‘Lettering things, you mean? Yes.’
He handed me a bevelled oblong of hardwood, and said, ‘This is for the front gate. The carpenter at the sheds fixed it for me. I want you to paint a sign on it. Can you print this up for me?’ He passed over a crumpled slip of paper on which he had crudely printed out the words: BEGGARS, HAWKERS, AND CANVASSERS WILL BE PROSECUTED.
I lettered the sign for him in white on black, but then he made me take it out and screw it to the front gate. I wanted to protest but his face was so stern and implacable that I said nothing. While I was attaching the sign to the gate two middle-aged men in black greatcoats came across and stood there watching me. When in my nervousness and humiliation I dropped one of the screws one of the men stooped over and picked it up and handed it to me, but neither he nor his companion uttered a single word. When the sign was firmly fixed against the gate they just turned away and shuffled off along the street muttering to each other. It was not very long before these signs – or something like them – were on gates all over the suburbs.
At Klebendorf’s the terror moved into the big studio in a different way. Advertising appropriations were cut and orders petered out, and there were long slack times when we all worked feverishly on ‘spec’ designs, but there were very few orders that seemed to come from them. Out in the factory half the machines were silent, and the flatbeds and the big rotaries were covered over with spoiled sheets of double-quad printing paper, like the drapes over furniture in an unoccupied house. Finally there was the surprising day when old Klebendorf came up to the studio. I say surprising, because the old man, whom I had never known to do more than grunt out a gruff sentence, or just grunt, had called the art staff together to hear his careful set speech. That was the only time I remember the two old Germans, Steiner and Richter, coming to the studio together, like two timid mice. Perhaps it was their presence that made old Klebendorf sound more German than ever, or maybe it was only emotion that twisted his speech.
‘You vill all know,’ he began after a good deal of coughing and throat-clearing, ‘that der printing indusstry iss not now in a condition of equitableness. We have been standing off thirty men from the factory already. Thirty goot men! It iss not goot. Nein! But’ – he clenched his fist – ‘it iss not as bad, my frients, as our oppositional firm of McIlwraith und Todd, which has its doors closed, pouf!’ – he spread his pudgy hands in a queer little quick gesture – ‘und every man, every goot man at that place is a job without. This iss bad. Ach! The times are of great difficulty. Here at Klebendorf und Hardt we have the good company and the good staff. Ve will act mit honour. Ja! But the orders they are not, and the overhead is of a cost phenomenal, und there must be taking place a changement. So! There will be suffering, but we vill spread the suffering. We will spread it so that no man he iss hurting too much. Ja! There is no man here who iss losing his job. Nein! Not vun! I have talked together with Mr Denton, und he vill tell you our prosement. Vot ve think iss best for all of us. Our difficulties ve will share, eh? Mein Gott! Mein Gott! it is of such difficulties the vorld over at this time! I have preoccupational matters very great. Mein own land is suffering also, and many of my own people are coming so far to seek assistance, and them I must be helping a little also. You understand? It is of great difficulty. Something bad it happens in this world … I do not know vot it iss …’
As I listened to the old man, his gross, flabby face crumpled in a mask of concern and anxiety and embarrassment: his thick guttural accents groping to express some vital message of mercy and loyalty and consideration and humaneness, my mind turned back to an image of a child in a locked bedroom rummaging in a wardrobe drawer. Was this the Hun of the Raemaker cartoons? This ludicrous little fat figure with the heavy gold watch-chain looped across the burgomaster belly, striving for a ‘condition of equitableness’ in a world where economic disaster had sprung out like a beast from the shadows – was this the hateful figure of German Kultur? His voice had thickened even more as he struggled to get hope and conviction into his words:
‘It vill not last. Ach Gott, it cannot last! It is a phase, no more. There will come another changement, this it iss sure, und for the good. Ja! We vill ride it out, eh? We vill all share the difficulties, und so we vill ride it out …’
After he had finished Joe Denton put the situation crisply. ‘What we’ve worked out is this,’ he said. ‘There’s not enough work here to keep us all busy, we all know that. So instead of chopping staff we’ll try a system of rationing. Each one of us will take it in turn to stand down for two weeks without pay. Without pay, remember. We’ll see how it works out. Everyone will be in this, apprentices and all. If things continue to get worse it might have to be a month off without pay, or two blokes off together. We’ll have to see about that. It depends how things go. I don’t think I have to tell you that there aren’t any jobs going anywhere else. Here at Klebendorf’s we’re probably better off than any other place in the city. One of the apprentices will take his time off with every alternate senior man. I’ll be taking the first lay-off myself, beginning tomorrow, and Young Joe here will come with me. You, Paul, will run the studio while I’m away. That’s all. Any questions?’
