A catalogue record for this book is available from the National Library of New Zealand
ISBN
e: 978-1-988516-01-1
m: 978-1-988516-02-8
An Upstart Press Book
Published in 2017 by Upstart Press Ltd
Level 4, 15 Huron St, Takapuna
Auckland, New Zealand
Text © Paddy Richardson 2017
The moral rights of the author have been asserted.
Design and format © Upstart Press Ltd 2017
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Front cover: Young girl’s image from the painting ‘Mila’ by Simon Richardson; photograph of Blackball by C Fraser, Sir George Grey Special Collections, Auckland Libraries (AWNS-19100217-14-1)
This one is for the men. With love and fond memories: Warwick, Jim, Chris, Simon and Wayne.
Part One
Down by a shining water well
I found a very little dell,
No higher than my head.
The heather and the gorse about
In summer bloom were coming out,
Some yellow and some red.
‘My Kingdom’, Robert Louis Stevenson
1
Blackball. There beside the creek and beneath the white-crusted Alps, hunched close against the Paparoas with the slide of beeches, rata, flax, ferns and moss clasping and enclosing it, the nor’westers swooping in from the Tasman Sea, the summers stifling and the winters freezing the very bones of you. Still, you grow used to a place. Most born here stay; those from the outside leave right away. Either that or they get that fond of it they’d never be anywhere else.
The first ones came for gold. The English capitalists after that came for the coal, growing the town through words and drawings in London offices and clubs. Sir Edwin Sandy Dawes bought up the land, the mine was opened and the aerial ropeway built to carry coal across Goat Terrace and Grey River to Ngahere. The men came with their families to work while those in London sat tight and waited for their profits.
Never come near the place, never in all these years.
Well, but they do all right for themselves without them; everything they’ve got here’s been built by the working man. There’s the Lodge, for one, and then there’s the Miners’ Hall; good-sized, solid buildings both of them. Yes, they look after their own here, my word, they do; there’s the brass band and the dances and the picnics for the kiddies and when a man gets sick or injured down the mine, well, anyone too sick or hurt to work’s looked after by the Workers’ Union, him and his missus and the kiddies as well. It’s the people make a place and this is a place to be proud of.
First thing you come across on your way in is the bridge, the wooden palings dried out silver and the planks squealing beneath your feet. After that comes the cemetery, then there’s the road into town so flat you can see down to the very end of it. On each side there are the ditches the men dug out to let the water through to stop the place flooding; here, on the coast, the rain comes in torrents sweeping down the hills so those ditches on the roadside had to be wide and deep. You see them, often enough, brim-full and turned black from the tar brought down from the roofs and as gushing and menacing as a river. You see the women outside the cottages calling to the kiddies to come back and stay away.
Behind the ditches are the coal piles, one for each cottage and delivered Tuesdays from the mine. The cottages, with the weatherboards bare of paint and the tarred roofs, are little and mean-looking but the women keep them clean, my word they do. And there’s the schoolhouse. They say the first teacher who came had to beat the lads out of the trees to get them inside and though they come willingly enough now they’re most of them at the mine by the time they’re thirteen.
Not that they’re an ignorant lot here, my word no. This place has its fair share of books to read and people to talk about them and men, important men, you understand, from the unions in England come regularly here to explain what the present thinking is and what’s planned. It’s solidarity here, with socialism the glue fastening everything together and, though this is only a little town, the folk here are a part of something much bigger so there’s the need and the determination to keep up with what’s going on with the movement in the rest of the world, to be ready for what’s coming.
It’ll not always be this way. By God, it will not.
The reek of sulphur seeps into the air and hangs in it like burnt treacle and the coal dust is in your hair and on your skin, it’s under your fingernails and you’re coughing it out or it’ll choke you. But coal is the town’s life-blood; the roof over your head, the food on your plate, it’s how you keep yourself warm and it gives you the hot water for the tin bath hauled every night into the kitchen to scrub the black from a working man’s skin. It’s that precious, soon as one of the bins moving across the aerial railway starts tipping, the ladies are out there with their buckets and their shovels, shouting and shoving, pulling hair sometimes, they’re that desperate for the extra.
Not that those same ladies aren’t tight with their sewing circles and knitting groups and giving a hand with little ones when a newborn comes along. And whenever there’s sickness or a death in a house, there’s even more of a shove over who’s first to the doorstep with a basket filled with cordials and scones. It’s a hard life for the women here and they have to stick together. The ones who don’t flounder, well, just look at Teresa Williams. Where’s it got her, keeping herself to herself? The prettiest girl in Ahaura at one time, they say, but see her now in one or other of the same two dresses she’s worn for years, her hands shaking and not able to look anyone in the eye and her boys gone, soon as they were old enough, off without so much as a word. Never does to set yourself up here with airs and graces. There’s a long way to fall with no one to catch you.
