Malley drove up the main road of Coal Flat. He noticed
the signs of the strike—the men standing in groups at street corners,
the fact that there were men of working age to be seen in the town at
all at ten in the morning, the policeman on guard outside the pub.
It reminded him of strikes in his own youth when he had been a
miner himself and an active organizer—him and Bob Semple and
Pat Hickey and Paddy Webb—like the
But those had been bitter days and harder. These workers now had had their own Government in for twelve years, they were secure, well-paid, well-fed and slept comfortable; yet they kept going on strike here and there all over the country, a few days at a time, over the most trivial of issues, especially during the war; because the shops were out of tobacco, because the butter ration wasn’t enough for their cut lunches. They were slow to realize that with a Labour Government they had to co-operate. Who was there to fight, now that the mines had been nationalized?
He recalled with affection his own fighting days, when tall and
unruly-haired he had paced platforms agitating and gesturing,
roaring his slogans to strong applause; his articles for the Grey
River Argus; his election campaigning. It was only eighteen miles
from here that he had been arrested in World Digest about New
Zealand the Social Laboratory. British Labour had learned from
them. What he had fought for was altering the course of the world’s
history. It had all come right and there was nothing more to be done.
Except to keep the system oiled. This local dispute was only a minor issue. It was the watersiders the Government was mostly worried about, a union full of agitators who would undo Labour’s work if they could. The Government was not openly interfering in this issue. The miners’ strike was confined to Coal Flat. The dredge company directors had lobbied the Minister of Labour to intervene but he had preferred to let the dispute solve itself. It all hung on the beer boycott. The Licensed Victuallers’ Association had lobbied the Minister too but he told them the dispute didn’t concern them. But he asked Bernie to look into it because it was in his electorate, and because he was afraid that if anyone in other towns broke the boycott, there might be further strikes. ‘Your easiest bet is to persuade the dredge manager to find some excuse to sack this bloke that’s still working,’ he said. Bernie chuckled; he had an old prejudice against scabs. he wondered if he should ask Dinnie Flaherty, the priest, to get Herlihy to stop drinking.
He could afford to be liberal about this dispute: he had quite a few shares in breweries, but it wasn’t the brewers who had put the price up, it was the publicans. If the boycott spread brewers would of course suffer, but so far the boycott was confined to the Coast. He was a drinking man himself and he took the side of the drinkers: the publicans would just have to pull in their horns. That was the trouble with this country nowadays: everyone wanted to make money. It was probable the dredge company directors would order the manager to get rid of their solitary worker anyway; they couldn’t be expected to go without their turnover because of one man. Anyway the gold-dredging industry didn’t have much future left; he reminded himself that when he got back he must sell those gold shares of his.
He was tall and vigorous for seventy. His hair was thick, though
white, and he had a thick white moustache. He dressed plainly in a
navy serge suit. He was a straightforward man and steered clear of
the political intrigues of Wellington, avoided drinking-parties and
the luxurious social functions that made him feel like a fish out of
He stopped first by the post office when he saw Ben Nicholson and Jock McEwan. He pulled up and got out of the car. He slipped his hands into his pockets and sauntered to them as if it was the most casual of meetings.
‘Well, Ben,’ he said. ‘I haven’t seen you for a while.’
Jock stared at him suspiciously. Ben grinned and said, ‘Hello, Bernie. Doing your rounds?’
‘Oh, just passing by,’ Bernie said.
Jock spat. Coal Flat wasn’t on the road to anywhere except Roa.
‘Just passing the time of day,’ Bernie said. ‘Thought I’d slip over and look at the old village.’
‘Is that what they pay you for in parliament?’ Jock said.
‘Who’s your cobber?’ Bernie asked.
‘This is Jock McEwan, the union secretary,’ Ben said. ‘You must have seen him at your last meeting up here.’
They shook hands.
‘Well, as a matter of fact, Jock, last night was the first night for a month I’ve been to bed before midnight. We can’t stickle for a seven-hour day up there.’
‘When do we get our seven-hour day?’
Bernie slipped his thumbs under the armholes of his waistcoat and rocked gently on his feet. ‘Well, it should be soon, Jock. When production allows it. You’re not getting much coal out at the moment. What’s the trouble, Ben?’
‘We’re on strike, Bernie.’
‘What’s the dispute?’
‘It’s a sympathy strike. The dispute’s at the dredge.’
Bernie looked around him. ‘Come and have a drink,’ he said.
Jock stared at him. ‘Who are you working for now? The publicans?’
‘Didn’t you know about the boycott?’ Ben asked.
Bernie looked worried: he had been saying, ‘Come and have a drink,’ before any deals for so many years that he had forgotten the boycott. He put his finger to his nose and looked conniving. He pursed his lips and rocked his head up, then down. ‘Ah, I see. When in Rome….’ More suddenly he said, ‘I heard the publicans are thinking of giving in.’ He hadn’t, but he wanted to regain their goodwill.
‘They will,’ Ben said. ‘We can go without beer, but they can’t go without their living.’
‘There’s still a bit of union discipline on the Coast, I see,’ Bernie said.
‘There wouldn’t be so much if your crowd had their way,’ Jock said.
‘Ah, now Jock, you’re being a bit hard,’ Bernie said. ‘I don’t deny there’s some Tories in disguise on our side, but we’re not all tarred with the same brush. There’s one or two of us with principles. You say I’ll have to go to the dredge, Ben? Where’s the union man hang out?’
Ben told him. Jock said, ‘You won’t find him in any mood to bargain. We don’t compromise in the Flat.’
Bernie turned to him suddenly, learning forward with his thumbs still in his waistcoat. ‘You’re a communist, aren’t you?’
‘I’d like to see the beggar that said I wasn’t,’ Jock said.
‘You know, Scottie,’ Bernie said tacking obliquely into a crescendo of anger. ‘When you left the Clyde you got on the wrong boat. You should’ve gone to bloody Russia!’
They stared at him as he got into his car and drove to the president of the dredge union. When he got there the secretary was there too. He sounded them to see if they were ready to consider returning to work, but neither of them would budge. They said that already Herlihy had stopped working, and it was up to the management to let them know if he had been suspended.
O’Malley found Thompson working with the clerk in the dredge office on the shore up the road from the dredge. Thompson didn’t recognize him at first and Bernie concluded that he was not an important fellow.
‘Your union men tell me this fullah Herlihy is off work,’ Bernie said.
‘That’s right, Mr O’Malley,’ Thompson said. ‘But we haven’t sacked him. He’s off colour. I’ve been to his house. He says he’ll be back in a day or two.’
‘Good God, man, don’t you know your chance when it falls into your lap?’ Bernie said.
‘What do you mean?’
‘Don’t you want this dispute settled as quickly and easily as you can? Well, tell the union you’ve sacked him.’
‘Herlihy’s a good worker, Mr O’Malley. I’m not throwing him away for the union.’
‘Well, you’re throwing away your shareholders’ money, that’s what you’re doing. You’ve got to get this dredge back to normal as soon as you can. If you let this go it might drag on for months.’
‘You could make them take it to arbitration.’
‘Well, we won’t. It’s a minor affair and we’re going to let it settle itself. I’ve seen your directors in Wellington and I tell you they’re sick of hanging on for the sake of one man.’
‘The directors gave me full liberty of action.’
‘How long ago?’
‘Two months back. I was on the phone to them only last week.’
‘Well, they’ve changed their minds since. If they say so, you’ll have to sack the man and he might be back working then and then he might have a claim on you for damages. You can get rid of him now while he’s off.’
‘What reason could I give for sacking him?’
Bernie grinned shrewdly and rocked on his heels. ‘Absenteeism,’ he said.
Thompson shouted, ‘Of all the—scabby tricks! I couldn’t do it, O’Malley. I’m not a politician!’
Bernie said, ‘If you get rid of him now while he’s off, you might be able to take him back later.’
‘The union would still object.’
‘Well, meet them, offer them terms, bargain. Anyway I’m told the union only want him suspended. Now’s your time to get this settled. You can’t hold up industry for the sake of one man. If you let this chance go, you can’t expect the Government to help you.’
Later in the day, Thompson met the executives of the union. They agreed to start work the following day provided that Herlihy was suspended for as long as he had worked while the strike lasted. A condition of his being re-employed was that he should support the beer boycott until it finished.
Constable Rae couldn’t believe it. He questioned Herlihy and
then told him to bring the boy to his house. He concentrated on
trying to establish the time and place of the alleged offence—7.30
p.m. on 30th July in the scrub by the dredge road. There were
several discrepancies apparent in the boy’s story but the constable
hadn’t the ability to frame objective questions in a case as shocking
to him as this one; and anyway he didn’t consider that his job. He
decided to get a statement from Rogers, and to save them both the
embarrassment of questions in Jimmy Cairns’s kitchen he sent a
note by a schoolboy that he wanted to see Rogers at his house after
school. Rogers dropped his case at Cairns’s after school and said to
‘What’s happening?’ she asked.
‘I don’t know,’ he said, ‘It can’t he serious.’
When the constable led him into the sitting-room, Rae said, ‘I’m afraid we’ll have to talk in private, dear,’ and Mrs Rae and Miss Dane looked wondering at Rogers as they carried their cups of tea to the kitchen.
Rogers blushed deeply when he heard the charge; he couldn’t believe it. ‘It’s not true,’ he said, more in wonder than in anger. He was overcome by fear that all his dealing with Peter might be brought into the open. How could he justify them? And how much harm would be done to the boy if they were known? Again he felt that his initial attempt to regenerate Peter had been a mistake. ‘I can’t believe that Peter said it,’ he said; and then he remembered what Peter had threatened before he retreated into the scrub. ‘How does he know anything about a thing like that?’
‘That’s the mystery,’ Rae said. ‘Someone must have taught him. I want to know if it was you.’
‘I never told him anything like that,’ Rogers said.
‘Did you do anything like that?’
‘Do you think I did?’
‘No, I wouldn’t have thought so. But my job is to find out what’s at the back of this. You understand I’m only doing my job.’
When Rogers made a statement, he did not mention his psychiatric treatment of Peter. Nor did he mention Peter’s threat because that would have involved broadcasting Peter’s story about Don and Miss Dane in the scrub.
He didn’t tell the Cairnses until the next morning when he arrived home early and unexpectedly. Heath met him in the school corridor that morning. ‘Rogers,’ he said, ‘I want to see you.’
‘Mr Rae called on me last night,’ Heath said with a blandly pleasant look that showed that this triumph was prepared. ‘As you know, the charge is so serious I can’t ignore it. I wouldn’t be doing my duty by the children and the parents if I did. I’m suspending you, young man, until the case is over and you’re cleared or proved guilty.’ He smiled with an attempt at patient impartiality, then added enigmatically, ‘Of course I haven’t any doubt myself about what the verdict will be.’
‘Have you the power to do this?’ Rogers asked.
‘Of course I have the power. What have you got to growl about? You’ll still draw your salary in the meantime. You can have a paid holiday—you’ll be better off than your precious strikers.’
Rogers was staggered. Heath believed the accusation. What if other people believed it? Or if the children heard of it? How would he face anybody? He wondered if the Palmers would believe it as easily. He didn’t put up much opposition to Heath. ‘You know where to find me if you want me back,’ he said.
‘That’s not likely to be before the next term, my boy,’ Heath said affably. ‘If I were you I’d be looking round for a lawyer. You’ll need one. Ah, yes,’ he said. ‘It doesn’t pay to be too kind to children like that boy. They’ll often bite the hand that feeds them. I’m taking it for granted, of course, that the boy’s been telling lies.’ Rogers stared at him with panic. He didn’t answer. He almost ran from the school. Children stopped to watch him go.
Jessie Cairns was doing her washing. Jimmy was sitting at the
table reading the Argus. ‘What, are you on strike too?’ Jimmy said.
‘Suspended,’ Rogers said. ‘Can you believe it? Suspended.’
‘What on earth for?’ Jessie asked, turning from her washtub and coming into the kitchen with wet hands held in front of her.
Rogers told them, haltingly and blushing.
‘Of all the nasty things to throw at you!’ she said. Rogers was conscious of Jimmy’s searching stare.
‘I wonder if Mike Herlihy’s getting his own back because you’re on our side,’ she said.
‘He wouldn’t try that,’ Jimmy said.
‘It’s evidently the boy,’ Rogers said. ‘I did talk to him on the road the other night. But I never left the road.’
‘What sort of mind has he got then?’ Jessie wondered. ‘If I was you I’d see a lawyer.’
‘I’ll go and see the doctor,’ Rogers said.
‘Yes, he’s your man,’ Jimmy said. ‘This’ll go hard on Herlihy if it’s shown up as a lot of lies.’
‘Well, it’s not true,’ Rogers said.
He was surprised that the doctor knew. ‘I examined the boy,’ he said. ‘There was certainly no sign of violation. What are they accusing you of?’
‘Indecent assault,’ Rogers said. ‘They say I made the boy take his pants down and hit him with a ruler. Then he says I chased him and he ran away. How could he run away without tripping if he had his pants round his calves?’
‘I can’t see why Rae’s going ahead with it,’ the doctor said. ‘But you’ve got nothing to worry about. It’ll all come clean in court.’
‘Miss Dane did that!’ Rogers said. ‘I just remembered. Oh, God,
do we have to bring her into this too? … Peter told me that night
she kept him behind after school because he’d thrown plasticine at
‘Can you believe anything that boy says?’ the doctor said. ‘I don’t want to rub it in, but you see now you were playing with fire. You helped to set free all that boy’s destructive impulses and now you can’t control them.’
‘Someone had to take the risk.’
‘In safer conditions than you could be sure of,’ the doctor said.
‘He warned me too,’ Rogers said. ‘There’s something else I must tell you. Don’t tell anyone. He says he saw Miss Dane and Don Palmer together in the scrub one night. He told her. That’s why she hit him with the ruler. I was going to tell his father he hadn’t been at school lately. He said that if I told his father he’d tell everyone about Miss Dane and Don—I’d told him to keep it a secret. Then he said he’d say it was me. Then he said he’d say it was me and some children.—One boy in class did have some fantastic story like that once.—So you see it’s not a far step to inventing what I’m accused of.’
‘How much of this talk goes on in your class?’
‘That’s the only time I know of. Peter had been talking to this boy —Donnie Palmer. Peter would have tried to corrupt other children anyway, if he’d been left as he was. The thing was to cure him. I’m sure it was a passing phase in Donnie, and a shallow one. He’s probably forgotten it all now.’
‘Can you be sure you haven’t done the children harm?’
‘I’m quite sure. Peter’s the only unhealthy one in the room. Donnie Palmer is unspoilt. Only he’s a bit more rebellious and shifty since Heath strapped him…. It broke his trust in adults. I’m sure about this, doctor. Healthy children are immune to Peter’s sickness. It isn’t contagious. Donnie was only attracted for a day or two because it was being impudent to authority, a revenge for Heath’s strap, to make up a story about his teacher. He didn’t know what he was saying.’
‘Well, as far as the court goes, you’ll only have to show that Peter’s word isn’t reliable. It looks as if he’s getting his revenge on you for Miss Dane.’
‘He said it was my fault, that I could have stopped her.’
‘Well, it should be easy to show how the boy concocted it.’
‘I can’t believe he said just that,’ Rogers said. ‘I don’t believe he’s heard of such a thing.’
‘Perhaps it’s the father’s interpretation of the boy’s story. When you see a lawyer, get him to play up that point.’
‘How?’
‘He can question the boy closely. If he shows ignorance there….’
‘What if all that comes out, about Peter and his obscene drawings? There’s only one way a court would
‘Why are you so worried? You’re not being screened. You’re not being evaluated. You’re being charged with a specific crime that you can prove yourself innocent of.’
‘It’s going to be so hard to face everybody. A smear like that sticks….’
‘Is it necessary to tell the court all the details of your treatment of the boy?’
‘I don’t see that I can avoid it. I’ve got to tell the truth.’
Mrs Alexander came in with tea. They had only just finished their first meal of the day. The doctor didn’t drink any. He told her of the charge. Rogers was embarrassed and expected her to say that she had warned him in the first place. But she was sympathetic.
‘Don’t worry about it,’ the doctor said. ‘People in this town will be friendlier to you than in any other, and when it’s proved false, they’ll be more friendly. You’ll have to hop down to Greymouth and see a lawyer.’
They hadn’t helped him much, yet Rogers was relieved when he left them.
A bicycle brake groaned behind him and Father Flaherty stepped off the pedals. Rogers grinned. ‘Hullo, Father,’ he said. ‘How’s the sporting priest? Your brake wants oiling. Where’s your car anyway?’
‘Getting repairs done,’ he said. ‘What’s this I’m hearing about you? Is it true what Mike Herlihy tells me?’
Rogers didn’t feel like telling him; he began by striking a false attitude. ‘Now you’re not going to give away the secrets of the confessional, Father?’
The Father flushed. ‘Don’t he so damned frivolous about it,’ he said. ‘Mike told me in his house.’
‘I thought Mike was off your visiting list.’
‘Bernie O’Malley asked me to see him. Tell me now, is it true?’
‘What did he tell you?’
‘He said you’d been interfering with the boy.’
‘Well, that’s true and it’s not true. It’s not true what you’re
thinking and what Mike thinks. I wouldn’t be capable of it. But I
have interfered with the boy’s mind, not very skilfully it seems. I
was trying to undo the harm done by his parents and by the nuns at
one of your convents and you, incidentally, with your story of
‘Then it’s true what Mike says about telling the boy about sex and God knows what other sordid things.’
‘Yes. Someone had to do something for the boy. His mind was on those things already. I had to tell him the truth so that the knowledge could free him.’
‘And you have the nerve to hold up your head and admit it? And treat it so lightly?’
‘Why not?’
‘God forgive me if I say anything I shouldn’t, but you deserve all that’s coming to you.’
‘Why? I never did what I’m being charged with.’
‘My God, you’ve got a lot to learn, Paul. You should be down on your knees, humbling yourself. And you just shrug it off and don’t care.’
‘Haven’t you heard of psychiatry before?’
‘The devil’s invention it is too. It’ll do you good to suffer. In a way—do you know what I think?—in a way, I hope you’re convicted. Not out of malice. But for your own good. Suffering never hurt anyone where it matters. Life is suffering, and you’ll never see heaven without it.’
‘Most of us’d rather have heaven here and now, and without suffering.’
‘You fool,’ Father Flaherty said with gentle weariness, though he was only Rogers’s age. ‘I wish I could make you see it. I’ve got a good mind to put your weights up for your own good. I could give evidence in court and tell them what you’ve just told me. Then you might be convicted and you’d have time to think, you’d be alone a lot, and you would have to think of your conscience and your God…. Our Lord suffered, we all have to suffer too…. You might wake up to thank me for it.’
‘You wouldn’t though,’ Rogers said, staring at him, openly, as if amused.
The Father stared back and disappointment crossed his face. ‘No,’ he said. ‘I couldn’t. It’d be like splitting on the secrets of the confessional. You told me openly. It wouldn’t be right. You see I’m too much tarred with the ways of this world. I treat a man as a man, and I’m not doing right by your soul, but I can’t do a dirty trick like that. And it might be presumption. Only remember what I said, Paul.’ He patted Rogers’s shoulder. ‘Promise me that, Paul,’ he said. ‘Think about yourself. Humble your soul. Get in touch with God.’
‘It’s the last thing I’m likely to do,’ Rogers said, feeling sorry for him.
From the footpath Arthur Henderson walked over to them, ‘Hello, Father!’ he said with sprightly mastery of his distaste for the priesthood, Rogers felt himself close up like an oyster.
‘I’ll pray for you,’ Father Flaherty said, stepping on to his bike.
Rogers watched him. ‘You’d be wasting your breath,’ he said.
Henderson said, ‘I say, Paul. There’s to be a special meeting of the committee tonight about you. What’s this I hear? Now don’t tell me it’s true is it?’
‘The charge isn’t true.’
‘Well, Paul,’ Henderson said accusingly. ‘I always say a man’s a man and he’s got his feelings and everyone’s got a different nature and everyone isn’t made the way the doctor ordered. But when it comes to a thing like this. Well, my goodness, Paul, I never thought you’d do a thing like that.’
‘It’s not true.’
‘Why didn’t you tell me, Paul?’ Henderson said. ‘You could have come to me with whatever you had on your mind. If I’d known you felt like that, I’d only have been too glad….’
‘It’s not true I said,’ Rogers said and strode away from him, leaving him shaking his head like an insulted aunt.
He was approaching Palmers’ pub and he saw Flora at the doorway, in an apron and slippers, kneeling to scrub the front doorstep. When she saw him she stood up with surprise.
‘Paul! Why aren’t you at school?’
Then she looked at him, half-pleading, half-accusing. ‘Then it’s true, you’re in trouble…. Oh, Paul! It’s not true, is it? What they say? What Mr Rae said? Is it?’
‘I thought you’d have known me better than to believe it,’ he said.
‘Paul! I didn’t believe it! I wouldn’t believe it! I said it’s all a mistake!’
‘I’m not that worried, Flora. It’ll all blow over. It’s not going to be hard to prove it’s a lie.’
‘Mr Rae came to see Mum. Mum had to ask Donnie some awful questions. Donnie didn’t know what it was all about. Paul, how on earth did it start?’
‘Mike Herlihy. Peter told him first.’
‘Peter Herlihy. Oh, Paul, I warned you. You brought it on
‘I can’t explain just now, Flora.’
‘Mum got stinking, Paul. She said you must be coming out in your true colours. I said, “You know you don’t believe that yourself, Mum,” and she cried.’
‘I can’t talk here, Flora. We don’t want a scene with your mother. Can I see you tonight? Half-past seven by the coal-bins?’
She was there five minutes before time. He had been there five minutes already, leaning against the corrugated-iron wall of the bath-house, feeling as if he was skulking in the dark, impatient to see her yet never doubting that she would come. She came hurrying briskly, without a hat, in a short dark coat of the season before, already going out of fashion with the new length in skirts. It made her look girlish, like a trusting innocent girl, venturing so surely downhill in the dark, with an unconscious poise in the way she walked. She hesitated and looked about, but he was hailing her.
She started imperceptibly. ‘Oh, you gave me a fright,’ she said, ‘And I was looking for you, too.’ Her fingers burrowed to his hand and pressed it. Her hand was throbbing warmly.
‘Where can we go?’ she said. ‘Somewhere away from the town,’
‘We’ll go up the Croesus track,’ he said. It was a track that led to an old gold claim fifteen miles away in the mountain range. Near the top it linked with another track, so that you could cross the Paparoas and come out on the beach at Barrytown, not far from the cave where Bernie O’Malley had hidden out during the First World War. For a start the track led through broom and maanuka and native heath, then it climbed and wound through deep bush. They walked slowly, away from the lights of the town, unsure of their feet till their eyes were accustomed to the dark. They didn’t talk at first. The bush was silent except for the sound of fallen twigs snapping and settling down to rot in peace, and the gurgle of runnels spilling where leaves and twigs had blocked them. A morepork called from deeper in the bush, but it only emphasized the peace of the place. Along the bank there were dozens of glow-worms, like dull sparks. Between the foliage above them the Milky Way was crisp and frosty like the night air.
They came to a small wooden bridge across a deeper and noisier creek where the water spilled over the boulders. They could see the foam faintly grey in the dark and the noise was like a muffler to second thoughts.
They talked about the charge and when they had agreed that
‘Shouldn’t you get back now?’ he said. ‘Your mother’ll know you’re out with me.’
‘I think she’s got a good idea, already, I’m seeing you still. She hasn’t said anything. I think she’s got so much trouble on her hands she doesn’t want to start any more.’
‘Flora, just now for me the future’s uncertain. I’d thought we’d be able to get a house here and set up on my army savings. After the trial I don’t know what’ll happen. I might lose my job, even.’
‘You won’t, Paul. I’ll stick by you. Even if you have to find another job. Don’t let me get away from you, Paul.’
‘You wouldn’t want to…. Come on, we should be getting back.’
‘What’s your hurry, Paul.’
‘This place,’ he said. ‘The noise of the creek, the stillness, the loneliness, it keeps singing in my blood. It makes me want you,’ he said, as if ashamed.
She didn’t move.
‘Let’s go, Flora, before it gets the better of us.’
‘It makes me want you.’
‘Everything’s so unsettled for me, Flora. It’d be silly at a time like this. It wouldn’t be fair to you. How do you know what’s going to happen?’
‘I’ll stick to you, whatever happens. I promise it.’
They did not move or speak for a while. Then Rogers said, ‘Anyway, I gave your father an undertaking. Before he would agree to the engagement. It seems self-righteous to say it now, but I didn’t give it to him lightly…. It seems a long time now.’
‘That’s all over, Paul,’ she said. ‘I didn’t tell you before. Dad said the engagement’s finished. I didn’t say anything, argue or anything. I knew it’d be no use. He won’t help us now, even if we asked him.’
‘Does he know you still see me?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Why didn’t you tell me before?’
‘It wasn’t important.’
They turned to face each other and moved into an embrace. The creek, the stars, the bush seemed to encourage them. They consummated their love on a coat spread on a frosty bank of moss and grass at the side of the track; it seemed they dived out of this world into another existence of song and joy, and neither knew how long they were there, or how it came about.
Rogers slipped into a dark sleeping house when he got to Cairns’s.
‘Where’ve you been, Flor?’ she asked, with more self-pity than accusation. ‘I’ve been worrying. It’s gone midnight. Dad told me to go to bed, but I couldn’t. I bet he’s not asleep either.’
‘Oh, Mum, you shouldn’t have stayed up,’ she said, more with patience than anger, because she was too strange and happy to be annoyed. ‘I’m old enough to look after myself. I went to Doris’s for the night.’
‘How are they?’ Mrs Palmer asked, a little sullenly.
‘They’re fine.’ She realized, after she had said it, that her mother was looking for some message of apology from Doris; but she added nothing to soften her answer. It was the first time in her life that she had told her mother a lie.
The clear cold nights lasted for a week and every night Rogers and Flora met at the coal-bins and headed for the moss-bank by the Croesus track to share their love under the stars.
The morning Heath suspended Rogers from work was the
beginning of Miss Dane’s decline. When Heath came in to tell
her that she would have to take both classes, she said, ‘Oh? Is Mr
Rogers ill?’
Heath made a wry grin. ‘Well, that’s one way of putting it,’ he said. ‘I’ll tell you more at playtime.’
At playtime he stood up and put his cup of tea on the staffroom table. ‘Well, colleagues,’ he said. The teachers expected something important when he called them colleagues. ‘I took a decision this morning which I feel I should explain to you, and I know that you’ll recognize that it was in the best interests of the school….’ There was an expectant but slightly sceptical silence, and Heath paused to savour it. ‘Mr Rogers—you may or may not know—is to be charged with a very serious offence….’ He blushed and stumbled in his speech. ‘… a charge of indecency, gross malpractice…. I—I—you know what I mean….’
Miss Dane gasped, ‘Really!’ and choked on her food. Mrs Hansen protested, ‘Never!’ Fred Lawson sat still in prim pink silence.
‘Never!’ Belle Hansen repeated. ‘I don’t believe it! If you mean what I’m thinking…. What exactly is the charge?’
‘Well, we can’t go into details…. It’s not necessary. I thought you might have had some shame, Mrs Hansen.’
‘Mr Heath!’ Belle said. ‘There’s no need to insult me!’
‘I beg your pardon,’ Heath said. ‘I spoke hastily. No offence ‘meant, and none should have been taken…. I mean, it’s hardly fit for ladies’ ears.’
‘Who was the girl?’ Fred Lawson asked, and Miss Dane, no longer choking, said, ‘Really!’
Heath looked relieved and smiled from superior knowledge. ‘I’m afraid it wasn’t a girl,’ he said.
‘Who was it then?’ Belle demanded. ‘Say what you mean. I can’t stand people who talk in mysteries.’
‘Well, of course, if you must know, Mrs Hansen, you can blame yourself if you’re shocked. It was a boy—young Herlihy! And never in my career have I come across anything so disgusting!’ He sat down, red and challenging.
‘I don’t believe it!’ Mrs Hansen said. ‘Paul may be a bet wet and woolly in his ideas and all that—I don’t believe he’d do that.’
Fred Lawson kept his embarrassed silence. Miss Dane couldn’t speak for shame and disgust: one part of her mind clamoured to visualize the act in detail, the other part refused even to recognize the demand.
Heath shrugged. ‘That’s the charge,’ he said.
Fred Lawson said, ‘Well all I can say is if a man does that sort of thing he deserves all he gets.’
‘Well, I agree, Fred,’ Mrs Hansen said, ‘But first you’ve got to prove it. Until it’s proved I don’t believe it.’
‘You’ve got no right to express an opinion,’ Heath said, ‘The
matter is sub … sub judice. No one is supposed to talk about it.’
‘That’s really what I’ve been saying,’ Mrs Hansen said.
Heath looked at her with exaggerated weariness, as if to say, ‘How can one argue with someone so illogical?’—‘Well, that’s something we’re agreed about,’ he said.
‘A man is innocent till he’s proved guilty,’ she said, with what struck Heath as irrelevant stubbornness.
Heath looked around the group, to break off this argument, and said, ‘Well, anyway, I’ve suspended Rogers…. Whatever the details of it, and whether he’s innocent or guilty, all that is beside the point….’
‘Very much to the point, I’d say,’ Mrs Hansen said.
Heath ignored her. ‘As far as I’m concerned my first duty is to the school, and so long as a shadow of suspicion attaches to Rogers I won’t have him inside the fence. And I’ll answer to the Board for it tool’ He challenged the room about him as if he had expected opposition. ‘I expect some support from my staff, in a matter like this,’ he added more limply.
‘Well, no one has objected, have they?’ Mrs Hansen said. By nods or silence the teachers agreed that Heath had taken the best course, Heath leaned over to Fred Lawson, ignoring the women teachers. ‘Nothing short of hanging for an offence like that, that’s my opinion!’
‘I wouldn’t place much credence on Peter Herlihy’s stories,’ Mrs Hansen said. ‘He’s just the kind of brat that’d get a teacher into trouble if he could.’
Miss Dane found it hard to teach that day. It wasn’t only that she
Even though the strike was settled, the extra police had left, and the Raes were sighing themselves back to normal, Miss Dane felt no relief from the anxieties occasioned by the strike. She slept no better at night, and often involuntarily she shuddered, for no apparent reason. She felt that in her blood she had acquiesced in the town’s evil—not by giving in to Don that night, either; but by something less definite and more pervasive. She felt growing on her a paradoxical contentment, a sort of acceptance of whatever life threw up; but she would not submit to it. Her conscience accused her of condoning sin, and her mind and her nerves were continually on edge. That night as she tried to rest between tossing, she felt her breasts tingle and then a strange horror of herself and her body. The dark did not soothe her, and if it hadn’t been that she would have had to explain to the Raes next morning, she would have switched on the light and tried to sleep with the light on. The next day was Saturday, and that week-end she didn’t go out of doors, so that Mrs Rae was a little irritated at her sitting around all the time, getting in the road of the housework. She was too unsettled to help Mrs Rae; she broke a plate when she was wiping up. On the following Saturday night she asked Mrs Rae to sleep with her again. It was only ten days since they had had to sleep together, because of the extra constables in the house.
‘I can’t face it, Mrs Rae!’ she blurted. ‘I’m all to pieces since I
Please, Mrs Rae. Just till the holidays—a bit of
change should buck me up again then. I’m afraid I’ve been working
too hard, and now with Mr Rogers away, I’ve twice as much to
do…. You’re very soothing, Mrs Rae. Please! I know you won’t
refuse me.’
Mrs Rae just stared at her. ‘You want a holiday, you’re run down,’ she said, but her words didn’t soothe her misgivings about Miss Dane’s sanity.
Rae himself was more surprised when he heard that he was expected to give up his bed again. With gestures of bad temper he muttered in spurts to himself as he went to his new room and found hairpins on the dressing-table and frocks in the wardrobe. Last time, she had at least cleared the room for him. He slept strangely again, like a married man on his first night in the army. In the morning he had to lie in and wait till the women were out of his room before he could get a clean shirt. That day he shifted some of his clothes to his new room, and asked Miss Dane to clear out a drawer for him. It seemed to give a seal of permanency to the arrangement. ‘But, understand,’ he told his wife, ‘it’s just for this week. When she comes back after the term holidays she’s got to settle down in her own room and none of these shenanikins. It was all tommy-rot in the first place.’
But Miss Dane was not greatly soothed. It was a comfort to have Mrs Rae’s big placid flesh so near; for two nights she lay more still but she slept no better, only in fitful dozes. First thing on the Monday morning she was ill; she didn’t feel like breakfast but Mrs Rae said, ‘What you need is building up,’ and coaxed her, as if she was a child, over her bacon and eggs. But she went straight to the bathroom and lost it.
‘I really must see a doctor,’ she said. Normally she would have taken her car down to Greymouth and seen a town doctor; her position called for it, and it would have been a comfort to take her ailments to a professional man of really respectable society rather than a man who was part of this local sinful community, a communist too. But, with Rogers away, she could hardly desert the school, and she decided she would have to see Dr Alexander in his evening surgery hours.
‘Do you feel better now?’ Mrs Rae asked her.
‘I feel well enough to go to school,’ she said.
‘The kids had better watch out today,’ Rae said with unusual mischief, but she took it sullenly. Mrs Rae was staring at her strangely as she left for school. ‘I didn’t like to ask her,’ she said, ‘but I just wonder….’
‘What are you wondering?’ Rae asked.
‘Morning sickness,’ she said. ‘It’s usually a sign….’
