Two of the young shipping reporters on the other newspapers, Johnny Drew and Noel Grantham, who were close good friends of mine, both bought Reichsmarks tickets for Rotterdam on a Norddeutscher-Lloyd ship, the Aller, and this was a strange thing in a way because Johnny had been one of the real leftist radicals at the University, and he was going to enlist in the International Brigade, and Noel Grantham was a fervent Roman Catholic and he intended to join Franco’s forces. They were the best of friends and remained that way. They shared a cabin going over, with lots of political arguments but no quarrels, and travelled from Rotterdam across France together and then parted at the Spanish frontier. They never saw each other again. Johnny died of gangrene in a Franco prison. Noel was wounded but got to London, where he worked as a police parole officer at first, and then he went back to newspaper work and later became a war correspondent. I suppose the thirties was the last time in the world when that sort of thing could have happened, when people could still take political sides without prejudice to personal feelings.
The real point about all this is that in the original arrangement I was supposed to go with Noel and Johnny – I had even bought my Reichsmarks and pencilled my booking on the AlIer – but then Helen stepped in at the last minute and stopped it all. After all her talk of ‘causes’ and ‘political commitment’ it was a little disconcerting to find her so stubbornly insistent that I should stay at home.
The Aller was delayed for a couple of weeks by some stevedore’s strike, and this made things rather awkward for me with Johnny and Noel, although they never reproached me when I cancelled my booking, and when I said to Helen, ‘But I feel so bloody guilty about it: I should give them a reason why I’m pulling out!’ she just smiled and said, ‘Nonsense, you’ve just got to tell them you’ve fallen in love and you’re engaged to be married, that’s all. Besides, you’re far too useful in other directions, although you don’t have to tell them that.’
In fact, to be perfectly honest, it was rather a relief to me that she did take this stand, and once she had put her foot down I didn’t really try to challenge it. (To this day I do not remember that I actually proposed marriage to her, although perhaps I did, since a date for it was fixed and the church settled.) I had never been caught up in the causes the way Johnny Drew or Noel Grantham had been, for one of them really had a political conscience and the other was a devout and militant Christian, and I had been taken along willy-nilly in something that I was never at all clear about. What I had come to blindly sense through the long pattern of the shipboard interviews was something to do with human suffering that I felt a kind of responsibility to try to understand … not necessarily to do something about, but just to try to understand … and these baffling questions seemed to me to belong more to the Dollicus and the wardrobe drawer and the things in our old hallway than to Helen’s tracts and catch-cries, but I could never see them clearly enough to grasp at them. They were just shadows, the shadows of carnival balloons or of crucifixions, they were the echoes of running feet fading down long empty corridors, they were the sound of subdued voices heard from the other side of high blank walls, they were erasures in an anonymous letter. They were a burden of troublesome images that defied elucidation. (Jack had a quite straightforward attitude to all these things: when I told him I had booked aboard the Aller, he said: ‘You ought to have your bloody head read! What d’you want to go away fighting for a lot of wops and dagoes for? There’s plenty to do here, isn’t there?’)
I remember the first time a German ship came in flying the new Swastika flag of the Nazis. She was the Stassfurt, one of the regular old Hamburg-Australia Line ships which had been calling at Melbourne for years. There had already been some publicity about the new flag and a bunch of leftists were lined up on the end of Victoria Docks carrying placards and shouting slogans and even throwing lumps of coal. But the passengers aboard the steamer were either Australians or European businessmen or German-Jews fleeing from Hitlerism, and even under the new Swastika flag flying right there at the masthead they talked quite openly about the evils of Nazism, while the neat German steward brought out Bock and lager in tall beaded steins, and all the passengers, even the Jews, agreed that they couldn’t have been treated better on the passage out from Hamburg.
Yet the queer thing is that not one of the German ships was ever the same after that day. They were the very ships that I had watched in and out of the docks for years, the long graceful four-masters of the Norddeutscher-Lloyd, the Main and the Aller and the Neckar and the Mosel, and the spotless, stumpier Hamburg-Australia ships like the Stassfurt, and they were even the same jovial and efficient captains I had known for so long, but once they all started coming in under the Swastika a kind of sinister stain seemed to brush off on them, and one never went aboard them again without being oppressed by a feeling of uneasiness, of eyes watching, of mouths opening to ask a question, of jackboots rapping on the steel plates at the far dim ends of alleyways.
Now all this was quite probably imagination, and all of us I think shared these unclarified doubts, but where Johnny and Noel did go away to find some answers for themselves, I was perfectly content, at the end, to have Helen find the answers for me. She loved my coming to her with this first-hand news from Europe, and she would pass the information around among her friends (whom I never knew but who seemed to be active in the Communist Party or the New Theatre or around the Trades Hall or at union meetings), larding it with her own comments and opinions; and since these opinions were ready-made and pat enough I gradually got to accept them as my own. So I am sure it was Helen, mostly, who was responsible for the falsity I began to attach to practically everything political. (There is a passage somewhere in E. M. Forster where he talks of the ‘vast armies of the benighted, who follow neither the heart nor the brain, and march to their destiny by catch-words’, and Helen certainly was one of these.)
