by JH Fletcher
Let me accept this, she prayed to the God she did not acknowledge. If it means so much to her. Let me accept it, if it pleases her.
She could not.
She snatched at Emma’s hands, held them in her own. She turned in her chair and looked with troubled eyes at her friend. ‘I’m sorry …’ So much she wanted not to hurt her, not to reject, but this was outside the bounds of possibility. She lifted the hands, kissed them.
Emma snatched them as from a fire.
‘Sorry?’ Face red and mottled, voice venomous.
‘I cannot,’ Dorrie explained.
‘Opportunity would be a great thing. I offer you friendship and you misinterpret it. Deliberately.’
Beneath her gown Dorrie’s skin still itched with the heat of Emma’s hands. ‘No harm done.’
‘That depends on who we mean, doesn’t it?’ The agate eyes scoured her. ‘I fear I have been mistaken in you.’
And left, chin high.
Dorrie sat for a long time while beyond the window the sky slowly darkened. Finally she got up, slipped on some shoes, wrapped a shawl about her and went out.
A light shone through Emma’s window. Dorrie raised her hand to knock on the door, changed her mind. Softly she tried the door. It opened silently. She looked inside.
Face down upon the bed, Emma lay. Her hands were clenched. Her face was buried in the pillow and from the pillow came a hurt, rusty sound like a child abandoned in the night.
Softly Dorrie closed the door between them.
It was one thing to graduate. Getting work as a graduate was another matter. Outside domestic duties any kind of job was hard to come by. Jobs for an Honours BA graduate were non-existent. Or nearly.
Years afterwards, Dorrie could still not make up her mind whether she had become involved in politics because of Ted Cutbone or whether it had been the other way round.
Ted Cutbone was an under-educated man with a fiery sense of outrage, a stalwart of the fledgling union movement. He was descended from a woman who had been transported from Somerset in the 1840s as a convicted prostitute and thief who, by guts alone, had made her way in the world. He was proud of that background, fond of saying that if he’d had half her strength he would have been prime minister.
It was hard to see Ted Cutbone as prime minister but he was passionately committed to advancing the cause of the working man. Ted got Dorrie a job with the Labor Party. She stood beside him on a hundred platforms, helped him organise strikes and walk-outs.
Ted had been pressing Dorrie to marry him for years when, on her thirty-first birthday, she told him she was pregnant.
‘That does it,’ he said. ‘We got to get married, now.’
She would not. ‘I’ll stay with you as long as you want me,’ she told him. ‘But marriage? Never.’
Beneath all his talk of a new order, Ted Cutbone was a conventional man. ‘I want our child to have a good start. What’s wrong with marriage?’
‘Nothing right with it, either. It’s bondage. Especially for a woman. I’d rather be free.’
Pregnant or not, she continued with her involvement in union and political matters. After her son Blaine was born she became a familiar sight at meetings, wearing the brilliant red sash that became her trademark, her son strapped to her hip.
She became one of the best-known figures of the Left.
‘All that politics,’ Dorrie said. ‘Fat lot of good it did me. But it seemed the right thing to do at the time, so I did it.’
To Ruth, Dorrie was the stuff of legend, of fantasy almost. Listening to the stories of Dorrie’s youth was like visiting another universe. Dorrie had been born at the beginning of things, Ruth thought enviously. In those days it had still been possible to live a life of passionate involvement, to create something worthwhile. Whereas now there was only a dreadful and uncertain future, a war that might destroy them all.
Ruth did not want to come back to such a world from the wonders and passion of the past. ‘You’ve had such an exciting life.’
The bird-bright eyes studied her. ‘Looking back, I suppose it was. It didn’t seem so at the time. Then we stuck up for what we thought was right, fought what we thought was wrong, lived our lives from day to day. Exactly how you’ll live your own life.’
Ruth was convinced Dorrie was wrong. Nothing could have seemed more different than the glamour of Dorrie’s youth and her own humdrum existence.
‘You could have gone into parliament,’ she said.
Dorrie snorted. ‘And talked crap every day of my life like the rest of them. No thank you. What we did, we did on the streets. There were a lot of people hurting in those days, remember, and for the most part the government didn’t give a damn. All they ever did was talk. Same as now.’
‘But to be the first woman in parliament …’
To Ruth such an achievement would have been glorious, like a pinnacle shining through mist.
‘I was never the first in anything,’ Dorrie said. ‘The ones who are first need a special kind of guts. I didn’t. It never even crossed my mind I could go to Uni until that poor cow Emma Grimes put me up to it. But when I got there I stuck. I was good at that. You couldn’t get me to give up when I’d decided to do something.’ She paused, memories running through her head. ‘That Stansridge business was like that. I stuck my heels in then, all right. Not that it did any good.’
Stansridge, a colliery town in New South Wales, had never been Dorrie’s fight until she made it so.
In the summer of 1929 the coal owners decided to cut wages. The local union men tried to resolve the business but got nowhere.