‘Oh, tommy-rot!’ Rae said and laughed right out. ‘Why, she doesn’t even know any men here! Unless you’re going to pin that on young Rogers too…. You women,’ he said. ‘It’s all you ever think of—having babies!’
‘I’d have had more if you’d let me,’ she said.
‘Two was all we could afford,’ he said. ‘You’ve no right to bring life into the world unless you can provide for it. Things were harder at the time, and it’s too late now to have more.’
Mrs Rae wasn’t listening. ‘I wonder what the doctor will say,’ she said.
It cased Miss Dane that the doctor was so impersonal. ‘They say he’s a good doctor,’ she thought. ‘At least his communism won’t affect that. But then what can you believe of what these people say?’ He asked her a few questions about her diet and her work and she felt reassured. Then he asked her about her periods. ‘But why?’ she protested. ‘Why ask that? I don’t see the reason…. Well, yes I think I did miss, I’m not sure. It was when I was making arrangements to shift from the hotel. And since then too I seemed to have so much else to think about. I really don’t know how I came to ignore it. Yes, I remember noticing it, then somehow I forgot about it altogether…. But what’s that got to do with it?… Really, Dr Alexander,’—she protested with acid archness—‘I’m hardly an expectant mother.’
When he asked to examine her, she hesitated. She had been examined before by male doctors, submitting herself in awe as if in sacrifice to a high priest; but this time she felt strangely reticent and afraid of exposing herself. ‘You can undress behind the screen,’ the doctor said; but she didn’t move. She seemed to commune with herself for a few seconds. Then in a humble but firm tone, as if driven to her last resources, she said: ‘Doctor Alexander, I’m afraid I must insist that your wife should be present.’ The doctor looked at her in surprise, but without comment he went out of the surgery and called his wife whose hands were doughy from making wholemeal scones. ‘Fancy baking at this time of night,’ a woman said as she passed through the waiting-room.
Miss Dane held herself in throughout the examination, with a
blushing deliberate dignity, as if she was carefully holding herself
‘Sit down, Miss Dane,’ he said when she had dressed. ‘Please understand that anything said in this surgery is confidential. My wife isn’t one for gossip…. I’m afraid I have some news that may surprise you….’
‘Is it anything serious doctor?’ she asked.
‘Serious? Well it may be, and it may be all right. You see, you’re not ill. It’s perfectly natural. But it may give you a shock. Take it gently, Miss Dane. There’s a good deal of time left yet. You’re three months pregnant.’
Miss Dane didn’t speak. She stared through the doctor as if slightly stunned, she stared at his wife and then at the floor. It was as if she was stripped and exposed, thrown back on an ultimate core of integrity, no longer able to pretend or try to justify herself, capable of nothing except being what it seemed she was. She felt now as if, without knowing, she had been initiated into the sinister secret society, and it would accept no resignations.
Then she moaned, ‘Oh, Doctor… I can’t be.’ But she didn’t believe what she said.
‘Don’t take it so badly Miss Dane,’ the doctor said. ‘There’s still plenty of time to get married. It doesn’t show yet and may not for another month. Who was the man?’
‘I don’t know any men,’ she protested involuntarily. ‘yes,’ she said as if to herself, ‘There was a night. It was…. Oh, I had a hand in it too. I pretended I didn’t know it was liquor. I encouraged him. Oh, Mrs Alexander….’ She began to weep and had to fight against sobbing. ‘Marriage is quite out of the question…. He’s not interested in me. I know! I tried to win him…. He brushed me off! Like a spider!’
Mrs Alexander stood behind her, nervous herself and embarrassed as she tried to soothe her by putting her hands on Miss Dane’s shoulders. ‘Who was it?’ she said.
‘If you’d rather not tell,’ the doctor said, ‘you needn’t. But it might help if we knew. I could advise you….Is he in this town?’
‘Yes,’ she said.
‘Not a teacher?’
‘Oh, no!’
‘Well, at least you can see him and tell him. He’s not married, is he?’
‘Oh, no!… He was; he’s divorced.’
‘Then you’ll have to persuade him to marry you. It’s the least he
‘Oh, Doctor, I’d never live it down. I’ll never live it down, even now…. But he won’t…. Why did it have to happen to me? I’d always been so careful. He’s the only one I’ve known in all my life; honestly Doctor, I’m prepared to swear it on the Bible, I’d never done it before!’
‘We believe you,’ Mrs Alexander said. She found it awkward to manage simple homely statements.
‘Not once! Not once, do you understand?… And now, only once; and this had to happen. I should have known. I should have left this town. Oh, I could see when I came here what an evil godless place it is. I wish I’d never come here…. It’s not fair, Doctor! It simply isn’t fair. It’s a thing I’ve always condemned myself. I never had any sympathy for girls who got themselves into trouble; I said it served them right. And now I’m as bad!’
‘But Miss Dane,’ the doctor said. ‘It’s a perfectly natural thing. You talk of it as if it’s an illness or a crime. Society expects you to marry, but if you can arrange that, you needn’t have any fears. You should be proud. You’re a mother; you’re bringing life into the world. Surely it’s a sacred thing, a religious thing to do. Even if you can’t marry you mustn’t despise yourself for it. But you should try to marry.’
‘Doctor Alexander,’ Miss Dane said, prim and aggrieved in spite of her earlier fit of sobs, ‘that’s a terrible thing to say. You must be a wicked man to talk like that, a complete heathen.’ She looked desperately at the doctor and his wife and stood shakily. ‘If you’re going to talk like that, I’ll have to go.’
The doctor dispensed her a phial of sleeping tablets, and said, ‘Whatever you do, don’t worry, Miss Dane. Remember what I said, you’ll have to see the father and tell him. If you have any trouble with him, or any worries at all, don’t hesitate to come back to me.’
Miss Dane stalked unsteadily out of the surgery, as the doctor called for the next patient, and said to his wife, ‘I shouldn’t have said that about it being natural.’
‘What a strange little woman,’ his wife said. ‘She’s thirty-three. Think of all the joy she’s missed in life. And this will only sour her the worse.’
If the doctor had diagnosed syphilis, Miss Dane couldn’t have
felt more unclean. She dreaded meeting people, reading accusation
She avoided Mrs Rae’s questions about what the doctor had said. She had hoped she might be able to pass them off with some bright joke but she couldn’t do it, and simply fumbled about with words that did not satisfy Mrs Rae. She slept that night because of the tablets. In the morning she was aware of Mrs Rae’s prying stares, though she couldn’t see how she could suspect anything. That evening she told her she would be able to sleep in her own room again, and Rae shifted back huffing and sighing.
And yet now that she knew, there was a new hardness in her. Though she accused herself for it, it seemed that at heart she had connived at her own fall, had accepted it and calculated on that basis. The obvious next step was to see Don, and strangely she did not dread the meeting.
But these times of bland energetic calculation alternated with moods of guilt and self-hatred. She did not know how she had got through the day teaching children and sharing in apparently normal conversation with the other teachers.
On the Tuesday afternoon Miss Dane went to Palmers’ hotel. She looked timidly towards the slide, but it was closed. There was no sound from the bar; it seemed to be locked up and empty. She was afraid to try the door in case she should find Don’s father there. She wanted to have this out with Don alone. Farther down the passage there was a door half-open and through it came a click of billiard balls. She looked through the door and saw at the far end of a billiard-table, Don’s head and shoulders. His eyes, squinting for a tricky shot, travelled down the cue and fixed on her in the door. He did not move or speak. She entered, and when she did not speak, he suddenly sent the ball rebounding from the walls of the table, and continued to move about the table as if she wasn’t there.
‘Mr Palmer,’ she said. ‘Mr Palmer, I’m afraid…. I wonder if I might have a word with you alone….’
‘No one about, is there?’ he said, shooting from behind his back, ‘This is alone enough, isn’t it?’
Miss Dane made a complaisant motion with her mouth as if to laugh. Don put down his cue and turned to face her, with an exaggerated expression of patience. ‘What is it now?’ he said.
‘Mr Palmer, you mustn’t breathe a word of this,’ she said, ‘I can’t bring myself to say it….’
‘Not another confession of love?’ he said.
‘Oh, Mr Palmer, please!’ she said, stamping her foot. She was
Don lit two cigarettes and gave her one. She puffed deep and coughed. More calmly Don said, ‘Didn’t you do what I told you to do that night?’
‘What was that?’
‘Oh, Christ! I might have known. It’s too late to be arguing about that now…. You’ll want me to marry you then.’ He drew deep on his cigarette and contemplated the prospect, with wry whimsy. He too looked tired. ‘How long gone are you?’
‘The doctor said three months.’
‘Well, there’s enough time yet, old girl. What’re you worrying about?’ He moved to her and expertly put his hands at the sides of her shoulders. She was blushing deeply. ‘Look up,’ he said and carelessly jerked her chin up with his thumb. ‘Mr Palmer, stop it!’ she said. ‘I won’t have you being familiar with me again!’
‘Well, you want me to marry you, don’t you?’ he said. ‘You’re getting your wish, old girl.’
‘Don’t call me that!’
‘Well, I never did know your first name.’ She couldn’t bring herself to tell him now.
‘You’re getting your wish…. The second time in my life I’ve been trapped.’ He looked at her with an admiration that pleased her though she distrusted it. ‘By a bloody old schoolmarm too. I’d never have believed it. Well, I suppose it’s time I settled down again and got away from here. We won’t live in the Flat,’ he said.
Miss Dane was trembling. ‘Mr Palmer,’ she said. ‘You don’t mean to say you mean it? I mean, you aren’t going to agree?’
‘You sound as if you don’t want me to.’
‘Oh Mr Palmer, it’s much easier than I thought it would be.’
‘Call me Don.’
‘Oh, Don…. It’s too good to be true. I can’t believe it. I can’t!’
‘Relax,’ he said. He drew her to him with wry tenderness. ‘Give your hubby a kiss,’ he said.
‘Oh, Mr… Don…. Oh, don’t, please…. What’ll people think?’
‘What’ll they think if you have a snork that’s got no father?’
‘Oh, Don … I can’t believe it. It doesn’t seem right somehow.’ There were tears streaming down her checks, when Mrs Palmer came in with a basket of dry washing.
‘Here, son,’ she said, ‘you do your smoking somewhere else, What a stink Dad’d kick up if he knew.’
They disengaged themselves, Miss Dane, flushing and crying, looked at Mrs Palmer and then at the floor like a surprised culprit. Don blandly returned his mother’s stare. ‘Why, Miss Dane of all people!’ she said.
‘My future wife,’ Don said.
‘Oh, Don,’ Mrs Palmer said. ‘Don’t play with the girl’s feelings, That’s a dirty thing to do.’
‘I mean it, Mum,’ he said. ‘We’re going to get married.’
‘You never said anything to me, son,’ she said.
‘I only just made up my mind. I’m telling you now. I couldn’t have told you any sooner.’
‘You might have said something to your old Mum and Dad before you were so quick off the jump.’
‘Listen, Mum, I’ve grown up a bar since we were down in Central Otago. It’s not Myra this time. I know what I’m doing.’
‘What’s all the hurry, son?’ Mrs Palmer said. ‘Its sounds to me a if there’s something fishy going on. Now don’t forget Don, whenever you’re in trouble, there’s always old Mum to come to for help, I’d have thought you’d have known that by now.’
Don grimaced slightly. ‘I’m trapped again, that’s why,’ he said. ‘Miss Dane’s got a baby of mine inside her.’
‘Well, Don Palmer!’ Mrs Palmer said slowly, ‘were you as hard up as that?’ She turned to Miss Dane. ‘What do you mean going with my boy?’ she asked. ‘The cheek of you! You’re only fit to reach infants, not to bring them into the world. The cheek of you, going with my boy! You’ve got to have a bit of the old what-ho to catch my boy’s eye. You’ve got to have a bit of something up here.–She prodded Miss Dane’s slim breasts.–‘You’ve got to have a bit of style.’–Contemptously she felt the material of Miss Dane’s frock. –‘A bit of curve in the leg, a bit of gloss in the hair. Not grey flecks at the side. Not a hairy cheek, or crow’s feet round the eyes. You’ve got to be somebody with sex appeal for my boy–understand?’
‘Stop it at once, Mrs Palmer!’ Miss Dane cried and threw herself at her, jabbing at her with her fists, slapping her face, kicking her legs, and pushing with her knee. Mrs Palmer fought back, pulling Miss Dane’s hair, slapping her. ‘You’re a wicked woman!’ Miss Dane gasped, and, ‘You common little slut!. Mrs Palmer bellowed. Don got between them and pushed them apart. Miss Dane stood on one side of the billiard-table, panting, looking fierce as she rearranged her hairpins. Mrs Palmer flopped into a chair and moaned, ‘Get me a whisky, son. You’ve got the keys to the bar.’
While Don was out of the room, she glared across the table at Miss Dane. ‘Oh, I know all about you cheap common little tarts,’ she said. ‘There isn’t a girl in town wouldn’t give everything she’s got for my boy. It happened once before. Oh, it’s an old trick getting a boy in the family way so he’ll have to marry you. And you put it over me! You cunning underhand little sly thing! We nursed one snake in our midst when Paul Rogers ratted on us. I didn’t think we’d have two. Why, if you hadn’t lived in this house I’d never have let you within a stone’s throw of the boy.’
Miss Dane didn’t reply. Mrs Palmer’s words made her furious, yet she felt an unusual satisfaction in her fury. She spoke as if she had the edge on Mrs Palmer. ‘There’s nothing you can do about it,’ she said. ‘Your son’s asked me to marry him. I’ve consented. You have no power in law.’
Dad came in. ‘What’s all the barney, Lil?’ he said.
‘Oh, Dad, I’m all done in,’ Mrs Palmer said. ‘It’s that boy again. He’s in trouble again. He’s no sooner rid of one bitch of a wife and he’s got another applicant.’ She laughed loudly and uneasily.
‘Well, he’s a grown man,’ Dad said, ‘If he wants to get married again, we can’t stop him.’
‘Look at it!’ Mrs Palmer said. ‘Prospective wife to my son! That shrivelled up little schoolmistress!’
‘Now, Lil, take it easy,’ Dad said. ‘This is for Don and Miss Dane to settle, whatever it is.’
‘Mr Palmer,’ Miss Dane said with what dignity she could muster, ‘if I can trust you to be silent on this matter, I’m going to have a baby and your son is the father, and Mrs Palmer’s been very cheap about it.’
‘Well, he’s only got himself to blame then!’ Dad said with unusual anger, neither directly to Miss Dane nor to his wife. ‘Christ knows he’s had one warning. We can’t be expected to mollycoddle him all his life.’
‘Your son has agreed to marry me,’ Miss Dane said.
‘So he bloody well should,’ Dad said. ‘He’s not going to run away from it.’
‘That’s not the point, Dad,’ Mrs Palmer said. ‘It means he’ll be leaving us.’
‘Are you the first mother that’s happened to?’ Miss Dane asked.
Don came back with two whiskies. He offered one to Miss Dane who refused it. ‘Dad?’ he said. His father ignored the offer. ‘You been letting your cock run away with you again? Once should ha’ been enough, shouldn’t it?’
‘Mr Palmer!’ Miss Dane said, as if struggling against her shame
‘There! Didn’t I tell you?’ Mrs Palmer said. ‘Didn’t I say so? Oh, you common little slut, angling for a husband because you couldn’t get one on the open market.’
‘Cut it out, Lil,’ Dad said, ‘Don’t get yourself worked up again.’
‘I was as much to blame as anyone,’ Don said.
‘It takes two to make that sort of a party,’ Mrs Palmer said. ‘You’re no more to blame than Miss Dane.’
‘Well, you two will have to settle it between you,’ Dad said.
‘You’re not leaving me, son,’ Mrs Palmer said. ‘Oh, Dad, I couldn’t stand it. First, Paul’s gone, now Doris has turned on us. Flora’s acting funny lately, coming home at all hours.’
‘Young Rogers was never anything to us,’ Dad said. ‘He’s in his own trouble now. There’s nothing wrong with Flora, it’s your imagination.’
‘They’ll take Donnie away from us,’ Mrs Palmer said. ‘It’s not
fair to hand the boy over to this woman—his teacher!’
‘Your can have Donnie, Mum,’ Don said. ‘We won’t grudge you the boy’s bringing up. You know I’m grateful for that.’
‘There’s no point in arguing further,’ Miss Dane said.
‘I couldn’t stand it, Dad,’ Mrs Palmer cried in terror. ‘There’s not much more the old war-horse can stand. It’s not fair to you to have an invalid wife on your hands in your old age. I might be in the nut-house yet…. No, Dad,’ she said gently and firmly. ‘Don’t try to quieten me…. I’ve had these warnings before. I know my own system. I know when I’ve got to rest and recuperate. But this time there won’t be any recuperating. We haven’t had a year like it before, Dad. Everything’s going to pieces at once. If Don goes I’ll go to pieces. I can’t help it. There it is.’
‘Mrs Palmer,’ Miss Dane said as if she couldn’t quite take her seriously. ‘If Don doesn’t marry me, what do you suppose will happen to me?’
‘You?’ Mrs Palmer said. ‘No one’s worrying about you. Blood’s thicker than water, Miss Dane. When your own are in trouble you don’t worry about other people.’
‘Oh, Mum,’ Don said. ‘You’ll get over it. You got used to Myra didn’t you? It isn’t as if you won’t see me again.’
‘I didn’t think my own boy would sign me over to the mad-house,’
Mrs Palmer said. ‘Just like that. ‘Course, it just goes to show how
much gratitude there is in this world. I used to think, well, human
nature isn’t up to much, but at least your own are dependable. Well,
we live and learn. I’ll feel a lot easier for it when I’m too daft to
‘She means it,’ Dad said to Don. ‘Come on, Lil, you’d better get up to bed.’
‘Not till this thing’s settled, Dad,’ Mrs Palmer said. ‘I’d just like to know whether I’m still to be counted among the sane or not. Are you going to stay with us, son?’
‘How can I, Mum?’ Don said.
‘Well, it’s her or me, son.’
Mr Palmer said as if he had suddenly had all principle crumpled in him by circumstances beyond his control, ‘You see how it is, Miss Dane. Her or you. I know it’s tough. In any other circumstances I’d ha’ made bloody sure he married you. What would you do yourself? If Don stays with us, your life is ruined, I’m not trying to deny that. If he leaves you, my wife is an invalid, for all we know she might lose her reason. What would you do yourself, Miss Dane? It’s tough on you, but you can’t ask the boy to turn his mother barmy and you can’t expect me to force him to…. Don can do what he likes, but you can’t expect me to push him into it… You did say, you encouraged him.’
Miss Dane stared at them as if up till now she hadn’t comprehended.
‘Mr Palmer!’ she cried. ‘How can you be serious? Don’t you know what it means to me? If I don’t get married I’ll have to go through all that scandal. I’d lose my job. I couldn’t support the child myself, without working.’
‘I know it’s difficult for you,’ Dad said limply.
‘And your son will go scot-free! He won’t have to put up with the
scandal. He can go anywhere. I’ll always have the baby. Don,’ she
pleaded. ‘Ignore them. They don’t know what they’re saying.’
‘Don looked downcast. ‘I’m going to marry her, Dad,’ he said.
‘Oh, no, Don,’ Mrs Palmer said with great patience as if to a child who doesn’t understand things properly. Flora came in and stared at the scene without asking questions. ‘Oh, no, Don. It’s time some of you started thinking of your old mother a bit more. Doris pleased herself. I’ll only have old Dopy here left. It’s not that I object to your marrying, son, but I couldn’t see you throw yourself away.’
‘I can please myself about that,’ Don said.
‘Whatever’s all the fuss about?’ Flora said.
‘You go on with what you’re doing, pet,’ Mrs Palmer said. ‘We’re just settling something.’
‘Don’t stay, Flora,’ Dad said.
But Flora didn’t go. More desperately Mrs Palmer said to Miss
Dane, ‘I don’t cure how it affects you; you angled for it. You brought
it on yourself. You’ve got your reward. You’ve got my son’s baby.
That’s enough for you.’
‘Mrs Palmer,’ Miss Dane said. ‘I couldn’t have believed anyone
could be so heartless and cynical. Well, let me tell you, I’m in no
position to care what you think. Don’s agreed to give a name to that
baby and a respectable home to me. And I’m going to see him
honour his promise.’
Mrs Palmer ignored her, Flora said, ‘Oh Don, have you been? … Well, what’s all the trouble about? Why can’t you marry her? Miss Dane, don’t worry. He’ll marry you. Don won’t leave you like that.
Don didn’t reply, Dad said nothing. Mrs Palmer said, ‘Because if he does he’ll be pitching me into the home at Hokitika, that’s why. You don’t want to see me sent into a place like that, do you, Dopy? Visiting me.’
‘Really, your mother is quite ridiculous,’ Miss Dane said, ‘You’ll be able to see your son. You can’t have him all your life.’
‘Oh, Mum, you’re talking rot,’ Flora said. ‘How will it drive you
mad? Didn’t Don get married before? And Doris? I’ll be leaving
you some day too.’
‘You’re not likely to be leaving us for a while yet, Dopy.’
‘You’re talking silly about Hokitika,’ Flora said, as if humouring her. ‘Do you think we’d ever send you there?’
‘Hokitika or Timbuctoo or my own backyard!’ Mrs Palmer shouted. ‘I can feel it coming on, Flor. I know how much I can stand. I tell you, I won’t be responsible for my actions.’
‘She means it,’ Dad said bitterly. ‘It’s not right. But it’s the way it is. It’s you or her,’ he said to Miss Dane.
‘Do you think I’ll let you get away with this?’ Miss Dane cried,
‘If I have that baby, I’ll tell everyone who fathered it—everyone.
Your name will be mud when I tell them how his parents didn’t have
the decency to….’
‘Who cares what you say?’ Mrs Palmer said.
‘Don!’ Miss Dane pleaded. ‘Say it. Say it, to reassure me. Tell them you don’t care whether she goes mad or not. Tell her you’re going to marry me.’
‘She’s blackmailing you,’ Mrs Palmer said. ‘Threatening to tell everyone.’
‘Don, I can’t believe it!’ Flora said. ‘Mum! Dad! What’s gone wrong with you all so suddenly!’ She seized Mum by the arm. ‘Mum, tell us you’re only play-acting. Tell Don you can’t stop him marrying Miss Dane.’
Mrs Palmer fended flora away gently. ‘You don’t understand,
pet,’ she said. Flora grabbed at Dad’s coat. ‘Dad, what’s wrong with
you? Tell Don it’s only right—he’s got to marry her!’ But Dad
stared through her with downcast eyes. ‘Dad, look at me! Tell me
what’s got into you all! … Don! It’s your decision anyway. Don’t
listen to Mum, Don. She doesn’t mean it. You’ll have to marry her.
Don’t you know how a girl must feel in a situation like that? You’re
responsible for it. Don!’ But Don only said, ‘I wanted to, Flor. I
offered to. But I can’t send Mum off her rocker at the same stroke.’
‘Oh, Mum,’ Flora said, ‘Mum’s weathered worse storms than
that. She says these things. Miss Dane, don’t believe them. They’ve
all gone off their rockers now, I reckon. But come back tomorrow
and they’ll be right again, you’ll see. Come and ask Don tomorrow.’
‘What people!’ Miss Dane said bitterly. ‘The high and mighty of the town. They can’t even stand up for the elementary decencies of life. Selfish, wicked people, destroying other people’s lives!’ Then for the first time in her life she surrendered herself to a heaving fit of sobs. The noise was dismal. Don moved to support her but furiously she pushed him off and fell across the billiard-table, weeping on to the faded baize.
Flora stood as if she too were at bay. ‘I’ve never seen you like this
before,’ she cried. ‘It is true, what Miss Dane says. You’re cruel and
selfish. You don’t know what you’re doing to me! All the things you
brought me up to believe in, you’re showing you don’t believe a
word of them when your own turn comes. Miss Dane,’ she said,
moving to her and putting her arm about her, stroking her hair,
while Miss Dane accepted her comforting. ‘Don’t believe them.
They can’t mean it…. If I was Miss Dane,’ she said furiously to
Don, ‘I wouldn’t even let you marry me now. Not after this. Can’t
you think of a girl’s pride? And I used to be proud of my brother.
You’re spineless.’
Dad went to the two women and separated them. ‘Come on, Flora,’ he said. ‘There’s no help for it. You’ll do yourself no good getting yourself worked up like this.’ Flora stood apart still staring at them with hostility. ‘Of course we’ll settle with you,’ Dad said to Miss Dane, as if to his conscience, because it was obvious she wasn’t listening. ‘We’ll see you right if it costs our last penny. You can put the baby in a home.’
‘We could take the baby,’ Mrs Palmer said, already more in
control of herself. ‘It’d give me something to think about. So long
as it’s Don’s. It is yours, isn’t it, Don?’
‘’Course it’s mine,’ Don said irritably.
‘Then don’t worry, Miss Dane,’ she continued. ‘The baby
‘They never knew if Miss Dane understood because she staggered out of the room, knocking into Don without recognition, and careless of her disarranged hair and scratched face, almost fell into her Morris Eight, still sobbing, and drove unsteadily down the main road. She did not stop at Raes’.
The two men watching her go looked surly and defeated. Mrs Palmer shook her head with an appearance of enigmatic wisdom. She said, ‘I don’t s’pose she’ll have much use for that car soon, Dad. It might be an idea to buy it for Don. You could pay her a good price for it, to help her along a bit.’
Flora came to them. ‘Cruel and spineless, that sums up the lot of
you. Let me tell you something. I’ve been taking risks myself lately.
Yes, with Paul! And Paul wouldn’t let me down the way you did.
Would you like it if that happened to me? It’d serve you right if it
did. Only it won’t.’
‘No one commented. They couldn’t face a new complication. Mum half collapsed and Dad supported her to her room. Ten minutes later Flora left, without good-byes, with a suitcase, for Doris’s.
Ahaura was a settlement on the river flat several miles up the Grey Valley. There was a sawmill, a railway station, and in the lush paddocks on the river flat, a few prosperous farmers ran sheep. Miss Dane drove there from Palmers’ to see Mr Hankinson, the Presbyterian parson who preached once a fortnight at the church in Coal Flat. There was no one else she could turn to; she didn’t look forward to seeing him, but she was beyond weighing the merits of her decision.
Mr Hankinson was a tall sour bent man in clerical grey. During
the week he put in five full days of duty, driving to see the members
of his congregation, drinking endless cups of tea with wives caught
without warning in the middle of washing or baking. He would talk
about their families for five minutes, then draw them into talk about
religion: the talk was usually one-sided, they were embarrassed and
usually said little but, ‘Yes, I s’pose you’re right, when you come to
think of it,’ or else they tried to shy away to another topic. Sometimes if a child was ill, they were more amenable to serious talk.
After a few minutes he would look at his watch, and say, ‘Just a
The manse was a six-roomed white wooden house already in need
of a new coat of paint. He and his wife lived alone in it; they had no
children. At one corner the corrugated-iron roof rose into a turret
like that on Dr Alexander’s at Coal Flat. Only the roof showed from
the road, because the house was hidden behind a high compact
hedge of Olearia Forsteri, its twigs full of cankers. Mr Hankinson
answered the door to Miss Dane. He stood with surprise and small
welcome in a cardigan and slippers. He took Miss Dane’s umbrella
but did not offer to take her wet raincoat. Nor did he offer her a cup
of tea; he had had several himself on his rounds that afternoon and
it wasn’t far off dinner time.
‘Well, Miss Dane?’ he said as he pointed her to a chair. He stood
facing her with his hands behind his back and his back to the fire.
His study was shelved sparsely with drab black books of theology.
He seldom read them, or anything at all but the Bible, though the
morning’s Press lay open at the roll-top desk where he wrote his
sermons.
‘Mr Hankinson, there’s something I have to tell you. I need advice—desperately.’
‘Oh? … Let me see, you shifted from that awful hotel, didn’t you? You’re well fixed up at the policeman’s, aren’t you? What is it then?’
‘It’s an embarrassing thing to talk of.’
‘Oh?’ Mr Hankinson’s face was already set at the defence.
‘I wouldn’t have come to you if there’d been anyone else I could turn to, Mr Hankinson. But I’m desperate….’
‘It’s nothing—er—financial, I hope?’ Mr Hankinson blurted in great embarrassment.
‘Certainly not…. Please don’t judge me, Mr Hankinson. Don’t accuse me. But I have to do something…. I’m going to have a child, and the father won’t marry me.’
‘Goodness me!’ Mr Hankinson exclaimed. ‘Miss Dane of all people! Are you serious?’
‘Mr Hankinson, you know I’m not given to practical jokes.’
‘Incredible!’ the parson was saying. ‘Good heavens, Miss
Dane!… What do you expect me to do?’
‘Advise me, Mr Hankinson,’ Miss Dane wailed. ‘Advise me, for God’s sake!’
‘I’d advise you to remember your language,’ the parson said with dignity, as an interim measure.
‘Oh, really,’ Miss Dane pleaded in exasperation.
Mr Hankinson sat down and motioned Miss Dane to sit too. She perched on the arm of a chair still in her wet coat.
‘How long ago did this—this thing happen?’
‘Three months ago.’
‘I’m surprised at you!’ With heavy admonition he said. ‘And yet
you’ve been coming to church all along, as if nothing had happened.
I didn’t think I’d ever have to accuse you of hypocrisy, Miss Dane.
Playing the organ, singing hymns, praying; as if nothing had happened. It’s a wonder you weren’t afraid of the roof falling on your
head.’
‘Oh, Mr Hankinson….’
‘Don’t Oh, Mr Hankinson me, young lady,’ he said angrily. ‘I’m
trying to help you.’ With what to him was unusual tenderness, he
said, ‘Don’t you realize what you’ve done. You’ve committed an
awful sin and there’s a heavy price to pay…. Who is the father?’
Miss Dane started at him with simmering defiance. ‘I’d rather not say,’ she said.
‘Be serious, Miss Dane. You haven’t the right to protect the man
like that. You’re shielding evil. Really, Miss Dane, you can’t expect
much help if you won’t say who the father is. It might have been
possible to put pressure on him.—He’s not married already, is
he? … Then what’s the objection to giving away his name? Does
be go to our church? … Miss Dane, you must tell me his name.’
She stared at him and said nothing. The person rose sadly and heaving a sigh, said, ‘Then on your own head he it. If you want to shield evil, you can’t expect others to help you.’
‘What can I do?’ Miss Dane asked in a tense whisper.
‘In Heaven’s name, how can I tell you?’ the parson said, loud and exasperated. ‘It would have been a patched-up affair, anyway, marrying him now. But how you expect me to do anything when you won’t tell me his name….’
‘Mr Hankinson, I can’t.’
‘You’ve made your bed, then,’ he said firmly. ‘You’ll have to lie
‘Oh, Mr Hankinson, you’ve got no understanding,’ Miss Dane said. ‘Why did I ever come to you?’
‘Quietly and firmly the parson said, ‘If you had any shame, you wouldn’t have had the cheek to come in the mood you’ve come to me now.’
‘Miss Dane stamped her foot. ‘You’ve got no understanding of a woman’s feeling!’ she shouted.
‘Don’t act the devil’s advocate,’ Mr Hankinson said, still quietly. ‘It’s your own choice. If you want to save your soul you’ve got a lot to make up. Defiance won’t help you. You’ll have to grovel on your knees and repent, repent, Miss Dane. I’d be failing in my duty if I told you otherwise.’
‘Miss Dane was crying.
‘That’s better,’ he said. ‘Tears are better. Now go and think of the awfulness of what you’ve done. And come back when you’re in a more repentant mood than you are today. Only you’ll have to tell me the father’s name or I won’t be able to help you.’
‘Oh, you’re too holy for words!’ Miss Dane cried suddenly. ‘I don’t care! You’ve got no feelings…. You—you creeping Jesus!’
‘Stop your blasphemy!’ Mr Hankinson shouted and flung open the door. He slammed the front door behind her and returned to his fire puffing.
Miss Dane was surprised at herself, at her defiance of everything she had hitherto respected. But still she muttered, ‘I don’t care! I don’t care!’ as she drove again into the rain. She seemed to be finding in herself reserves of strength she had never before suspected. She felt strong enough to go ahead and have the baby, husband or no husband.
However, just as the car was approaching Ngahere, the engine stalled. Miss Dane tried several times to start it, then looked at the steady rain outside and sighing deeply, fell head forward over the wheel. She heard a car pull up, and someone tapped on the window. Under a black hat she saw a man’s face grinning with effort against the rain.
‘In trouble?’ he said.
‘Oh, Mr Flaherty,’ she said. ‘I’m just out of petrol.’
He went to his car, brought a gallon tin and poured it into her tank. ‘You can drop it round at the presbytery next time you’re at Ahaura,’ he said. He tipped his hat. ‘You look all upset,’ he said grinning as if he was paying her a compliment. She didn’t answer.
She couldn’t have said when the idea first took her; it just seemed
It didn’t bother her in the least that she didn’t go to school that morning, or any other morning that week. Heath assumed she was ill, and in one moment of fluster at having to manage with two of his staff away, he sent a boy to look for Rogers. But the boy reported that Rogers was working on the dredge now. And on second thought, Heath was glad he hadn’t asked him.
On her way to Ahaura Miss Dane passed Mr Hankinson’s car; he didn’t acknowledge her, and it gratified her unusually that she could stare him through as if he was a stranger. Father Flaherty answered the door himself. ‘Ah,’ he said, ‘I’m awake to all your tricks. Trying to get us a bad name, having women call on us. I know you Presbyterians.’