Some of the shipboard interviews continued to move me deeply and strangely, and in a way incomprehensibly. When I would tell Helen about them she would make them seem perfectly understandable and clear, although even then I had the feeling that she would deliver these explanations as if human understanding was a commodity that came in a package with instructions for serving, as if Europe was splitting apart according to a set of tested recipes. I knew that her careful clichés were falsifying it all, but I would still accept her versions of the dissonance gratefully enough as an alternative to the hopeless task of trying to examine and analyse the confusion of multiplying shadows for which no explanations could be found at all.
So I had only myself to blame, really.
It is impossible to say precisely when Helen Midgeley decided to make me her husband6 – certainly it was one of the reasons why she kept me from crusading off to Spain – but it is not at all difficult to understand why. She could see that I was beginning to cut something of a figure in the world of Melbourne journalism; I had standing, a good salary, a developing reputation, a political malleability which she would find much pleasure in working on; I was in every way eligible, and I was exactly the partner to share her own potential expansion, socially, intellectually, politically, and economically …
I had by this time long since passed through my cadetship, and I had graduated from the general and more senior rounds to the élite minority of the newspaper’s ‘special writers’. To appreciate the significance of this advancement, one really has to remember the old Morning Post as it was, and it is almost as hard to remember a newspaper of thirty years ago as it is to remember the fashions of thirty years ago.
Everything about the Morning Post was deliberately and publicly arranged to suggest dignity, grandeur, omniscience, infallibility, and a privileged standing in the community, as if the front page masthead, with its lion and its unicorn and the curly riband emblazoned Dieu et Mon Droit and the name in Olde English lettering had conferred some special Royal distinction on the newspaper and its staff. Indeed, it always seemed to me that something of the Royal Palace influence had cr
ept into the architecture of the building, for much marble had been used in the entrance foyer and the lower parts of the façade, and there were impressive doors of studded bronze opening on to the Back Dates Department and a hall decorated with a tremendously large mural all worked out in gold and coloured mosaic of ‘The Spirit of Communications’ – the spirit being a buxom nude woman with bolts of lightning playing from her fingertips who waded Gulliver-like in a shallow sea amid an armada of small ships of various types. A severe storm seemed to be threatening this Lilliputian fleet, for there was an encircling nimbus of thunder clouds, in which sat telegraph operators, astronomers, mathematicians, natives with signal drums, men in solar topees, and white-jacketed scientists with microscopes and test-tubes and Bunsen burners. As an allegory it seemed to mystify most visitors, but they were always very impressed by the fact that it was all created out of tiny chips of gilded and coloured stone, and those on the staff would be very proud to point out that it had been designed by an Associate of the Royal Academy and had cost a cool twenty-five thousand guineas. This also impressed people, because it was more than twice as much as the prize money for the Melbourne Cup.
The Post building was ten stories high, being at that time one of the tallest, and certainly among the grandest buildings in Melbourne, and on top of everything else sat a greenish, copper-sheathed cupola upon which was airily poised, on one foot, a gilded representation of Prometheus, which the reporters generally referred to as ‘Promiscuity Defying Convention’. This golden Prometheus held in his hands, of all things a flagpole, upon which one might have expected a Royal Standard to be unfurled on special days, or at least something dashingly heraldic, but the flag, in fact, was rather a drab thing of maroon and green and white which said Morning Post Classified Ads Give Best Results.
Between the mosaic Spirit of Communications in the entrance hall and the gilded Prometheus reaching to the sky were a few floors containing offices which were rented out, mostly to advertising agencies, and the rest of the space was devoted to the company’s various publishing activities. Although the daily paper was the spiritual core and the financial strength of the business, Prometheus was right to flaunt that banner: it was the endless pages of the classified ads, the death and funeral notices, the births and christenings, the lost property and the land offers, the weddings and the In Memoriams, the legal notices and the business announcements, and the property and employment notices, which formed the inexhaustible Eldorado that was the delight of the counting-house, and on the mundane mass of this revenue the Morning Post could well afford all its literary snobberies and proud conceits.
Yet behind the glitter of the mosaic, the sheen of pink marble, and the gilded flanks of allegorical statuary there were warrens of little rooms and airless cubby-holes divided by frosted glass and mahogany, where pinched Dickensian creatures sat with black celluloid cuffs over their shirt-sleeves, and green celluloid eye-shades over their foreheads, and these anonymous troglodytes were forever computing, tabulating, classifying, indexing and invoicing. They were as far removed from our proud and gentlemanly world of the Literary Staff as denizens on some other little-known and underprivileged planet. There was a secondary group of more-or-less weevil-like creatures who did have certain links with us, even though they, too, were hidden away in curious places in rooms beyond rooms or rooms within rooms and rooms around the ends of corridors. Among these were the printers’ readers, who checked copy and proofs for errors of fact or spelling or typography, and the people concerned with other publications.
