Title: Coal Flat

Author: Bill Pearson

Publication details: Paul’s Book Arcade, 1963, Auckland

Digital publication kindly authorised by: Paul Millar

Part of: New Zealand Texts Collection

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Coal Flat

2

2

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 page 94 house, hoping to pay it off as he earned. In the meantime they lived, only seeing each other at evenings and at breakfast, more austerely than they had been used to. Don cut out drinking, and would have knocked off smoking, but that was something Myra couldn’t do, and he had to buy cigarettes so that she could borrow them when she had none. They went dancing on Saturdays. She said she couldn’t stay home every night. ‘It’s just as well I’m still working,’ she said. ‘I’d go mad if I had to stay home all day by myself. I can’t knit or sew or anything like that.’ For a start she couldn’t cook, but she had seen enough of her mother’s cooking and the cooking at the Grill, to pick it up; she was quick to learn, though it was never a work of love. Domesticity bored her. She would have liked a night-club life, like what she saw in films, but she was a practical girl, and since she couldn’t afford to do anything else, she reconciled herself to housework. Don was attentive to her. He would have liked to bring her presents on his way home. If he passed a shop window with an unusual scarf or hairbrush, he would return on pay-day and buy it for her. He never tired of her chubby selfish face and he loved her in an undramatic way, even when the mixture of lust and romance with which he approached their hired marriage-bed had worn off. But for her his glamour wore off. She had to remind herself of his surprising handsomeness to be aware of her good luck. It was when they were out together, at a dance or in a restaurant, that she was proud of him, when she saw the other men with their plain and ugly faces, when she caught the envious glances of other women. But at home his good looks didn’t seem to matter so much, and you couldn’t think about his looks in bed. But she was a girl who looked for the simplest way out, and she resigned herself to putting in her life with him.

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 page 95 saw his concern for the boy, and she kept him away from him on the pretext that men were helpless with babies. Don became attentive, domestic and subdued. Myra didn’t pine for her Saturday night dances now. She was content to stay home; of evenings they listened to the serials and advertisements on 4ZB, and this saved them the trouble of striking deeper common ground in talking. Often Don missed this way of knowing her; it was as if he had started to know her the wrong way round. But they met over the baby.

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’.

page 96

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.