‘Miss Dane stammered but she couldn’t raise a smile. ‘Here’s your petrol, Mr Flaherty,’ she said. ‘It was very kind of you. I forgot to say thank you.’
‘Not at all, not at all.’
‘I’d like to talk to you seriously, Mr Flaherty,’ she said.
His face showed surprise and sudden wariness. ‘Yes?’ he said.
They sat in a sitting-room that showed signs of being little used,
of being over-dusted and over-polished by someone strange to the
house. There were some black books, a missal, piles of Catholic
Truth Society pamphlets going yellow, with their covers falling
loose. The morning’s Argus lay unopened by some neatly refolded
Zealandias.
Miss Dane felt more at ease with this man, but she didn’t know if it was because he was normally good-humoured, or whether it was because she didn’t know herself if she was genuine. She had come to try something out; at present she was exploring, acting a part. If it didn’t work out successfully nothing was lost. At least that was what she told herself.
‘Mr Flaherty,’ she said as if it was a carefully prepared speech, though it wasn’t, ‘What would you say to an unmarried mother?’
‘The priest looked surprised and irritated. He was about to say
something harsh when he remembered that she owed him no
‘What would you tell her, in the confessional?’ she persisted.
He stared at her for a minute, then, without surprise, he said, ‘You?’
‘Yes, Mr Flaherty,’ she said, losing control of herself in tears. ‘I had to come to someone for advice. I didn’t know all this would happen.’
‘Why did you come to me?’ he said, rather grimly.
‘I went to my own minister yesterday—I was on my way back when you gave me the petrol. Oh, Mr Flaherty, he was harsh to me, he gave me no sympathy, he put me out of his house.’
‘Are you looking for sympathy?’ he asked.
‘I want advice. The father won’t marry me. He was going to, but his mother won’t have it. I don’t know what to do.’
‘Who is he?’
‘I can’t tell you that.’
‘Then tell me one thing—is he a Catholic?’
‘No—no—he’s a heathen. But then I am too, after what I’ve done. Mr Flaherty, I’ve tried to live a good life, it was that once I slipped. I’m not denying that I encouraged him, the father I mean.’
‘At least you recognize your sin.’
She looked up at him with a hunted expression. ‘None of you clergy are very sympathetic, are you?’
‘You don’t expect us to excuse it, do you? There’s plenty of mercy for you if you do the right thing. I’m not trying to excuse your own minister for being so self-righteous about it. God’s mercy is infinite, and that’s something Hankinson doesn’t seem to know. But you can’t expect to be let off with a caution.’
‘Do you want me to grovel on my knees like Mr Hankinson said?’
‘You’ll have to do more than that before you’ve finished. Only it’ll be worth it in the end…. You don’t know how embarrassing this is for me. You’re not even a Catholic, and I usually hear these things in the confessional…. Here, this is a roundabout way of doing things I know.—How long have you got before the baby comes? … Well, you’ve got time then. Read these. I can’t do anything for you unless you’re a Catholic. These might help you.’ He gave her three books that expounded Catholic doctrines.
Miss Dane returned home and went straight to bed. She told Mrs
Rae she was ill. All day she read, and before the week’s end she had
visited the priest twice more, while he, hopefully yet with embarrassment, explained difficulties in the faith. By the week-end she
had resolved to turn Catholic. Even before she had made up her
mind, she felt as if she was about to unload her problem on to
It came on her like a subtle seduction, reminiscent somehow of that night at Ngahere when she had put up no resistance to the excitement caused by gin and tobacco-fumes and Don’s voice; yet it was slower and more peaceful.
And huge as the institution was she felt it gave her direct entry to the presence of God’s love. She used to suppress any but the most impersonal attitudes to Christ, as if they were shameful; now He came terribly near and dear to her, and the thought of his wrongs pricked anguish from her heart like a weeping sore. ‘I’ve offended him as much as anyone,’ she moaned as she remembered the night with Don and that last puff of self-will at Hankinson’s when she had used his name as a term of contempt. The more she thought about the Redemption the more abjectly she accused herself, but the more miraculous it seemed that her chances of salvation were infinitely greater than she had ever realized. Self-accusation and gratitude, guilt and joy, repeatedly her emotions turned on these, as if she were tied to a wheel endlessly turning between them, and the two came to seem one—like whining that turned into singing once you heard it properly. By the time she had taken the decision she felt released.
On the Friday evening Mr Palmer senior came and offered her £600 for her car. It came to her as an unexpected stroke of good luck, perhaps a token of a later change in grace. ‘But it’s only worth four hundred!’ she said. ‘True, I’ve only had it a year, and I’ve looked after it. But it only cost me £485.’
Dad stared at her as if he couldn’t believe her brightness. He had dreaded meeting her again. Yet she seemed to have forgotten that terrible argument in the billiard-room three days before. The transaction was done at the front door.
‘That’s to cover other eventualities,’ Dad said. He had worked it out methodically, so much for the car’s actual value, so much for seven months’ expenses of living without working, so much for the maternity hospital, and for the baby’s clothes. ‘If you ever need more, you know where we live.’
But she didn’t seem to follow him.
The following night Mrs Rae was surprised, answering a knock
on the front door, to find Don Palmer. She called Miss Dane, who
‘I’ve come to tell you,’ he said miserably. ‘I’m not backing out.’ He had convinced himself that he had never intended different.
Miss Dane evidently didn’t understand him. ‘Yes, Mr Palmer?’ she said. ‘Yes? What is it?’
‘The old woman can go off her bloody rocker if she wants to,’ he said. ‘I’m not a bloody kid.’
‘Really, Mr Palmer,’ she said. ‘It is a miserable sort of night to be standing at the door talking.’
‘I’ve come to tell you,’ he said. ‘I’ll marry you.’
She stared as if she hadn’t heard.
‘We’re getting married,’ he said. ‘You’re getting what you wanted. There won’t be any scandal.’
She seemed to be looking right through him, and he almost begged her, ‘Oh, for Christ’s sake, Miss—what’s your first name? You’ve never told me that.—Christ, don’t you see? I’m going to marry you. We’ll go away, away from the old woman….’
‘Please mind your language,’ she said distantly and firmly. ‘I’m sorry, I’m afraid I’ve made other arrangements.’
‘You’ve what? How could you make other arrangements? You said there was no other way out for you.’
‘Unless you were prepared to become a Catholic,’ she said.
‘A Catholic! For Christ’s sake. I’ll turn anything you want me to. You’re not a Catholic!’
‘That wouldn’t be good enough, Mr Palmer. You wouldn’t be a true believer. I couldn’t take the responsibility. And even if I left the child with you I couldn’t be sure that you would give it a Christian upbringing. No. No. I’m quite decided now, Mr Palmer. I’ll have to go ahead with my own arrangements.’
‘What arrangements?’
‘I’m joining the Church.’
‘The Church!’ he exclaimed, exasperated.
‘I’m changing to the true faith, and if it’s at all possible I’ll …’ but she checked herself.
‘That’s all very well!’ Don protested. ‘If there was no other way out. Can’t you see it’ll be better for you to get married and give the kid a father? What good will the Church do to you?’
‘I could hardly expect you to see that.’
‘Miss Dane! Oh, whatever your name is, Miss Dane,’ Don pleaded. ‘It’s my last chance to get my head out of water…. I’ve felt like a worm since the last time you came round … I had to do it. I had to tell the old woman where she got off. Don’t go and ditch me now!’
‘You’ve had your chance, Mr Palmer,’ Miss Dane said quietly and firmly, ‘and it’s past now. I’m quite convinced there was a purpose in your mother’s intervention and I’m thankful for it now. I can see things a lot more clearly now.’
‘Oh, for Christ’s sake …’ Don protested. She took offence at the
oath, and with a touch of fierceness as from an old unconverted
depth in her, she looked straight at him. ‘I don’t think I could live
with you now. Not after the way you acted the other day.’ She
quietly closed the door, leaving him bewildered and bereaved of his
purpose.
Back in her room she blamed herself for having dared to show pride. Yet she felt strangely relieved: the future was so much clearer now, even though she hadn’t planned it. What would happen? Would she be able to put the baby in a convent, and become a teaching nun? Get another job, bring the baby up herself, unmarried and penitent, with her head high among the shaded whispers? She didn’t know: just now it didn’t seem to matter. The future was God’s and what he thought best would be good enough for her. She fumbled in a drawer for a fresh handkerchief and her fingers lit on Mrs O’Reilly’s St Christopher medal that she had forgotten about all these months. She smiled, hung it round her neck, and tears of gratitude melted from her eyes.
On the Monday she left the district. People thought she was only going away for the term holidays, but she never came back.
The sun was low and its light faded, and there was already a
promise of frost in the air, as Truman Heath walked briskly from
the school. His case was heavier than usual since he had foraged
through his office collecting the last odds-and-ends of his possessions—books, rulers, a whistle, celluloid set-squares, an old pair of
goloshes. His pace slowed a little when he saw his son ahead of him;
he was in his class and he had never outgrown the dim embarrassment of having to teach in the witness of his son. He wished Ronald
would run ahead.
There had been an air of disappointment over the whole day. It had started bright but by noon the sun had gone behind cloud, only to reappear for an hour or so before its setting. There was a frustrating lack of climax in his departure from the school. It was as if he was only a visitor letting himself out quietly from a party where no one had recognized him, as if he didn’t belong to the school. He had an unusual sensation of not belonging anywhere.
The reason was intangible. There had been the expected farewell
presentation. He had roughly rehearsed what he would say and
there were no hitches in the proceedings. Yet they had never quite
warmed up. Perhaps it was because there were only three others
present—the committee had sent Mr Rae. Fred Lawson had stood
up at morning tea. His speech, in words designed for a larger
audience, but subdued and apologetic in tone in deference to the
smallness of their number, fell flat and a little ridiculous. He said it
fell on him to take this opportunity of expressing on behalf of the
staff of the school an appreciation of what Mr Heath had done for
the school, and to say how sorry each of the staff would be to see
him go; this small appreciation was a small token by which Mr
Heath might remember his days in the Flat; he wished Mr Heath
every success in his new position. Rae spoke in similar words. Mrs
Hansen sat through it impassively, and when Heath blushed, hope, he knew for certain—that the same applied to the staff and that he could gratefully accept
their kind wishes for his new position. Though he was sorry to
leave Coal Flat, he was looking forward to his new position in Central Otago. It would be a bigger school than Coal Flat, and it was an
advance in his career. He had only one regret, and that was that he
hadn’t been able, as he had thought, to pick his next position. His
ambitions seemed to have been higher than his actual status in the
eyes of the Otago Education Board. He might as well be frank about
it. Never mind. He had no doubt that in his new school he could so
Yet, as he thought of his speech now on his way home, what else
could he have said? He had been honest; he hadn’t evaded the fact
that they had had their differences. Couldn’t they see that clashes of
opinion were unavoidable? Couldn’t they make allowances, especially at a time like this?… Well, that was over now and unalterable.
What had been had been. There was the future to think of—the
school at Cromwell—hadn’t the Palmers come from somewhere
near there? But again he felt disappointed and cheated. Now that
the appointment had been announced in the Education Gazette,
now that he had been reassured by the advancement, there seemed
to be nothing to look forward to for years till the next move. What
lay ahead but packing, shifting into a new house, getting to know
new people, new children? It didn’t attract him at all. Truman
Heath, walking for the last time home from Coal Flat school, felt
terribly tired. He was going home—home to the wife he had lost
contact with when Ronald was born, to the bitchy silences over the
meal-table, allying only in the rearing of their boy and often disunited over him, to mutual distrust and petty rivalry suppressed
only for the sake of appearances to be kept up before the boy and
the neighbours. Yes, they were well and truly married to each other.
Neither would have been able to face the effort of living without the
other—she needed his pay-cheques, he needed her to do his cooking
and washing and mending, just as he needed the goodwill of her
father on the Otago Education Board. The boy needed them both.
He had lost contact with Ronald as soon as he was of school age.
Perhaps he never really had made contact—hadn’t she always come
between them when he was a baby, taking him from his arms,
standing by as if a man could never be trusted with a baby,
Ronald looked back and saw him coming, and hesitantly, as if afraid to do otherwise, stopped till he caught him up. He didn’t speak to hi, only grinned lifelessly. ‘Well?’ Truman Heath said, and they walked uneasily together in silence.
Then Heath said with a brisk infusion of heartiness, ‘Looking forward to helping with the packing?’
‘I s’pose so,’ Ronald said; and there was no more said, till Heath tried again.
‘Cromwell. I was born there, you know.’
This more personal confession only embarrassed his son, as if it demanded that he too should lower his defences and open more freely his thoughts—but what was he thinking? He didn’t know himself, when his father was with him, what he felt or thought. He didn’t comment, and his father said, ‘Did you know that?’
‘No.’
‘I thought you knew…. Yes, born and bred there. Know it like the back of my hand. I’ll be able to point out all the places of interest to you….’
There was a brief sound of breath being expelled simultaneously from Ronald’s nose and mouth; it was a comment of complaisance, as if to humour his father and keep him talking and save those dreadful silences, yet it was at the same time an expression of distrust. And Heath took it as a sneer and gave up trying to fathom this strange unapproachable son he had never known.
What was this life? he wondered. Didn’t everything in the end turn out to be a hoax? You saved towards marriage and marriage failed you, a family failed you. You slaved out of ambition for the jobs of greater responsibility and higher salary, and you found yourself in charge of an obstructive staff, working with an unco-operative committee, living at a cold distance from the parents of the town. You were imprisoned, a squirrel in a cage, sweating your heart out and getting nowhere; imprisoned by a contemptuous wife and an impenetrable son, slaving for them without even their gratitude in return. All his life he had been straining after mirages.
The sun faded in a wintry glow behind the hills at the back of the
gold dredge, and a frost crept into the air. There was a nostalgic
On the Saturday morning, the day after he had suspended,
Rogers took the bus to Greymouth to see a, lawyer. Mike Cassidy
was a bluff big-hearted son of the generation of Irishmen who were
among the first to settle the West Coast, taking to sawmills when the
gold rush finished, lingering on to prospect on small gold claims,
moving to the river-mouth ports to work at clearing bush, house-building, road-laying, railway construction. The brash days of the
Coast came and went with the gold rush, but their traditions stayed
till well into the new century, dying about the time of the First
World War. Yet, in the three river-mouth ports, there was still a
small elderly society of people who remembered those days. You
could thumb through their photos, younger, looking self-important
with handle-bar moustaches and hair parted in the middle and
brushed straight to the side, in the golden jubilee souvenir books
issued by the borough councils; most of them were dead, or survived pottering in back gardens, sitting in collarless shirts and
waistcoats by kitchen ranges, seldom seen on the streets. Newer
generations hadn’t heard of them, and they on their side nursed
suspicions that the young men of today were spineless and spunkless, till the All Blacks did well on an overseas tour, or a war came
and perhaps a local lad got a V.C. and then they thought, ‘There’s
life in the old Coast yet’. In their day they had been hard-drinking,
hard-swearing, boastful Irishmen who said sir to no man; they
were a society on their own, and the laws of the rest of the country
didn’t necessarily apply on the Coast, particularly licensing laws.
The Coast of those days produced some hard-headed fighting politicians, Dick Seddon, Harry Holland, Jimmy O’Brien and Paddy
Webb—it didn’t matter whether you agreed with them or not, they
talked straight from the shoulder, and when they got into a squabble
they fought like men, and you thought, ‘Well, they are keeping the
old Coast’s feather up.’ But those days lived only in the memories
of older men, one of whom every few months would take his place
in the obituary column and be driven his last mile to the cemetery
Mike Cassidy was well in his sixties but didn’t look it. He had a
reputation of being a shrewd lawyer, for charging exorbitant fees to
those who could afford it, and nominal ones to those who couldn’t.
He had never taken part in politics, yet in his day he had defended
unions in industrial disputes, or pleaded for them in arbitration
courts, most of them successfully. But since the end of the war,
since everyone had been denouncing every strike or dispute as
communist-inspired, and old Jimmy Teague who had been priest
for the last thirty years, had been sermonizing more frequently on
atheistic
Rogers had phoned for an appointment. He knocked and a brusque voice called, ‘Come in!’ and he entered the little office lined with old statute-books and books of law which looked as if they were never opened. Cassidy didn’t get up, he sat back from his desk and told Rogers to sit in an arm-chair covered with plush, worn and greasy at the top. ‘Rogers is the name?’ Cassidy said. ‘You’re Harry Rogers’s boy then? Used to be on the railway?’
‘That’s right.’
‘Oh, I knew him well. I rode to Hokitika with him in the cab of his engine once! I bet he never told you that! We had a night out that night—an Orphans’ Club do.’ He put his elbows on the desk and pressed his hands together. ‘Yes, we had some good old times, Harry and the rest of the gang. Well, those days won’t come again. Old Harry’s out of it now. Probably happier where he is, and all. Where’s the rest of the family now?’
Rogers told him where his brothers and sisters lived, what they were doing. ‘I don’t see much of them,’ he said.
‘Pity!’ Cassidy said. ‘A man should keep in touch with his family. Would you want a cup of tea now?’
‘I don’t mind.’
‘I’ve got no girl here this morning. I’m my own office-girl. Mind you, I’ve always voted for Bernie O’Malley, and I don’t care who knows it, but I reckon sometimes his crowd take things too far. All this forty-hour week business. My office-girl doesn’t work Saturdays but I have to. I told him so last week too. Ah, he just grinned. He says, “Mike, you’re getting fat and prosperous. Your principles are going to fat!” I says, “What about you?” Yes, what about him? He’s right, though. Old people see things different… Well, God help me, I don’t want to be bothered fussing round with teapots and gas burners. Can you make the tea?’
‘If you like—’
‘No, no, don’t bother now. Not at all. Look now, here’s four bob, go to Tommy Barlow’s and get a couple of bottles of Monteith’s, and we’ll have a man’s drink.’
Rogers remembered the boycott. ‘I’d rather not drink,’ he said.
‘Now don’t be silly now. This is my shout. Be off with you for that beer and I’ll be giving thought to your case,’ He stood up and pushed Rogers out of the door. Rogers didn’t go to Barlow’s; he walked a few hundred yards farther on to the one pub in the town that was selling sixpenny beer. When he came back, Cassidy said:
‘Ah, it’s Speight’s now. Why is that?’
‘I went to the Central. They didn’t have Monteith’s.’
‘Ah, this bloody boycott. I keep forgetting about it. Well, old Harry would have stuck up for the boycott, so I can’t complain if you do. And Speight’s is just as good a drink, only it doesn’t travel well…. Now, tell me about this case.’ He found two glasses in a cupboard. They had to be washed of stale beer. Then he poured Rogers a glass.
Rogers flushed and began an account of the charge against him.
‘Now, let me see,’ Cassidy said. ‘Herlihy’s the boy’s name.
Would that be Mike Herlihy’s boy? … Ah yes, he didn’t come to
much good. He was training for a priest, you know. Well, he didn’t
seem to have the vocation. So he gave it up and then he seemed to
lose all his interest in life, you know. A failure. He took to the beer.
I heard his marriage wasn’t a success. Strange fullah, Mike. He had
promise as a lad. You’d ha’ thought he’d go anywhere then. I used
to say to myself, “He’ll be a bishop yet, will old Mike”,’
Rogers completed his account.
‘Well, my boy, I reckon it won’t be difficult to clear you of that now. It’s a horrible thing they’ve accused you of. They haven’t even got a scrap of evidence. You know, I wonder what the policeman up there was doing anyway to bring it to the court at all. I daresay the magistrate would dismiss it, but it’ll be better if we get the whole thing cleared up, otherwise people’ll have their suspicions still. We’ll reserve our defence, that’s what we’ll do, and it’ll pass on to the Supreme Court to come up in the next sessions, that’s about a fortnight from now.’
‘I can leave it to you then?’ Rogers asked.
‘Don’t worry now. Everything will be all right. It’ll be one of the easiest cases I’ve had….
‘Thanks, Mr Cassidy, I’m grateful.’
‘Not at all, not at all now.’
Mike Herlihy sat bored and sour in his kitchen, reading the
Argus. He had chopped enough wood for a month; there was no
‘Bloody two-faced bastards,’ she said. ‘They kicked up at young Palmer taking their jobs. They don’t say anything about that schoolteacher taking yours. If Thompson had any guts he wouldn’t employ him. They’re all the bloody same—you get no thanks for it. The company gave Jack the sack, and the dredge company’s pushed you overboard now. I wouldn’t go back to them! I’d go and work in the mine!’
‘Rogers that was supposed to be such a socialist,’ Mike said. ‘Couldn’t abide scabbing. What’s he doing but scabbing, taking my job?’
‘He’ll pay yet,’ Nora said. ‘He’s only got a couple of weeks’ freedom. He’ll be living off the country then.’
They looked up as the door clicked and Peter came in.
‘What are you doing home now?’ Nora said in alarm.
Peter didn’t answer but stood with one hand on the back of his father’s chair. ‘Answer your mother,’ Mike said. ‘Why are you home from school?’
‘It had better be a bloody good reason,’ Nora said. ‘You’re in trouble enough without adding to it.’
‘Is anything wrong?’ Mike asked.
‘No,’ Peter said.
Nora took him by the neck of his raincoat and shook him. ‘Then why are you home?’ she screamed.
‘I don’t like school,’ he said. ‘Anyway, we break up today.’ He had in fact had a week at school since he made up the story about Rogers. Miss Dane treated him as if he was an untouchable. The other teachers looked strangely at him. The other children had picked up rumours and he found himself an object of cold curiosity and an outcast. The last straw was when a gang of boys began to chase him. He hadn’t been to school since, but today it was raining and he was so tired of cowering from the drips in his hidey-hole that he had braved his mother’s fury.
‘You can’t pull that trick twice, young man,’ she said. ‘It was over your wagging school that all this other business came out. You can’t tell us that one again,’
‘Shut up,’ Mike said. ‘You can credit the boy with the truth now and again. He didn’t make that lot up.’
‘I won’t stand it, do you hear? You’ve got no excuse to be missing school.’ She pulled at Peter and he cheeked her. ‘None of your lip now!’ But Peter gave her more. She fetched the stick and laid it on his legs. ‘Dad!’ Peter called, but Mike didn’t interfere.
‘Now get up to school,’ Nora said, ‘And I hope they’ll give you more for being late.’
From the door, between sobs, Peter shouted: ‘You’re mad, both of you. I’m going to say it was all lies about Mr Rogers.’ He ran for his life, Mike and Nora ran after him, and Mike would never have caught him if the boy hadn’t been skulking in some fern at the side of the road.
‘What’s this you said?’ Mike demanded. ‘What about Rogers?’
‘It was only a story,’ Peter said with bitter triumph. ‘I made it all up.’
‘Tell me now,’ Mike said frantically, ‘tell me the truth and no shenanikins. Was it true?’
‘He’s only saying it to annoy us,’ Nora said. ‘You say that again I’ll damn near flay you,’
‘I did so make it up,’ Peter said.
Mike clouted him on the head and kept slapping him on the back.
‘Tell me now. Was it true?’ After a few minutes of saying, ‘No’, Peter whimpered ‘Yes’, and Mike stopped.
They sent him out again, not caring if in fact he went to school. ‘We’ll look bloody fools if it was lies,’ Mike said.
‘He only said it to get even,’ Nora said. ‘By Christ, if he comes out with that in court, I’ll bloody near kill him.’
‘Lay off him a bit,’ Mike said. ‘Don’t make him get a set on you or he might…. What about the schoolteacher, if it’s not true?’
‘It’ll serve him bloody well right for pinching your job,’ Nora said. ‘You’re not in any position to be defending him.’
‘That’s all very well,’ Mike said. ‘You can’t go ruining a man’s life on a lie.’
‘That’s his worry,’ Liza said. ‘He’s got a lawyer. It’s up to them.’
‘I don’t want to go through with this if it’s lies.’
‘Don’t back out now,’ she said. ‘You’ve got a chance to get even with him.’
‘That’s got nothing to do with it.’
But the more Mike pondered the more confused he was. He wouldn’t be able to believe Peter now, whatever he said: yet if his first story was true, he couldn’t back out. He decided to let the matter solve itself, and he framed a silent prayer to God to do justice.
Rogers sat in a little room off the courtroom, waiting. It
evidently wasn’t a busy session of the Supreme Court, since
there were only four in the room; but then there never was much
serious crime on the Coast. There was a young pale fellow, no more
than eighteen, with plentiful hair slicked back in a duck’s-arse cut,
presumably an English seaman. There were two men of middle age;
one of them shifty-eyed and non-committal in a shabby overcoat,
the other a bald-headed man in a prosperous suit, with his hat on
his lap. He tapped the floor with the toe of one shoe, and occasionally drummed his fingers on his hat; spasmodically he loosely
pursed his lips, and whimbled a few bars of a tune. He looked as if
he wanted to demonstrate that, no matter how much the rest of the
company might belong there, he certainly didn’t. It transpired later
that he was facing a charge of drunken driving. He had knocked
down a woman cyclist who was in hospital.
Rogers made to light a smoke. The businessman pursed his lips and shook his head. ‘Not allowed, old boy,’ he said.
The English seaman turned with bland surprise. ‘Cor!’ he said. ‘Cawn’t ye do anythin’ rahnd ‘ere?’ He smiled knowingly and exposed a butt held inwards between his thumb and index finger, ‘Cawn’t see it, ye see,’ he said. ‘On’y the smoke. That don’t worry them.’
The businessman emitted breath from his nose in disapproval. The other middle-aged man’s face refused to express comment. He, it turned out later, was up for stealing timber from a railway-yard and corrugated iron from the wharf.
The policeman outside the door looked in. ‘Here, no smoking’ cock!’ he said to the seaman who grinned and muttered, ‘F—in, ’ell.’
‘It’s times like these you need a bloody smoke,’ the thief said with wry grimness, breaking the ice.
‘It’s senseless,’ Rogers said.
‘They jus’ like rubbin’ it into ya, that’s all,’ the seaman said.
‘Well, the law’s got to be respected,’ the businessman said. ‘We’re not in a pub, you know.’
Then the policeman put his head in again. He was young and obliging. Perhaps he had learned that policeman are social outcasts from the society that hires them to protect its lives and property, that they have more contacts with their victims than with law-abiding folk. Perhaps the courtroom was one of the few places where he was approached for directions and generally looked up to. Anyway, he said, ‘It’s all right by me if you want to have a puff. But watch out for the sergeant. I’ll kick twice on the door if he comes.’
The seaman gave Rogers a sidelong knowing look of triumph, as if he had worked this. He felt in his pocket for his dog-end, and accepted a cigarette from Rogers. The policeman looked in and called the businessman’s name. Rogers was surprised that though he hadn’t recognized the man, he knew the name—he was the owner of a big drapery store. He stood hastily and strode out briskly as if to demonstrate to the judge that he was only too willing to co-operate with the law, to show these anonymous criminals that he could take his medicine even if it might be more than justice would warrant.
‘Thomas bloody Cameron,’ the thief said. ‘He’ll get off.’ He jerked his head up in a very knowing motion. ‘A fine and a caution. You’ll see. Not even his driving licence taken off him.’
‘What’s your trouble, mate,’ the seaman said.
He shrugged. ‘Just helpin’ meself to a bit o’ timber an’ iron.’ The seaman looked at the door as if to warn him. ‘It don’t matter if he hears,’ the thief said. ‘They got proof. Be lucky if I don’t get two years.’
‘Two year!’ the seaman said. ‘Cor, I ’ope I don’t get that,’
‘A man’s a mug,’ the man said.
‘You weren’t careful enough,’ the seaman said. ‘There’s no crime in breakin’ the law, it’s bein’ caught that’s the crime. This country’s dead easy for liftin’ things. Ye can walk right on to the docks ‘ere, an’ no one will awsk ya what yer business is. Not like ‘ome it ain’t, flippin’ ‘igh walls abaht the docks, the law on the gates. Not that I ever went in for that m’self. Just been noticin’, like.’
‘They get you jis’ the same,’ the man said. ‘Find it in yer backyard. The neighbours seen me building a new back shed out of it. There’s no secrets in this town.’
‘That’s w’en y’operate single-’anded. Y’ave to be organized. Get
send it. Not that I’ve ever
’ad anythin’ to do with it.’
‘I only took it for the back shed,’ the thief said. ‘I don’t make a business of it. Couldn’t have paid cash for it. Put a fiver on a horse, thought that might bring in enough, but it came fourth.’
‘This country’s too slow for me. Get back ‘ome I will soon—I ’ope. ‘Ad a letter from the old girl this week. Said w’en am I comin’ ’ome she did. Wants ‘er wanderin’ boy back again. Cor, I ’ope they deport me. Then I’d get ‘ome, see?’
‘Where’s home?’ the thief asked.
‘Camberwell.’
‘Never heard of it.’
‘Camberwell w’ere the beauties come from. Sahth Lon’on it is.
Shouldn’t mind bein’ there right nah, be just abaht eleven o’clock
las’ night. Be jus’ comin’ aht o’ the Odeon on Denmark ‘ill I would,
me an’ my girl—or over at the palais—on’y she don’t write to me no
more.’
‘What are you up for yourself?’ the thief said.
The seaman grinned with shrewd self-deprecation.
‘Playin’ rahnd with a girl under age,’ he said. ‘Tahn bike, they called ‘er up at the village where I was. As if I was the on’y one. On’y no one else was game to admit it. On’y went after ‘er m’self w’en I knew she was easy, an’ she f—in’ split on me. All these Noo Zealanders. Frightened to get their names in the papers they are. Cawn’t blame them really. But I thought my mate would ‘a ’elped me aht. Said ‘e ‘ad too good a job in the mine. If ‘e’d admitted it, the sentence would ‘a’ been lighter, see.’
‘You deserve all you get for that,’ the thief said. ‘I’ve got no sympathy for anyone that touches kids.’
‘Cor, she was no kid, mate. Well-developed she was for ‘er age. Useta fling ‘er charms abaht she did, jus’ tryin’ ta get the boys worked up…. She ain’t that much younger than me.’
The thief didn’t comment; he sat in sullen silence, morally beyond further intercourse with this young opportunist. Rogers was
irritated by him. He had his own case to worry about. He stared at
that Brylcreem’d mop of fair hair which before the morning was out
he’d be shaking from his lips. Even while he was looking the seaman
unconsciously took a comb from the pocket of his jacket and ran it
through the hair. He had a soft pallid skin which seemed to have
escaped exposure to sun and wind. Perhaps he was a steward; no, in
the engine-room, more likely. What was so noticeable was his
Rogers supposed that he couldn’t help himself, but yet everything he said offended him. It was really vitality, not goodness; a kind of innocence that recognized no principles, only expediency. He was a trim animal haunted by his boyhood in the sink-or-swim of a huge commercial city. Camberwell—was it acres of drab dusty rows of brick houses such as he had seen in the films? This boy was like an antelope, eyes and ears pricked for danger, scenting his way by fear and cunning through the outskirts of the jungle. There was something horrifying about him. If he made Rogers feel green and provincial, he also made him feel upright and clean, and a little smug.
‘You’d ‘a’ swore she were seventeen,’ the seaman said. ‘That’s what she said she was. ‘Ah was I to know different? I don’t ‘old with touchin’ them under age m’self if it comes to that.’
He turned to Rogers again and said, ‘W’at abaht you, mate? W’at are you ‘ere for?’
Rogers blushed. ‘Something I didn’t do,’ he said.
‘Cor, a wise one, eh? Not lettin’ on. If ya plead not guilty ya want a good lawyer. I couldn’t afford a lawyer. ‘The government’s got me one. You might get off.’
‘I should. I didn’t do it.’
‘W’at’s the charge?’
Rogers looked at the wooden-faced thief staring across the room, with the end of a rolled cigarette stuck on his lower lip. ‘I’m not saying just now,’ he said. ‘It’ll be in the papers.’
‘Won’t see no papers where I’m goin’,’ the seaman said.
All three sat silently into the afternoon, the two New Zealanders sullenly, the Londoner subdued but watchful. Then the policeman kicked twice on the door and they hastily stubbed and pocketed their cigarettes. A sergeant put his head round the door and called the thief’s name. He stood up and walked out, slouching a little. ‘You been smoking?’ the sergeant said to the seaman.
‘It’s me breath,’ the seaman said. ‘It’s that cold in ‘ere ye can see yer breath. Look at me, fair shiverin’ I am.’
The sergeant looked at him with generous contempt for one who could think him so credulous. ‘Don’t let me catch you, that’s all,’ he said, and went after the thief.
The seaman looked sideways at Rogers with that mischievous knowing grin. You could almost hear him think, ‘Crawfty, eh?’
‘He didn’t believe that story,’ Rogers said feeling superior to this simple boy. Peter Herlihy could have invented a more convincing lie.
‘Nuh, I know he didn’t,’ the seaman said, looking superior to this
slow-witted colonial. ‘That’s the ‘ole idea. Tell ‘im a story so full of
’oles ye could water the gawden with it, and it puts ‘im in a good
mood, see. ‘E ’umours ya then.’
‘It might work while you’re young. Do you always live like that?’ Rogers asked. ‘Working on people’s minds.’
‘Oh yerss, ya got to, mate,’ the seaman said, fair bubbling with philosophy. ‘Live by yer wits if ya want to keep aht a trouble. One thing abaht Lon’on, it shawpens yer wits. No good at school, I weren’t, not at readin’ an’ sums an’ all that, but ya learn to be quick. You Noo Zealanders are dead easy for it.’
