2

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 page 69 one daughter at medical school in Dunedin; and they lived alone, living a ‘progressive’ but austere life, considered queer by their enemies in Coal Flat, shrugged away by their friends. ‘Of course he doesn’t have to work an eight-hour shift with his muscles,’ people would say when it was mentioned that they ate only two meals a day —at ten o’clock and at six. People who didn’t like his political views tried to undermine his reputation as a doctor; in any small town in New Zealand a new doctor’s professional ability is rated in the minds of his patients by gossip about his manner, his sympathy for complaints and his success in treatment. The town gossips had made it their business to revive some old complaint, or invent the symptoms of a new and vague feeling-out-of-sorts, as an excuse to be among the first to be able to appraise him with authority. But if they were not ill, he told them so; and if they were, his manner was not over-sympathetic, but practical: they felt he was not treating them but their diseases. So for a start, his professional reputation was low, but later, as he met more genuine complaints and treated them as well as any town doctor, the community came to accept him. Among the miners he was honoured, as one of the only two communist intellectuals in the town—the other was a self-educated native who could stand up to the doctor in argument, a man who had worked in the Soviet Union in the 1920’s and fallen out with other communists because he would not call it a working man’s paradise—and he had done a lot for Coal Flat: on his arrival, he had called a committee of miners and teachers and got a branch of the Country Library Service for Coal Flat; then he had organized W.E.A. classes in economics and biology; and this evening, though Rogers had forgotten it, there was to be an informal meeting of socialists to talk about the contemporary direction of the socialist movement in the unions.

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 page 70 mornings with her washing, an exertion that left her thin nervous body fagged for the rest of the day, since in Asia she had had house-girls to do the work: ‘It isn’t as if she had a family wash to do,’ they would say.

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 1947, after eleven years of Labour Government. He said that too many people in the country, and in Coal Flat too, had forgotten that a capitalist society lived on the incentive to make a profit. Perhaps wages were good, and no one was overworked, but workers should see that this was only a rake-off from a period of local capitalist prosperity. ‘Before five years are up there will be a crisis in finance, if not here, in the United States, and all these good conditions will be swallowed up in inflation—or page 71 there will be a slump, and by then we may have a Tory government grinding the worker’s face.’

‘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 1926 strike. ‘I don’t trust these half-pie good times. They can’t last.’

‘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 page 72 face puzzled. ‘You’re the only teacher here who would do it. If you’d agree to it, we’ll give it union backing.’

‘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 page 73 miners here, and all workers, have got a decent wage, security—what else do they want? I mean, we may have evolved our own brand of socialism, nothing like the Russian kind, but suited to New Zealand conditions.’

‘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. Every- page 74 body wanting to make his little pile and be comfortable. There’s none of the spirit there was before the war when Labour first got in. But what we want is something that grows out of this town as a natural extension of its union activities—not something imposed on us from headquarters. That’s the trouble with this country. Everybody leaves it to the Government—to the authorities—to Wellington…. Why can’t we start right here on cultural things, have people doing things for themselves, acting plays, holding discussion groups like this on all sorts of subjects? Why don’t we try to form a community centre?’

‘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 page 75 not transform society from the roots up, that is truly revolutionary, that does not operate according to the exact science of Marxism-Leninism-Stalinism, that is not led by the working-class and the most advanced and militant section of the working-class, the Communist Party. It is incorrect to say that we have socialism in New Zealand. Time and again we have had clear proof that the Labour Party is the hangman of the working-class. It is incorrect to think that things are all right in New Zealand at the present time. It is obvious that the speaker who said that is out of touch with the party press. It he had been acquainted with the party press he would know of the wage claims under arbitration at the present time, wage claims which are entirely due to the rising cost of living; he would know of the disputes brought about by the effort of the employers to reduce the real earnings of the working-class. It seems to me that, first of all there is one lesson we can learn from what that speaker said and that is that A more determined effort must be made to sell the party paper.

‘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.’

page 76

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 page 77 after a snore-off. The welfare state, and the clear blue sky overhead and summer sun on the bush, and the township where everyone knew everyone else and no one would bother to do you any harm. She’ll be right, dig; now, or later, or sometime, everything’ll be jake, or near enough to it. He wasn’t really listening as the doctor expounded the arguments that were meant to dislodge his heresy; he was just agreeing because he’d had enough disagreement for one night, saying yes, yes, to smooth things over, ‘Yes, perhaps you’re right. Yes, I didn’t think of that.’ Not that the doctor didn’t recognize that his acquiescence was too easy. The only thing that woke him was Mrs Alexander’s slight jab: ‘It’s you pampered children who often let us down in the end.’ He was stung into defensiveness and looked at her for hostility, but she was only smiling indulgently, and he felt tempted to welcome her motherliness as he had accepted Mrs Palmer’s: ‘We have to be harsh on you,’ she said. ‘Cruel to be kind. The revolution doesn’t happen in a hothouse.’ It was all so unreal; talking of revolution as if it might happen any day, in 1947, in New Zealand of all places. She took his cup for a refill. ‘Warm your cockles with this; the cold wind doth blow.’

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.’

page 78

‘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.’