by Mark O'Flynn
Once Clancy and I happened on them during this exchange. Violet had accidentally spilled a McIntosh apple from her basket. It began to roll down the steep hill of Katoomba Street until it came to a halt under Clancy’s foot. He retrieved it for her. She accepted it without a word then examined the bruises on it. I could read her thoughts. The cook would be vexed with fruit like this, so she handed it back to Wei Sing. Wei Sing passed it disdainfully to Clancy. Clancy gave it a shine on his shirt then took a bite. He smiled at Wei Sing. Wei Sing eyed him suspiciously. He made the sign of the Chinese shackles, as if he was divining for water, then showed Clancy the flat of his hand and made a slapping motion, leaving Clancy to solve the equation. Violet wouldn’t let him carry the basket as we walked beside her up the hill, both of us hoping some other small disaster might happen that we could save her from. Saving Violet from disaster seemed to be the extent of Clancy’s aspirations, whereas I didn’t know what I wanted.
It was also one of Violet’s duties to help with the cleaning of rooms after guests had departed. She swept and dusted. Where did all these dead blowflies come from? She polished and mopped and stripped the sheets. She supplied rooms with fresh water and, in springtime, fresh flowers. The hotel had over sixty rooms. Mr Goyder said that on no account were maids to enter rooms while guests were in residence. Also, on no account were any of the maids to enter Room One, the King George Suite, on the first floor. This was the sole province of Mrs Haddock herself. The King George Suite was reserved for the most important guests. The governor and the premier had each stayed there at various times. It was rumoured that the hotel would soon be playing host to Prince Alfred, the Duke of Edinburgh, who wanted to see the famed Orphan Rock for himself and report back what all the fuss was about. Violet felt overwhelmed with all this talk of premiers and governors and dukes. She felt, so she said, intimidated by the very number on the door as she scurried past with her wet rags and dustpan. The old gothic serving table downstairs (which Mrs Haddock had told her was three hundred and fifty years old) needed polishing, and that was another of her chores. It was hard to imagine the age of it, and when feeling tired and peevish, she wondered if perhaps Mrs Haddock was of a similar age.
Violet liked to sit in the big, steamy kitchen. It was pleasant to rest for a moment by the warmth of the stove, especially if it was raining outside. If she had returned from her errands unobserved it might be a while before Mrs Haddock set her on the course of her afternoon’s duties. The kitchen smelled warm and doughy. Through Violet’s words I could imagine it clearly, like a dream. She said all the maids found time to dawdle there at some point during the day. The chef didn’t mind. Mrs Haddock’s footsteps on the flagstones were warning enough to give them time to look busy.
At the end of the long day she trudged down the hill to Darley Street to be met, typically, by the snotty faces of her brothers and sisters clamouring about her. ‘Did you bring us something, Violet?’ they wheedled, hoping for leftover sweetmeats from the kitchen.
‘Don’t touch me with your mucky hands.’ Violet was proud of her uniform, but her legs ached from being up on them all day.
‘What did you bring us, Violet?’
‘The back of my hand,’ she said, realising too late just who it was she sounded like, the person she now went in to greet.
Violet’s father, Tom Kefford, would be sitting at the table, his hands about a mug of powerful tea – ‘So strong,’ he always said, ‘you could trot a mouse on it.’ In his work for the Department of Main Roads he was helping to cut the Darling Causeway across the western edge of the range. New settlements would soon be opening up there. He was often away overnight, sometimes for a week, at Hartley or Bowenfels or in the other direction down at Woodford. When he returned, Mrs Kefford was always relieved to see him, so much so that she had yet to start on their tea, so engrossed was she in listening to him, and it was often left to Violet to feed the children, scolding them when they got under her feet.
Snow fell thick on the streets of Katoomba for three weeks straight. Children slid down the steep hill on sheets of tin, until someone’s ankle tendon was near sundered, and Dr Spark’s skill with a needle and thread was put to the test. After that, Dr Spark and Buggery Clout conspired to outlaw the sliding of children on sheets of tin down the main street. Punishment for a first offence was the blunt conjunction of a knuckle and a skull bone.