‘You didn’t keep out of trouble this time.’
The seaman shrugged with good humour. ‘Nuh. Di’n’t keep me wits abaht me. Stawted drinkin’ in this country. Never touched it at ’ome. Not worth it. Dulls yer wits too much. Just awsk my ole man.
Well, I don’t suppose I shall get any beer w’ere I’m goin’.’
‘You’ll be happy,’ Rogers said, slightly indulgent.
‘’Appy! I suppose I shall ‘ave to make the best of it… ‘Ere, that copper won’t ‘car ya, w’at are you ‘ere for?’
‘Worse than yours,’ Rogers said blushing. ‘They say I interfered with a little boy.’
‘Cor!’ The seaman eyed Rogers shrewdly with disapproval. ‘I don’t ‘old with that, like. Different when two blokes is old enough to please theirselves.’
Rogers gave up; he couldn’t cope with these comments. This lad no sooner infuriated you with one offensive remark than he was making another. He wanted to protest but he couldn’t find words.
‘Did ya do it?’ the seaman asked.
‘No,’ Rogers said emphatically.
‘I don’t believe ya did at that,’ the seaman said, as if it was quite a concession to take a man at his word. ‘Ah come they pinched ya for it then?’
‘It’s a long story,’ Rogers said. ‘I’m a teacher. The boy’s a bad case. I got on the wrong side of him, and he made up this story. I’m sorry for him.’
‘W’at are ya sorry for him for then? ‘E got ya into trouble.’
‘He’ll be shown up to be a liar and he’ll get it from his old man. Everybody’ll be down on him.’
‘Ya don’t want to be too sure of that,’ the seaman said. ‘Ya might ’ave quite a job to prove ya didn’t do it. Ave ya got a good lawyer?’
‘As good as I’ll get in this town. It’ll be easy to prove he’s making it up. But it involves other people, you see. I don’t want to mention their names.’
‘W’y don’t ya want to mention their names?’
‘One of them’s a teacher at the same school. She might have a breakdown if this came out. The other is a pal of mine—or was.’
‘Ya cawn’t worry about that, mate,’ the seaman said. ‘It’s you or
them. Anyway they didn’t touch the kid, did they?… Well, nothin’s going to ‘appen to them. Jus’ get their names in the papers,
that’s all. You might do time. Cor, that’s friendship that is. Oo d’ya
think you are—Jesus?’
‘It’s the woman I’m worried about most—not that she’s any friend of mine. The lawyer reckons I’ll have to bring this up. But he says I mightn’t have to mention any names.’
‘You Noo Zealanders again, ya don’t like splittin’ on yer mates,
do ya? Wouldn’t think twice abaht it I wouldn’t. An’ ma mates
wouldn’t blame me either. Ya got to look after yerself. Like my mate
nah—’e wouldn’t come aht an’ say ’e’d been with this pawty o’
fifteen but I don’t blame ‘im.’
‘Well, that wouldn’t have done much good,’ Rogers said. ‘What about the girl? Surely she’s got a right to be considered.’
‘’Er!’ the seaman said. ‘Nothin’s gonna-r-’appen to ‘er. She’ll be
up Blackball still—still flingin’ ‘er se-ductive chawms abaht, that’s
what she’ll be doin’. On’y no one’ll touch ‘er nah, not for a few
months anyway, w’en she turns sixteen. Cor—why din’t I arrive in
Blackball six months later? I might get two year nah. It don’t work
aht…. Don’t worry abaht ‘er—she won’t be doin’ no time.’
‘Well, take another case,’ Rogers said. ‘Where there’s no third party involved. You’d have liked your mate a lot more if he had stuck by you.’
The seaman said, ‘Yerss, I suppose I should ‘ave. But ya cawn’t expect it. Anyway ya don’t do things jus’ to make people like ya. That’s soft that is. A luxury. All right for them that can afford it. You’re not in any position to afford it, mate.’
‘I’ve had a softer life than you, I suppose,’ Rogers said.
‘It won’t be too soft for you if you get time. Nuh. Ya don’ want to be worryin’ abaht this kid or this other teacher—it’s them or you, an’ no one else’s gonna look after you.’
It wasn’t long before the seaman was called. ‘Wish me luck, mate,’ he said. ‘An’ good luck y’self, too.’
Rogers sat alone waiting. He hadn’t wanted to give that away in court, about Don and Miss Dane or about Miss Dane hitting Peter.
Cassidy said he would have to. But he couldn’t have thought it important or he’d have asked Miss Dane to be a witness for the defence. Miss Dane had gone on her holidays. But what a shock she’d get to come back and find her secrets advertised in the papers. No, it was a breach of faith. Yet he had to defend his innocence, the seaman had been right about that. Rogers gave up trying to decide: best leave it to his lawyer, he would know what to do. Yes, and Mike Cassidy would understand why he didn’t want other people dragged into the slime.
After a while Mike Cassidy pushed through the door. He was wearing a heavy belted new overcoat and a hat of broadish brim; they made him look flashy, like an old man struggling to keep up with the times: it was odd in an old stalwart of the town.
‘You didn’t tell me you were a communist,’ Mike said accusingly. He sat on the bench sighing and spread his legs, leaning forward. He looked unhappy with himself.
‘Who told you that?’ Rogers said.
‘Well, I’ve been hearing things about you all right. Dinnie Flaherty from Ahaura was telling me you were a communist now. He said you’d deserve all you get. He said you’d been teaching the kiddies a lot of godless nonsense about things they shouldn’t be worrying about at their age.’
‘Well, Father Flaherty’s changed his mind then. He told me he wouldn’t interfere.’
‘So it’s true then.’ Mike looked more at ease now.
‘Is what true? You’ve got everything mixed up, Mr Cassidy. I didn’t teach anything like that. I answered this boy Herlihy’s questions without evasion. And I’m not saying whether I’m a communist or not, though some of my friends are and I’ve got a lot of respect for them.’
Mike looked troubled again. ‘If I’d known I would never have accepted your brief in the first place. I’ve made it a rule now never to take up the case of a communist.’ The way he stared at Rogers he seemed to be pleading with him to understand the necessity of this decision, as if he wasn’t accusing Rogers of something but Rogers was accusing him. His face kept working, his eyes kept shifting: again it was odd in an old stalwart of the days when the West Coast was free and frank. He said, ‘You can have the case remanded, you know, and get another lawyer.’
Rogers felt a kind of moral advantage. ‘Well, I’m not answering
your question, Mr Cassidy,’ he said. ‘You’ve no right to ask. It
shouldn’t make any difference to your case. This is supposed to be
a free town in a free country. And what’s it got to do with Father
him any harm? Did he ring you specially
about this, or did you just happen to run into him?’
Mike’s eyes shifted again. Then, as if he wasn’t satisfied with his case, he stared sharply again at Rogers and said with ready moral rectitude: ‘And you didn’t tell me you were a conscientious objector in the war either. That’s what Bernie O’Malley says to me. What I say is if a man can’t find the guts to fight for his country, he can’t expect to enjoy his country’s justice. Now then?’
‘You knew that when I called on you,’ Rogers said. ‘You must have. The whole town knew…. That’s not the reason.’
Mike didn’t answer. He got up and put his hands in his overcoat pockets. ‘Well, young fullah, I can tell you I won’t be happy about taking your case, My heart won’t be in it at all. You haven’t convinced me. I thought I’d just give you a second chance and that’s why I came down hoping you’d be able to tell me it was all a misunderstanding. Now tell me now—it is, isn’t it? Isn’t it all a mistake? Tell me and I’ll put my heart into it.’ He pressed Rogers’s shoulders and his eyes again were pleading.
‘I’m not answering, Mr Cassidy,’ Rogers said. ‘You make me feel that if I did I’d be selling out. If that’s the way you feel, I don’t want your services. I’ll defend myself.’
‘Right!’ Mike said, almost with relief. ‘On your own head be it…. It’s a big decision…. There won’t be any fee, you know,’
Nevertheless the prospect daunted him. His position was serious now. How would he defend himself? What if, from sheer ignorance of the law, he wasn’t able to prove the allegation false? He didn’t want a remand; he wanted to get it over and done with. He began to sweat with worry, and regardless of the sergeant’s prohibition, lit a smoke, though it didn’t help him.
‘Mr Cassidy! Before you go, can you tell me one thing?’
‘What would that be now?’
‘If I’ve got to defend myself, when am I allowed to speak? Can I question the witnesses?’
‘Ah now,’ Mike said very willingly. ‘You can question the witnesses and you can sum up for the defence at the end. They’ve got no evidence, you know that. You know more about what went on than I do. It’s an easy case.’
‘Thanks.’
‘Well, son,’ Mike said, turning round as if looking for something
but not sure what it was, ‘it’s a pity. It’s a pity. Ah, if old Harry
were here now. He’d make you see some sense. Ah….’ He drifted
into a sigh for the lost days when a man was a man and spoke his
mind out and nobody hindered him, when fair was fair and there
Rogers watching him go felt sorry for him; he was looking at a broken man, and one who knew he was broken.
Following the sergeant into the court Rogers was humbled by the pompous atmosphere of justice. He saw a crowded public gallery of people with appetites whetted for the revelation of other people’s secrets; most of them people he would know, but he was too awed to take in details and he didn’t recognize anyone except Flora. It gave him a great kick of encouragement to see her there; she had said she would come, yet by now he hadn’t expected to see her till it was all over. It was strange to see her and not be able to speak to her. There were the reporters at a table at the side; lawyers with gowns and short wigs, and clerks of whose function he was not clear; and as he stepped up into the dock feeling exposed to hostile publicity, and gripped the rail, he was awed by the judge, his wrinkled face with spectacles under the absurd long wig. It was hard to read any humanity behind those wrinkles, the thin lips and the tired eyes. To his right at the end of the bench sat an impersonal but bright-looking typist; Rogers recognized her as a girl who was several years behind him at school. It was strange, in a town he knew so well and so informally, to be the central figure in a pompous ceremony in which people he knew had taken on different functions, hostile to him; it was like a dream.
The clerk of the court passed a note up to the judge. He was new to this circuit. The last one had had a reputation for stiff sentences; no one knew much about this one, though he looked as if he was getting too old for his job. Already, Rogers thought, the seaman has been dealt with; he had a sudden temptation to whisper to the lawyer at the table below him, ‘How did the seaman get on?’ and the oddity of the desire made him want to snigger. ‘Pull yourself together,’ he thought.
He was brought round sharply by the voice of the clerk, loudly
Then the judge addressed him. It startled him that that bird-like old man under a long wig should have any personal interest in him, as if he had any part in this play at all except to be a victim whose fate is decided by others. ‘I understand you are conducting your own defence,’ the judge said.
Rogers struggled for words. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘your honour.’
‘You’ve had to do this at short notice and you haven’t had time to prepare your case?’
‘No, your honour,’ His voice was more like his own now.
‘Do you want the case remanded?’
‘I’d rather get it over with, your honour.’
‘You know you can interrogate each witness when the Crown Prosecutor has finished his examination-in-chief?’
‘Thank you, your honour.’
This old man was assisting him. Rogers now felt completely at sea; nothing was predictable in this place.
The selection of the jury was got through without challenge. To
his right they sat solemn in their box, in their best suits. Most of
them he recognized. Alf Parsons, the baker, and elder of the Presbyterian church, an old associate of his father’s; Fred Hamilton, a
draughtsman for the public works; Harry Silcock who ran a travel
agency, a leading sponsor of a football club and always, according to
rumours that were never substantiated, about to be named as co-re,
in divorces that never came off; Dinnie O’Donovan, a grocer and
secretary of the Hibernian Society; Fergie McLaren, on the local
pipe-band and the Caledonian Society, a wholesale importer; a
tobacconist-and-barber, a wine merchant who was on the Amateur
Operatic Society, a surveyor who was on the Hospital Board and the
School Committee, a building contractor, a public works inspector,
an accountant and the captain of a little fishing vessel. The tradesmen and merchant adventurers, the officials and supervisors of the
town’s work: the elders and betters of Greymouth, looking very
conscious of it packed in their wooden box. Surveying them from
the dock Rogers felt the strange and desperate clarity of mind of a
man at bay. If this was society come to judge him, what a wooden,
How would they have acted if the charge had been true, he wondered. How would he have felt if the charge had been true? He ran
away from the question; that implied mental sickness, and that was
something he couldn’t contemplate in himself. How would he act if
he was in a jury trying a man guilty of such an act? Yet what problem of society or psychology was there that couldn’t be solved by
courage and clear thinking? We were prisoners of our own taboos,
Rogers thought, taboos made in a different country in an older period
in a different type of society: if this jury was society come to judgement, we were not yet a mature society; these responsible and respectable citizens were afraid of something, afraid of their own
humanity. In their pompous stiffness they were like German
soldiers goose-stepping to terrify the enemy: only there was no
enemy. It was just that they were afraid. Afraid of love.
What was the purpose of the law then? What had they done already to the seaman and the thief? The law said, ‘You will not, because if you do, you’ll be punished.’ It didn’t say, ‘Use your willpower, conduct yourself like a civilized man.’ It prohibited, it didn’t exhort; it punished, it didn’t cure. And who was the better for the retribution? The seaman? The girl he had taken into the bush? Society? Other potential offenders?
The first witness was Constable Rae. The prosecutor rose to question the constable. He had a quiet disdainful way of putting his questions; it was hard to know what he was looking for, but there was a suspicion of a sting in them. But the constable’s evidence wasn’t crucial, and the lawyer didn’t ask him much.
The prosecutor sat down. Rogers hadn’t much idea what to ask the constable, but he made a stab in the dark.
‘When Mr Herlihy came to you, did he seem sure of the accusation?’
‘Well, he just told me what the boy had told him.’
‘He had no evidence of his own?’
‘No.’
‘Did he seem uncertain?’
‘He was very worried. He thought it should be aired in a public court.’
‘He wasn’t absolutely certain then?’
‘No, he didn’t seem altogether certain.’
Then Mike Herlihy shuffled into the witness-box, carrying his bartered old hat which looked as if it had been brushed and not very well pressed for the occasion. He was wearing a navy serge suit of a cut twenty years old. The prosecutor stood again.
‘On the night of the alleged offence, the accused visited you?’
‘Yes, he did.’
‘Was there any purpose to his visit?’
‘He came to tell me the boy hadn’t been going to school.’
‘Did he say anything else?’
‘He wanted me to give up my beer, because of the boycott,’
‘What sort of state was he in?’
‘He was rather agitated.’
‘When your boy came home, did you ask him whether he had been missing school?’
‘Yes.’
‘And he had been?’
‘Yes.’
‘You asked him why?’
‘Yes. He said he was frightened of his teacher.’
The prosecutor sat down again.
Rogers asked Herlihy, ‘Did your son actually say that I had done the thing I am accused of?’
‘Well, not in so many words.’
‘Did he volunteer any of this information—without any prompting, I mean?’
Herlihy, who was also hurt at the implication that he didn’t know
the meaning of volunteer, resented having to be questioned by the
man he was accusing.
‘Are you suggesting that I put the words into the boy’s mouth?’
‘Answer the question, please,’ Rogers said, now savouring his power, drawing on his reading of court cases in the newspapers. He felt far more in command of himself. ‘Did he volunteer the information?’
‘Yes, ’course he did. I don’t go round telling lies.’
‘How long after I left you that night did your son come home?’
‘It was about nine o’clock.’
‘What time was it when I was there?’
‘About half-past seven, I think.’
‘Does your son often stay out so late?’
‘He usually gets in earlier than that.’
‘About what time does he usually get in?’
‘Seven or eight o’clock.’
‘Would you say your son was a difficult child?’
‘No.’
‘You once sent him to a convent?’
‘Yes.’
‘Why?’
‘I’m a Catholic, that’s why.’
‘Was it because you and your wife could not manage him?’
‘There’s nothing wrong with the boy. Just a bit of devilry, like all kids.’
‘Has your son been in trouble with the police?’
‘No.’
‘Have you been interviewed by Mr Rae about him?’
‘Well, there was a complaint about him throwing stones.’
‘When your son came in on the night of this alleged offence, what did you say to him?’
‘I asked him why he had been staying away from school.’
‘What did he say?’
‘He said he was frightened of you.’
‘Did he say why he was frightened?’
‘He said you had hit him with a ruler. He said you told him secrets too.’
Herlihy was flushed and accusing. Rogers was no longer concerned to avoid this admission of his treatment of Peter.
‘What did he mean by secrets?’
‘Filthy stories. He said you told him a story about a man and a woman in the bush.’
‘Will you give us the details of the story?’
‘I’m not mentioning any names.’
‘Did he say the story was about actual people?’
‘People from Coal Flat.’
‘This story that your son said I told him—what did he say they did.’
Herlihy blushed. ‘He didn’t say anything about that,’ he said.
Then Peter came in, looking guilty and distrustful of the policeman who led him in. ‘Now, son,’ the judge said. ‘We want you to feel at ease in here, and tell us what happened.’
Peter looked at him and then at the jury and the prosecutor and
Peter said nothing. The judge told the prosecutor he could proceed. For the first time it struck Rogers what a strange system British justice was. He had been brought up to believe it was the best in the world and had never questioned it. Now how precarious it seemed: a contest between prosecution and defence, neither interested in establishing the truth; the prosecution hungry for a conviction, sometimes a death, whether in fact the accused was guilty or not, the defence using every means to clear him, even if he was guilty. How many men had hanged because the prosecutor had a sharp mind and a persuasive tongue? And here was this lawyer bent on getting him into prison, for no other reason than to satisfy his professional pride or perhaps further his career. How cynical it was.
In more desperate circumstances he himself would have been struggling just as dishonestly to avoid prison. But in this case, which could hardly end in a conviction, he could afford to pursue the line demanded by the intense clarity in which, it seemed, he saw this court. That was to establish the truth, suppress nothing, and mislead no one; put all his cards on the table. Don and Miss Dane—it would all have to come out. What if the jury had the minds of shopkeepers? You had to refer to some authority; then the best referee would be a group of other men. These twelve of his peers. If society was not the clear-minded fearless community he would have liked it to be, then he could only trust that society would eventually change itself. They were men, after all, even if they had been maimed and limited by the values and institutions they had been born to. On their goodness, their justice and their sympathy he would have to rely. It was the only honest course.
Peter answering the prosecutor’s questions spoke only in mutters or nodded. Then he stopped answering at all.
‘And what did he do then? … Don’t be afraid.’
Peter looked up, his eyes lit distrustfully. ‘Is Mr Rogers going to get into trouble? … What will you do to him?’ he asked in that intense whisper. He had come full circle, Rogers thought; back to where he started. He was now no freer of his obsessions than he had been when he first walked into the classroom clutching his raincoat and answered Rogers in that same fierce whisper. Rogers looked away from him. It was painful to see this gratuitously malevolent lawyer tormenting him.
The lawyer coughed with slight amusement. The judge said, ‘You must not presume the guilt of the accused.’
‘I beg pardon, your honour…. Now son, I want you to imagine I’m your father, someone you can trust, and tell us what happened that night.’
‘You wouldn’t punish him. You’re too scared,’ Peter whispered. There was laughter in the gallery and the clerk called for silence.
Peter broke into tears and a loud whine.
‘Sit down for a while, son,’ the judge said. To Rogers he said, ‘Do you wish to question the boy?’ Rogers couldn’t bear to see the boy tortured in public like this. ‘No,’ he said.
Peter was led out, whimpering now.
The next witness was Dr Alexander. He said that he had examined the boy and saw no sign of injury consistent with the charge. Rogers did not question him.
The judge asked Rogers if he wished to give evidence on oath. Rogers said yes and went into the witness-box.
Rogers began: ‘First, I say I am not guilty of the charge. Second, there are some facts of which the Court is not aware because so far they have not been brought out. This boy Peter Herlihy whom you all saw comes from an unhappy home. His father would not admit it, but his father is not an unbiased judge. I can speak with authority on this since I know one grandparent, I know the father, and the boy himself has told me of his home life. His parents married against the wishes of the mother’s family: they were Protestants and Mr Herlihy a Catholic, in fact, a man who had been studying for the priesthood and had given it up.’
‘This is irrelevant,’ the prosecutor interrupted.
‘The objection is overruled,’ the judge said.
‘The mother is not a Catholic,’ Rogers went on. ‘You have heard the father say that he is and that he sent the boy to a convent. I have heard that the mother was opposed to this though not opposed to sending him away, and I suspect that the boy was sent there because he was unmanageable. At any rate, I know that when he came back he was a difficult boy, a problem child, with the making of a delinquent who might have ended—with more justification—in this dock. As his teacher I felt that something should be done for him; as one who had no kinship with him I felt it would be impudent of me to interfere with him. When his father was in the witness-box I did not ask him a certain question, but with the judge’s permission if he can be recalled I propose to ask him if I did not, early this year, call on him and suggest that the boy should have psychiatric treatment at Seaview Hospital.’
‘I object,’ the prosecutor called.
‘Are you suggesting that the boy is insane?’ the judge asked.
‘Certainly not,’ Rogers said. ‘But it was plain, when he came into my class, that he was a prisoner of unhealthy guilts and fears and obsessions. The boy’s father laughed at my suggestion. I had to do something. The boy was disturbing my class. He used to torment little girls, he ran round the class with a piece of plasticine between his legs.’
There was a shocked gasp from the gallery, the prosecutor again objected, without success.
‘I tell you this not to condemn the boy, who has suffered and is suffering too much already. I tell it to put myself in the clear: I had to do something, both to preserve order in the classroom and to save the boy. If his parents were too blind to see he was ailing, someone had to do something.’
‘Could you not have spoken to the headmaster and had him removed?’ the judge asked.
‘The headmaster and I did not see eye to eye. The headmaster would have told you at least that the boy was a problem child. The boy’s trouble as I saw it was that he had never had much affection. His grandmother doesn’t recognize him, his mother doesn’t want him, his father is a drunkard.’
The prosecutor rose. ‘Your honour, because Mr Herlihy had the courage to defy a beer boycott imposed by his trade union, there is no need for the defence to call him a drunkard.’
‘Objection sustained. You must realize that reference to this boycott is not relevant.’
Rogers continued. ‘At home, then, he didn’t get the affection and security he needed. To report him to the headmaster would have only brought more punishment on his head. It would have turned him even further in on himself.’
‘What did you do, then?’ the judge asked.
‘I had some knowledge of psychology. I wanted to set the boy free of his fears. I gained his confidence and asked him questions. It became clear that he was obsessed with certain violent incidents which occurred on Saturday nights in his mother’s bedroom.’
More gasps came from the gallery, the prosecutor objected, and the judge said, ‘I can’t let you go into all that.’
Rogers continued. ‘Then at least I can say the boy had sex on his mind. A boy of eight. He drew pictures with sexual themes. I didn’t prohibit them. I thought it best for him to work this out of his system. After a while he stopped drawing them and I felt I had been successful. He used to shy away from other boys; after I had dealt with him, he began to play with them and became the leader of a gang.’
The prosecutor was busy writing notes.
‘What sort of a gang?’ the judge asked.
‘A harmless gang of boys playing. But I found I had bitten off more than I could chew. There were too many people down on him. I won his confidence and then let him down. I had to keep my job. I couldn’t protect him against other teachers if they punished him, and two of them had a set on him. He felt that I had deserted him. On the night of the alleged offence, when I met him, he told me that another teacher, Miss Dane, had made him take off his pants and had put him across her knees and slapped him. She hit him later with a ruler. That was why he stayed away from school. He had no protector at school, since I had failed him. I told him to come back to school or I’d have to see his father. He threatened that he would accuse me of something.’
‘Of what?’ the judge asked.
‘I must go back a bit. Some time before this he told me he had been hiding in his special hidey-hole in the scrub at night, when a man and woman had come into the scrub and unwittingly had performed an act before his eyes. He didn’t say who they were. I told him not to talk about it. On the night of this alleged offence I’m accused of, he told me who they were. The boy told me that if I told his father he had been wagging school, he would tell his secret and say it was me. I said no one would believe him. He said that he would say it was me and some of the schoolchildren. When I met him that night I was on my way to the father’s. I only ran into the boy by accident. I was never closer to him than three yards away. I only spoke to him. I didn’t touch him. I’ve never done or suggested or intended or dreamt of the act I’m accused of, I didn’t hit him with a ruler or make him remove his pants. That story must be based on what the other teacher, Miss Dane, did. I know no more about it than what the boy told me.
‘You may not know that my political beliefs are not reputable in some quarters.’
‘I object,’ the prosecutor called.
‘Objection sustained.’
‘I only mentioned it to show that there may be motivation on the
father’s part for believing more than his son said. The father was
the occasion of a strike, with which I sympathized. Since then I have
been working on the dredge myself. Naturally enough, he is sour
about it. I believe that the boy made up some fantastic stories based
on what he saw in the scrub one night, on a story about an imaginary
incident with other children behind some bushes, and on Miss
Dane’s punishment of him before he began to stay away from
Rogers finished and the prosecutor got up to cross-examine him.
‘You encouraged the boy to lead a gang?’
‘Yes.’
‘A harmless gang, you said. What did this gang do?’
‘They played cowboys and Indians with another gang. Sometimes they made raids on each other.’
‘You encouraged the boy to draw obscene pictures?’
‘Obscenity is often enough in the eye of the beholder. I looked on them as therapeutic.’
‘The prosecutor turned to the jury and smirked. ‘Therapeutic means health-giving,’ he said.
‘I mean that they enabled him to get rid of his obsessions. I didn’t comment on the drawings. They embarrassed me. But I didn’t prohibit them. And, as I said, he lost interest in drawing any more. That proves my approach was correct.’
‘Was it not your duty to have reported the strangeness of the boy’s conduct to your headmaster?’
‘It would have done him more harm than good.’
‘You didn’t like your headmaster?’
‘No.’
‘What sort of man was he?’
‘He is a man very much like you.’
There were sniggers in the gallery, and the lawyer flushed. ‘You must keep your temper,’ the judge said to Rogers.
‘I suggest that you kept it secret because you feared that if it were known you would lose your job?’
‘That’s only partly true. I hadn’t started to find out what was wrong with the boy then. I knew the headmaster would only make things worse.’
‘You admit it is partly true. I suggest that you deliberately set out to corrupt the boy?’
‘No.’
‘You saw the boy a few minutes ago? Would you say there has been an improvement in his conduct since you first met him?’
‘There was an improvement but he’s got worse again. There has been a great falling-off.’
‘I suggest that you are responsible for that falling-off.’
‘I contend that it has happened since he left the school. Why blame me for the boy? He was in a bad way before I ever saw him.
If anyone’s to blame for him, it’s not only me but all of us, our
whole society. His parents and the society that made them as they
are, all the priests and teachers that have picked on the boy.’
‘You do accept some of the blame then?’
‘In so far as I share the values of this society, or don’t try to change them.’
‘What values are these?’ the prosecutor said.
‘What I mean is, society has no pity for a boy like that. It leaves him at the mercy of his parents and, when he’s grown up, it’ll only take note of him when he goes wrong; then it’ll punish him.’
‘When the boy came into the court before, you looked away?’
‘Yes.’
‘You could not look him in the eye?’
‘I couldn’t bear to see you torturing him. That boy’s got more confidence in me than in you. Even if I have let him down. If I’d looked at him you might have said I was exerting a sinister influence on him.’
‘You must refrain from these personal remarks,’ the judge said. He ordered Herlihy to be recalled, and Mike admitted to Rogers that he had ridiculed the suggestion that Peter should see a psychiatrist, also that he did drink a lot, and that his wife often nagged at the boy.
The judge said that in view of the statement made by Rogers relating to Peter, he had decided to recall the boy. Rogers began to question him.
‘Peter,’ he said. ‘You remember that this man said he would punish me? Why did you want to see me punished?’
Peter whispered, ‘Because.’
‘Tell the people, Peter; don’t worry about me. What would you want them to do to me?’
‘Give you the strap. Hit you with a ruler on the behind.’ He grinned tensely and inadvertently.
‘Why?’
‘Because you’re not fair. You didn’t stop Miss Dane from hitting me. You could have stuck up for me.’
‘Has anyone hit you like you wanted me hit?’
‘Yes.’
‘Who?’
‘Miss Dane.’
‘Why?’
‘Because I told her something.’
‘Did you stay away from school because she hit you?’
‘Yes.’
‘Do you remember that secret you told me? Was that what you told her then?’
‘Yes.’
‘Will you tell the people what it was?’
A glint came into his eyes at being able to tell something like this in public. ‘Miss Dane and Donnie Palmer’s father came into my hidey-hole in the scrub,’ he said.
‘Did you see them?’
‘Yes.’
‘You remember that night I saw you by the road to the dredge? What did I say to you?’
‘You told me to come back to school.’
‘I said I would tell your father if you didn’t. What did you say?’
‘I said I’d tell on you too,’
‘What would you say?’
‘I’d tell them about Miss Dane and Donnie’s father and say it was you.’
‘Was it really me?’
‘No.’
‘Why did you say it?’
‘’Cause, ’Cause I wanted to get even with you.’
‘The other things you told your father, were they true?’
‘No.’
‘You made them up?’
‘Yes.’
‘Why?’
‘I was frightened. I didn’t want him to know I’d been away from school.’
Then he must have made some progress with Peter, he was so articulate.
‘But he did know.’
‘I didn’t want Mum to know. She’d have hit me.’
‘But your father would have told her anyway.’
‘I wanted them to take my side.’
‘You wanted them to be good to you?’
Peter didn’t answer.
‘Will you tell these people now whether those things you said about me were true?’
‘I told them later I on’y made them up. Dad gave me a hiding.’
The judge turned to the prosecutor. ‘Did you know this?’
‘The father did say something about the boy later saying such a thing. We concluded that he was afraid of the accused.’
‘Are you frightened of Mr Rogers?’ the judge asked Peter.
Peter spoke more loudly, with slight scorn. ‘No,’ he said. ‘He couldn’t hurt a flea. He used to be good to me. Then he made me wild ’cause he didn’t stop Miss Dane growling at me.’
‘Why didn’t you say the boy had withdrawn the charge?’ the judge asked Mike Herlihy.
‘Well, your honour, kids are unreliable. You can understand my position. I didn’t know whether it was true or not. I wanted it aired in court.’
‘You should have told us before. You might have ruined this young man’s career.’
The judge asked the prosecutor whether he wished to question Peter and he said no. The judge said he intended to direct the jury to bring in a verdict of not guilty: the prosecutor said he had nothing to say.
Turning to Peter again, the judge asked, ‘Are you happy at home?’
Peter didn’t answer. Rogers wondered how any child could be expected to answer such a question, when he had no other experience to compare it with, only the convent.
‘Does your mother hit you?’
Peter whispered, ‘Yes.’
‘Does she hit you a lot?’
‘I run away,’ he whispered.
‘Does your father drink a lot?’
‘He gets drunk,’ Peter whispered with a secret gleam in his eyes.
The judge called the doctor in again.
‘In your opinion does this boy get enough to eat?’
‘Yes, your honour.’
‘You know his home? Do you think he is sufficiently cared for?’
‘No, your honour. The mother is neurotic and doesn’t show much affection for the boy. The father is often drunk.’
‘I’ll ask the Press not to publish anything about the boy’s home life,’ the judge said. ‘Now, son, who do you like best, your mother or your father?’
‘Dad,’ Peter said.
‘Do you like your mother?’
‘No.’
‘Then I’m going to make a recommendation,’ the judge said to Herlihy. ‘I want you to send your boy to a boarding-school or orphanage or other institution where he will be properly cared for. I’m not satisfied that your home is the best for him. Will you do that?’
Grudgingly Herlihy answered, ‘I’d already made arrangements for him to go back to the convent.’
‘But that’s the same convent he was at before!’ Rogers protested.
‘If you speak out of turn you will be fined for contempt of court,’ the judge said, and to Herlihy, ‘Can you afford to send him there?’
‘When I get my job back again,’ Herlihy said.
‘If you find it difficult, it won’t hurt you to cut down on your drinking expenses,’ the judge said.
‘Now, young man,’ he said to Rogers. ‘You’ve been playing with fire. You’ve been encumbering this boy’s mind with knowledge he’s not ready for. You must realize now that if you hadn’t told him these things you wouldn’t be here now. It is very probable that the Education Board will review your appointment. I’m not making any recommendation that the board should, but I want you to undertake now that you won’t dabble in psychology of this sort again, and that you’ll confine yourself to the school curriculum.’
‘Very well, your honour,’ Rogers said humbly. ‘I undertake that.’
The jury retired for five minutes and brought in a verdict of not guilty.
‘What happened to the seaman?’ Rogers asked. He was sitting in the back seat of the doctor’s car, Flora beside him. They were driving beside the Grey River, back to Coal Flat. The river was full and muddy.
‘Probation,’ the doctor said. ‘He had to agree to get a job on a ship again and leave the country.’
‘Deported?’
‘More or less. He had deserted his ship.’
‘What about the watersider that pinched the timber?’
‘Two years in gaol.’
‘And the chap up for drunken driving?’
‘Driving licence suspended for a year and a £50 fine.’
‘Thos. Cameron won’t like that…. The seaman got off,’ Rogers said. ‘I’m glad. A strange little chap. That was a lenient sentence.’
‘The crime against property wasn’t treated so leniently,’ the doctor said.
‘No one ever has much sympathy for a thief,’ Rogers said. ‘But this judge seemed to be a bit more human than I expected.’
‘He has a reputation,’ the doctor said. ‘Last year in Christchurch he let a woman who was convicted for abortion off on probation. She was responsible for two women’s deaths. There were questions asked in Parliament. The Women’s Institute protested and the
Women’s Division of the Farmers’ Union. He seems to have sympathy for the more sensational criminals.’
