Strumpet City

by James Plunkett

  Mr. Doggett, fixing his new calendar for 1914 to the wall of the office overlooking the idle marshalling yard, looked beyond it and noted that the ships at the quayside were working normally. Free labourers now glutted the port. The police were there to guard them, of course, but he took heart. It could not possibly be long now. In January also Fitz attended a closed meeting in Liberty Hall at which the members were advised to go back to work if they could do so without signing the document that had started the whole thing. Joe, who was standing beside Fitz, looked around at him. They were beaten. For the present anyway. No one had said so, but everybody knew it. They would have to get back to work now as best they could.

  ‘That’s that,’ Fitz said. They stood at the river wall to talk awhile. The food kitchens in the basement were already closed. There were no longer queues with jamjars and cans.

  ‘What are the chances?’ Joe wondered.

  ‘None for me,’ Fitz said.

  ‘Still—no harm trying.’

  ‘No harm in the world,’ Fitz said.

  Mary said the same thing. She had never criticised or complained, but she had grown thin and looked unwell. The police had wrecked what little remained in the room which once had been her source of comfort and pride. It had only the broken table now and, incongruously, the clock that had been Pat’s wedding present to them. The police had overlooked it. Or perhaps Father Giffley’s unexpected entry had saved it. She said he should try his luck. Maybe they would remember that he had always been a good workman.

  He went down to the foundry with the rest. They were presented with a form which was not quite the same as the original. It demanded an undertaking that they would not take part in sympathetic strikes but it made no mention of relinquishing membership of their Union. They discussed it and decided to sign.

  ‘There’ll be another day,’ Fitz told them when they consulted him. He himself was called aside by Carrington. They walked in silence down the yard to an empty storeroom. At the door Carrington took a whistle from his pocket and stopped to blow two blasts. A boy appeared from one of the houses.

  ‘Get my sandwiches from the locker,’ Carrington told him, ‘and bring a can of tea.’

  ‘Yes, Mr. Carrington,’ the boy said.

  They went inside. There was a stove lighting in one corner and from the window they had a view of the wintry yard. It looked desolate enough. Exposed machinery had gathered rust, grass had rooted in the spaces between the cobbles, the paint on doors and woodwork had faded and peeled.

  ‘We’ll have a cup of tea when the nipper comes,’ Carrington said.

  ‘I’m not here to drink their tea,’ Fitz told him.

  ‘The tea is mine. Don’t be so bloody shirty.’ His tone was friendly. But he was embarrassed.

  ‘I’d like to know what the news is,’ Fitz said. Carrington opened the shutter of the stove and stirred the coals until they flamed.

  ‘We might as well be warm,’ he said.

  He offered Fitz a stool to sit on and gave him a cigarette. It was so long since Fitz had smoked that the first pull of it made him dizzy. For a while Carrington’s face became a blurred disc.

  ‘The news isn’t good,’ Carrington said at last.

  ‘I thought it wouldn’t be,’ Fitz told him.

  ‘I told you they wouldn’t re-employ a foreman who went out with the rank and file, and that’s the instruction they’ve sent down. You’re not to be taken on.’

  ‘Am I the only one?’

  ‘There are two others.’

  ‘Shop stewards?’

  ‘One is a shop steward. The other is just an incurable troublemaker.’

  The boy came in with the sandwiches and the tea. Fitz rose to go but Carrington gripped his arm.

  ‘We’re not enemies, Fitz.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Then stay where you are. I want to talk to you.’

  ‘Is there any sense in talking?’

  ‘Sit down.’

  Fitz hesitated. But he took the mug of tea which Carrington pressed on him and accepted a sandwich. The feel of the sandwich in his hand roused reserves of hunger that had been building up for weeks. It had meat in it. He forced himself to delay before eating it. It took an enormous amount of will. After a decent interval he began to eat it. Once he began it was impossible to stop. He worked away steadily at it until it had gone. Carrington immediately offered him another, but Fitz waved it aside.

  ‘No shame in being hungry,’ Carrington said, ‘take it.’ He was smiling. Fitz gave in and took it.