On Sundays the Presbyterian church in Hart Street is fair shuddering on its foundations with the hymns being played; there’s fine singers among them, from Wales the best of them and they show others the way. There are strong players in the brass band as well: Jack Cassidy on the trombone, Jimmy Deans on the mellophone and Tom Bright on the euphonium, and they say young Clem’s learning now and it’s the cornet he’s picked up. Well, and don’t they make a picture, the Bright family outside the church on a Sunday? Mick’s a good man, high up in the union he is, and there’s Meg and Clem and the little girls and, my word, Meg Bright’s a handsome woman but nice with it, a fine woman, Meggie Bright is, one of the best.
St Brendan’s is just around the corner. It was a grand day that Sunday St Brendan’s finally opened with the choir from Ahaura singing and Father Boyle speaking out in that feeling way he has of the blood of martyrs being the seed of the Church and how that applied to the terrible sufferings of the Irish race for their faith. And there she was, Teresa Williams, with the two older boys on one side of her and the twins on the other and little Pansy on her knee. Teresa still had her looks then and the kiddies were nicely decked out. That’s the one thing you always could say for Teresa Williams: in spite of Dan Williams and all his boozing and lady friends and what little was left out of his pay packet for her, she kept the kiddies clean and dressed tidy. How she did that was anyone’s guess, though Nellie Branson from the Post Office said there was a parcel every year from Ahaura that Teresa came for, though she never uttered a word about it to Nellie and never so much as a tha
nk you either. But the boys were there, fair like Teresa they were and nice-looking with their pants and shirts clean and pressed and not so much as a scuff on their boots. And Pansy, well, what a little poppet, she was, what a little beauty in the white dress with the sash and the ribbons in her hair. She was the one took after her dad, dark and with those eyes.
Teresa was praying for the week ahead. That he wouldn’t come home the worse for drink and if he did she could keep the boys out of his way. It was them she had to look out for, she’d rather get it herself than have her boys hurt. But oh, the smash of his fists and that mad, hard look in his eyes. It’s the way he gets with the drink but he hurts her and there’s the shame of it as well with the walls of the house thin and next door’s so close and the shouting from him and the whimpering she can’t keep in her throat and the bruises on her face they look for, though she asks him, not my face, please, not my face.
She didn’t have to bother about Pansy — oh, but isn’t she the apple of his eye, that one? — so she prays for her boys and the days ahead and she offers up the week as she did with the last, offers up her suffering along with it, mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa, knocking with her fist against her breast.
The town is the glint of oil lamps in the windows lighting up the dark when you’re walking of an evening, it’s Mother once again reading aloud the letters from Home, which is England. And it’s the wood pigeons down again from the hills to sup from the rhododendrons since it’s spring and it’s looking for the pinpoints of glow worms in the caves off the Croesus track. It’s the annual Miners’ Picnic with new shirts and clean pants for the little boys and new frocks for the little girls, the hemming just finished late last night. It’s the autumn blackberrying and the jam-making afterwards, it’s the uptowners from the crossroads up, and the rest of them the downtowners, it’s the Miners’ Ball, it’s the band blaring out for the dances in the hall. And it’s the pelting pouring hammering bucketing rollocking lashings of rain, rocketing out of the heavens.
And even with too many of them dying during a hard birth, or others as just wee babies or little ones from the diphtheria or the croup or the fever, Blackball’s the kiddies, more and more of them. You hear them calling out to each other in the mornings on their way to the schoolhouse and you see them running together on the wide, flat streets or crouched in a huddle over the drains looking for crawlies or there they are at the creek building dams and paddling about in the water screaming out at the cold of it.
If you look up above you, you can just about make them out: Clem Bright and Otto Bader dashing around like young goats up there in among the ferns and the flaxes and the trees and Pansy Williams won’t be far away, either. They’re that tight, those three, that their mothers just about have to prise them apart to get them home for their teas.
Pansy’s in the hidey-hole. They made it halfway up a tree where the trunk forks out. Clem took up the axe he’d carried up with him from home and cut away the middle branches so there was room to sit, then they fitted in the bits of timber they’d foraged for around the mine and nailed them in.
Up from her lookout point, the bush is still filled with light and she watches as the town, already partially hidden by the floating smoke mist, darkens and begins to fade away. At school, Mr Kennedy told them the town had been named after the shipping line which was entrusted with a task of great consequence, that of delivering coal from the mine to England and the Empire. The finest coal there is, boys and girls, renowned throughout the Empire for the brilliance and the hardness which makes it burn so hot and so long. He indicated with his stick on the map where the ships must travel to, all the pink countries: England, India, Hong Kong, Singapore, Malaya, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. All the countries which stand together, boys and girls, all the countries united and every one of them with its own special duty to the King and Empire, such as us sending coal.
Pansy Williams watches from her hidey-hole way up above the cemetery and the sliver of creek, way up above the criss-cross of roads and the clanking, yawning mine and the churches and the cottages and the schoolhouse and the Miners’ Hall.
Blackball. Blackball.