‘Any other judge would have let Cameron off with a tiny fine and a caution and rubbed it into the seaman,’ Rogers said.
‘They’d both have given the thief two years,’ the doctor said.
‘You were good, Paul,’ Flora said. ‘I was proud of you when you made that speech in the witness-box.’
‘A bit romantic,’ the doctor said. ‘I know you did very well, considering you had to conduct your own defence at such short notice, But you were too melodramatic. You didn’t really have to bring out all that about treating the boy for his neuroses.’
‘I don’t know how I could have avoided it. I’m not subtle enough. I’d sworn to tell the whole truth.’
‘You couldn’t expect a jury to take a sympathetic view of methods as unorthodox as yours.’
‘I had to bring that out. Things were looking pretty sticky there for a while. I thought I was going to be convicted.’
‘Only because you mentioned the boy’s drawings and all that. That would make anyone suspect the charge was true.’
‘How would you have done it?’
‘You could have stuck to time, date, place; refuted the actual charge or proved it impossible.’
‘I’m not a lawyer…. That lawyer was a nasty piece of work.’
‘Well, there’s one thing you can be sure of. You’ll have lost your job now.’
‘They won’t do that now. I’m cleared.’
‘Not after those admissions. The Education Board will be scared not to sack you.’
‘Surely they’ve heard of psychiatry before.’
‘They’ll say you’re not qualified. They’ll let doctors use it behind closed doors because we doctors are treated like priests used to be.’
The car rounded the bluffs at Wallsend, overlooking the river, and cruised down the hill, under a railway bridge, and up the hill to Stillwater. Ahead, to the left, the backs of the Paparoas were a soft murky mottled green in bright late winter’s afternoon sunlight.
‘We’re only a hundred miles or so north of the setting of Erewhon,’ the doctor said. ‘Illness was a crime there. Mental illness is a crime in this country. The mental hospitals are like prisons. If you
think you can diagnose mental illness, isolate its cause and attempt
to treat it, people think you’re contaminated yourself. Unless you’re
doctor. The board will get a lot of anonymous and righteously
indignant letters about you, when this case is read, so will the
‘He won’t help me,’ Rogers said. ‘Not even my father’s son. Well, I can’t worry now. That hurdle’s over, and I haven’t got my breath back yet. What about Peter? He’ll go back to that convent again…. Oh, Flora, if we’d thought of it before, we might have adopted him.’
‘You’re not serious, Paul. He’d be too much of a handful for me.’
‘It’s impossible now. The father wouldn’t allow it. Or the court.
Floral Do you think—? Would Frank and Doris want to adopt him? They’ll have to adopt if they want any children. I know they’d want to start with a baby, not a boy of eight. But in this case—?’
‘You could ask her,’ Flora said. ‘He’d be a handful. But Doris is like that. She likes having something to grapple with.’
‘I doubt if Herlihy would consent,’ the doctor said. ‘But it’s certainly worth trying.’
‘We’ll ask them tonight,’ Rogers said. ‘Do you know I haven’t eaten since seven o’clock? You two must be hungry too. Let’s stop at the pub here and have dinner. They are serving means again now, aren’t they?’
‘They charge sevenpence,’ the doctor said. ‘Let’s wait till we get to the Flat.’
In another street in Greymouth, not far from the courthouse, another meeting was taking place. The Westland Branch
of the Licensed Victuallers’ Association was meeting in the reception room of the town’s one tourist hotel that advertised itself as
‘under vice-regal patronage’. They normally met in one or other of
the publicans’ sitting-rooms since their meetings were not usually
big, but today they expected a big attendance.
There were about sixty publicans there from as far north as Reefton and as far south as Okarito. They stood around talking for a while without their usual hearty cordiality. There was a tone of deprecation in their sullen murmuring. The branch president called, ‘Well, gentlemen, let’s get down to business!’ and they sat at the tables, where glasses and bottles of local beer were set.
The meeting didn’t take long. The topic was the success or failure of the raising of the price of beer. The secretary spoke briefly; he said that there had been varying reports, and he personally thought that if the publicans of the Coast stuck together they could win. He was sorry to have to mention again that efforts to persuade their own defecting member in Greymouth to sell at sevenpence had been unsuccessful. There were angry cries of, ‘Shame!’ Well, that member would soon learn the meaning of the old Coast motto, ‘United we stand, divided we fall’. He needn’t expect much favour from his fellow publicans or from the association in the future. But he was sorry to have to say that a group of Grey Valley members had asked for this meeting. No doubt they would argue persuasively. However, what he proposed to do was to invite opinions first from other members so that those present could see the complaints of the Grey Valley group in perspective. Because there was a bigger thing at stake than just the advantage of the moment. If the publicans held out they could win. Anyway they were lucky enough to have a guest speaker who could argue this better than he could, Mr Tribe from headquarters in Wellington. Mr Tribe considered the matter so important that he’d flown down from Wellington in order to address this meeting.
Mr Tribe was a tallish broad-shouldered rather stout man in a double-breasted tweed suit which, though it would have looked sloppy to tailors in foreign cities, was flashy by West Coast standards, and made him look stouter and more uncouth than he was. He wore an R.S.A. badge and he had horn-rimmed spectacles and his fair hair was trimmed short. On the surface he looked much like any New Zealand publican or businessman, solemn, uncultured, moderate; the sort of man who grinned, a little sheepishly, from thousands of photographs in illustrated weeklies, on hotel walls, of presentations of racing trophies; a man who would slap your back and call you Charlie on first acquaintance, yet a man habitually with his defences up; a man whose face told you his life was an open record, yet he didn’t want any questions asked. He had been an All Black in the ’23 team and he had mixed with sportsmen all his life. In Wellington he had mixed with an odd assortment of the up-and- upper crust, with businessmen, with M.P.s’ secretaries, higher trade union officials, members of the racing club, the bigger publicans, owners of racehorses. He belonged to a newer group in the sup porters of the National Party, a group whose motto might well be, ‘Mum’s the word’, whose fraternal greeting might well be a sly finger alongside the nose; on the sly they did their deals, on the sly they pursued their one ambition, to get rich quick by any means that didn’t carry a risk of imprisonment; on the sly they got their fun: sober, moderate and respectable on the record; out of the photographer’s focus they went grimly to parties where they soaked themselves in spirits, told sexy stories and made clumsy passes at other men’s wives who responded with as little subtlety. On the sly, in fact, Mr Tribe had been getting off for the past two years with the wife of an ‘old friend’ of three years’ standing.
But none of the Westland publicans knew much about Mr Tribe, only that he held shares in a brewery that controlled a number of tied houses in the North Island, and that was why he had been sent to speak to them, since he wasn’t a publican himself.
Mr Tribe introduced himself. He suggested that before he started, it might be a good idea to have this meeting in committee. The chairman asked if someone might move in that direction, and though there were objections (‘We don’t need to go behind closed doors; we’ve got an honest case.’), when it was evident that the Grey Valley publicans would prefer not to be reported, the motion was carried and the two reporters went out.
‘Well, chaps,’ Mr Tribe said, ‘I’ve come down here specially to
tell you what your chairman’s just said—and a bloody sight more.
This is an important issue. There’s far more at stake than a they got their orders from. No, it would be a bloody sight different
if this was a case of genuine protest against the cost of living—and
who was to blame anyway for the rising cost of living? Only the
workers, always putting in wage-claims and forcing prices up, like a
dog chasing its tail. But this was something different—it was a case
of the ringleaders misleading the others on the orders of someone a
bloody long way away, they knew who, someone who had probably
never paid sixpence for a beer in his life, let alone sevenpence, because they probably weren’t allowed to drink beer in Russia, or
perhaps old Joe did but the ordinary people didn’t; he didn’t really
know about that.
‘Well, this Gover’ment—they could take it from him this Gover’ment wouldn’t do anything. They wanted the bloody miners to win; it was a pity this strike hadn’t gone on, they might have been able to have made the Gover’ment do something then. But the strike was over now, and the Gover’ment wouldn’t carry out a job for the publicans, as they called it—as if the association was asking them to do anything unfair! Well, it would only be two years till the next election, and he could tell them that the party reckoned their chances of getting in were never better. And then, they’d see action. Sid Holland would put those bloody wharfies and miners in their place, make no mistake about that.
‘Well, what he’d come down to tell them was to hang on. Not to despair, but hold out. He knew some of them were going through tough times, but they’d be doing good for themselves as well as the whole country like true patriots if they held out. Look, here was a cat he could let out of the bag—only mum was the word—they knew there was a Royal Commission sitting on the liquor trade right now. Well, no names mentioned or anything else, but there was a move afoot by some people to get the price of beer brought down to sixpence all over the country. And these people could point to the West Coast and say, ‘They’re selling it for sixpence and they aren’t bankrupt. Why can’t you?’ Well, they may as well know now that was one of the many good reasons why the rise in price was proposed in the first place, three months ago. They could see for themselves, it stood to reason, if the West Coast publicans gave in on this price issue, the whole trade all over the country would have to lower the price of beer.
‘Now, they might well ask, what had he to get out of this. Fair question needing a fair answer. He wasn’t a publican himself, he was a shareholder in a brewery. This boycott didn’t affect the brewers one iota. But the brewers had the common sense to see that if the miners won on this issue, they would win on others. The brewers were heart and soul behind their best customers the publicans on this issue, because the brewers too were sick of the trade unions and the Gover’ment and everything else in this country. The brewers’ advice was, “Hold out, don’t worry about a short-term loss of trade.”
‘The secretary of the association in Wellington had asked him to come down to talk to them, and he had authorized him to promise them that the association was prepared to carry on with its “strike fund” to assist publicans whose trade had suffered, if necessary for months. They could count on that.
‘Look, how could these miners hold out? Weren’t they already slipping away for their beer to other towns where they weren’t known? The brewers and the publicans had created a taste in them for beer; created a demand, that demand had to be satisfied, that was economics. The miners’ bloody dry throats would get the better of them yet.’
He implored them once more to hold out for the good days when their own Government would be in power.
Mr Tribe’s speech impressed the publicans. After the clapping,
during which Mr Tribe gulped a glass of beer with an expression on
his face as if he was saying to himself, ‘I told you they’d be impressed. Yes, that’s me, I don’t pull my punches,’ the chairman
Don Palmer from Coal Flat got up. He spoke deferentially. ‘Mr Chairman,’ he said, ‘I’m not one to make a fuss. I take the bad with the good, at the best of times. But I’ve been asked to speak in the name of the publicans in the mining towns of the Grey Valley— Dobson, Taylorville, Wallsend, Stillwater, Ngahere, Coal Flat, Blackball, Roa, and all the pubs as far as Reefton—I don’t know if Dunollie and Rapahoe are in on this too—there are more than a dozen pubs affected, a dozen and a half nearly. We’re in a position where we’re running at a serious loss. We’ve had to put off staff; we can’t serve draught beer anyway because the rest of the keg will go bad; we don’t take in more than three or four bob in a day. I’ve taken in exactly nothing in the last two and a half weeks; the other two publicans in Coal Flat will tell you the same; not a cent in nearly three weeks, and not likely to be for the next three weeks, and the next three, and the next three. We can’t go on. The place has got to be kept going as you know, there are overheads, lighting, heating, a wife and family to keep. We can’t go on dipping into the bank. Mr Tribe tells us the association will pay up. I can tell you the association’s money won’t even pay my regular expenses, let alone make up for the trade I’m losing.’
‘If you like I’ll recommend to the secretary that he should raise the amount,’ Mr Tribe said.
‘I don’t care if he doubles it,’ Dad said. ‘It’s not good enough.
Since we’re in committee I’m going to tell you something that I
wouldn’t have mentioned otherwise. These are just some of the
things that have happened to me since the boycott started. The
miners and dredgies ganged up on my son because he took a job on
the dredge during the strike. The one loyal customer from the
dredge has been suspended. That’s how much sympathy the dredge
company’s got for the publican. Mr Tribe says we’ve all got to stick
together, businessmen and publicans and all the rest; well, the
directors of the dredge company were more interested in the immediate advantage than in holding out till Sid Holland gets into power.
They gave in to the union over the dredge manager’s head, too, I
know. Well, that’s only a start. My son daren’t leave the house now,
‘You’re scabbing!’ Tribe shouted.
‘That’s union talk,’ Dad said.
‘Well, it’s one union against another, you might say. The scab on the dredge got squeezed out, and the scabs on our side’ll get squeezed out. Don’t think that that beggar selling for sixpence in this town’ll get away with it. He’ll find yet that the brewers won’t supply him; they’ll be out of this, and they’ll be late delivering that, and then when he applies for his licence to be renewed, there’ll be opposition behind the scenes. You don’t want to join him. You might find it even harder to carry on than you do now.’
But a publican from Dunollie jumped up. ‘I’m like Mr Palmer. I’m not from the Grey Valley, but I’m from a miners’ town. I haven’t done any business for weeks. And neither has my friend here from Rapahoe. The co-op. miners would come in, I reckon, because they are working for themselves and ought to see our point of view, only there’s pickets outside my pub. What I want to know is who is this bloke that’s doing all the lecturing? I thought he was a guest speaker; he’s not even a member of the association, what right’s he got to take part in this argument?’
The chairman began to explain but Tribe cut him short. ‘I’ve been authorized by the headquarters in Wellington to put their case,’ he said flatly.
‘Well, let me tell you, I don’t like this little-Hitler way of talking
to us. We’re small men, us publicans, not brewers; we don’t like
tied houses and big combines and all this talk about Sid Holland
either, I’m a Labour man myself, so let’s keep politics out of it. We
aren’t big business. We’re small men trying to earn an honest living.
This is our local branch and we run it ourselves. Headquarters can’t
start giving us orders. They shouldn’t have a case against our own
case. They’re supposed to carry out our orders. We don’t need any
jumped-up whipper-snapper from Wellington to tell us our business. And let me tell you, I might disagree with the miners on a
good many things, but my hackles stand up when I hear any city
The chairman murmured to Tribe who sat glowering. He didn’t reply. Other mining-town publicans spoke. Three of them threatened to follow Don Palmer’s lead. Tribe shouted, ‘You’re holding the pistol at the meeting’s head. You’re taking the law into your own hands.’
‘Well, it’s our meeting,’ the Dunollie man called. ‘I’ll abide by the meeting decision myself, but if the others go their own way, I say good luck to them.’
A ballot was taken, and by a majority of ten, Don Palmer’s motion was carried: the price of beer on the West Coast was lowered to sixpence. The Dunollie man called for three cheers, and several publicans in spite of themselves, cheered the first time, but there were no more. The doors were opened and the surprised reporters were let in on the news.
Nora Herlihy crept uncertainly down the steep narrow
track and felt her way in the dark to the back door. She stood
quivering and hesitant, looking at the crack of light under the door
and listening. There was no sound, only an occasional splutter and
hiss from the coal fire. Then she heard her mother cough. Inadvertently Nora knocked, timidly and sharply. She heard a chair move.
‘Who’s that?’ her mother called in alarm. Nora did not answer.
‘Who is it?’ she called again, the note of alarm more prominent in her voice, ‘Go away! Or I’ll call the police. Is it Nora’s bastard? Who is it?’ She was up now and moving heavily to the door. She opened the door three inches, placing her weight against it, and peered round it. Nora stood there without speaking. There were tears in her eyes.
Mrs Seldom did not move for fully a minute. Then she took her weight from the door and opened it another few inches. ‘Well, Nora Seldom!’ she said slowly. ‘Nora Seldom! I wouldn’t have known her.’ She walked unevenly back to her chair by the fire. ‘Ah yes, she’s a changed gel now, my God, she is.’
Nora pushed open the door and closed it carefully behind her. Mrs Seldom did not offer her a scat, and she pulled a hard kitchen chair from the table and sat by the fire, four feet from her mother. Mrs Seldom stared at the fire. ‘The years go by, and Ned is in his grave,’ she said, ‘but still the ones that are in the right will see justice done. Ah yes, they’ll live to see their wrongs put right. I always said that. Yes, I always said that.’
Nora sat, her eyes glistening, but making no sound. Her mother turned and eyed her triumphantly, addressing her for the first time, ‘It’s a pity Ned isn’t here to see you,’ she said with some bitterness,
‘Yes, it’s a pity. But I wouldn’t be so sure he isn’t. Oh no, make no mistake about that, Ned’s not missing anything. Ned’s taking it all in…. We’ve got our wish, Ned; yes, we’ve got our wish, like I always knew we would….’
Nora broke down. ‘Oh, Mum, stop it!’ she cried.
‘Ah now, young lady, don’t start laying down the law the minute you cross the doorstep. Oh no, that’s not for you to do, that’s my place, not yours. Are you there, Ned? Ah yes,’ she almost chuckled heavily, ‘Ah yes, Ned’ll be taking it all in, that he will. I always knew Nora would come back to us, Ned. I always knew. I’ve been living for it all these years and now it’s come true.’
‘Oh, Mum, I had to come and see you,’ Nora said desperately. ‘I’m leaving Mike!’
‘Ah, you’re a sorry gel now, Nora Seldom,’ her mother said. ‘Ah yes, I knew it would come to this. I could ha’ told you what would happen, every bit of it, the day you walked out so hoity-toity after that Doolan bugger. Yes, I would have bet you ten pounds on it, and I’d have got my money back. You’re a sorry gel now, Nora. Ah no, you came to no good running after that one.’
‘Mum, I’m leaving him now, and that brat of his too. I can’t stand it a minute longer. It was all a pack of lies about that schoolteacher. The boy made it all up. Christ Almighty, the town hates us enough now without him showing us up like that. A pack of bloody fools we look now, God knows. And I asked him, Mum, I asked him long ago to own up if it was a pack of bloody lies, and he denied it, he said he was telling the truth, and Mike the bloody fool encouraged him. I won’t be with them a minute longer, Mum. I bloody near flayed him, Mum. I gave him the hiding of his life when he got in. And Mike didn’t interfere. I don’t know where he went. Crawled up to the pub, I suppose, like a bloody mongrel with his tail between his legs, to get drunk and then come home and take it out on me. Well, he won’t be taking it out on me again! I’m not staying there, Mum.’
But it was plain that Mrs Seldom, who didn’t read the paper,
didn’t know about the court case, ‘I knew you’d leave him, Nora.’
she said proudly but gently. ‘I knew Nora would come back. Ah
Ned, you haven’t got long to wait now. No, I haven’t got long to go
now, Ned. I’ve lived to see justice done, and when that’s done I can
give up the ghost. It won’t be long now. I knew you couldn’t stay
away for long, Nora. I knew you’d see reason after a time. Ah, you
thought you’d be stubborn, didn’t you? You thought we’d ha’ got
weak and given in. But we could be stubborn too. Oh yes, Ned and
I were determined. By Jesus, we were.’ She leant over and lifted the
big dusty black-leaded kettle on to a hook over the fire and lowered
the hook. ‘We’ll have a cup of tea, Nora,’ she said. ‘It’ll be the first
cup of tea you’ve had here for a long time. You’re the first from
Coal Flat since the strike Nora, and that’s eighteen years now. Oh,
‘Did you know him, Mum?’
‘Who? Young Paul Rogers? Ah, Nora, he was my messenger often enough. He used to get things for me in town. Yes. It’s only a month or two since he ordered some coal for me. Yes, I said, “It’s not my place to go to the Mine Office for coal, Paul Rogers. It’s their place to come to me.” No, it was not my place. So he didn’t say anything, but he must ha’ gone away and given them a piece of his mind for the coal came the next day. Yes, I knew I could count on Nellie Rogers’s son.’
‘It was him all the fuss was about,’ Nora said. ‘It was him Mike took to court, and Peter told all that pack of stinking lies about.’
‘You wouldn’t expect that Doolan bugger to do any good to a friend of mine,’ Mrs Seldom said, ‘or any bastard of his either. No, an enemy of mine couldn’t be a friend to Nellie Rogers’s son.’ Suspiciously she asked, ‘What did he take him to court for?’
‘Oh, Mum, I can’t tell! It was terrible. It was all a pack of bloody lies!’
‘Did he get off then?’
‘Yes, he got off. And we’re shown up as a pair of fools that’d listen to any pack of lies that brat’d make up.’
‘Ah yes, they’d have to let Paul Rogers off. They couldn’t do anything to him on the word of that Doolan or his bastard. It wouldn’t be right. No, it wouldn’t be right.’
‘Oh, Mum, don’t talk about it!’ Nora said, frustrated that her mother should understand so little of what she had come to tell her. She bent forward and broke into bitter tears, all the bitterer because it hurt her pride to cry. Her mother sat back proudly and watched her, as if preening herself in her hour of triumph. ‘Ah, tears is it? Yes, tears it would have to be, Nora; tears for the hurt you did to your elders, tears for Ned’s early grave, tears for disobedience. Crying won’t make it better, Nora, but crying it had to come to.’
‘I wish I’d never left home, Mum!’ Nora cried. ‘I wish I’d never set eyes on the bugger. He wasn’t good to me. He didn’t treat me right. He had no respect for me. He even went back to his bloody drinking after he’d promised to knock it off for me.’
‘We knew what was right for you,’ Mrs Seldom said, ‘Ned and I.
‘I didn’t want any kids from him, Mum. It’s terrible to raise a kid to jeer at you. That’s what he did. That boy aged me early. He was the plague of my life, and Mike wouldn’t put him in order. He was a bloody sight worse when he came back from the convent.’
‘You chose your own fate, Nora, and fate can be nasty medicine. But it teaches you in the end. Ah, Nora, why didn’t you listen to Ned and me?’
The kettle boiled and Nora, suppressing her tears, got out the cups and saucers, the milk and sugar. She made the tea in the big old-fashioned teapot with its broken lid replaced by the lid of a cocoa-tin, while her mother proudly and silently acknowledged her help. She was disconcerted that her mother hadn’t abused her as she had expected.
‘I left him there howling and smarting,’ Nora said. ‘I don’t care if I never see him again. He’s Mike’s to worry about now. He can have the thankless job of feeding him and clothing him and keeping him in order and see if he can do it on the miserable bit he gave me when he’d taken out his beer-money. If I’d had more strength I’d still have been chastising the little brat.’
‘You’re well rid of him then. Get yourself a biscuit, Nora. They’re from the grocer. Ah, I don’t bother to bake now. It’s a long time since I’ve tasted a home-baked biscuit. You can make some for me now. You stay here, Nora, and don’t go back to that Doolan now or his bastard son. You don’t have to look after me for long. You can have that wedding-dress of mine now. It won’t be much use to you now. But it’ll be something to remember me by. It was my mother’s before me and I was a proud gel when I was married to Ned in it. And then it can go to Jack’s girl. Get me that pen and ink from the mantelpiece. There’s a writing-pad in the the drawer. I’ll write to Jack now and tell him. You’re to have the wedding-dress and half of the furniture and half the money in the bank. Ned won’t mind now. I’m doing what he would have done. Jack will be pleased. Yes, Jack will be pleased. Ah yes, I knew I’d never die till I’d made peace with my daughter.’
Nora got her the steel pen and small earthen bottle of ink, the writing-block with the edges of the sheets yellowed; she noticed that the stamps kept inside the writing-block carried portraits of George V.
‘I thought Jack might take me in, Mum,’ she said. ‘I didn’t think
‘Ah, you can stay here, Nora. It won’t be for long. Then you can go to Jack if you like and you can both sell up the house. Now you go back and get your things and don’t waste a word on that Doolan priest, and I’ll write to Jack.’ She settled laboriously to write the letter. When Nora had gone it occurred to her that since Jack was coming she need not write to him. But a dim suspicion that there might be some trap in Nora’s visit made her finish the letter and, when she had stamped the envelope, stumble with a stick up the path and along the main road to the post office. If the letter was posted, there would be no doubt that Jack would get it. It took her fifteen minutes to get to the post office. There was a strange red glow to the north of the township; it might have been lights from the dredge, since she didn’t know where the dredge was now, or it might have been a bush fire.
Nora, twenty minutes ahead of her, saw what it was as she came to the steep little track down the terrace on which the town stood and saw her own house blazing.
‘I’ll ask Frank,’ Doris said. ‘If he says it’s all right, then it’s all right by me.’
She and Flora faced Rogers across a kitchen table already laid. The potatoes and turnips were boiling, the mince simmering, and the custard pudding cooling. ‘He ought to be in any minute now,’ Doris said.
Frank pushed the door open roughly and took in the scene with a surly but not unfriendly look. He gave Doris a rough kiss and sat down to take off his working boots. ‘What, you not in goal yet?’ he said to Rogers.
‘The case was dismissed,’ Doris said. ‘Paul’s feeling a bit feather-headed now. Who wouldn’t be?’
‘Feather-headed!’ Rogers protested. ‘I’m worn out.’
‘Yeah, I heard at the mine,’ Frank said. ‘By God, it just shows you. Bloody lying little brat. It’s hard to credit that a kid could think up a story like that.’
‘His father had a hand in it,’ Rogers said, ‘I don’t believe Peter knew what it was all about.’
Frank went to the kitchen sink and washed himself noisily. He
left them and came back in his socks wearing a clean singlet and a
Frank sneered. ‘Ar! This isn’t the Grand Hotel.’
‘You’ll get a cold, Frank,’ Doris said.
Frank got up unwillingly to get a shirt. ‘Anybody’d think they’d never seen a man’s chest before.’ He stood at the door and expanded his chest. He pulled up his singlet and tautened the hard shield of his stomach muscles. ‘How do you like that, Flor?’ he asked. ‘I bet Paul can’t do as good as that.’ Doris put down the saucepans and pushed him to the door. ‘Frank!’ she said petulantly slapping his buttocks, and he went out chuckling.
During the meal Doris said, ‘The boy’s got to go to a convent. The judge said.’
‘Best place for him,’ Frank said. ‘Keep him out of trouble.’
‘It made him worse last time,’ Rogers said.
‘Well, it’s not your worry,’ Frank said.
‘Paul reckons someone ought to adopt him,’ Doris said.
‘Who the hell’d want to adopt a kid like that?’ Frank said. ‘What the hell are you worrying about him for? He got you into trouble enough.’
‘Someone’s got to do something for him,’ Rogers said. ‘Everybody passes the buck to someone else. They dump him into a convent. He’ll end up a criminal if someone doesn’t try to help him.’
‘You can’t be worried about that.’
‘He’d be a handful but he’d get better if he was properly looked after.’
‘Paul wondered if we could,’ Doris said.
‘Us!’ Frank exploded. ‘Jesus Christ Almighty! What would we
want to adopt him for? You don’t adopt kids as old as that. You
want them as babies so you can train them young. Anyway the
boy’s old man wouldn’t let us. You’ve got to have the parents’ permission. If the judge says he’s got to go to a convent he’s got to go.
A court order’s a court order.’
‘It’ll be hard to get around that, Paul,’ Flora said.
‘Anyway, why pick on us?’ Frank said. ‘Look here, it might be
known in the family that Doris and I can’t have any of our own, but
we don’t want the whole bloody town to know it. You’ve got a
bloody check!’ he said to Paul. ‘You don’t need to think we’re so
hard up that we’ll snap at any waif and stray that’s offering, do you?
We’ve got some bloody self-respect. If we ever do any adopting it
won’t be for a while yet, and it’ll be a baby that doesn’t know its
mother or its father, that we can bring up our own way; not a
ready-made grown-up kid that knows we’re not its parents and’ll
‘Oh well, Paul was just wondering,’ Doris said.
‘You didn’t want to adopt him, did you?’ Frank said.
‘I said I’d see what you said,’ Doris said, with resignation.
‘I just thought I’d sound you on it,’ Rogers said. ‘There was no harm in trying.’
‘The matter’s closed,’ Frank said. ‘I’m not discussing it any more.’
‘There’s no one will lift a finger to help the boy,’ Rogers said.
‘Everybody says, “What a pity, look at the home he comes from.” But we just dump him into an institution. Nobody will do anything for him. Do you wonder that he’ll grow up to hate people?’
‘I told you before, it’s not your responsibility,’ Frank said.
‘There’s too many nosey-parkering people minding everyone else’s
business in this world already.’ He refolded the Evening Star in
front of him and started to read.
There was a small knock on the door. ‘Come in,’ Doris shouted eagerly, glad that the discussion was interrupted. Young Donnie came in shyly.
‘Come in, Donnie,’ Doris said, jumping up to kiss him. ‘Have you had your tea?’
‘Yes,’ he said.
‘Then have a cup of milk. Here.’
Flora kissed him too.
‘Auntie Flora, Gran says will you come home. She wants you to come and see her.’
‘You be careful, Flora,’ Frank said. ‘There’s a bloody trap at the end of it, I’ll bet.’
‘Oh, Frank,’ Doris said. ‘How do you know? You can’t blame Mum for wanting to see Flora. She’s been through a worrying time.’
‘If you’ve got any sense,’ Frank said to Rogers, ‘you’ll go with her.’
‘Oh, Frank,’ Doris said. ‘Flora’s got a mind of her own.’
‘Hullo!’ Frank said from his paper. ‘They’ve brought the beer down! I didn’t know that. It’s all over then. They’ve given in. I wonder if that’s why your Mum wants to see Flor.’
‘Then we can go and see them again!’ Doris said joyfully. ‘Gosh, that’s great.’
‘Don’t be in such a hurry,’ Frank said. ‘Wait for a day or two till things get back to normal…. I wonder how many of their old customers will go back there now.’
‘Dad’s trying to get a pub away from the Coast,’ Flora said. ‘They won’t be here long.’
‘They want you to go with them, that’s it,’ Frank said. ‘Paul, you keep your eye on her.’
‘Gran said to tell you she hasn’t been well,’ Donnie said.
‘Looking for sympathy,’ Frank said. ‘If she can’t boss you around she wants you to feel sorry for her. She’s got Don there to feel sorry for her.’
‘Oh, Frank,’ Doris said. ‘Not in front of the kid.’
‘How’s Daddie?’ Flora asked.
‘He’s all right,’ Donnie said; then more surely, ‘He doesn’t talk much. He’s been out all day.’
‘Is Granddad well?’
‘Yes. He went into town today. But Grannie’s not. She locked the front door, ‘cause there was only me and her at home.’
‘I’ll have to go and see her, Paul,’ Flora said. ‘It’s not fair. You come with me.’
‘I bet you won’t be back here to sleep tonight,’ Frank said. Flora didn’t comment.
The three of them crossed the bridge over the creek and climbed to the Roa road. They had passed the bins when the lights of a car shone behind them; they turned to see a Morris Eight slithering fast and unpredictably towards them. They ran to the bracken and blackberry at the side of the road. ‘It’s Daddie’s car!’ Donnie said. The car screeched suddenly to a stop. Don leaned out of the window, with a peculiar drunken leer on his face. ‘Going far?’ he said. ‘Climb in.’ Flora stared sullenly; she had not spoken to him since she walked out of the hotel.
‘You’re drunk, Don,’ Rogers said. ‘You’re not fit to drive.’
‘What of it?’ Don said. ‘You never been drunk before? It’s a good feeling. I’m high, Paul. Four hours’ solid drinking at Roa, not a sod to talk to. Do you know how much it cost me? Sixpence. Just think of that. The beer’s down to sixpence again, and I’ve been drinking it. I’ve been on the spirits too. Rum, whisky, advocaat, everything.’
‘Don, you should have been home with Mum,’ Flora said.
‘Mum’s old enough to take care of herself, isn’t she? She doesn’t
want her little Donnie-boy to act the mother to her now, does she?
I’m old enough to manage by myself, too, see? That’s what a lot of
people don’t seem to understand!’
Donnie began to cry. ‘You go ahead with him, Flora,’ Rogers said. ‘He shouldn’t see his father like this. I’ll catch you up.’ Flora walked off quickly, clutching Donnie’s hand.
‘You know what I want now, Paul?’ Don said. ‘I want a nice
woman, like Tess, like that one I had in Christchurch. Not a
shrivelled-up old sour-apple like Miss Dane. One that’s slim and
‘Snap out of it, Don,’ Rogers said. ‘You’ve got yourself into a mess. You ought to go away again and set yourself on your own feet.’
‘It was all in the paper, wasn’t it?’ Don said. ‘About me and that sour-apple schoolteacher in the scrub. That’s friendship, Paul, getting yourself out of trouble by getting me into it.’
‘There’s no comparison. You wouldn’t have gone to gaol. You won’t lose your job.’
‘Now everyone’ll know after all, when she has that snork, that I’m the father.’
‘Miss Dane? Carrying a baby? … Well You could have married her.’
‘I wanted to, Paul, I was going to. But Mum put her foot on it.’
‘Where’s your manhood then? Surely you could have ignored her.’
‘I did in the end. It was too late then, Paul. The old girl had got religion or something. She was queer. She wouldn’t listen to me. She didn’t seem to know what I was talking about. Paul, I tried, do you understand me? I could have set myself up, and to hell with the old woman, and married the old girl but she didn’t want it. What could I do? I couldn’t force her to marry me. And I had a row with the old woman about it.’
‘You’re all in a mess, Don.’
‘She beggared my life,’ Don said. ‘Climb in.’ Rogers climbed into the back seat. ‘What’s that glow ahead?’ Rogers asked. ‘It looks like a fire.’
‘The hobs of hell,’ Don said, and suddenly accelerated. ‘You’re my friend, you were telling me once,’ he said wryly, ‘a friend’ll go anywhere for you. Why don’t you come along with me? I could use some company where I’m going.’