There were no questions. The rationing went into effect. Old Joe Denton returned after the first two weeks and made a big thing about what a marvellous time he’d had, staking up his dahlias and labelling them and doing all the odd chores around the house that he’d been putting off for years. Paul Klein went off, and I with him. For me it was a wonderful two weeks. All the time I would have spent at Klebendorf’s I was able to devote to my work-table, writing. Mother would bring my lunch in on a tray. I wrote articles, sketches, stories, paragraphs, and I sent them to newspapers and magazines in other States, and even overseas. (I got rejection-slips, of course, but later, when I was able to add up the tally of that time, I found that I had made in those two weeks seven times the amount of money I would have earned in the same period at Klebendorf’s!)
For the others, though, it was a bitter, anxious time. The Depression steadily grew worse. The rationing became a month off without pay, then two men would go at once, and still there were not enough orders coming in to really keep busy those who remained. There were no more practical jokes with turpentine, no more playing of the darts game, and nobody any longer would lift his voice in a chorus from Gilbert and Sullivan.
Many of the factory floors were quite silent now for hours and even days at a time, and through them Mr Klebendorf would wander, a solitary, head-shaking ghost of himself, grown ten years older and stooped under the weight of his anxieties, grunting and clucking and snuffling through the ruins of a lifetime, trapped in an endless nightmare of liquidation and broken faith. He hardly ever spoke to anybody. He could seldom be found in his own managerial office. He would just shuffle around, haunting the static floors of his business; one would come across him in the most unexpected places – standing alone by the dusty deserted ink-slab where old George Rosevear had once put me in my place, stooped over and curiously jabbing his fat little finger into a dry ink duct, sidling down the length of the disused varnishing-machine, his hand gently moving along the coarse canvas of the conveyer-dryer as a child might run a stick along a picket fence, staring for five minutes at a time at a covered monotype machine or an idle guillotine, or walking around in the rat-infested loft among the racks of limestone slabs that had come out from Bavaria. And wherever he went there would be other eyes watching him in unspeakable apprehension: a girl in a blue smock standing at a wrapping table, a maintenance mechanic oiling cog-wheels, a printer in the jobbing department dusting powdered silver on the wet print of a batch of wedding invitations, Claude Cranston standing behind his stacks of unsold calendars.
Towards the end of that year the old man had a stroke. Two of the stone hands who were still employed found him crumpled up below the feed platform of the big rotary-offset that took the sixty-forty sheets. One side of his face was twisted up and his left eye rolled around loosely
. They carried him into the studio, because we had an old couch there, and a telephone with which a doctor might be summoned. He remained fully conscious for sixteen hours, and while we were waiting for the ambulance to come he sent down for his son, Werner, and made a rather pompous, disjointed little speech, handing over the business as if it were all in the flush of its prosperity. That night a second stroke took him off.
It was old Klebendorf’s death, I am sure, that finally drove home to me the appalling irony of the situation I found myself in.
I was conscious suddenly of the agonizing insecurity of every other person in the studio. Being skilled craftsmen, they had become the victims of their own craft skills and specializations: there was nothing else they could do and nowhere else for them to go. Half the lithographic studios in the city were running on the barest of skeleton staffs or had closed down altogether.