2
The men have already passed them on their way back from the mine, Mr Bright calling out they need to come in soon, his teeth flashing white against the blackness of his face. But they’ve still got time because first the men need their baths and their mothers will be busy filling the tubs from the big kettles on the range and scrubbing their dads’ backs until the skin’s clean as they can get it. And busy, too, hoisting up the tubs and tipping out the water, all oily and grey it is, out into the backyard for the spuds.
Too busy to call them in yet. They’ve got a game going and it’s a good one they started up in the bush, except it got too dark so they brought it down into the lights out now in the streets. You run and hide like usual but with this game you have to sneak up behind and tag the one that’s in before they see you.
You’re in, you’re in.
Up there it’s better because you’re running and jumping over tree-roots and rocks and all the time listening for the counting to stop and looking for the right place. You dart off the track and hunch down with your heart beating hard and that tickly, almost-scared feeling in your belly and with the ferns hiding you and the smell of the bush and earth around you, wet and warm and a strange kind of sweet.
Huddled up, not breathing almost, listening hard for the muffled thudda-thudda-thudda of feet dulled down by the layers of spongy ferns. Waiting for the shock of hands grasping your shoulder and dragging you out. Sometimes she makes it. She lifts her head, spies it out and then she’s running, her hand reaching, reaching, slapping the tree. Home free.
But it’s good down here as well, hiding in the shadows then running fast as you can make it before you’re picked up under the light. Everything is foggy-wet and the frost that’s coming in the night is already in the air.
Pansy. Clem. Otto.
But now Ma’s out by the coal heap, her arms folded over her chest and Mr Bright’s at the front door, his pipe in his hand, looking up and down the road. And now here’s Klara Bader marching towards them like she’s cock of the walk and you’d better not get in her way.
You have to come home. Mummy said.
What if they ran up into the bush again and hid? Or to the caves? The caves would be better: they could light a fire, there’s wood and lumps of coal there for the taking and they could sneak out after dark for blankets and food. They could stay for ever in the caves. Nobody would find them.
Hurry up, Otto. Or I’ll tell.
She doesn’t want to go home. Her eyes dart between Clem and Otto. Can they hear her? They’ve practised it up in the bush, kneeling together, eyes tight closed, sending messages with their thoughts.
Run away. Run.
Oh, but Clem’s already heading off for home. Clem always goes when he’s called and he never talks back, even if they’re in the middle of something important. Otto, though. Otto would come.
Pan-sy. You come along right now.
Otto!
Otto slides his eyes at her and that look Mr Kennedy calls devilment is on his face but now he’s following after Klara.
Even with the boys gone and only the three of them left, being inside makes her feel like she’s being squeezed like washing dragged through the mangle.
Don’t make me have to come and get you, missy.
It’s not just the boots heaped by the door and the clothes dripping and sagging from the pulley above the range and the buckets of coal by the hearth and the newspapers on the table. You could take away all of them but there would be still Ma and Daddy making the air too small.
She could run away on her own. She could. Except it’s dark, darker still down at the caves. She’s not brave enough to go alone.
‘Well, now, and how’s my little girl and what’ve you been up to?’ D
addy has the Argus spread across the table and he looks up as she follows Ma inside. Ma takes the bowls from the shelf and pours soup into each one. She fishes around with the ladle for the soup bone and spoons it into Daddy’s.
‘She should be in here helping me with the dinner, is what she should be up to. She’s plenty old enough. When I was her age I was cooking a whole mutton dinner for a family. She’s too big to be out playing games in the streets.’
‘It’s for me to say when the girl’s too big for this or old enough for that.’
Daddy’s on her side and that’s good, except it’s bad as well because, while Ma doesn’t argue back, she keeps it all inside of herself, all the words Daddy says in Pansy’s favour. Ma never smiles and draws Pansy close to her as she’s seen other mothers do. Like Mrs Bright who’s always nice and cheerful and holds Clem against her sometimes and calls him my little lad even though his face flares up red.
She washes her hands in the basin while Ma puts out bread and the soup. Daddy keeps on with the paper while he eats, reading and turning over the pages, spreading them out flat so that they take up most of the table. He picks up the bone in his fingers, eats the meat and sucks out the marrow, then he cleans his bowl up with his bread, mopping up the juice. He licks his fingers and dries them on the paper and when he stands up Pansy feels them in her hair messing it up and she giggles. ‘You play long as you want, girlie,’ he says. ‘It’ll all turn out for you the same way as it has for me soon enough, and, take my word for it, there’ll be no more playing for you then.’
He shoves his cap on his head, gives her a wink and he’s gone, the door shutting behind him. Ma looks up, frowning, from her bowl. It’s still half-full. Ma never eats much. ‘Get that hair out of your face and finish your soup. The chooks need feeding.’
Every night after Daddy leaves and the chooks are fed and everything cleaned up in the kitchen they say the rosary. Ma takes her beads out of the little satin bag, kisses the crucifix and makes the sign of the cross with it. Blessed mother, by the power of the rosary we beseech you to embrace all the members of our family in the love of your Immaculate Heart.
Through the Lonesome Dark Page 1