The car was heading diagonally across the road to Mrs Seldom’s house below. ‘You bloody fool,’ Rogers almost screamed and hurled himself through the door. He hit the road on a half-turn, left foot first and slewed painfully round falling on his hip.
He tried to get up but he was too dizzy. He had been sitting there a minute or two when Don lurched overhead. ‘You bloody fool,’ Don said, ‘Did you think I meant it? You should ha’ known me better than that…. Get up.’ He helped Rogers up.
‘I can’t stand on one leg. I’ve ricked my ankle. You’re too unsteady.’ He had to lower himself again. His shoulder was sore and his forehead was bleeding.
‘I’ll get the car if you’ll let me drive you again. I’ll take you to the doctor’s.’
Rogers let Don hoist him as well as he could into the car. ‘I’ll drop you at the quack’s, and then I’m going away, Paul, away. Tonight. Straight after this. I’m going to fill up along the road and drive all night.’
Against the pain, Rogers said: ‘Can’t you leave it till tomorrow, Don? Wait till you’re sober?’
Don didn’t answer. Across the silence came Mrs Palmer’s voice calling plaintively like a child for its mother, ‘Don-NEE! Don-NEE!’
Nora Herlihy watched the last embers of the house in which she had lived sixteen painful years. That period was ended and her only regret was that she hadn’t been able to collect her belongings first. She was furious, nevertheless, that Peter had got his own back on her; furious at her impotence. There was a crowd of people watching. They were still heaving buckets of water on the glowing pieces of wood and twisted roofing iron, the broken glass, the collapsed iron beds, the cracked iron bath-tub. There was no fire brigade in Coal Flat and no water supply except from the water races. Any building that caught fire was doomed, and the townsfolk turned out with buckets to prevent other buildings catching. But Nora and Mike had no neighbours; there was only the scrub around them. And since they lived away from the town, it was harder to get many buckets down there in time. There was no sign of Mike. He couldn’t have been in Palmers’ bar because people said that old Don hadn’t opened up the bar tonight. Someone said Mike had been seen walking towards Ngahere. She supposed he was drinking there. But she didn’t care where he was.
Constable Rae came to her. ‘You think it was the boy, Mrs Herlihy?’
‘I’m bloody sure of it, constable. I warn you if I see him I’ll damn near kill him.’
‘He’ll have to be charged, Mrs Herlihy. He’ll go before the Children’s Court. People won’t stand it, having a young incendiarist at large.’
‘You can do what you bloody well like with him, Mr Rae. I don’t care if I never see him again.’
Jessie and Jimmy Cairns came deferentially to her. ‘You can stay
with us, Mrs Herlihy, till Mike fixes up a new place for you,’ Jessie
Nora was deeply touched at this act of kindness, but beyond a small firm smile, she was too proud to acknowledge it. ‘Jack’s coming for me,’ she said, ‘and I’m going to Mum’s.’ She was glad of this opportunity to show her independence of the town; and it gratified her that Jessie and Jimmy raised their eyebrows when she mentioned her mother. ‘Well, if you need anything, let us know,’ Jessie said, and for the first time in many years Nora said, ‘Thanks’.
Jack arrived in a few minutes in a small Ford truck.
‘Why didn’t you get in touch with me before, if it was like this?’ he said. ‘I never knew.’
‘Oh, Jack,’ Nora said, breaking again into tears, ‘I wish you’d stopped me going after him. You were the only one that could have done it. Mum and Dad always made me stubborn.’
‘Come back now then,’ Jack said, ‘The wife’ll give you some things to go on with till you buy some new ones.’ Jimmy Cairns sauntered curiously to the truck and called tentatively, ‘Hullo, Jack!’ But Jack didn’t even look, let alone answer.
Nora watched Flora Palmer, dishevelled, run to the doctor who had come to see if there were any casualties.
‘I’m staying at Mum’s,’ Nora said. ‘I’ve been to make it up with her. She’s writing to you about it.’
Jack nodded his approval. ‘I’ll take you there,’ he said.
Joe Taiha and Arty Nicholson didn’t get to Arahura till ten
o’clock. They had clubbed in and bought an old second-hand
sedan, a
The front door opened at the noise of the car pulling up and Kahu’s mother came out, a stout middle-aged woman in a bright red frock. She called out lazily in Maori. Joe said, ‘She wants us to come inside and have a feed. She’s got something ready for us.’
‘Where am I going to put it?’ Arty commented. ‘I’m full of beer. Hell, we don’t want to be too long. We’ve got to get there by the morning.’
‘We’ll be there in the morning,’ Joe said, but the way he said it Arty wasn’t sure that he believed it himself. He reckoned he’d have to keep hurrying him.
Kahu’s mother in the car-light was smiling an easy deep smile of welcome and Arty was embarrassed grinning back and nodding. Then Kahu came running out, bare legged in high-heeled shoes that made her unsteady, in a short cheap print frock and a cardigan. Arty couldn’t take his eyes off her; he reckoned that, except for the cardigan, that frock was all she was wearing.
‘Catch, Kahu,’ Joe said and threw her a box of a hundred cigarettes.
‘Oh, Joe, you’re good to me,’ Kahu said, and ran her fingers through his hair. Joe put his arm behind her and squeezed her arm.
‘Oh! you hurt!’ she squealed. ‘You stop it now!’ He released her and she ran inside laughing. ‘You bring your friend in,’ she called from the door. ‘Don’t you leave him standing there in the cold.’
Arty tried not to notice the untidiness and dirt in the kitchen, a couple of dead flies on the window-ledge, a dusty last summer’s flypaper still hanging with its victims, the sticky patches and a small pool of spilt milk on the oilcloth table-cover, a broken chair and a dog’s bone on the floor. He was half-expecting Joe to demur and apologize, as he would have done taking a stranger into his own home even if it wasn’t untidy. But Joe didn’t seem to notice it. Kahu’s mother found a dishcloth and wiped the table-cover.
‘We thought you’d be coming yesterday,’ she said. ‘We had the
haangi ready.’
She friend some steak and onions in a pan whose outside was
crusted with black. There was a plate of cold pork as well, cooked in
the haangi the day before. She served the meals on plates that she
wiped, unnecessarily, with her apron, All the same Arty hadn’t
tasted better steak and onions. Kahu’s father was a stout, broad-faced man, who made generous and slightly pompous gestures inviting Arty to make himself at home; he worked in the butter factory
at Hokitika. His father sat back in an armchair with loose stuffing by
the range, a greying-headed thinnish man with his front teeth missing and the rest tobacco-stained, who looked and coughed as if he
had tuberculosis. He had worked on the roads with a tar-sealing
gang till the end of the war, though he must have been nearly
seventy. His English was poor and he only used it when he talked to
Arty. But Kahu objected to her mother talking Maori. ‘It’s bad
manners,’ she said. ‘Mum talks English good, Arty. She’s too shy
to let you know.’ ‘This made Mrs Torere cackle for a long time with
laughter, though the old man said something sternly to her. She
answered him in a tone of offence and then turned to Arty and
laughed: ‘He reckons I don’t talk Maori too good either. Not good
enough for him, anyway.’ There was a sixteen-year-old boy sitting
watching, grinning but saying nothing, and three children came out,
sleepy-eyed and stared at Arty, a girl of thirteen in her nightdress
and two boys of ten and eight in pyjamas. Mrs Torere gave them
smaller helpings of steak and they ate it with their fingers. After a
few beers Arty was feeling indulgent and thinking what a tale he’d
have to tell the boys when he got home again.
He was having a long yarn with Kahu’s father about pay in the mines and on the dredge and in the dairy factory, when Kahu’s mother interrupted.
‘Kahu got bad news, Joe,’ she said. ‘She’s got the sack.’
‘No!’ Kahu said. ‘I didn’t get the sack! I left the job, Mum, you should know that. I left the job.’
‘What for?’ Joe asked.
‘One of the guests at the hotel missed some money,’ Kahu said. ‘The landlady she reckons it’s one of us maids. We all look round at each other. They all look round at me. Oh yes, just ‘cause I’m the Maori girl there. I say, “How much did she lose? Two bob or five quid? How much? Maybe it’s not worth all this fuss?” And the landlady says, that’s a silly way to look at it. It’s the principle, she says. And then she looks at me as if she’s sure it’s me just ‘cause I said that. So I got in first, Joe. I told her, “You call me thief, I’m leaving.” And I walked out…. I bet it was that new girl always skiting about her boy friends and a different one every night. I bet she’s the thief. Oh no, they don’t look at that one. She’s not a Maori girl.’
‘Have you got another job?’ Joe asked.
‘I can get in the asylum as a maid,’ she said pouting.
‘You don’t work there,’ Joe said. ‘You’re not gonna work in that place. I don’t care even if you don’t work, you’re not to work there.’
‘You try the Woolworths,’ Mrs Torere said. ‘They often want girls.’
‘The Maori girl can’t get work in a shop,’ Kahu said. Mrs Torere rocked her shoulders and sighed. Mr Torere said, ‘Some of the people in the town are too bloody proud.’
‘I’m proud too. I’m gonna try another hotel,’ Kahu said. ‘You go down there an’ catch a lot of whitebait, Joe, so we can get married an’ I don’t have to worry any more about any job…. You got a girl, Arty?’
Arty grinned. Joe said, ‘Arty’s girl’s name is Winnie. She’s good looking too. She’s seventeen.’
‘When you gonna marry her?’ Kahu asked.
Arty shrugged. ‘Come off it. I’m not in a hurry yet.’
‘The Maori boy’s the best for the Maori girl,’ Kahu said. ‘The
paakehaa waits too long to get married. The paakehaa girl runs
around with three, four, maybe five men before she’ll marry anyone.
Then she doesn’t care too much. The Maori girl marries the first
boy, an’ she loves him the best. The Maori way’s the best way,
eh?’
‘Haw!’ Arty said. ‘You want to see him eying all the sheilahs at the dances.’
But Kahu pouted and looked jealously at Joe. ‘Joe Taiha, you tell me the truth now! You run aroun’ with any other girl?’
Joe, as Arty’s host, was too polite to argue with him, as Arty
‘Joe not a boy to run aroun’, Kahu,’ Mrs Torere said. ‘I know that. Joe not a boy to tell you the lies.’
The father grunted and nodded solemnly; the grandfather looked stern and offended.
‘That’s right too,’ Kahu said. ‘Joe’s good to me all right.’
‘I was only kidding,’ Arty said limply.
In Maori Joe said to Kahu, ‘If a Maori said that to you about me I’d want to fight him. But not Arty. He didn’t mean it. He thinks it’s something to boast about to run around with a lot of girls. He thought he was praising me.’ Arty was embarrassed when they spoke Maori. Then in English Joe said, ‘Arty doesn’t run around with all the girls. Only Winnie. Winnie’s a good girl too. Just the girl for Arty.’
‘You bring her down to see us some day when you get back,’ Kahu said. ‘Eh, Mum? Can Arty bring his girl down to see us?’
Mrs Torere beamed and nodded vigorously. ‘She be welcome here,’ she said, ‘long as she’s not too proud to stay with the Maori.’
‘When we come back,’ Arty said gratefully in a voice that didn’t sound his own, ‘I’ll bring her down.’
‘Joe and I are getting married,’ Kahu said. ‘Joe’s nineteen, I’m eighteen. ‘That way we spend the best time of our life together.’ She smiled wistfully. ‘Yeah, long as Joe’s kind to me an’ the babies an’ he don’t run after other women, I don’t wish for anything better.’
They all drank beer and they sang to Joe’s guitar. The boy of
sixteen was allowed to smoke and drink as well. Arty wanted to
hurry Joe along but now felt too humble to start pushing his weight
about. About one o’clock Mrs Torere said, ‘We won’t put the tent
up tonight. You two sleep in here. The kids sleep on the floor tonight.’ The young girl went into her parents’ bed, and the two small
boys took a couple of blankets and rolled under them on the floor.
The light in the bedroom had no shade and the blind was stuck.
Arty turned out the light and undressed in the dark. He was afraid
that the sheets wouldn’t be clean but he put the thought out of his
head. He waited for Joe to come to bed, but he dropped off to sleep,
In the morning after a long talkative breakfast, they eventually got to the car. Now Mrs Torere brought out a kit of kuumaras, some pipis, and a half-kerosene tin of cooked mutton-birds preserved in fat. Arty wondered how they were going to carry everything. After a long noisy bout of farewells they got away again. This time Arty drove. They didn’t drink, and they didn’t talk much, but they smoked almost continuously, not having anything else to occupy their minds. It was a clear day and the sun was warm for August. It was thickly forested hill-country; on both sides of them the bush glistened, moist and fresh in the sun after recent rains. Tuis and bellbirds tolled continually, occasional fantails looped from twig to twig, and tomtits darted across the road. They were always climbing and turning, uphill, downhill, around bends, through cuttings, across bridges and up again. The farther south they went, the closer they approached the chain of clear white peaks to their left, the Alps. Joe seemed to take the country for granted, but Arty was as fascinated as if he was travelling in another country, though he wouldn’t have admitted it. They stopped at the bridge of the Little Wanganui River, and ate the bread and cold pork Kahu’s mother had given them, idly watching the river rushing fiercely down its several braided channels. They stopped again at a lagoon by Okarito Forks and threw stones in such a way that they skimmed the surface of the water. They did not stop at the Franz Josef glacier or at the Fox, because they belonged to the open road and the wilderness and they didn’t want to run into any citified tourists, gawking at rivers of ice and staying in soft hotels. After that there was hardly any settlement, only high hills and gullies, an occasional farm and sawmill on a flat, and a deserted public works camp. ‘We ought to stay here the night,’ Arty said.
‘No, we’ll go right on to the Paringa,’ Joe said. He opened beer bottles, and they guzzled straight from the bottles. Since there was no traffic Arty began to fool with the car, swerving from one side to the other, making out he was drunk. A few miles before the Paringa, he almost swerved right off the road when he heard a boy’s voice from the back seat say, ‘You stop that. If you’re drunk you shouldn’t be driving.’ He pulled up suddenly, and he and Joe turned round to stare at this boy who had emerged from the pile of oilskins. He was trembling and evidently had only spoken out of great provocation; his hands and mouth were greasy; he had evidently been eating their food too. As soon as they stopped, he dived out of the car into the bush.
‘Well, Jesus Christ, that’s the kid of Herlihy,’ Arty said. ‘He must ha’ stowed away with us.’
Joe followed him into the bush. Peter was urinating urgently against a ponga. ‘Why didn’t you tell us to stop?’ Joe said grinning. ‘You could have got out when we did.’
Peter eyed him distrustfully as if ready to run again. ‘You would have made me go back,’ he said.
‘What the hell are you doing in the car anyway?’ Arty said, coming to them. Peter didn’t answer.
‘Mum would have given you a feed last night, if you’d come out,’ Joe said.
‘Well, come on out of the bush,’ Arty said. ‘It’s senseless talking here.’
But Peter always kept a good five yards’ distance from them, his eyes keyed for danger. ‘Come on, son,’ Arty said impatiently, ‘we won’t cat you.’
Joe threw a cooked kuumara to him and Peter caught it.
‘Come on,’ Arty said contemptuously
‘Don’t frighten him,’ Joe said. ‘Leave him to me, Arty.’
He bent poised for a minute to put Peter on his guard, then he darted after him and Peter turned and ran for his life up the road. Joe caught him by a long patch of grass at the side of the road, he held him and tickled his ribs. Peter struggled fiercely. Joe tumbled over on his back and lifted Peter high, but he had to stand again to dodge Peter’s kicks. He threw him into the air and caught him, then put him on the ground face down and holding him by the wrists knelt over him. ‘Submit,’ Joe said half-playfully, ‘submit.’ Peter relaxed suddenly and began to cry. ‘Oh, what a sissy,’ Joe said. ‘Crying like a little baby.’ Arty stood watching, impatient and mystified.
Peter began to struggle again more fiercely. Joe released him and
he got up, too breathless to run away again. Joe began to shadow-box, then to spar at him gently; Peter replied sullenly putting all his
effort into his blows. ‘Oh, the champion!’ Joe said. ‘We’ll have you
in the ring yet. Arty, who do you favour for the flyweight championship?—Taiha the Torpedo versus Mighty Mouse the Kid from
Coal Flat. Put your money down, folks!’ They kept sparring, Joe
balanced on his haunches like a Ukrainian dancer, Peter occasionally
knocking him off his balance with savage nervous blows. Eventually
Joe’s playfulness was contagious and Peter relaxed, a distrustful
grin breaking through his hunted face. They carried on till they
were breathless and Joe let a tap from Peter knock him on his back
and lay there. Arty had caught on by now and counted loudly to ten,
hoisting Peter’s arm and shouting, ‘The winner!’ Peter looked
‘Boy, I’m out of breath,’ Joe said. ‘Give us a beer, ref, and a smoke. Give the winner a smoke, too.’
Arty hesitated, then to cover his hesitation, gave Peter the cigarette he had lit for himself. ‘You’re among men now,’ Joe said to Peter. ‘You can smoke.’
Peter’s eyes glinted and he puffed deeply and expertly. ‘Don’t you go and make yourself sick,’ Arty said.
‘This isn’t the first time I’ve smoked,’ Peter said.
After a while Arty said, ‘What are we going to do about him?’ He looked at his watch, ‘Christ, it’s half-past three. We want to find somewhere to camp before it gets dark.’
‘There’s no hurry,’ Joe said. ‘We keep Maori time while we’re on this trip.’
‘What did you come with us for? How did you get in the car?’ Arty asked.
‘I sneaked in when no one was looking,’ Peter said. ‘I waited till Mum went up to Granma’s, an’ then I ran after her, she didn’t see me, an’ I saw your car outside your place an’ I hid. I didn’t know you were going to go away in it. I was too scared to come out when you got in it.’
‘Did you stay in it all night at Arahura last night?’ Joe asked.
‘Nuh,’ Peter said scornfully. ‘I scouted around. Look!’ he said, producing a dead hen from under the oilskins. ‘I killed this.’
‘What, you been killing Mum’s hens?’ Joe said, then grinned. ‘Not only the Maori joker’s the thief, eh, Arty? Some white boys are just as big thieves, eh?’
‘Why were you hiding?’ Arty asked.
‘Mum gave me a hiding,’ Peter said. ‘Dad was out. She reckoned I should ha’ told them it wasn’t true about Mr Rogers. She gave me the worst hiding I ever had. I set the house on fire.’
‘You what?’ Arty said.
Peter was on his guard again as if he’d said too much.
‘Did it burn down?’ Joe asked.
‘There was no fire when we left,’ Arty said.
‘I don’t know,’ Peter said. ‘I put some paper under the curtains in Mum’s room and lit a fire, and then I ran outside.’
‘It must have burnt,’ Arty said. ‘If his mother was out. It’s a wonder we didn’t see any smoke or glow.’
‘We were thinking about the trip,’ Joe said.
‘We’ll have to take you back,’ Arty said.
‘I’m not going back!’ Peter said. He looked desperate again.
‘Well, we can’t take you with us,’ Arty said. ‘Christ, they’ll be looking for you. They might think you were burnt in the fire.’
‘I don’t care,’ Peter said.
‘If we take him back we’ll have to call off the trip,’ Joe said.
‘We could take him back to the Fox or somewhere, give him to somebody else to look after, to hand over to the police.’
‘Don’t you!’ Peter said.
‘It’s too late to go back today,’ Joe said. ‘He better stay the night with us.’
‘We can’t have a bloody kid with us,’ Arty said. ‘We didn’t count on that—Christ! What if he starts wanting to go home after a day or two? Howling for his old woman?’
‘I don’t want to go home,’ Peter said.
‘Why?’ Joe said.
‘I don’t like my old woman. She gives me hidings. Dad didn’t stop her this time. He was out getting drunk. They’re going to send me back to the convent. I don’t want to go there.’
‘Why?’ Arty said.
‘’Cause I was there before. The nuns hit me. They’ll lock me up by myself.’
‘Bloody starved old bitches,’ Arty said.
‘What do you want to do?’ Joe asked.
‘I want to come with you.’
‘Why?’
‘You let me smoke. You don’t nag, nag, nag at me like all the bloody women do. Peter, do this, Peter, do that. Peter, you’re a wicked boy,’
‘You’ll soon get sick of smoking, son,’ Arty said. ‘We aren’t just gonna sit around smoking all day. We’ll be doing hard work. If you come with us you’d have to help. You’d have to work for your living.’
‘What are you going to do?’
‘We’re going whitebaiting. We’re going to work all day to make some money. We get out of this car in a few miles and walk. We’ll have to walk for thirty-five miles through the bush, uphill half the way. You’d get tired and want to go back.’
‘I would not.’
‘There’ll be no entertainment. No pictures, no papers, no wireless, nothing. We might he there two months.’
‘Where’ll you live?’
‘In a hut by the bush by a creek.’
Peter’s eyes lit up with anticipation. ‘In a hut in the bush,’ he said. ‘That’ll be corker.’
‘I give up,’ Arty said. ‘I’m only encouraging him.’
‘It’s five miles from the nearest settlement,’ Joe said. ‘Every day we’ll have to carry the tins of whitebait five miles, then get them across the river on the ferry. You’ll be half-dead with work if you come with us.’
But Peter was only the keener to come. ‘We might get into trouble with the law,’ Arty said. ‘What if we have to pay out all our money in a hefty fine for taking him away?’
‘Oh, let him come,’ Joe said. ‘When I was a boy like him I’d have been keen too.’
They got to the Paringa bridge and slept the night in the car. In the morning they sorted things out, packed their fifty-pound packs. There would be blankets in the hut, and the cans for the whitebait they would fetch from the other end, at the Haast. They only had to carry clothes, oilskins and food, and they could get more stores from the Haast. Even so they could not manage the food Mrs Torere had given them: much of it they had already eaten, but they had to leave some of the remaining kuumaras, half of the muttonbirds, the cold pork, and Peter’s dead hen. They gave Peter the two whitebait nets to carry on his shoulder, and after shouting greeting to a man camped nearby, already dipping his net in the Paringa, they set off. The road stopped here, the bridge stood like a monument to a postponed enterprise, as if the bush and the wet had worn the engineers down, as if they had just packed up in the rain without a word and left the ferns to spore and the beech seedlings to strike, evacuating disputed territory. The road became a track and the track climbed. Every few hundred yards they came to shallow watercourses and they splashed through them in their gumboots. They were lucky it was so fine a day, that they weren’t slithering and sweating under dripping oilskins, getting their supplies wet. Even so, black clouds came tumbling in from the west and over the sun, and without warning it began to teem. The three of them huddled under a kingfern, while it thundered and struck lightning and the rain turned to big hailstones, and streams ran down the track. Then as suddenly as it had started it stopped, and all was quiet again except the dripping of the bush and the tuis starting up again, tolling across the gullies in the ranges, and other tuis taking up the call till the air was loud with their throatings and the memory of them. A fantail emerged and looped over the heads of the three who had stepped out again on to the track. Peter made a snatch at it as if to catch it. ‘Leave it,’ Joe said, puzzled that anyone should want to kill a fantail. ‘It’s mad,’ Peter said. ‘All things are mad— birds and animals.’
Farther on the track the two young men noticed that Peter was out of sight behind them. They stopped to wait for him. ‘I knew this’d happen,’ Arty said. ‘It’ll he like this all the bloody way. Waiting for him to catch up.’ After five minutes Peter ran into view, carrying the whitebait netting on its supplejack hoops, without the poles. ‘What did you do with the poles?’ Arty asked.
‘I left them. They were too heavy,’ Peter said. ‘We don’t need them. We can make new ones when we get there.’
The two men caught each other’s eyes and burst out laughing. ‘This little fellah’s a bit smarter than us,’ Joe said.
‘Well, by Christ, Taiha!’ Arty said, ‘The bloody experienced whitebaiter. And you didn’t even think of that! By God, you’ll never forget this.’ For the rest of the trip he would say things like, ‘Did you fill the water-bottle, Joe?’—‘Did you bring any firewood, Joe?’—‘What about that pot-plant for the front garden?’ But they treated Peter with a new admiration.
Red Flaherty laughed when he heard that one. After they had
climbed forty feet over muck and a big fallen kaamahi tree, where a
slip had blocked the track, the track came alongside the Moeraki
River, spuming fierce and grey over boulders. Where it was free of
boulders the water was bluish-grey and opaque from glacial flour.
A bridge crossed it and at the other side of the bridge was a blue-painted hut with a sign ‘Blue Hotel’, named after the river locally
known as the Blue. It was one of the several huts along the Haast
track, built for the roadmen who kept the track clear of slips and
tree-falls and the fast-growing vegetation, but more often used by
deer-stalkers, trampers, occasional cattle-drovers, and horsemen
going through to Central Otago. Red Flaherty, a deer-stalker, was
in permanent occupation of this one; there were three beds in it,
but the roadman used another hut next to it. It was wooden with a
roof of corrugated iron, and an iron chimney standing like a postman’s whistle at one end. Red was an Australian who had spent his
life avoiding cities; he had given up prospecting for gold farther
north and moved into the Blue hut to stalk deer, living on the sale
of skins and the bounty paid by the Government for the antlers of
the deer, first introduced to the country for sport and since become
a pest; they are the bark of trees and killed them, causing the soil to
loosen under dead trees, so that the heavy rainfall brought on land-slips, washed away the soil, and flooded the rivers. He lived on venison, potatoes and onions, bacon and damper, cocoa and tea; and,
except the venison, he had to pack them by horse, once a month,
from Bruce Bay, twenty miles north. The walls of the hut were
lined with pin-ups of seductive, disproportionately-legged women
Esquire, boxers and wrestlers from Truth and the Auckland Weekly News, and sentimental almanac pictures of kittens
with wool, puppies, and a magazine reproduction of Whistler’s
Mother. Red had just hooked up a damper to bake over the fire
when the three walked into the hut.
He was eager to have company; he and the roadman didn’t always see eye to eye, though they never quarrelled openly. He
wouldn’t let them eat their own supplies. Joe said they weren’t
staying for more than half an hour, they wanted to make the Iron
hut, eight miles farther on, the other side of the Maori Saddle. But
they stayed over an hour while Red eagerly peeled potatoes and
onions and sliced bacon for them. Joe left him a few kuumaras and
a muttonbird, of the two he had taken out of the fat and wrapped in
newspaper and stuffed into his pack. ‘You go down to the Paringa,’
he said. ‘The old crate isn’t locked. There’s more kuumara and
muttonbirds. You can have all that’s there.’ Red said he would go
down the next day; a change in tucker would be a bit of all-right.
Peter was silent and fascinated, watching them, glad to be in this
men’s world of the open-air and rough good-fellowship. He quietly
took over the job of frying the bacon, swearing when fat sputtered
on to him, and Joe said they would have to make him cook when
they got there.
‘Who’s the boy?’ Red asked.
‘He’s Arty’s young brother,’ Joe said casually.
‘Aren’t you at school?’
‘It’s the school holidays now,’ Joe said. ‘He’ll go back before school starts.’
They left after a big lazy meal, but Red was wondering. Last night he’d heard on the wireless a police announcement about a missing boy. He hadn’t listened to the description but he did remember the boy was from Coal Flat; they said they had come from there. But it would be a month before he went for stores to Bruce Bay, so Red didn’t think more about it. He didn’t say anything to the roadman when he came back that night; he didn’t want the roadman to be getting the credit for his own suspicions.
The Maori Saddle was three miles’ unbroken winding climb.
They reached the Iron hut before dark, and Peter chopped wood
for the fire, while Joe reheated the muttonbird and made some soup
to go with it. Next day they were at the Maori creek at midday, it
was an easy walk downhill. They had to ford the river; it was
swamp-fed and the water was the colour of beer; it was swift and
deceptively smooth on the surface. The stones on the bottom were
slippery, and they had to cross carefully. Arty, with the water up to
The but where they were to live was a couple of hundred yards down the other bank of the Maori, standing on grassed sand and silt with a few trees about. There was smooth grass for a hundred yards towards the sea beach, then it rose to a dune, and on the other side was coarse gravel with the Tasman pounding on it. Along the coast the bush wasn’t so thick; the tree-level tapered down to about twenty feet, and the foliage ended evenly as if it had been trimmed by the winds from the sea; it was close and unbroken, like a protective covering. The floor was swampy and there were no fresh creeks for the five miles between the Maori and the Haast; there was no heavy timber, only scrub of maanuka, maahoe, kaamahi, coprosma, ponga ferns and some small beeches. The first thing Peter did was to take the tomahawk and cut three kaamahi saplings and trim them as poles for the nets. Arty fixed the netting on them, and Joe rang on a wall-telephone installed in the hut to the farmer at the mouth of the Haast, who operated a rowing-boat as a ferry across the river. He walked the five miles along the grass behind the beach to the rough stones and driftwood in the bed of the Haast. The farmer had already rowed across with the cans which had been flown from the canning factory in Dunedin to the airfield at Okuru, some miles farther south; Arty had written away and arranged this months ago, Any of the public works drivers on the road-building scheme on the other side of the river would take the full cans to Okuru. ‘How you gonna carry those tins up here every day?’ the farmer asked. ‘They’ll he damn heavy when they’re full.’
Joe shrugged. He hadn’t thought about that.
‘You young fullahs, you’re all the same today,’ the farmer said. He was a thin tall bent-shouldered old man with a long wispy moustache. ‘You never give thought to anything, always leap before you look.’
‘We’ll manage, I s’pose,’ Joe said.
‘Tell you what,’ the farmer said, ‘I’ve got an old milkcart over there. You have to push it by hand. Just a flat top with four sides on bike wheels. It won’t be so bad to push along the grass. You can have it for a couple of quid. If it’s still in running order when you leave I’ll give you a quid back for it.’
Joe crossed with him, thanked him and paid up. All the same,
The whitebait is a delicacy, eaten fresh or from a can. It is the young of a minnow, that lives in the upper reaches of rivers; the young is like a tiny white eel, almost transparent, almost boneless, two or three inches long. Every autumn the adult fish swim down to the tidal river-mouths to lay their eggs and extrude their milt in the swampy margins during a spring-tide. The eggs are left high and dry and hatch with the next spring-tide. The young swim to sea, but in the spring they return to head upriver in shoals. The West Coast rivers used to be full of them; but in the north the breeding-grounds have been trampled by cattle, and one of the rivers poisoned with cyanide from a gold mine, and only in South Westland were they now as plentiful as they had been in all rivers.
Joe and Arty had no competition on the Maori, and their traps were regularly full; and besides the traps, they used the nets; each dip of the net caught fifty or more. It was patient, satisfying work, standing alone in gumboots in the water, dipping the net, letting it lie, dragging downstream, lifting it out and back, dipping again, occasionally emptying the net; a slow, satisfying rhythm. Arty found it fine to work out of doors after three years in the mine. Peter found it tiring, but persisted, hoping to beat the men’s catches. When it rained, they would work in oilskins and sou’westers, getting an odd satisfaction from standing in heavy downpours—the rain wasn’t cold. It was good to know that they could knock off whenever they liked, or lie in their bunks on a wet morning if they wanted to.
Of an evening when the sky over the sea was gold with one of
those brilliant West Coast sunsets, so soft and gold that you could
stare right into the sun without dazzling, before it sank so quickly
Peter found it an ideal life, living primitively in a but in the wilds away from towns, away from women, with two easy-going young men who would let him swear and smoke, who would recognize his skill in chopping driftwood, making fires, cooking, climbing trees, and keeping the hut clean. No one told anybody to do anything, sweep the floor, put on a stew, catch a fish or an eel for dinner. Somebody did it, and for their time the system worked well. The experience was like Peter’s dream of his hut in the bush, away from the world, only there was no Alsatian, no man-traps, and he wasn’t alone.
The only trouble was their position. ‘Why didn’t we camp at the Paringa?’ Arty said, ‘We could have got the transport van to take the bait up to the Fox, then by service bus to Hokitika. Or on the other side of the Haast? There are roads there. We’d be near the airfield.’
‘The Paringa would have been all right,’ Joe said. ‘Other side of the Haast, there are too many other people at it. Some of the public works’ chaps working on the Haast Pass road, they knock off for a month or two like we did. We don’t want to have any rows with them about who’s got the right to some stand on the river.’
Their catches were limited by the number of cans they could carry on the handcart. They could have caught more, but there was no point in it. They were sick of eating it themselves, and preferred to catch fish and eels from the river for their own meals, or a pigeon from the bush. Joe knew how to cook them.
At one stage Arty was for moving to the Paringa. But Joe pointed out that Peter was happy there. ‘There’s no one to bother us here,’ he said. ‘Up there, sooner or later, people will be asking, “Who’s this kid? Why isn’t he at school?”’ Between them they developed a fatherly concern for the boy; Peter couldn’t understand why they would not let him take the cart to the Haast, as he wanted to. One day, after they had been there a month, he trailed Joe, skirting through the tall scrub at the edge of the grass and came out at him on the gravel by the ferry-point when Joe was handing the cans to the farmer. He was disappointed to see that Joe’s pleasure was dubious.
‘Who’s the boy?’ the farmer asked. ‘Where do you come from, son? What’s your name?’
‘Oh, he’s Peter Nicholson, Arty’s little brother,’ Joe said.
‘He’s not the kid that’s missing, is he? The one that the wireless was on about all the time three or four weeks back?’
‘Some kid missing, eh?’ Joe said.
‘Yeah, from up Coal Flat. Burned the house down and ran away. Don’ know whether they found him or not. Haven’t heard any more about it. They reckoned he must have fallen into the Grey River an’ got drowned. It’s not you, is it?’ he said with playful fierceness, lunging at Peter. Peter ran into the scrub, and came back cautiously.