The company printed quite a number of strange little magazines that one never saw on bookstalls and could never quite imagine anyone reading – they were to do with crocheting and tatting, or bee-keeping, or gladioli culture, or radio circuits, or house decoration: there was one called The Christian Parishioner and another called Caged Birds and an Almanac of Astrology – and these publications were each of them put out week after week by two or three oldish people in back rooms who seemed not to have names and certainly had no physical features that one ever remembered. The principal of all these subsidiary publications was a weekly called the Rural Record, which was aimed at the agricultural world of the Victorian farmer and was crammed with advertisements – the money that poured in from the manufacturers of castrating-tools and sheep-dip preparations and reapers-and-binders and chemicals to kill white ants and stump-jump ploughs and grubbing equipment! – and I think there is some significance in the fact that this journal had to be printed on a thin type of cheap newsprint, because one of the big factors in its circulation was that it could be cut up into squares and used in country privies and when they tried glossy paper for the covers and a centre pictorial section the sales dropped almost immediately.
In a big newspaper organization there is always a lot more behind the scenes than the marble and the mosaics and the statuary. Since there were fewer than a hundred on the Literary Staff it came as a bit of a shock to realize that there were almost two thousand people on the Post payroll who worked in that building. There were the floors of the counting-house, the women’s staff, the photographic section with its darkrooms and studios and its etching rooms blue-lit and flickering as if summer lightning had been trapped there, the machine floor and the linotype batteries, the artists’ department and the map rooms, the arcaded stores for the great rolls of newsprint, the morgue and the illustrations library, the board-rooms and the conference-rooms, and heaven knows what else in that labyrinth of rooms, floors and corridors. The topmost floor always interested me in the bold shamelessness of its sub-divisions, for there was a central kitchen there, and to the right of this was the Literary Staff’s dining-room, with starched tablecloths and good cutlery and napery and flowers in vases on every table, and at the end of this was a small private dining-room (with a cocktail bar installed) where the directors occasionally gave private luncheons to distinguished guests. On the opposite side of the kitchen was a very much bigger area and this was the staff cafeteria, with hard wooden benches and a painted concrete floor and long wooden tables of scrubbed deal, where all those other than the Literary Staff or the directors or the chief executives of departments could buy self-service meals or tea or coffee in thick china mugs at much cheaper prices. The place was always crowded and usually there was a warm fug of tobacco smoke and food smells and the insidious stink of printing ink and wet newsprint, and in this place you could hear good talk and real laughter that was quite different from the discreet amusement which was the most that was ever permitted in the staff dining-room on the other side of the floor.
The real heart, in a way, of the whole of this complex organism was, nonetheless, the literary department, and this was located on the third floor, midway between the offices of the various editors and the noisy floor of the compositors and the linotype batteries. It was divided into two main rooms on either side of the chief-of-staff’s glassed-in box; nearest the editor’s sanctum was the sub-editors’ room, with fifteen subs around a huge elliptical table, all wearing green eye-shades and stooped over, in shirtsleeves and waistcoats and braces, as if they were all slightly cowed by the basilisk presence of Mr Farnsworth, who had been there as chief sub for as long as anybody could remember. He sat always on a chair that was slightly larger than all the others, and raised a few inches higher, and he had a row of lead-based spikes in front of him, and to his left the teleprinter and the gawping, faintly hissing mouths of the pneumatic tubes. Mr Farnsworth had a series of grunts which the other sub-editors all understood, as they understood the cryptic markings he would make on copy or on proofs, and the subs’ table worked efficiently enough to these directions, for it was only very seldom that old Farnsworth would open his mouth to make any verbal comment. For all the apparent confusion of spikes and proofs and copy paper and wire baskets and scissors and reference books and glue-pots and blue pencils and lay-out sheets that littered it, the subs’ table at the Post was one of the best and most efficient I ever knew.
Mr Farnsworth was v
ery tall and spare and grey: the word that defined him best was aquiline, for he looked like a very old eagle, rather moulted, who has given up soaring and swooping, and just sits on his high rock staring down at the world below. He became too old later for the pressures and the tensions of the night subs’ table, and they made him chief day sub so that he could work only in the mornings and afternoons, sorting early cables and going through spiked copy. He dropped dead in his chair one day around noon, but just sat there staring down at the copy in that basilisk way he had, so that it wasn’t until the early night sub, Wally Graham, came on at five-thirty that anybody realized the old fellow was no longer alive, and in fact was already stiff with rigor mortis.
Swing-doors of cracked glass led from the subs’ room to the reporters’ room, which was a huge high-ceilinged chamber furnished with rows of square tables and chairs. There were varnished maps on the walls and some photographs of early editors, but the room generally speaking was austere and functional. At either end of the room were two lectern-like fixtures, one supporting the duty-book, in which each day’s assignments were entered, and the other a huge leather-bound dictionary. There was a rack for coats and hats, a cupboard filled with ink and copy-paper and carbons and stationery, slotted frames for the reading and cutting files of various newspapers, a framed manifesto on the ethics of journalism quoted from some obscure and long-forgotten editorial in the London Times, a collection of obscene typographical errors pasted upon a partition, and not much else.
My Brother Jack Page 23