They no longer made jokes about their ‘time off’. They were loyal and brave and they shared every adversity with scrupulous fairness and without complaint; but in every face the eyes were haunted by an embedded shadow of disaster: each man, seeing his lay-off time approaching, would grow more and more silent under the afflicting dread of its consequences. One noticed trivial things; they all looked less spruce, even almost shabby, in the mornings; there was no money to spare for dry-cleaning or new ties or a better suit, or even for the absurd extra things like the buttonhole that Paul Klein would buy every morning from the old woman outside Spencer Street railway station – frangipani or gardenia or a red carnation – when he used to come to work dapperly limping and swinging his cane. Tom Middleton’s string quartet was disbanded. Barney Druce gave up his photography and resigned from the canoe club. Just little things like these that sat in their eyes like cold stones. One knew, of course, that they were all beginning to fall behind on their payments towards the securities which represented the absolutes of their being, their house mortgages and their insurance policies, a Baby Austin, a block of land in a ‘better’ suburb, a sandy allotment at Dromana where one day a holiday ‘week-ender’ might be built. There was murmured sombre talk of second-mortgages and the Credit-Foncier and the surrender-value of insurance policies.
Among them all, only I was secure. I, who had to a great degree betrayed their kindliness, who had defected on all the honest standards in which they implicitly believed, I was the only person who had a way out of the dilemma, who had security, who had a second string to his bow.
I gave the matter very careful thought, and then one day I approached Joe Denton, without any previous reference to Mother or to Dad, and I asked him if he would consider waiving the last fourteen months of my indentures. I explained that I thought I would be able to live by my writing, that if I was out of the way it would give that much more latitude to Young Joe, that there was really not enough work any longer to justify two apprentices. He thought about it for a long time, rubbing away at his chin, and then he looked up at me and said:
‘Well, it might be a practical solution, David. You’re pretty hot stuff with this writing of yours. You probably would do better there in the long run. Yes, I’ll put it up to Werner if you want me to. Your parents would have to agree, of course, and one of them would have to come in and sign the waiver. For my part, I think on the whole I’d be in favour of it. You’re quite right, too, it would be a help to have the pressure eased a bit. I think Young Joe would be grateful to you. None of us knows how long this state of affairs is likely to last.’
Before talking to him I had, of course, taken the precaution of telephoning Mr Brewster. At the end of that month I joined the editorial staff of the Morning Post.
While all this was happening Jack had been engaged in his own personal battle with the Depression. So at this point I must retrace some ground …
After Sheila came out of the nursing home they took a bedsitting-room in a back street in Windsor, because the rent was cheap and it was not far from Chapel Street, where Sheila had found a temporary position as a salesgirl at Maple’s. Jack could get no regular employment, but he picked up casual work from time to time, relieving on a baker’s round, some pick-and-shovel jobs, delivering briquettes, driving a contractor’s truck, peddling Tattersall’s lottery tickets. Things like that.
Although I was absurdly embarrassed by the fact that they were obviously ‘living in sin’, I would go down to Windsor every week or so to see how they were getting on. It was an even sadder street than the one we lived in – facing rows of identical little duplexes, sitting behind picket fences and small desiccated garden plots filled with geraniums and laburnums and pigface, and the whole street had decayed in a shabbily respectable way, so that the prim little duplexes were lined up like regimented rows of faded spinster sisters assembled to be praised for their virtuous endurance. It was the sort of street where children played along the gutters at marbles and hoops and cherrybobs and tipcat and hopscotch, because there was nowhere else to play, and at regular intervals down the pavements unkempt oleanders and dusty pepper-trees grew out of crumpled wire guards, inside which chaff had gathered and discarded matchboxes and the dried turds of dogs. All the houses had door-knobs that were brightly polished, and coloured glass leadlights, and names on their gates. The one where Jack and Sheila lived was called Rose of Sharon.