  ‘Thanks,’ he said.

  ‘There’s one way you might get back,’ Carrington said, ‘but you’re probably going to be stubborn about it.’

  ‘Tell me what it is.’

  ‘If I could tell them you’d leave the union and give an undertaking never to join it again, it might make them change their minds.’

  ‘Is this your idea or theirs?’

  ‘Mine. I don’t even know if it would work. But I’m willing to put it to them.’

  ‘I’ll do anything within reason,’ Fitz said, ‘but not that.’

  ‘Fitz,’ Carrington said earnestly, ‘I have respect for you as a person and as one of my best foremen. If you do what I ask it’ll all be forgotten about in a few months anyway. What’s the sense in being stubborn?’

  ‘No,’ Fitz said.

  ‘Do you realise the position you’re in?’

  ‘I’ve a shrewd notion.’

  ‘I don’t think you have,’ Carrington said. ‘You’re the only foreman I know of who walked out with the men. It’s not just a matter of the foundry refusing to employ you. You’ll be blacklisted in every job in the city.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘Because I’ve been given the general list drawn up by the Federation with instructions to follow it, when I’m taking men on. Your name is on it. You don’t believe me?’

  The information was hard to accept. As he reflected on it he felt panic beginning to stir in the back of his mind.

  ‘I believe you,’ Fitz said.

  ‘Then let me try what I suggested.’

  Fitz hesitated. He shut his mind to speculation about the future.

  ‘No,’ he said.

  ‘You’re a stubborn bloody man,’ Carrington said. He offered another cigarette and they smoked in silence. Then Carrington said:

  ‘There’s something else I wanted to speak to you about. I’m thinking of that friend of yours who lost his legs here a couple of years ago. Mulhall—wasn’t it?’

  ‘Bernard Mulhall,’ Fitz said. ‘He died.’

  ‘I know that. Had he a family?’

  ‘A wife and an only son.’

  ‘That’s what I was told. How old is the son?’

  ‘About eighteen. He might be more.’

  ‘I think I can help him.’

  ‘I seem to remember Bernie Mulhall being on your blacklist too.’

  ‘I know. But there was a lot of admiration and sympathy for him higher up. I can offer him a job.’

  ‘Have you been told to?’

  ‘Not in so many words. But one of the Directors expressed interest in the case and sent word down the line. A bit mad in his way—Yearling.’

  Fitz made no comment.

  ‘He’s the man that left you home on the evening of the accident,’ Carrington supplied.

  ‘I remember him,’ Fitz said.

  ‘Will you send young Mulhall down to me?’

  ‘I will,’ Fitz said.

  ‘And keep in touch with me. There’s nothing I can do here, but I get to know of odd jobs here and there. They might help to keep things going for you while you look around.’

  ‘Do you think there’s any point in looking around?’

  ‘If you can stand up to being sent from pillar to post. Don’t let them beat you.’

  Fitz smiled at him.

  ‘I’m wondering whose side you’re on.’

  ‘Not on Larkin’s anyway,’ Carrington said. ‘Yours—I suppose
.’

  ‘That’s something,’ Fitz said.

  Willie Mulhall started in the foundry a week later. It was his first adult job. His mother came over to thank Mary the moment she got the news.

  ‘Now I’ll be able to pay back what I owe you,’ she said. She embraced Mary and began to cry.

  There was nothing for Fitz. He went from job to job but was turned away time after time. In February the Strike Fund closed down altogether. When that happened Mary put the clock on the pram and wheeled it down to The Erin’s Isle Pawnshop. Mr. Silverwater refused to look at it. He was open for people who wanted to redeem the articles they had pledged, not to take in more. She returned home and Fitz put it back on its place on the mantelpiece.

  ‘What are we to do?’ she asked him. He had no answer for her. Except to offer to try what Carrington had suggested. That, too, was impossible.

  ‘We’ll keep trying. Things will be better as the rest begin working again. Something is bound to turn up.’