‘I know that kid,’ he said. ‘I seen him playing by the river. I bet he fell in.’
‘What was his name?’ the farmer asked.
‘Peter Herlihy. He was mad. So was his old woman too.’
The farmer’s face went suddenly unexpressive, and he pushed off on his oars with a casual, ‘Hooray!’ He was wondering how Peter knew the name of the missing boy.
A week later the wall-phone in the hut rang; someone at the other end of the line was endlessly turning the handle. Arty answered it, mystified that anyone should call them up. It was the farmer from the Haast. ‘The police have been asking me about that bay you’ve got there,’ he said. ‘What’s his name?’
‘Peter Herlihy,’ Arty said.
‘I thought it was. Well, he’s got to go back home. The policeman will be coming for him tomorrow. Don’t let him get away.’
Arty grunted and hung up the receiver. Peter came in with a full can of whitebait he had caught in a few hours. Arty didn’t say anything but went up the track to meet Joe coming back with the handcart.
‘I didn’t think it could last this long,’ Joe said. ‘He won’t want to go.’
‘I reckon we ought to clear out with him, back the way we came.’
‘That’s no good. They’d catch us. That’d look as if we were running away.’
‘I’m not going to let him go back by himself. It’s a bugger having to go now. There’s still a couple of weeks’ run left for the bait.’
‘We’ll go back with him,’ Joe said. ‘We’ll be all packed up when the cop comes. It doesn’t matter about the bait. We made a few quid already. We’ll fill these cans and take them back tomorrow and give old Tom his cart back.’
‘But the cop’ll be coming that way.’
‘You mean Peter’s going to fly back?’
‘He’ll come back with us,’ Arty said.
Next day they packed and waited, once Joe had taken the cans and cart for the last time to the farmer. They had told Peter they were going back. He wasn’t eager but he was prepared to go anywhere with them. He was much calmer now and happier-looking than when they had met him; he was still impulsive, rough, occasionally spiteful when something he was handling wouldn’t go the way he wanted it, but his eyes were franker and healthier than they had ever been.
They were sitting waiting when Peter saw two men walking along the grass behind the beach. He jumped up excitedly and stared with his hand over his eyes. ‘I was scared one of them was a cop,’ he said, ‘’cause he’s got blue trousers. But you don’t have cops down here.’ The men wore trilby hats softened and shabby from many showers, sports jackets, and one of them wore his policeman’s trousers.
‘Sergeant Dickson from Hokirika, Constable Davies from Whataroa,’ he said. ‘I’ve got a warrant to take back this boy. Is his name Herlihy?’
‘It is the cops!’ Peter yelled and scuttled along the bank upstream.
‘Don’t let them get me, Arty!’
The constable ran heavily after him, but lost ground and came back looking sheepish. ‘Don’t let him get away,’ the sergeant flustered.
‘He’ll come back,’ Joe said. ‘Look, Sergeant, this boy’ll come back all right if he comes with us. But if you try to take him you’d have to put the handcuffs on him. I don’t envy you trying to carry him five miles along this beach. You haven’t even got a handcart to put him on.’
‘What was he doing down here with you all the time?’ the sergeant asked.
Arty and Joe explained how they had met him.
‘Didn’t you know we were looking for him? Didn’t you hear the wireless? Every policeman in the country has been looking for him.’
Joe widened his eyes to feign surprise. ‘We didn’t know,’ he said. ‘We haven’t got any wireless. There’s a telephone there. Old Tom could ha’ told us. He didn’t say anything about it.’
‘How did you find out he was here?’ Arty asked.
‘We had a couple of reports. Old Tom, and Red Flaherty from the Blue told the storekeeper at Bruce Bay. This kid’s a menace. He burnt his house down. He’s got to go before the Children’s Court.’
‘No kid’s a menace,’ Joe said. ‘You jus’ got to handle them the right way.’
‘Don’t make any mistake about this one.’
‘You ask Arty then. Arty—have we had any trouble with him?’
‘He’s been a bloody good kid, I don’t care what you say,’ Arty said. ‘Listen, Sergeant. He’ll come back with us. Give us a couple of days and we’ll land back at Coal Flat with him and hand him over to old Rae.’
The constable wasn’t used to much trouble in his district. He was so pally with his neighbours that it hurt him when now and again he had to act against them, even when he made a routine raid of the pub after hours. The sergeant, too, prided himself on knowing how to handle a situation tactfully. He would have liked to take their assurance that they would get Peter back home within a few days. But there had been so much publicity that he was afraid of a blister if anything went wrong.
‘It’s no good,’ he said. ‘It’s not allowed.’ After a good deal of argument they hit on a compromise. Arty would go with the sergeant and Peter and fly out. The constable would tramp with Joe to Paringa and ride back to Whataroa.
Joe went upstream and whistled for Peter who peered stealthily out of a maanuka clump. ‘Arty’ll go with you,’ Joe said. But Peter was doubtful and kept his distance from the policeman. Joe and Arty between them talked him round.
They saw Joe and the constable across the Maori, and they set off down the long strand of grass, Peter slipping back into his old familiar sullenness. He was like a soldier returning from leave to a camp he hates.
When Flora finally got back from the hospital at Greymouth it was after midnight. Rogers had come to, when she
returned with the doctor from the fire at Nora Herlihy’s,; he was
groggy and couldn’t move his left leg. The doctor said it was broken.
He rang Greymouth for an ambulance, but rather than wait for
another half hour, he persuaded Rogers to be carried to his car,
where he was propped in the back seat with cushions; and, Flora in
the front seat with him, the doctor drove slowly to Greymouth.
Rogers was strained, pale and in pain when Flora left him, pressing his hand and saying, ‘I’ll come a lot, Paul.’ Flora herself was strained and worn when the doctor let her out of the car at Coal Flat. ‘Where are you staying tonight?’ he said.
‘I’m going to Mum’s.’
‘Don’t overdo it,’ he said. ‘They’ve all had a hard time. Don’t get carried away.’
Mrs Palmer was lying back in an arm-chair with an empty whisky glass by her, and Doris sitting, behind her leaning over to stroke her brow; Dad stared disconsolately ahead of him. ‘Ah, you’re good,’ Mrs Palmer said. ‘You all come back when we’re in trouble. The past doesn’t matter now, Flora. Oh, Flora, how did it happen? Why isn’t Don home yet?’
‘Don’s gone away, Mum. Paul told me. He said he’s gone for good. He didn’t know where.’
Mrs Palmer’s face took on a defeated faraway look as if the inevitable she had always feared had come at last. Without a word she went up to bed.
The next day they reopened the bar. Dad and Flora served. Mum never appeared. Their old customers came drifting back.
Doris came frequently to see them. Mum picked up surprisingly
quickly. Most of the old spark had gone our of her but she wasn’t
nearly so miserable and bickering as she had been during the boycott. She had come to terms with some part of herself and she was
Because of this Flora found it easier to consider not leaving her, though Mrs Palmer’s need for attention was not so great as it would have been had she been difficult to live with.
One night her mother said in that more distant way of speaking she had developed since Don walked out, ‘Flor, when we get away up to Nelson, we won’t have the memories of this old place. Why don’t you and Paul live with us up there? We’d make a happy family. It’d be nice to have you both around.’
Flora, on one of her twice-weekly visits to Rogers, asked him
about it. Rogers was on the glassed-in veranda of the ward, which
meant he needed less attention. She had been telling him about
Jimmy Cairns taking offence at the Truth poster outside Sid
Raynes’s and tearing it up. It read WEST COAST TEACHER ON SEX
CHARGE.
She told him too that Dad had put up the pub for sale, but no one was keen to buy it so soon after the boycott. ‘Dad was hoping a small man would make an offer. But so far there’s only one from the brewery. And they haven’t offered as much as Dad wants. Oh, he said the Miners’ Union were after it, for a Working Men’s Club; they’d have to raise a loan to buy it, and anyway Dad wouldn’t sell it to them. He reckons he ought to stay and build up trade again before he sells. But Mum’s keen to get away.’
She told him that the Miners’ Union had sent off a letter to the Education Board expressing its confidence in him. ‘Dr Alexander tried to get a motion of confidence through the school committee too. He said it only lost by one vote. It was the new headmaster. Paul, do you think you’ll get your job back?’
Rogers thought before answering. ‘It was the new headmaster and
half the committee as well,’ he said. ‘They were shocked at my
methods. Why can’t people face the truth? What they know is true,
what they base their lives on, talk about or think about and forget
about every day of their lives. And they won’t let you tell it to a boy
who’s got wrong ideas about it. I thought the committee would
support me. The Education Board won’t take much notice of the
Miners’ Union. It looks as if I’ll have to start thinking about
another job.’
Flora hesitated. ‘They reckon if your leg doesn’t mend, Paul—it’s funny how Mum takes it for granted your leg won’t heal properly—she reckons we could go and live with them. You wouldn’t have to work much…?
‘Flora, this leg is going to get better. I know it!’ Rogers said grinning.
‘What if you can’t work, Paul? You mightn’t get your job back.’
‘I’ll get work. This leg will be as good as before…. It’s peaceful here you know.’ He looked out towards the beach and a lowering sky. ‘Seeing the weather outside makes you glad to be indoors and not have to go to work.’
‘What sort of work would you do, Paul?’
‘I haven’t thought yet…. I don’t know that I’d want to go back to Coal Flat, Flora, we’ll go away somewhere. Christchurch perhaps, even Auckland. No, nor Auckland. Dunedin—Dunedin’s far enough away.’
‘Why don’t you want to come to Nelson? There’s no harm. Mum and Dad aren’t against us getting married now. Mum says we’d be welcome, we wouldn’t have to pay any board. You wouldn’t have any heavy work. Dad says you could help with the bar, look after the books, take the bets.’
‘I thought we’d settled all that long ago.’
‘I haven’t asked you before.’
‘We’re not living with your parents.’
‘Why?’
Flora starred when Rogers replied so fiercely, ‘Flora, can’t you see where you’re leading me? Back where we started. Right under old Mum’s thumb. A fine bloody ending for a man! Do you want me a kept hireling, incapacitated for preference, hobbling about on a gammy leg, pitting my brains to calculating the divis for your old man’s bookmaking?’
‘Oh, you’re exaggerating,’ she said.
‘Didn’t I warn you?’ he asked. ‘I told you what to expect if you
married me. If we did what your mother wants I’d be half-dead in
a year, in the soul, in the mind and heart. There’d be no one to
meet except customers laying their bets, there’d be no talk, no ideas
but football and races and the local gossip. I want to stay awake in
this life, Flora. So must you, I want to do something, not snore off
in the handiest comfortable corner. It’d be a pretty awful existence
for both of us, vegetating together, waiting to step into their money
when they died, watching each other get fat and complacent and
ugly. If I was an invalid, as you all seem so sure I’m going to be,
I’d feel imprisoned, I’d end up by hating you all.’
‘Now, Paul, there’s no need to make a scene about it. This is important for both of us. Let’s talk it out sensibly.’
‘I’m sorry, Flora.’
‘Paul, the past is over. There’s no need for any bad feeling now…. Mum needs me, Paul. She could have managed before and I’d have made no bones about leaving her. But she’s not well, Paul, and you know she’s had a hard time.’
‘I know she has. But she’s got your father.’
‘She wants one of us to be around. And I’m the only one left. We could go to Nelson. It wouldn’t be as hard as you think.’
‘We’re not going, Flora.’
‘I can’t let Mum go up there when I know she needs someone with her. I’m only being loyal, Paul.’
‘I know.’
‘We wouldn’t need to live with them even.’
‘No, Flora; no.’
‘Well, let’s think again. We’ve got to work this out somehow. What if they were to stay in Coal Flat? It wouldn’t be hard to persuade them. Then there’d be Doris there too. And we could be there: we could get a house and just go and see them now and again.’
‘No, Flora. I don’t want to go back to the Flat unless I teach. It’d be like defeat. I’d feel out of place.’
‘You always liked the Flat though.’
‘I did. And I felt at home in it…. What would I do? There’s only the mine or the dredge. Unless you want me working in a shop…. Grocer’s assistant.’
‘I can remember the time, Paul, when I would have turned up my nose at those for jobs, and you would have called me a snob. What’s wrong with the mine? As long as you get well again, you could do it. You’d be with your friends. Most of the people think the same way as you about politics. I’d have Doris and Mum and Dad. You’d have your friends. We’d have each other.’
‘Maybe I am more of a snob than I knew, Flora… I’ll have to think it over. I can’t answer now. I just know the idea of going back doesn’t appeal to me…. We’ll go together, wherever it is.’
‘I’ve been taking that for granted.’
‘We’ll talk about it next time you come…. Is there any news of Peter?’
She shook her head.
‘Poor kid. He must have gone into the river. Oh, Flora, I’ll always feel to blame for it.’
‘Don’t be silly, Paul, you’re not to blame. It’s just the way things happened.’
‘If I believed in Peter’s religion I’d pray for him. It’s rotten to know there’s nothing more you can do for him.’
‘You did enough and it didn’t work out the way you thought it would.’
‘No. As I said, I’m to blame.’
‘Stop thinking about it.’
He would have to go away, he thought when she was gone. Even if the board did reinstate him, there would be too many memories of failure. What had he done in his seven months at the Flat? Failed with Peter. Got involved in a boycott and a strike without making any difference to the outcome. Lost friends. Got himself smeared. They wouldn’t want to trust him with their children again. How could he fight his reputation for hesitance and unorthodoxy? He was a failure—another Mike Herlihy. At least he had gained Flora. But they would have to go away together somewhere, somewhere away from Mum.
Rogers spent much of his time, when he wasn’t charting to his
ward-mates, looking through the windows of the veranda at a view
that was full of memories of his boyhood. South past the abattoirs
was the corrugated-iron structure of the stone-crusher on the beach.
From the abattoirs came the lowing of doomed cattle, the bleating
of sheep and the squeals of pigs coming to the electric charge.
Across from the yard of the abattoirs was a small green airfield built
on a filled-in lagoon—one of the two lagoons fed by a creek that was
lazy when it wasn’t in flood and lying behind a spit of sand running
to the mouth of the Grey River; when he was a boy the hospital
sewers drained into the lagoon, they weren’t allowed to play there,
and its shores at low tide were slimy and littered with rusty tins and
scraps of paper; people dumped rubbish on it and drowned cats in
sugar-bags, with butter on their feet. There had been lupins and
gorse all round; as boys they had known all the tracks through them
and played hide-and-seek; lovers used to go there at night. As boys
they helped the man over the road who came down every evening
for a week piling the back of his truck with lupins to manure his
garden. Now the airfield was green, small and tidy, and the lupins
grew only along the beach, behind the ridge of stones washed up by
the Tasman strewn with flood-carried trees and driftwood. Straight
opposite was the thing they had called the h, the remains of the
frame of the rudder of an old wreck, a cargo ship called the that had run on the bar at the mouth of the Grey years ago; the
This day was clear. There was frost on the grass in the morning, and a ‘barber’—the keen wind and night mist blowing down from the Grey Valley—was pushing across Blaketown and Cobden and disappearing over the sea. There was a general easterly breeze; outside it would be cold but bracing and Rogers was impatient to be able to walk along the beach in the spray of the sea that was always pounding rhythmically at the back of the thoughts of everyone in the hospital, to fondle the buds of gorse and lupins just yellowing, a week or two off blazing open, to feel the sharp prick of new gorse.
Idly he watched a small two-winged Tiger Moth fly in and land on the airfield. Two men and a boy got out, the collars of their jackets up. They began to dance on the spot and slap their arms around their shoulders as if they were cold. Then an indefinable movement of the boy made him sit up in his bed. That was Peter Herlihy, and the men—one was a stranger, the other looked like Arty Nicholson. Rogers watched with excitement. They were talking, now they were arguing. Arty said something to Peter, as if challenging him to a race, and they ran to the hangar, the other man following. The plane taxied and took off again, heading south. A few minutes later a taxi drove along the beach road, a policeman in the front seat with the driver; the two men and Peter got in the back.
As the taxi returned, passing below within a hundred and fifty yards of Rogers, he saw Peter’s face, well-cared for, but with a troubled expression on it. He stared out of the window and worried impotently.
Peter looking out of the car saw Rogers’s face at the hospital
window, stared intently, then looked away blushing. He wanted to
The taxi stopped outside the police station, an old wooden building with almost all the paint flaked off: a new station was on the draught-board. At the back was a small wooden gaol with a barred window. The two policemen got out; the sergeant told Arty to stay there with Peter, then the local man came back.
‘You’re getting a free ride,’ he said to Arty. ‘We’re going to Nelson Creek.’
‘What are we going there for?’ Peter asked.
The policeman addressed his reply to Arty: ‘His old man lives there now. In one of those mill huts.’
‘I’m not going back!’ Peter said sullenly. ‘My old woman’ll half-kill me.’
‘Your mother doesn’t live there any more,’ the policeman said harshly. ‘Most boys’d be glad to get home to Mum.’
Peter’s eyes brightened. ‘Where is she? Has she gone away?’
‘She’s cleared out and left you, if you want to know. An’ I don’t blame her either if that’s all the respect she gets from you.’
‘Who’s there then?’
‘Your old man, that’s all.’
‘I’m not going to that convent.’
The policeman shrugged.
The taxi drove up the Grey Valley. They picked up Constable Rae at Ngahere, and then turned up a siding that led up, through bush and paddocks full of bracken and blackberry and blackened stumps in swampy ground, towards low hills covered with tall timber. They came to the straggling saw-milling settlement and stopped two or three times asking where Mike Herlihy lived. There were only a few women about; and every time they asked one of them, she would give long-winded directions, then stare at Peter and the others in the car and call to the nearest neighbour that the boy of Herlihy had been found.
The hut was very like the one they had left at the mouth of the
Maori; iron-roofed, with one room, a corrugated-iron chimney at
one end. Some slabs had been nailed on struts over the doorway to
make a porch and bits of slab, from which the bark had been removed, had been sawn and split to make a trellis on either side, and
a briar rose had been trained against one of them. The small plot by
the front wall was full of weeds, but some nasturtiums and
‘Oh, you’re back, are you?’ he grunted to Peter. ‘Where the hell ‘a’ ya been?’
Peter hung his head sulkily. Mike didn’t like to have his authority made a fool of in front of these strangers. ‘Come on, now, answer me!’ he said and clouted him lightly on the head. Peter ran to Arty and hid by his side.
‘Who’s this you’re knocking round with now?’ Mike said. ‘Bloody young Nicholson. He won’t do you any damn good. Now tell me, what did you run away for?’
‘You know why,’ Peter said.
‘Why did you burn the bloody place down?’
‘Mum gave me a hiding. You never stopped her.’
‘Well, you deserved a bloody hiding that night, after all that fuss and shenanikins over that schoolteacher. You’re not the only kid that gets a hiding. Other kids don’t burn the house down. Where ‘a’ ya been all this time?’
‘Down South Westland with this young fullah and his mate,’ the constable said.
‘We went down whitebaiting,’ Arty said.
‘What do you mean taking my kid away like that?’ Mike asked. ‘I’ve a good mind to put you up for it.’
‘We weren’t gonna come all the way back just for him,’ Arty said. ‘We didn’t find him till we got there.’ Peter listening felt that Arty had deserted him already.
‘Oh, you hid away in their car, did you?’ Mike said, and then to Arty, ‘You could ‘a’ let someone know.’
‘He was happy with us,’ Arty said. ‘We didn’t know he was being looked for. If you’d looked after him properly in the first place he wouldn’t ha’ run away from home.’
‘You keep your sticky bloody beak in your own affairs,’ Mike said. ‘Well, what are you all waiting round here for? He’s home, isn’t he? You’ve delivered him safe and sound. Do you want me to sign for him, or what?’
‘You’ll have to be with him at the Court House tomorrow morning at half-past ten,’ the constable said. ‘Don’t forget. You’ll be responsible that he doesn’t get away. He’s lucky we didn’t take him into custody.’
Mike nodded reluctantly. Constable Rae said, ‘Come on, driver, you can take us back to the Flat.’
‘There’ll be a pretty stiff bill for this outing,’ the driver said.
‘Ah, well, it’s Government money,’ the constable said.
‘See what you’ve cost the country, son,’ the driver said. ‘I don’t know why the local station doesn’t get a couple of cars of their own. All the cities have got them. Now, what if you had a troublesome customer, made a mess of my car? You’d have to pay damages.’
‘Don’t go, Arty!’ Peter said, dragging at Arty getting into the back seat. ‘You said you wouldn’t let them take me back. They’ll send me to the convent.’
‘I’ve got to,’ Arty said, ‘I’m not your father, Peter; I can’t take you from him.’
‘Let me come with you. I don’t want to stay here,’ Peter said.
‘Your mother’s not here to growl at you.’ Mike said, ‘Don’t be so bloody soft.’
‘I don’t want you either. You didn’t stop her hitting me.’ Arty got into the car and slammed the door.
‘I knew you’d be like all the men,’ Peter called at him. ‘They all let you down. Mr Rogers didn’t stick up for me, Dad let Mum give me a hiding, you’re just as bad. You’re all bloody frauds!’ he shouted, with tears streaming, at Arty who stared back, almost pleading with Peter to stop, angry and embarrassed.
‘You wonder what kids are coming to nowadays,’ the driver said glibly.
Mike went inside sulkily and sulkily Peter followed him. The hut was tidier than the one at the Maori yet Peter refused to accept it. Mike put some logs on the fire and removed some woollen underwear hung to dry in front of it. He peeled some potatoes and chipped them. ‘Sausages and chips,’ he said. ‘You like them, don’t you? You can cook them, can’t you?’ But Peter did not budge from the corner by the fire where he brooded. ‘You don’t seem to think I might ha’ been worrying about you all this time,’ Mike said. ‘You don’t care much about your father’s feelings.’
‘You went off and got drunk,’ Peter said. ‘You didn’t stop Mum laying into me.’
‘And you burnt the bloody house down,’ Mike said angrily. ‘You can’t put that back now. Houses don’t grow on bloody trees, you know. They cost money. I haven’t got the money to build another. I won’t get much out of the insurance.’
‘You spend it on beer,’ Peter said.
‘It’s not your place to start lecturing me,’ Mike said. ‘At least I
don’t burn houses down. You ought to be thankful I’m not giving
you a hiding for that.’
‘You gave me one anyway. That day I said it wasn’t true about Mr Rogers.’
Mike snarled.
‘I’m not going back to the convent,’ Peter said.
‘We’ll see about that,’ Mike said. ‘It’ll all be settled in court tomorrow.’
Over their meal he tried to make contact with this son who had got lost to him over the years. ‘I’m not going to live like this all the time. Oh, no. Living off the frying-pan isn’t good for the guts. I’m going fishing tomorrow. I’ve got some gelly there.’ He looked at Peter and thought he had better hide the gelignite out of his reach. ‘It the court’ll let you stay here, you can come fishing with me. This’ll be a man’s household. No nagging women around. Nora’s cleared off to her brother and you’ll never see her again.’ But Peter sulked till he went to bed.
In the morning Mike dressed up again in his blue serge suit, a clean shirt studded at the neck without a collar and polished his new boots. ‘I bought you a clean jersey,’ he said. ‘Your pants are a bit worn. They’ll have to do. And your sandals are nearly worn out.’ Peter kept wriggling where the coarse wool of the new jersey irritated his neck. They got a lift on a timber lorry to Ngahere and caught the bus from Coal Flat into town.
The Children’s Court met in a small room off the Magistrate’s
Court. There were no reporters, and there were only Peter and
Mike, the magistrate, and a woman from the Child Welfare Branch
of the Education Department. The magistrate was in his fifties,
grey-headed, with spectacles. In court he dealt with cases according
to the strict letter of the law, never allowing himself any comment
outside his interpretation of the law; he believed in moderate sentences for a first offence, and maximum sentences for second or
later offences. Privately he deplored the light sentences passed by
the judge at the last sessions of the Supreme Court, since he believed that the only deterrent was severity. When he dealt with
juvenile cases, however, he tried to relax and frequently found himself unable to cope with the complexity of children’s delinquencies
until he had reinterpreted them into terms of responsibility and
appropriate measures to prevent any recurrence of the offence. In
this court guilt and punishment did not concern him; but neither
was he concerned with the happiness of the child, only that he
should be prevented from offending again. He could not see why
the Child Welfare Act allowed him such wide discretionary powers;
he would have been quite satisfied, when he doubted if a boy’s
parents were capable of adequately supervising him, to commit him
to a boys’ home for several years. In this way the State would relieve the parents of their responsibilities; far from being
The woman who sat beside him across the table was a spinster of forty-five, an austere-faced woman, who wore a plain felt hat and a tightly fitting costume of austere, masculine tailoring; in another society she might have found her work as a policewoman, or an officer in a women’s military unit. Her bearing was that of one dedicated to inspection. When she visited the homes on her list, she made a conscientious tour of the house, looked under the bed for fluff, unobtrusively ran her fingers on furniture for dust, noted unwashed dishes, peeped into the lavatory, and later checked up with teachers on the children’s attendance. The mothers on her list disliked her visits, they fumed or quailed at her discreet questions, but they had to humour her for fear that she might recommend that the children should be taken away from them. Actually, though she consciously hinted at this threat, she seldom used it, because she liked to increase her empire. She liked her work; her main regret was that when she was younger, she hadn’t passed her nursing exams; she might have been a matron in a hospital now, and it would have satisfied her more to have adults in her charge. She wasn’t an obviously bossy type of woman. She certainly was scornful of the ‘goosey’ members of her profession as she called them, those other child welfare officers, who were too tactful, too sympathetic; after all, they had a responsibility to the children to keep the parents up to the mark, and a responsibility to keep the children up to the mark too. But she exercised tact and discretion, she was always deliberately patient, and she brought a professional, if superior, smile to her visits. She seldom spoke about her work but she gave her friends the impression that if she were to talk, what tales she could tell about the way the other half lived.
Though the magistrate set out to make the court as informal as he could, Peter sat staring distrustfully across the table. The woman especially he distrusted; he had already dismissed the magistrate as comparatively harmless, Mike sat uneasily, not knowing whether he could put his elbows on the table or lean back with his hands in his pockets. The magistrate began by reading through some papers. Finally he took off his pince-nez and replaced his spectacles. He pursed his lips and leaned across the table.
‘Your name is Peter Herlihy?’
‘Yes.’
The woman glanced as if to reprove him for lack of manners, but it wasn’t her place to intervene unless called on.
‘I’ve been hearing some terrible things about you. Is it true that you set fire to your parents’ house at Coal Flat?’ Peter didn’t answer. ‘Answer me, now. You won’t get anywhere by being sulky. We’re here to help you, you know. Is it true?’
‘Yes.’
‘That’s a terrible thing to admit. Why did you do it?’
‘Because.’
‘You’ll have to give me a better reason than that. What happened before you set fire to the house.’
‘Mum gave me a hiding.’
‘Is that why you burnt the house?’
Peter nodded.
‘Well, we’ve at least established the motive,’ the magistrate said aside to the child welfare officer. ‘Why did your mother give you the hiding?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Perhaps I can tell you,’ Mike said, sitting upright. ‘The wife was annoyed with him because of a case we’d brought against the boy’s teacher and the boy said in court it wasn’t true. The wife was annoyed because he’d made us look fools.’
‘Was it true, what they said about your teacher?’ the magistrate asked Peter.
‘No.’
‘Then why did you make those things up?’
‘I on’y made some of it up. Dad told the cop. I didn’t tell him. I told Dad it wasn’t true an’ he gave me a hiding.’
‘We weren’t sure,’ Mike said. ‘We thought it best to get the whole thing brought out in court.’
‘Quite properly, too,’ the magistrate said. ‘I read the proceedings of that court…. However, that doesn’t concern us. You say your mother gave you a hiding? Did she often do that?’
‘Sometimes.’
‘Well, other boys are punished by their parents. Why did you take it so hardly?’
‘He wouldn’t stop her,’ Peter said, looking at his father. ‘He didn’t care. He went out an’ got drunk.’
‘I’d had a worrying day,’ Mike said. ‘The wife was nagging. I went out for some fresh air.’
‘You drink a lot?’
‘Well, I like my pint, that’s as far as it goes.’
‘How much would you say you consumed in an evening?’
‘Well,’ Mike said slyly, ‘the pubs are closed in the evenings.’
‘Come, come,’ the magistrate said. ‘This isn’t going to go any further.’
‘Well, it depends. About half a dozen pints, on an average. Sometimes less.’
‘I see. Would you say it was too much?’
‘No, sir.’
‘Can you afford it?’
‘Well, I’ve managed up to now, sir. The wife used to complain about it, like.’
‘Your wife is no longer living with you?’
‘No, sir.’
‘You and she didn’t get along very well?’
‘No, sir.’
‘What about you? Did you like your mother?’
‘No,’ Peter said.
‘Why?’
Peter didn’t answer.
‘She was always growling at him,’ Mike said.
‘Do you want to live with your mother?’
‘No,’ Peter said.
‘When you ran away from home, who were you running away from?’
‘I thought I’d get into trouble.’
‘Naturally enough. Would you like to live with your father?’
Peter stared in sulky indecision. The longer he delayed his reply the more miserable Mike felt. Then Peter said, ‘I want to live with Arty and Joe.’
‘Who are Arty and Joe?’
‘There was two young fullahs going whitebaiting down near the Haast,’ Mike said. ‘The boy hid in their car and they looked after him.’
‘Come, come,’ the magistrate said. ‘You can’t live with two young men. I presume they’ll be getting married sooner or later and they wouldn’t want a boy of your age around. You know that there’s a recommendation from a Judge of the Supreme Court that you should go to a convent. I don’t yet see any reason to override that. I was thinking of holidays. Who would you like to look after you in the holidays?’
Peter didn’t answer.
‘Do you think your wife will come back?’
‘No,’ Mike said. ‘We didn’t hit it off together.’
‘Do you think she contemplates divorce action? Do you contemplate such action?’
‘I’m a Catholic, sir.’
Peter said, ‘I’m not going to that convent.’
The child welfare officer looked at him as if to say, just give her a
free hand and she would deal with this boy.
‘I repeat that you won’t get far by being nasty,’ the magistrate said. ‘Have you been to this convent before?’
‘Yes.’
‘He was there last year,’ his father said.
‘Why didn’t you like it?’
‘The nuns used to hit me and lock me up. They’re mad nuns.’
‘Well, it strikes me that you could do with some judicious punishment, my boy, and being locked up in a room never hurt anyone. I’m sure the nuns didn’t administer punishment without good reason. Nobody does. I hope you’ll come to understand that. We adults are here to help you, and if we punish a boy it’s to make you a better man. Do you understand?’
If Peter did, he didn’t show it.
The magistrate turned from them to the child welfare officer. ‘Miss Cole,’ he said in a low voice. ‘There are really only two alternatives, as I see it. Either the convent, or send him home to his father under your supervision. Could you undertake to do that?’
‘I’m quite sure I could manage him,’ she said.
‘Well,’ the magistrate said turning to Mike. ‘Could you manage to look after him?’
‘I could try,’ Mike said. ‘As long as he doesn’t burn the place down on me again.’
‘You would have to keep matches away from him. Would you undertake not to get up to any nonsense like that again? If I let you go home to your father, will you promise me not to burn the house?’
Peter looked at him with scorn.
‘I keep gelignite there,’ Mike said inadvertently. ‘For blasting stumps,’ he added hastily.
‘You mustn’t keep any there then. Miss Cole will keep a lookout for that.’
Mike leaned forward. ‘That doesn’t mean I’m on your inspection list?’ he asked.
‘The boy will be under Miss Cole’s supervision. She will have to report periodically. If the Child Welfare Branch is not satisfied that you are providing him with adequate care and protection, it will have the power to recommend his removal to an institution and a court may direct that this should be done.’
‘I’m not having any women coming poking their noses into my
hut,’ Mike said. ‘I had one nagging over me long enough. At least
‘I was under the impression that you wanted the boy home,’ the magistrate said. ‘In that case, I have no alternative but to give effect to His Honour’s recommendation that the boy should go to the convent.’ He rose and bent patronizingly over Peter. ‘You may not like it now, my boy. But when you’re a man you’ll thank me for this.’
‘I’m not going there,’ Peter said. ‘I’m not!’
When his father tried to lead him out he kicked and struggled so much that they had to call a policeman who locked him in a room till he cooled off; and when his father finally persuaded him to come back with him, he did not speak to him all the way home.
Rogers saw Father Flaherty talking to another patient on the veranda of his ward: he was evidently visiting parishioners in hospital. When he had finished with this patient he came over to Rogers.
‘G’day, crock,’ he said. ‘Isn’t it time you were up on your feet again?’
‘So you did put my weights up after all,’ Rogers said.
The priest’s smile went out. ‘I only told Mike Cassidy. After all he was your lawyer. I didn’t tell the other side.’
‘Why did you do that?’
‘I thought Mike should know.’
‘Well, it had the effect of making him want to drop the case.’
‘Well, I wasn’t to know he’d do that. I didn’t put him up to it. Anyway you got off without his help.’
‘I had nothing to hide.’
‘Well, what’s the argument about?… You might be a little more cheerful when a visitor comes to see you.’
‘Forget it…. Listen, Father, can’t you stop Peter going to that convent?’
‘He’s already there.’
‘Can’t you get him out of it then?’
‘Why should I?’
‘It just about ruined him last time he was there.’
‘Good God, who are you to talk? I could say that you just about
ruined him. What good did you do for him? Tell me that.’
‘I’m not going into that. But I’m certain that convent is the worst place for him.’