They had the front room, which was larger than one might have expected, but it was so filled with huge clumsy things – a dining-room table and a sideboard as well as an entire veneered bedroom-suite in figured walnut – that it was not really very spacious at all. They had a gas-ring and a shilling meter in the corner, and to get to the toilet, which was only an outhouse, they had to go down through the duplex and way up to the end of the backyard, where a paling fence concealed a lane crowded with battered dust-bins. There was honeysuckle growing over the outhouse because the place was unsewered and a sanitary truck came twice a week to collect the cans. Their Irish landlady lived in some rear part of the other half of the duplex.
Still, Jack and Sheila seemed very happy there … or they were at the beginning, at any rate.
From the first, Jack fought the Depression on his own terms and in his own way. He refused implacably to take the dole or to have anything to do with ‘sustenance work’. ‘If you think I’m going to stand there holding my hand out like a flamin’ beggar, you’ve got another bloody think coming!’ he would say. Or: ‘Catch me lining up for a handout with all those bloomin’ black crows!’ It was not bravado. He genuinely believed it was ‘the Susso’ that was the crushing evil of the times, that the very fact of living on an artificial succour would rip the spirit out of a man, that by donning the dyed black coat you gave in, and accepted the humiliation of defeat without ‘giving it a go’.
He would involve himself in strange ventures to prove his convictions. If he could find no job in the city he would take himself off to the country for weeks at a time on rabbiting expeditions and scratch out a meagre subsistence by selling the skins. But the price for rabbit skins dropped to nothing, and then it was gold ‘fossicking’ that captured his desperate imagination.
‘Remember those Christmas holidays from school, Davy?’ he said to me excitedly, during one of my visits. ‘You know, when we’d go up to Bert’s father’s farm near Corindhap. All those worked-over gold diggings … d’you remember? Well, listen, I’m going to give it a go up there. There must be heaps of gold still left around you know. Jesus, when they were workin’ the place up there they were having gold strikes everywhere, and they’d just tear through a place like shit through a blanket. Don’t you remember Berringa? … that dead town where everyone walked out when they struck it bigger somewhere else … all those locked houses and the mullock-heaps and the poppet-heads … or that long tunnel the Chinese miners opened up through the mountain near Dereel? I bet you, Davy, there’s a ton of stuff up there still, if you can only get your bloody hands on it!’ He chuckled and slapped my shoulder. ‘It’d be a turn-up for the books if I struck it rich, wouldn’t it, eh?’ He rubbed his hand
s together. ‘Like that parsimonious old bloody wowser of a grandfather of ours! Jesus, he owned a goldmine, didn’t he?’
He was away for weeks on this quest, and I can imagine him now, looking back on it, more movingly than I did then, for there were times when I considered him a stubborn fool who should accept the situation and take the dole as everyone else was doing. I see him quite differently now. I see him as a proud, lean, solitary figure, with his blanket-roll and his billy and his wash-pan and his few things, searching through the streets of silent, uninhabited houses and the long-abandoned workings of an Australian ‘ghost town’, or, with a stub of candle in his fingers, cautiously exploring the dangerous tunnels and the caved-in shafts and diggings of generations before, or washing the sandy gravels in the quartzy beds of shallow streams. Making his lonely camp fires, too, under the scraggy gums, cooking his damper in the ashes, playing to the heedless night for his own solace the mouth-organ he always carried in his pocket.
Jack, I realize now, was a character born for ardent adventure. (The stage was never big enough.) He was hamstrung by circumstance and, in another way, by his own innate nobility. He could have acted out some passionate Conradian drama, in South America say, or on some unnamed island, of which he would have been king. Looking back now, down the years which gave adventure to me and denied it to him, one likes to think this. The circumstances were against him. But circumstances are against all of us. One way or another …
He came back from his gold-fossicking gauntly thin, and, with an attempt at self-justification and pride which turned into a joke against himself even before he had finished speaking, he showed Sheila and me the results of it all – one small oval-shaped aspirin bottle not quite filled with gold dust and tiny glittering chips. ‘Never mind, Sheil’,’ he said, with that undaunted grin of his. ‘It was still worth givin’ it a go!’
My Brother Jack Page 19