Down in our valley, sago snow sugared the leaves of angophoras, turning them into pink, ghostly creatures. The rock faces of the escarpment took on greater likenesses to old men. The iron in the stone blazed orange with rust. Waterfalls froze. Sheets of ice could be snapped off and brought back to the village in buckets to be melted over a fire. The deep snow kept us shivering around a communal fire like a tribe of cave people. At night our water bags froze. An inch of ice lay over the water drums; I could lift it out and roll it along like a wheel. Each morning frost crackled on the backs of the pit ponies, and when we took off the blankets their haunches steamed.
At the mine, Clancy and I continued to learn the ropes. I took my turn emptying what the pony skips brought out of the mountain into the dump gantry for the rise up the Incline. People were saying the Incline was the steepest funicular line in the world. North certainly liked to promote this rumour. I learned how to erect brattice and timber baffles so as to direct air deep into the mine. I also tried my hand at spragging, that is, chocking the steel wheels of the railway skips so they wouldn’t roll backwards – that was, of course, how my father lost the front half of his finger. Then Baldy Baldock gave me a pick and put me to work on a long wall with William Garbutt, winkling chunks of torbanite out of the rock. Emerging from the perpetual night of the tunnel into daylight for lunch was painfully bright as our eyes took a long time to adjust. I had pause to consider, in a melancholy way, that here I was at the tender age of fifteen already performing the work my father had been doing most of his life. Surely there was more to being a man than this? And when did my father’s ambition in the world slow down to this lethargic plod? Douglas said I was judging him. He had no desire to be mayor, swanning around in golden chains. I thought that if a squatter from the Warrego River could aspire to be mayor, then why not me or Douglas? I wondered what a mayor actually did to earn a crust.
Some of the men resented that Clancy and I were being paid as much as them even though we were barely a year in the job. It made, they said, a mockery of their wealth of experience. I guess some of them were having some melancholy thoughts of their own. But Ossie Farnell said, reasonably, that as we were doing the same work and facing the same risks it was only fair that we should be paid likewise. Further, he said these divisions among us gave North the upper hand in our negotiations. The mine’s owner didn’t need to listen to us when no one could make a decision as to what we were actually asking for.
Life was still not so easy for Clancy. He didn’t advance up the pecking order as rapidly as me. He was still a trapper, opening the ventilation doors for the wheelers and ponies, greasing the tommy dodds. He wasn’t a good digger, and a pick in his hands was like a wooden leg on a donkey. Our father tried to teach him as best he could the art of pick and shovel, but Clancy’s hands wouldn’t learn the knack of it, and he resented being told. They came near to blows a couple of times and had to be separated by my mother. If she had cause to raise her voice even the birds stopped their racket.
One day Clancy brought home a pick he had neglected to return to the stockpile. He intended to use it to dig a bog hole further away from the village where he could while away a few private moments. While he was levering out a rock he snapped the handle. That in itself was hardly a felony; however, the next day he tried to sneak the implement back into the stockpile and thereby pass the blame on to someone else. Crusher Edwards saw him at it and forced Clancy to pay for it out of his own wages. Douglas didn’t come to Clancy’s defence. He thought the lad had to learn a lesson. But the lesson Clancy learned was not one of motivation. Instead he began to think of way
s he could get back at Crusher Edwards.
At the end of one working day a few weeks later, after Crusher had made his ascent to close down the engine house, Clancy broke into the site office, which was about the size of an upright coffin, and stole the green ribbon North had won for (third) best Combustible Minerals. He showed it to me atop the Ruined Castle where he pretended to blow his nose on it. After we had stopped laughing it dawned on me what trouble he would be in if Crusher ever caught him.
‘Give it a rest, fizgig,’ said Clancy. ‘I’m not gunna keep it. What would I want it for? I just want to make him squirm.’
He kept the ribbon for a week, during which Crusher was unusually agitated, especially if word arrived that North was paying us a visit, as he did from time to time. Then, when he thought Crusher had suffered enough, Clancy broke into the office again and pinned the ribbon back up in its pride of place above the little window. Clancy was flirting with such danger; I didn’t quite see the same humour in it that he did. In fact I began to see his motive – just to make Crusher squirm – as rather paltry.