  That evening he borrowed from Joe, who was back at work in Nolan & Keyes.

  ‘It’ll be a while before I can pay you back,’ he said.

  ‘Don’t be worrying,’ Joe told him. But he worried just the same. He had never before borrowed money without knowing how he was going to return it. He was starting at the bottom again—a scavenger for odd jobs.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Pat was passing the shop with its display of religious goods when the little foreman stopped him on the pavement and said:

  ‘I don’t seem to have seen you around lately?’

  ‘I’ve been in gaol,’ Pat said.

  ‘When did you get out?’

  ‘This morning, about two hours ago.’

  ‘And what was it like?’

  Pat considered.

  ‘A bit confined,’ he decided.

  ‘Come over here with me, for the love of God.’

  ‘What is it?’ Pat asked.

  The little foreman insisted on dragging him over to the window.

  ‘Have a look at that,’ he invited, pointing at it. Pat looked in.

  ‘Well—I’ll be damned,’ he said.

  Inside the window, with a pencil behind his ear and a roll of dockets peeping from the breast pocket of his shop coat, Timothy Keever was struggling to put a statue of St. Patrick on display. The statue was heavy and the window space already crowded.

  ‘Watch this,’ said the little foreman. Pat had met him from time to time in various bookmakers’ shops, where his fellow-punters knew him as Ballcock Brannigan. He now banged with his fist on the glass to attract Keever’s attention. Neither could hear the other because of the thickness of the glass, so Ballcock began to convey his instructions in dumbshow. Keever, indicating that he understood, moved first a statue of St. Christopher and another of the Little Flower. But the rearrangement was unsuccessful. He looked out for further instructions.

  ‘Move the other stuff first.’ Ballcock shouted in at him. Keever shook his head.

  ‘Did you ever see such a thick?’ Ballcock asked Pat. He gave the instruction again, this time in dumbshow. Keever acknowledged and set to work again. He shifted a heavily mounted candle, Paschal in design; then a set of purple vestments, appropriate liturgically to the seasons of Advent and Lent; then a shroud which would provide for the last sartorial decencies of some deceased Brother of the Third Order of St. Francis. In his struggle with these complexities he banged his head severely against a sanctuary lamp, a pendulous one with a red bowl and a brass container.

  ‘Holy Jaysus,’ Ballcock said. Keever, reaching up to steady the lamp which was swaying from the blow, nearly toppled the statue nearest to him. Ballcock hammered furiously on the glass.

  ‘You clumsy bastard,’ he shouted. Keever looked out, puzzled.

  ‘Deaf as well as everything else,’ Ballcock decided. He turned his back to the glass and lit a cigarette.

  ‘That’s what you get for employing ex-scabs,’ Pat said.

  ‘No choice of mine,’ Ballcock said. ‘Clerical influence—that’s what has Keever in his job. Here, have a cigarette.’

  ‘Thanks,’ Pat said.

  ‘I suppose you haven’t been doing the horses lately?’

  ‘They didn’t encourage it,’ Pat said. ‘What’s any good today?’

  ‘I’ll tell you what’s good,’ Ballcock confided. ‘Packleader at Leicester in the two-forty. It’s information which I got from a priest that’s a customer—a most Reverend punter.’

  ‘I haven’t done a horse for months,’ Pat told him.

  ‘Nor nothing else neither,’ Ballcock said, ‘not if gaol’s the same as in my day.’

  ‘That’s right,’ Pat agreed. ‘Nothing else.’

  ‘Well—be true to the Church and back Packleader. Follow your clergy. Have you a job?’

  ‘I don’t know. I’m on my way down to Nolan & Keyes to find out.’

  ‘If you don’t pick it up right away,’ Ballcock offered, ‘drop back to me. I have three days casual I can give you.’

  ‘I’d be glad of it.’

  ‘Welcome,’ Ballcock said. He flung away his cigarette butt and looked again at the window. Keever was doing his best to rearrange the display.

  ‘Excuse me,’ Ballcock said, ‘I have a few things to discuss with mahogany skull there.’