‘What harm did it do him before?’
‘He hated it. He came back sullen and sneaky.’
‘How do you know he wouldn’t have been worse if he’d stayed at home? It could be that he wasn’t at the convent long enough. You must admit he’s better in a convent than in that home.’
‘I’m not even sure about that.’
‘Be fair. Goodness me, you know what that home was like. Now he’s got the nuns to look after him, not that screaming termagant of a mother. He’ll get attention, firm handling, regular meals, plenty of rest, security. It’s just what he needs.’
‘Firm handling is what I’m afraid of.’
‘Now, if you’re meaning that the nuns are harsh on principle you’ve been listening to rumours that a man like you should know better than to take notice of. They’re very kind with kids; of course when they get a boy like young Herlihy they need to be firm.’
‘Well, they were hard on him last time. He told me.’
‘They won’t be any harder than they have to be. And where did your soft treatment get him-or you either? Into court; into hospital too, if the truth be known.’
‘Peter isn’t to blame for that. But listen, Father, aren’t there other convents? Couldn’t he be sent to another where they won’t be so hard on him?’
‘That’s the only one that could handle him, I reckon. And he’ll get a good Christian training there. What’s the alternative anyway? I hope you’re not thinking of trying to adopt him?’
‘Not me. But there must be somebody in the Flat who’d be prepared to take him in. Some mining family.’
‘Well, I haven’t heard of any applicants…. And even if there were, would you expect me to be in favour of it–or Mike either? Have him brought up in atheism when he could be brought up as a Christian? No, Paul, you can’t persuade me that’s the right course. You won’t understand me, but the boy’s soul is at stake.’
It was a full union meting on the Wednesday following Arty’s return, the second meeting since the mine had resumed work. At the previous meeting the miners had demanded immediate action towards the provision of a town water supply, in view of the two serious fires in the town. Jock McEwan read a reply from the county council; the secretary had replied that the council were sending their engineer to investigate the possibility of tapping the Roaring
Meg, a fierce tributary of Coal Creek in the hills at the back of the town. ‘I’m not satisfied with their reply,’ Jock said. ‘The engineer is only going to investigate. And while he’s investigating and the clerks in Greymouth are pushing his report into a drawer, months will go by. There might be another fire by then. And to cap it off, they’ve sent us a pamphlet on fire precautions from the Forestry Department. That’s the final bloody insult! Do they think we’re going to put up with that? Two fires weren’t caused by carelessness—one was an accident, the other was the deliberate action of a boy. What we want is the facilities to put the fire out once it starts in spite of all reasonable precautions.’ After a brief discussion, the meeting decided to unite with the dredge-workers in demanding immediate action.
There were cheers when Jock read a promise from the Minister of Mines that the seven-hour shift would begin to operate in the new year.
The Canterbury Education Board had replied noting the union’s expression of confidence in Rogers; it pointed out that Mr Rogers’s appointment had been terminated and added that no further action was contemplated.
‘Well, there it is,’ Ben said. ‘Is there any discussion?’
Nobody said anything for a few seconds. Jock McEwan said: ‘It’s not good enough, though.’
‘Well, it’s a straightforward reply,’ Ben said, ‘even if it’s not what he hoped for.’
‘We’re not used to being slapped in the eye like this,’ Jock said.
‘We asked for it,’ somebody said.
‘Well, is there anything more we can do?—That’s the point. The Canterbury Education Board is a good bit stronger than the Coal Flat Miners’ Union.’
‘We’re wasting the meeting’s time,’ the same man said. ‘It’s not very long since Rogers was on the side of the scabs.’
‘We went into all that last time,’ Jimmy Cairns said. ‘That’s all past history now.’
‘He came out on our side in the end,’ someone else said.
‘Well, that’s so,’ Ben said, ‘but all we’re concerned with at the moment is whether we’ve got confidence in him as a teacher.’
‘Speaking for myself, like,’ Jock McEwan said, ‘as I said last time, I didn’t like all that carry-on about sex and psychology.’
Arthur Henderson stood up from the small table where he was
taking notes for the Argus. ‘Well, I said it last time too. I must say
I was shocked at all that came out in the papers, filling that little
boy’s head with all sorts of things he shouldn’t know about.’
Jimmy Cairns said: ‘All right, we discussed this last time too. You’re forgetting that the judge made Paul undertake not to go in for that sort of thing again.’
‘Well, as I see it’—Arthur Henderson was conscious of the fact that he was one of the only two members of the school committee at the meeting—‘all this has got some bearing on whether we’ve got confidence in Mr Rogers as a teacher. I remember when the same question came up earlier in the year at a school committee meeting—’
Jock McEwan interrupted: ‘Now just a minute. I don’t think it’s right that school committee business should be discussed at this meeting. But since the question’s been raised the question had better be settled. I was at that school committee meeting and the matter ended with the committee having complete confidence in Rogers…. All the same I couldn’t see the need for all that tommy-rot.’
‘There was no need for it,’ someone called.
‘Hear, hear,’ Arty Nicholson said. ‘He’s a damn good kid that boy.’
‘That sort of thing would only make him worse.’
‘That’s what I reckon,’ Arty said.
‘Well, just a minute,’ Ben said. ‘All this came up last time. Yet in the end we passed a vote of confidence in Rogers. What I want to know is, is there anything more we can do, and if there is, are we prepared to do it?’
There was no comment; and after a pause Jock McEwan said, ‘Well, just to test the feeling of the meeting, I’ll move that we pass on to the next business.’
‘I’ll second that,’ Ben said.
No one said No.
There was a fraternal letter from the dredge-workers thanking
the miners for support in their recent strike and noting that the
management had come to an agreement and the worker over whom
the strike began had been suspended, and though now free to come
back had, because of a personal misfortune of which the miners no
doubt knew the circumstances, left the town and begun work in a
sawmill. Ben Nicholson commented: ‘Well, that’s a bit formal and
doesn’t tell you one thing that most of us don’t already know. For
the benefit of those who don’t, the dredge-workers, while they’ve
got no sympathy for a scab, wanted to give a hand to Mike Herlihy
for a series of misfortunes which were no fault of his own, and
they’ve taken round the hat. They aimed at £30, but they’ve got
about forty. It’s not a lot, but it will help him on a bit. If anyone
Arty Nicholson stood up. ‘There’s one thing I want to bring up.’ Some of the lads called out: ‘Sit down. You’re no miner. You’re a whitebaiter.’—‘The bushman!’
‘It’s all very well to give Mike Herlihy a few quid,’ Arty went on. ‘I’m not quarrelling with that. But what about his kid?’ Everyone turned to stare at him, puzzled. ‘He was down South Westland with me and Joe ‘Taiha, and he’s a damn good kid, I don’t care what you say. I’ve been in this town nineteen years and you know as well as I do that everybody’s made out the Herlihys were queer, and nobody’s had anything to do with them. The old man drunk and the old woman nagging and giving the kid a hiding if he dropped a crumb on the floor; how would you like to be brought up in a home like that?’
‘Just a minute,’ Ben said. ‘I don’t see that this is strictly the concern of this meeting.’
‘It’s not the union’s place to take any notice of family matters,’ Arthur Henderson said.
‘You’re wasting the meeting’s time, lad,’ Jock McEwan said.
‘Just a minute,’ Arty protested. ‘Wait till you hear me!’
‘Does the meeting want to hear this item? We’ve still got to discuss plans for a working-men’s club,’ Ben asked. There were cries, ‘No!’ Arty shouted, ‘How do you know whether you want to hear when you don’t know what it is?’
‘Well, I don’t know what you’re going to say,’ Ben said. ‘But this town is too deeply torn with personal strife as it is. We don’t want to add fuel to the fire. We’re an organization for unity, not for dissension. We don’t want you reopening old wounds.’
‘I’m not trying to make trouble,’ Arty shouted. ‘I want to tell you about this boy. He’s got no one to stick up for him.’
‘Well, I suggest we go into committee and give him a hearing,’
Ben said. Some of Arty’s pals called, ‘Favouritism!’ The meeting
voted for this suggestion but with only a majority of four. Arthur
Henderson put down his pencil, and with the meeting’s permission,
stayed to listen; the reporter from the Star, who had come up
specially since the Star had discarded local correspondents as too
biased, had already slipped out to phone the office about the seven-hour shift and their resolution on the town water supply. When he
came back and couldn’t get in, he was annoyed that he had no hint
of what it was about.
‘Well,’ Arty began again. ‘I’ve brought this up here because
there’s nowhere else I could bring it up. This kid Peter Herlihy
Arty sat down. There were murmurs of deprecation, but no one volunteered any comment, though Ben called for discussion. Then Arthur Henderson said hesitantly, ‘The meeting ought to take into consideration the fact that it was this boy Herlihy who got young Rogers into trouble….’
‘I can remember when Rogers wasn’t any friend of the union,’ someone said.
‘Well, he’s lost his job through the boy. I’m not saying I’m sticking up for Rogers. We’re all agreed he didn’t need to tell him all that tommy-rot about sex.’
‘All this is beside the point,’ Jock McEwan said. ‘As I see it, it’s a matter of fundamental principle. What’s the union for? We exist to secure better conditions from our employers, to get wage agreements, and to help our comrades in other industries in their efforts to better their conditions, and to support the political party that works for our ends. We’re not a child welfare office. We can’t take everything on our plate.’
‘I don’t know about that,’ Jimmy Cairns said, completely serious for once. ‘We’re a crowd of ordinary working men doing a necessary job. There’s a bit too much formality sometimes. If there’s a case where we can lend a helping hand, we ought to think it over. We agreed to give a few quid to the boy’s old man. That’s the sort of thing we’ve done before. We don’t want to turn this case down just because we haven’t had one like it before.’
‘It’s not true to say we only deal with conditions,’ Ben said,
thinking aloud rather than arguing a case. ‘We’ve dealt with matters
affecting the whole town—the question of bus stops, the town water
supply. Because, with the dredge-workers, we are the town—most
‘You talk as if the workers were in power,’ Jock McEwan said. ‘The capitalist class is going to give us a few more kicks before they pass out. They won’t give up without a fight. We’ve got to hold fast to what we’ve won in the past. If we get ambitious ideas and spread our activities we’ll weaken ourselves. We’re going to be in debt with this club.’
‘I’m not interested in all this talk about principle,’ Arty said. ‘I want to get something done for the kid.’
‘We’ve got to consider the principle of it,’ his father said. ‘We
can’t run the risk of weakening our movement. This boy and a hell
of a lot of other boys would be worse off then, in the long run. I’m
not arguing one way or the other. I can see both sides of it, but if
the whole meeting supports what Arty wants, I think we can carry
it. If we are all hesitant we’d do more harm than good if we took it
on. Now in a proper socialist society it would be the union’s responsibility to take care of a fellow-worker’s boy.’
‘Then it’s the dredge-workers’ job,’ someone interjected.
‘You can’t expect them to feel much sympathy for a fellow-worker that scabbed on them,’ another said.
‘Well, they have put in to a fund to help him along,’ Ben said. ‘But if you look at it like that, it’s not anybody’s pigeon, Mike’s no longer on the dredge. You can’t expect the sawmillers to take this on when all this trouble happened before he came to work with them. At least we all know Mike. It’s the whole town’s responsibility.’
‘I heard he hasn’t even joined the union at Nelson Creek,’ another voice came.
‘Then we shouldn’t lift a finger to help him!’ someone else said.
‘He’ll have to pay up,’ Ben said. ‘His dredge union fees will be transferred. He’ll have to pay up the next financial year. That’s just a bit of showing off.’
‘I’m not caring about Mike Herlihy,’ Arty said, ‘It’s the boy. You can’t take it out on him.’
‘What do you want us to do?’ someone asked.
‘I’ve got a letter from Joe Taiha,’ Arty said. ‘He’s down at Arahura. He says his girl’s mother would adopt Peter. He’s getting married in a couple of months. Then he could look after him.’
Inadvertently, someone said, ‘But they’re Maoris!’
‘What the hell if they are Maoris?’ Arty asked. ‘I thought we were supposed to be socialists. I thought we didn’t hold with the colour bar.’
‘Well, I’m not one for the colour bar either,’ the speaker said, standing to defend himself. ‘But I don’t reckon this kid’ll get a good home with the Maoris. It’s—well—it’s out of the frying-pan into the fire.’
‘I’ve been in that home,’ Arty said. ‘It mightn’t be too spick-and-span. It’s a bit rough and ready I’ll admit. But they’d treat the boy right. They’d feed him decently and give him a bit of care.’
‘I’m not blaming the Maoris, mind,’ the other miner said. ‘I know they’re not to blame for the way they live. But it’s just a fact. When they’ve got decent healthy houses and can clothe themselves a bit better then there’d be no objection.’
‘Well, it’s a poor reflection on us if we’ve got to ask a Maori to take the kid,’ Jimmy Cairns objected. ‘We should have canvassed among ourselves first.’
‘That’s not right either. This is all irrelevant,’ Ben said. ‘It doesn’t matter whether it’s a Maori home or a white home. It’s got to be someone the boy knows, who’s willing to adopt him and who’ll give him a good home. I could take him in myself if it came to that, but the boy doesn’t know me and I’ve got no reason to expect he’ll take a great liking to me. But is it possible? What about the court order? What about the parents’ permission? What about the Child Welfare Office?’
‘Well, I can tell you this much,’ Arty said. ‘Joe saw the woman from the Child Welfare Office when she was on her rounds, looking at some place in Arahura, and she told him flat his girl’s mother’s place would be “absolutely unsuitable”. Damn cheek! I’ve seen the house. It’s a damn sight better than that old mill hut Mike Herlihy’s got now over at Nelson Creek!’
‘Well, if you’d told us that before,’ Jock McEwan said, ‘you’d have saved us a bit of unpleasant discussion.’
‘It brought some things to light we oughtn’t to be too happy about,’ Ben said. ‘Well, that rules Joe’s people our. We’re not very enlightened on this question ourselves, so you can’t expect a government official to be. Now it’s a question of possibilities. Has anybody approached the boy’s father and mother? That’s the first step.’
‘No,’ Arty said impatiently. ‘It all takes time. While we’re farting around, the boy’ll have to go to this convent.’
‘Well, we can’t obstruct a court order,’ Ben said. ‘It’s no use
getting hot under the collar. That won’t get the boy out. One thing
‘He’s all right,’ Arty said. ‘He won’t burn anyone’s house down.’
Jack McEwan asked, ‘Is this to be recorded in the minutes?’
‘It’s not strictly a union matter,’ Ben said. ‘Can we form a committee, not having any official connection with the union? Say in the minutes that a committee was formed to discuss a matter raised by Mr A. Nicholson?’
This was agreed to and a committee was formed of Ben, Arty, Joe (if available) and Jimmy Cairns, with power to co-opt Ben’s and Jimmy’s wives if they wanted to.
Joe was never at any of the meetings of the nameless committee, if meetings they could be called. Arty and his parents would mull the matter over at the meal table, Ben would pass the word on to Jimmy at work if they had come to any suggestion and when he got home Jimmy would ask Jessie about it. Joe sent Arty a cheque for £70, his share in the payment for the whitebait; they had agreed to divide the money in three, a third to go to Peter. Joe opened up a post office savings account for him, but under his own name.
The ‘committee’ agreed that, though Jessie was prepared on thinking it over to take Peter in, Ben’s was the best place for him, since he would see a lot of Arty. Arty had suggested that in six months’ time when he and Winnie were married, they could take him, but the older ones shook their heads. ‘You don’t want a boy as old as that when you’re just starting out,’ Jessie said.
‘What does he know about bringing up kids?’ Arty’s mother
wanted to know.
‘Or Winnie either,’ Jessie said.
So Ben went over to Nelson Creek on the Saturday and knocked
up Mike. Mike did not look at him. He stared sourly into the fire
and occasionally spat, so that big gobs of phlegm dangled like yo-yos
from the grate, hissing and hardening, leaving silvery deposits. ‘You
haven’t got a bloody chance,’ Mike said contemptuously when Ben
‘We could provide him with a home, that’s something you won’t
do, and the convent can’t do because it’s an institution.’
‘Why are you so interested in the boy all of a sudden? You didn’t take any notice of him before.’
‘He had a home then. We thought he was all right.’
Mike pondered without letting Ben see that he might be considering the offer. Then he spat again and said, ‘It was you bloody socialists that started all this trouble anyway. Coming along offering to help after you’ve ruined me….’
‘We didn’t burn your house down,’ Ben said.
‘If it hadn’t been for the strike I might have thought twice… about prosecuting young Rogers when the boy said it wasn’t true. You drove me to it.’
‘You can’t blame us for that.’
‘Then Nora wouldn’t have licked him. And we’d still have a house. And now yer-all come begging forgiveness, saying you’re sorry. “Here’s fifty quid to smooth it over.” I wouldn’t take their bloody fifty quid. They can keep their charity. That’s one thing I picked up from Nora—pride.’ He mumbled, ‘Pride’.
‘I’ve not come to talk about that,’ Ben said. ‘I’ve come to ask if you’ll sign adoption papers for the boy.’
‘That boy will get a good Catholic upbringing at the convent,’ Mike said. ‘I don’t want him brought up a heathen. There’s enough of your type in the world already.’
‘You won’t sign then?’
‘Give me the paper,’ Mike said with a sly grin around the tip of his pipe; Ben passed it to him readily but not without mistrust, and Mike snatched it and threw it in the fire. He chuckled as if to bolster his self-esteem. ‘Ha! You didn’t expect that, did you, Nicholson? I’m a bit too smart for you yet!’
Ben shrugged. ‘I’ll be back again,’ he said.
‘Bring a few more of those papers,’ Mike said. ‘I’ll want them for lighting the fire.’
Ben saw Nora at her mother’s. Mrs Seldom answered the door. She did not speak; she closed the door. But a minute later Nora appeared and they negotiated on the back doorstep. Nora glared at him, waiting for his reason.
‘It’s about your boy, Mrs Herlihy,’ Ben began.
‘I’m Nora Seldom now. Unless I ever get any maintenance money.’
‘Maggie and I want to adopt him.’
Nora leaned against the doorpost and laughed for the first time since before she was married, a shrill mirthless laugh. She stood nodding her head over him with a grim set to her lips. ‘Well, by Christ, Ben Nicholson, if that isn’t the best I’ve heard! You’re as good as a bloody treat. What’s wrong with Maggie McKenzie? I thought she found it hard enough to do any work at all, let alone take any more on. Mum! Here’s a good ’un! Listen to this! Ben and Maggie want to adopt the brat!’
Mrs Seldom called her in, but Nora went out again with mock determination on her face. ‘No bloody fear,’ she said. ‘I don’t give two damns what’s behind it. You don’t get two chances like this in your lifetime. You can have the bugger for all I care,’ she said to Ben. ‘Where is he anyway?’
‘He’s in a convent. Would you sign here then?’
‘Have you seen Mike?’
‘He won’t sign.’
‘Give me the pen then. I can’t do it quick enough. I don’t care if he rots in a convent or who’s keeping him. If Mike dies I’ll have to keep him. I might be rid of him yet.’
But though Ben went twice again to Mike he wouldn’t sign. Ben didn’t risk passing him the paper with Nora’s signature on it. Mike was drunk but Mike seemed to be glad of his company, to have someone he could prove himself on in argument. Ben gave up calling on him. And Peter brooded in the convent.
You couldn’t blame her for loyalty, Rogers was thinking; and it was about his turn to make concessions. So far they had all been hers. But when he had tried to concede, when he had refused at first to support the boycott, it hadn’t helped him or Flora.
‘I haven’t said anything to Mum yet, Paul. But if you’ll agree I bet I could persuade Dad to stay. There’s a house going on School Road,’ she said. ‘The people are moving after Christmas. We could get that. Paul, I think you’d like it at the Flat again. You could get into the mine. They’d be glad to have a chap like you in the union. You might even be secretary in time.’
‘Oh, Flora, stop planning so far ahead. You don’t take on a job in the hope of a union executive’s job at the end of it. I’m not a careerist.’
‘Well, even without that, don’t you think it’s worth a try?’
Rogers thought before he said what he’d been planning to say:
‘You’ve got friends there.’
‘They let me down.’
‘How did they let you down? They tried to get your job back for you. They did all they could.’
‘They’ve got their doubts about me now. They’re not with me any more. I wouldn’t be part of them.’
‘What are we going to do then?’
‘Go to Christchurch. I’ll try to get into adult education. You’d like it there. It’s a better climate. There’d be more to do. Beaches, films, libraries, concerts.’
‘I could get on without them with you. But what about Mum? Paul, she needs me.’
‘Don’t I need you? What about me? Flora, it just won’t work. Last time I gave in to your family it only led to trouble. You’ve got to make the choice, Flora. And anyway I don’t believe your mother will be so ready to forget the past. She’ll hold me to blame for Don going away.’
Flora didn’t answer and he continued: ‘I know you had to go home after the trouble, Flora, especially when Don went away, but your home’s making you too comfortable again. You don’t want to have to choose. You want it both ways. We’ve got to start together, no Mum, no Dad, nobody to poke into us and try to manage us and kill us with attention. Surely you see what happiness it will be.’
She held her hand in his and said nothing for a while. Eventually she said: ‘We can’t end up hating each other, Paul? Like you said last time? I’d rather go off with Mum and Dad and leave you if I thought that would happen.’
‘We won’t, by ourselves.’
‘Well, they’ll just have to go off to Nelson by themselves,’ she said smiling. ‘I was silly to think different.’
She changed the subject. ‘Mum’s trying to track down Miss Dane. She wants that baby. It would give her more to think about.’
‘That baby! It can’t be far off now…. Will Miss Dane give it up?’
‘I don’t know. Nobody knows where she’s gone. Doris offered to take Donnie when Mum and Dad go, but Mum wouldn’t hear of it. Doris is going to adopt one anyhow. But there’s a huge waiting-list. She could have one fairly soon if she’d take a Maori but Frank wouldn’t have it. I said, “Well, you’re part Maori yourself, you kids might have been dark.” But it made her cry. I shouldn’t have said it. That’s what she’d told Frank.’
‘Ours might be too.’
‘They’ll be none the less welcome for that. I even hope they will
be…. Well, she will have Donnie and Dad’ll be with her, and she’ll
just have to get used to not having us.’
‘Well! What’s wrong with us?’ Jessie asked.
Rogers leaned over the kitchen table watching her cut Jimmy’s crib for the next day. The rain was drumming on the iron roof.
‘I’ve got nothing against you, Jessie,’ he said. ‘I’ve got reason to be thankful to you. People at the Flat have been good to me.’
‘Well, why run away from it?’
‘Oh, it’s not that, Jessie. It’s—well, I can’t explain very well. I want to get away from all the memories of things.’
‘Well, I know you had a sticky time in the end. But your friends are still with you, Paul. And everybody in the Flat knows exactly what did happen. If you go away you might have rumours following you around, and people that don’t know any different might believe them.’
‘It’s the job,’ Jimmy said. ‘You can’t expect him to want to be a miner.’
‘Flora wanted me to stay. But I wouldn’t have liked it.’
‘Oh no, that wouldn’t have been any solution,’ the doctor said. ‘What would be the sense of throwing away all your training? You can use yourself far more effectively in a profession. You can identify yourself with the workers’ cause without having to be a worker yourself. That would have been sectarianism. Left-sectarianism.’
‘Talk English, Doctor,’ Rogers said. ‘Coal Flat people don’t understand terms like that. Anyway, you’re barking up the wrong tree. I’ve got to change direction. There’s something wrong with the way I’ve been going in the past and I feel let down by it. I’m going to keep my distance and take my bearings before I commit myself now.’
‘There’s no need to do that. There’s nothing that’s happened to you that can’t be explained in good Marxist terms. You’re taking things too subjectively. The sooner you start work again the better.’
‘Well, I won’t be working here.’
‘If you get into adult education you might get back over here as a tutor-organizer. You could conduct lessons for the people here.’
‘That doesn’t attract me.’
‘Why not? You’re locked out of school education now. But by fighting for progressive ideas in general you could influence education in particular, from the outside, through the parents.’
‘Now, Doctor, we talked about this months ago. I was opposed to it then, only I didn’t give honest reasons, because I didn’t know why I was against it. But now I do. The climate’s not favourable. No one wants to learn anything. Everyone’s too comfortable having a sleep, even the miners. You wouldn’t even get the horse to water, let alone make him drink. And people don’t learn that way. They learn best from their own experience and what the miners learn will be from their collective experience, from disputes and action and settlements of disputes, not from classes in history and politics and literature.’
‘But as you said yourself then, that’s only half of life. They could learn from what they do themselves…. You remember you suggested a community centre. There’s the nucleus of it already in this new working-men’s club they’re starting in the old billiard-room. With a bright man running it, it could be a livelier scheme than I thought at the time. I think McKenzie was wrong about that. The people themselves could work something out.’
‘McKenzie didn’t have a clue. But we’re back where we were. What’s the use in stimulating activity when no one feels the need for it? All they feel the need of in the new club is beer and billiards and forty-fives…. Drama groups, reading and discussion groups in Coal Flat! It would be as phoney as glee clubs or marching girls.’
‘Don’t you even believe in the value of adult education?’
‘Where the need is felt. Where people want it. But they don’t want it here.’
‘You’re despairing too much.’
‘Well, someone else might be able to work it here. Not me.’
‘Well, you men can argue,’ Jessie said. ‘But I’m going in next door to mind the kids. They’re going to the pictures.’
‘What’s on?’ Jimmy asked.
‘Oh, some crime film. Where’s my coat? Who’d live in this climate?’ Jessie went out and left them.
‘I suppose the hall will be full,’ Rogers said. ‘Union meetings in the day, crime films at night. It’s like those comics Sid Raynes was selling.’
‘Well, you did something about that,’ the doctor said. ‘You could
‘Flora’s helping them pack,’ he said.
‘You’re pretty sour about things tonight,’ Jimmy said. ‘You shouldn’t take it out on us.’
Rogers looked at him with bitterness. ‘You let me down,’ he said. He looked down at the table: he didn’t like being bitter with anyone.
‘How did we let you down? We even tried to get your job back for you.’
‘You didn’t support me. Not about Peter. You wouldn’t have supported me if you’d known what I was doing. I had to do it all behind your backs.’
‘Well, I’m not sure that we agree with what you were doing with that boy. We know you meant well. But you took a risk, and it didn’t work.’
‘It would have worked if I’d had society behind me. One man can’t do everything by himself.’
‘No one expects you to. And if you’re blaming society, society’s a lot bigger than the Miners’ Union. There were the boy’s parents and that home he came from and the priest and the headmaster and the policeman and the judge and the magistrate and child welfare; they all had a hand in it. We even tried to get the boy adopted out. The union’s never done that before.’
‘It’s a pity it hadn’t. That’s what I’m getting at. This community would let that boy live under its nose unhappy and getting worse and go about its business like the Levite and not do anything till the boy broke the law. Then you hand him over to the State and now you’re telling me the State’s to blame. If it’s the State’s fault, it’s your fault even more.’
‘We did try to do something for the boy.’
‘Only because I did something first. If it hadn’t been for me Peter would have still been down there in that house…’
‘And Mike would have had his house still. And the boy isn’t much better off for your interference where he’s ended up, being reared in all that superstition…. I tell you, you took too much on. It was more than any one man could handle.’
‘I know I took too much on. Perhaps it wouldn’t have worked even if you’d all known what I was doing, even if you’d been helping the boy too. But I can’t stay here. I’m out of place. The town isn’t with me. That’s what I mean when I say I feel you let me down.’
‘Well, if it comes to that, you let us down. You didn’t stick by us when we tried to get something done.’
‘I couldn’t see it then.’
‘Well, we couldn’t see with you about the boy. We still don’t. If you want us to see it, you’ve got to explain these things. You’ve got to educate us up to it.’
Rogers pondered for a while. ‘But not here,’ he said. ‘I’ve got to start in another place. In a city….’ He looked up at Jimmy with wry self-disparagement. ‘I’ll be a safe conforming suburban back-gardener,’ he said. ‘Boasting of beancrops over the back fence. No Jimmy, I’m keeping out of union matters and politics now. I’ll steer clear of ideas except as I need them for my job. I’ll just be another suburban New Zealander, from Upper Riccarton or Shirley or further out on the outskirts, and I’ll go for the job and the wife and family and the house and garden. That’s my career—the job and the home. I’ve been pushed into it.’
‘Well, you’ve got to look after Flora. But that’s not everything. That’s the way you’re talking now,’ Jimmy said. ‘But in a few months you’ll be all right again. And there’s plenty of room for progressive ideas in any job, especially the kind that you’re likely to go for. Only don’t go getting yourself into trouble again.’
It was a small group that stood on the footpath waiting for the bus to leave: Jessie, the Palmer parents, Rogers and Flora.
‘We’re going tomorrow,’ Mrs Palmer told Jessie. ‘We’re not going to the wedding. I can’t face the travelling.’
Their farewell was undemonstrative and even coming to the bus had cost them a great deal of pride. ‘Let Flor come up and see us now and again, Paul,’ Mrs Palmer said. ‘That’s all I ask.’
‘Look after her,’ Dad said, ‘or I’ll want to know why.’ Rogers grinned and Flora smiled.
‘There’s some things you learn in life,’ Mum said to Jessie. ‘I’m not too old to learn yet. When you’re old you’re not wanted. The young have their lives to live. Well, Dad and I’ll be content by ourselves and wee Donnie if we can see the girls now and again…. Tell Jimmy the new publican’s shouting tonight. We might even shout ourselves before that if the boys come up early enough.’
It was a sunny November morning and already the air was singing
with grass cicadas. The sun was on the hills and the bush, fresh
after the night’s rain, was a fresh deep green with black in the
Arohaina mai (O Kiingi ma): Have pity on us (O Lord), a hymn
whose words were composed by Tuini Ngawai of the Ngaati-porou tribe on the East Coast of the North Island and set to the
tune of ‘Love Walked In’.
birch: Common West Coast bushman’s name for two kinds of tree,
the kaamahi and the New Zealand beech.
box: A metal truck used in coal-mines.
bungy: West Coast corruption of Maori ponga, a kind of tree-fern.
A bungy hut is a hut made of the trunks of tree-ferns.
cavel: The casting of lots by which miners are assigned their places on the coal-face and the mates they will work with.
cracker: Common West Coast bushman’s name for a larger-leaved
species of Coprosma. (Probably from Maori karaka, a very
different tree whose leaves are vaguely similar.)
crib: A miner’s lunch.
damper: A kind of unleavened bread made of flour and water and cooked over an open fire.
forty-fives: A peculiar card game played on the West Coast, imported originally from Ireland.
Hickey, Pat: A miners’ trade union organizer and socialist in the early years of the century. Hickey had been a member of the American I.W.W.
Holland, Harry: Leader of the New Zealand Labour Party who
died before it was elected to office in
I.W.W.: Industrial Workers of the World, an American syndicalist labour movement of the early years of this century.
jig:
(Coal-mining) a steep tramway in which the full truck descending hauls up the empty one to the coal-face. (Gold-dredging) a movable screen which is moved up and
down in agitated water to separate the grains of gold from other
suspended solids.
kingfern: A local name for the mamaku, Cyathca medullaris, the tall
tree-fern with a wide frond-spread.
ladder: The continuous line of excavating buckets carried on an oblique endless chain on a gold-dredge.
mickeymick: A compact twiggy scrub with small leaves of the genus
Coprouna. (From Maoti mingimingi.)
mockamock: The wineberry, a small fast-growing tree often the
first to establish itself after bush has been felled or cleared.
(From Maori mahomako.)
muhlenbeckia: A rambling climber which often strangles its host tree under its dense masses of leaves and stems.
Olearia Forsteri: A low tree of the daisy family, often used for
hedges and frequently cankered. Also called O. paniculata.
over the hill: West Coast expression for ‘across the Southern Alps’, that is, in Canterbury province.
race (of boxes): A local expression for a rake (of trucks).
snork: Very young baby. (Probably from Yorkshire snork, a young
pig, rather than, as Eric Partridge suggests, from stork.)
sool (a dog) on to: To set or urge (a dog) on to.
sprag: A piece of metal or wood inserted between the spokes of the wheel of a moving truck in order to brake it.
Star: The Greymouth Evening Star, Greymouth’s conservative
daily.
stinkwood: A small shrub, a species of Coprosma, with an unpleasant smell when broken.
Webb, Paddy: Labour M.P. for Buller who succeeded Harry Holland. He was associated with Pat Hickey and Bob Semple in organizing branches of a Socialist Party on the Coast in the early years of the century.
whiteywood: The maahoe, a small tree.
Bill Pearson was born at Greymouth in
He served first in New Zealand and Fiji, returned home and was posted to Egypt. His remaining service took him to Italy and Japan. After demobilization he returned to Canterbury College graduating M.A. and gaining a post-graduate scholarship. At King’s College, London, he received a doctorate for his work on the Catholic poets Coventry Patmore, G. M. Hopkins and Francis Thompson. He taught for nearly two years on ‘supply’ in London County Council schools, primary and secondary, secular and ecclesiastical.
In Best Short Stories of 1951
as among the best ‘foreign’ stories of that year.
His analysis of New Zealand (pakeha)
behaviour in ‘Fretful Sleepers’ and his essay
‘The Maori People’, both of which appeared
in Landfall, are considerable contributions to
New Zealand social description. The latter
reflects his deep interest during recent years
in the problems and welfare of Maoris. ‘Fretful Sleepers’ is an analysis of New Zealand
character and behaviour of exceptional insight
and acuteness.
Cover design by Colin McCahon