One calm spring morning several weeks later there was a sudden fall at a rock face. Strange, to think of disaster while the birds were singing, the sun shining. When we had gathered we found that Herb Grainger, who had just started work that day in a new adit, was crushed under several tons of sandstone, coal and shale. It took half a day to dig him out. And still the birds kept on singing. Crusher Edwards, and later North, came and watched the progress of this sombre excavation.
Once the body had been unearthed and taken away under a tarpaulin, Ossie called on everyone to down tools. An impromptu gathering assembled at the site of the accident. Ossie wanted to talk about the issue of safety and the risks we jointly faced. Grainger had been working at a cut where the required props and pillars hadn’t been erected. It was no wonder the ceiling had collapsed. Who was going to help Grainger’s widow? ‘This is,’ his voice took on its speechy quality, ‘an issue for all of us. Look,’ he pointed, ‘there is still blood on the rocks.’
At that moment Crusher Edwards stepped between the men to the centre of the small crowd. North had disappeared immediately after the body was taken away. ‘While we are deeply upset,’ Crusher began, ‘at the injury caused to Mr Grainger —’
‘The death caused to Mr Grainger,’ said Ossie sourly.
‘— the Australian Kerosene Oil and Mineral Company accepts no responsibility for this accident.’
‘He was working for the Australian Kerosene Oil and Mineral Company.’
‘Shut it, Ossie,’ growled Crusher. ‘The accident was Herb’s own fault.’
‘Tell that to his widow.’ Ossie hoicked a gollion onto the ground. ‘I say we take a vote, to stop work, lads, while we ascertain just who is at fault, and whose responsibility it is to provide props and pillars to shore up the goaf.’
Crusher raised his voice. ‘I have it on authority of Mr North to inform you that any man who downs his tools today stands to be dismissed.’
There was a collective moan of protest and dismay, and some incredulity. I looked around at the blackened faces, trying to gauge their various reactions.
Ossie bristled at this talk like a bull to a red rag, or more accurately, like a bull to another bull.
‘I would like to see Mr North’s face when his profit margin drops out of his bum hole.’
‘I might have thought,’ said Crusher, ‘that a minute’s silence would be a more fitting farewell to a fallen comrade.’
‘You are a maggot,’ said Ossie.
‘You have heard me. The company can afford to give you no more time.’ Crusher moved off through the crowd. Ossie called after Edwards, but those words were not remembered. The disaster had been turned on its head.
When he was gone Ossie had trouble holding the attention of the men. He wasn’t the speaker Dundas had been. The miners broke into small groups, muttering and mizzling. Someone kicked over a rock from the fallen goaf so that Grainger’s blood was covered with dust.
‘This is what Dundas meant when he said we had to get organised,’ Ossie insisted. ‘We ought to join with the collieries at Hartley and Gladstone.’
My father spoke up, giving voice to the thoughts of many of the men there. ‘Ossie, it is terrible, no one is arguing that point. But none of us can afford to lose our jobs.’ There were rumblings of agreement.
‘Nor I, Douglas, but I’ll not stand by and see a brother struck down and the management he works for not held to account.’ Ossie could see he was losing the men. He threw up his hands. ‘You can make your own decisions. I stand by mine.’ With that Ossie marched off through the slack, heading towards the village, where Grainger’s broken body had been carried. A few of the others followed, including my father and Garbutt. After some more quiet discussion, the remaining miners went reluctantly back to work.
I liked Ossie’s fighting words. I believed that what happened to Grainger – and also, through no fault of her own, Mrs Grainger – should not happen to any of us, least of all my mother. So after weighing up the risk against my ability to find another job if I had to (I was young, I was fit), I followed after Douglas with heavy foreboding. Looking back I noticed Clancy trailing behind me.
We returned to work the next day, collecting our tools from under Crusher’s glowering eye. Our wages were docked and we had to carry that inconvenience.