  He strode in and called Keever from the window. They both disappeared into the back of the shop.

  It was a cold, blustering day, with a sky that was too bright and too wide after his months in prison and streets that were noisy and suddenly unfamiliar. The shop window was better. It was neatly framed and, now that Keever had left, comfortingly devoid of speech and movement. St. Patrick, the National Apostle, occupied a central position. In green robes and bishop’s mitre he gazed past Pat at the streets of the capital city. Snakes at his feet cowered in petrified terror of his golden crozier and in his right hand a stone shamrock symbolised the mystery of the Unity and the Most Holy Trinity. St. Patrick’s Day, Pat calculated, was almost exactly a week away. He was glad to make the calculation. It brought him into touch with everyday life for the first time since his release.

  There was a second fact to be absorbed. Tonight, all going well, he would sleep in the House of the Boer War Heroes. Lily’s letter to him had said so. While he finished his cigarette he took it from his pocket and read it again:

  . . . you will have nowhere of your own to stay after all those months will you but don’t worry the landlady here is away I have the house all to myself and I can put you up for the night which will give you a bit of a chance to look around for somewhere but don’t come until after seven o’clock so as I will be home from my work. Everything with me is all right hospital was a great rest and I have good news for you Pat which is why I want you to come as well but watch out for the neighbours if they as much as well you know what I mean be careful for God’s sake or we are both sunk . . .

  At seven o’clock, about ten hours away, he would see her and be staying with her again. The thought made him restless. He returned the letter to his pocket and began to walk. There was his job to be enquired about. There was this suddenly unfamiliar city to be considered. They were not the streets of a few months before. No collection boxes rattled, no pickets were on patrol, the trams ran without police protection. It seemed a tame end to eight months of struggle. He wondered how his mates on the job would feel about it. He quickened his pace.

  Gulls circling above the river gladdened his heart. That and the strong smell of the sea. His spirit now welcomed all sounds, those of crane and ship, dray wheel and bogey. The width of the sky exalted him. He stopped and was overjoyed at the sight of the unloading gangs along the wharf. To men he did not know he shouted.

  ‘Hi, mate—more power.’

  They grinned and waved back. There was no defeat in the faces he passed. They sweated familiarly, were dust-coated, had ready answers. They had spirits that recovered easily from adversity. A few weeks’ work and everything was as it had alw
ays been. More or less. There was little to be lost that was worth pining about.

  The gates of Nolan & Keyes stood wide open, a sunlit space where the air smelled of tar from the nearby gasworks. It was noonday now. The carters were either off on their rounds or gathered in the shed near the stables having their midday food.

  Suddenly unsure, he stepped into the gateman’s hut and found the yard foreman drinking tea and smoking his pipe by the gas fire. The foreman looked around, then rose slowly.

  ‘Pat Bannister,’ he said. To Pat’s surprise he held out his hand.

  ‘Back again,’ Pat said, taking it.

  ‘When did you get out?’

  ‘This morning.’

  ‘You should have let me know.’

  That was hopeful.

  ‘They weren’t greatly in favour of letter-writing,’ Pat said.

  ‘You’re looking for a start?’

  ‘I came down here first thing.’

  ‘Certainly,’ the foreman said.

  ‘When?’

  ‘Right now, if you like. There’s a half-day left.’

  ‘That’d suit fine.’

  ‘Quinn has your horse I’m afraid,’ the foreman said, ‘but Mulcahy’s out sick so you could yoke up his. Come on the scales with the rest of them after the meal break and I’ll have a half-day made up for you.’

  Pat hesitated. He wondered about the form, but there seemed to be nothing else.

  ‘No formalities?’

  ‘Not here,’ the foreman said. ‘Nolan & Keyes and Doggett’s want to get on with the bloody work. But don’t go shouting out loud about Larkin. Give it a rest for a while.’

  ‘Are the lads below?’

  ‘They are,’ the foreman said, ‘you’ll find them chewing the rag—as usual.’

  ‘I’ll be glad to do the half-day,’ Pat confessed.