However, a week after the accident Ossie was summoned alone to the main office at North’s siding and given his notice. He even had to hand back his crib tin. The matter of the missing ribbon had found a scapegoat. There must have been some angry words exchanged and even a few fisticuffs because Ossie was seen a couple of days later sporting two black eyes courtesy, we guessed, of Crusher Edwards. When we saw him Ossie was wandering down Gang Gang Street, past Hudson’s Gully. Although he was looking determinedly ahead, he somehow seemed at a loss, as if the daylight was a strange country in which he had found himself, a land with its own rituals.
My mother and Mrs Garbutt helped Mrs Grainger to pack her things. There was no point in her staying in the valley without a husband to feed. It took several days for her to stop crying and learn to speak again. On the day she left, Edwards made an exception and allowed a coal skip to carry her possessions to the top. She had a sister in Lawson. No one knew where she went after that.
THIRTEEN
Most Sunday afternoons now, Clancy and I waited for Violet to finish her shift. Sometimes Clancy waited alone. More rarely I did if Clancy had to help his mother. I was too shy to presume, although my observation – deluded as it probably was – was that Violet seemed more pleased to see me alone than the two of us waiting on the street for her. Of course, I don’t know what she thought when it was just Clancy waiting on his own. There was a similar imbalance when Violet’s friend Matilda Sherman was there and the two of them would giggle behind their hands at us.
On rare occasions when the chance arose to hive off for a midweek afternoon, such as the day Grainger died, Clancy would down tools. He had no desire to hand profit to the shareholders of the Australian Kerosene Oil and Mineral Company; he didn’t care if the company went bankrupt and we all lost our jobs. Nor did he feel any solidarity with the miners who were seeking to organise, to – that new word – unionise. Clancy’s motives were never lofty. He had oodle in his kick and a strange luxury, some spare time. He would take Violet to a teashop. I knew how he thought. He would buy her a scone.
One Sunday afternoon the three of us, Clancy, Violet and I, were passing by St Hilda’s Church on Katoomba Street. There were puddles caught on the road, the sky its own airy landscape. There was a commotion of people all a-chatter around the wooden doors of the church. I recognised the formidable shape of Mary Morgan and the less formidable shape of Joshua, dancing – or was it hiding? – behind her. Mary Morgan was flinging her arms heavenward. There were some serious invocations going on.
Among the crowd we could see the uniforms of Sergeant Matthew Brownrig (strange
to see him in the daytime and standing upright) and Buggery Clout. Something was afoot, and this got the better of our curiosity. Somebody was yelling; the Lord’s name was being taken in vain. In that voice we heard all the childhood, midnight sermons of James Cowley Morgan Fisher. We pushed our way through the crowd. Clancy caught Joshua’s attention and their eyes locked for a moment.
After his break with the Salvation Army all those years ago, Fisher had proceeded to have schisms with every other denomination in Katoomba, and further afield. He argued theology and doctrine at the drop of a hat, and fought with the Bappos, the Congos, the Methos, the Presbos. No one would have him. Fisher saw this as a sign of devilish infiltration, and he was quite happy to promulgate this view. He would get lifts with passing bullockies down to churches in Springwood, preaching at them until, riled by his ceaseless prattle, they put him off at lonely sidings. He had schisms up and down the mountains.
‘What is it?’ Violet asked. ‘What’s happening?’ She was mildly intrigued by the fuss. She had seen the old coot about town, of course, distinctive not only for his kilt and blue knees but for the beard he wore tied behind his neck as if he was taking himself for a trot. She knew he was the father of Joshua Morgan, for whom she felt pity. However, she didn’t have our longer-standing familiarity with the man.
‘It’s Fisher. Sonky as a curlew,’ I said.
We eventually gathered from the crowd, and the hysterical shrieks of Mary Morgan, and finally our own observation, that Fisher had nailed his left hand to St Hilda’s wooden door. I don’t know if it was the moment itself, or the proximity to Violet, the laying of her hand on my arm in horror, but it seemed that a warm icicle bled down my spine. It was hard to imagine how Fisher had achieved this on his own, but he had. Unless, of course, it was Mary Morgan who had done the nailing. His kilt was askew in too revealing a manner. There were sniggers among the crowd.