Union headquarters sent Dorrie to sort things out. The locals had asked for her specifically. Everyone could see that Stansridge was going to be difficult. No one had any idea whether any deal at all would be possible, with both sides so far apart and neither willing to give any ground, but Dorrie had been involved in a hundred disputes in her time and been successful in most of them. If anyone could pull it off it would be Dorrie. But some of the local union boys had never wanted her there at all, some because they thought the time for talking was past, others who were afraid how they would look if an outsider, and a woman, succeeded where they had failed.
Dorrie knew all about the problems but nevertheless was determined to go.
‘Even if there is only one chance in a thousand,’ she said, ‘we must try.’
Ted was against it. He was five years older than Dorrie but still had fire in his belly, or at least in his mouth. ‘They’re going to have to fight some time,’ he told her, ‘so let ’em get on with it.’
Dorrie stared at him in exasperation. ‘That’s what you’d like, isn’t it? A fight. A fight means men starving in the streets. Starving men and starving women and starving children. Is that what you want?’
Ted was angry. ‘They’re threatening to cut wages, woman. They want to work the pits with non-union men. If stopping them means a strike then that’s the price they’ll have to pay.’
‘We’re in the middle of summer,’ Dorrie said. ‘Coal stocks are high. We go on strike now, all the owners need do is close the pits and wait. When the cold weather comes will be the time to have a strike.’
So Dorrie went and tried to negotiate but the owners would not be moved.
Grim looks, then, and angry words. Even so Dorrie tried to persuade them. ‘Don’t you see? They’re doing this deliberately. They know they’ll have trouble sooner or later and they’d sooner face it now, in mid-summer, than wait for the winter. From their point of view it makes sense. Don’t let them get away with it.’
But the men had gone beyond listening or anything but the determination to fight. Next morning when Dorrie looked out of her bedroom window the street was full of men and women standing in groups, talking seriously to each other.
Her sense of hopelessness sickened her. ‘That’s it, then. They’re out.’ She came to Ted who was still lying in bed and put her face into his shoulder as he lay there. ‘I am ashamed.’
‘No reason,’ he told her. ‘You did your best.’
‘It wasn’t good enough.’
‘Not your fault the owners wouldn’t listen.’
‘Not the owners. The men wouldn’t listen, either. The winter was the time. Then we might have had a chance. Not now.’ Passion made her voice break. ‘It was my fault. If I’d found the right words they would have listened to me.’
Ted’s arm was around her shoulders. ‘These things have a rhythm of their own. Once they start no one can stop ’em. You never know, they may still win.’
‘We,’ she corrected. ‘It’s our fight now. But it’s hopeless. There’s no way we can win.’
The early signs would have meant nothing to anyone not familiar with the town.
The people, for a start. They were everywhere, standing on street corners, polishing their shoulders against the walls of houses, talking softly in little groups. The absence of noise was another sign. No whistle to signal shift changes. No ring of steel-toed boots on the roadways. No raised voices or laughter. Above all, no noise of children playing. A curtain of silence had been drawn over the town. Of fear, too, for no one could tell how things would end.
Dorrie was everywhere, visiting homes, going to meetings, tramping on foot through the district, talking, encouraging, motivating. She did everything she could to keep the men and their families in heart.
‘But you were always against it,’ Ted said.
‘We’re in it now so we’ve got to do the best we can. The worst thing would be for them to go back without a fight. Then the owners would really know they’ve got us where they want us.’
The weeks passed. The faces of the men, usually chalk-white under the coal dust, were now as brown as cricketers but every face was thinner and brilliant about the eyes as throughout the town anger smouldered and grew.
The men stayed out, no coal was cut and none delivered. Slowly the summer drew towards its end.
At first, despite the uncertainty, things hadn’t been too bad. There had been an air almost of holiday in those first days but the mood changed as hunger tightened its grip on the town. What food there was went first to the children and the women with babies coming. Everyone else went hungry and tempers grew raw-edged.
Summer became autumn and still the strike went on. Some families packed up and left but most stayed, their faces grimmer by the day, their eyes more brilliant. There was no talk of surrender, anyone suggesting such a thing would have been run out of town, but food was in such short supply that the children, too, were now forced to go without. It was no longer news to hear that a child had been sent home from school after fainting in the schoolyard and the mood of the town grew more dangerous.
Winter; when Dorrie had wanted the strike to start. With winter came rain and cold and people began to die. Mostly they were the old and indigent so that no one could be sure that the strike had killed them but that was what people believed. There was talk of violence but violence would mean troops and that no one wanted, so despite the angry words there was little actual trouble.
Several times the union met with management but the outcome was always the same. Let the men go back to work and management would see what could be done. But the threat to cut wages was not withdrawn and the union delegates were told that the owners would not negotiate under duress.
‘Duress!’ Dorrie exclaimed. Despair had made her face as white as any miner. ‘Men with full bellies talking of duress while children starve in the streets!’
Yet somehow they survived the winter. August came and with spring a renewal of hope and determination.
‘Coal stocks are right down.’ Again and again Dorrie gave them the same message. ‘If we can hang on the owners will have to talk.’
For the first time in months there was singing in the streets.
Perhaps there was a chance they might win, after all.
No one knew where the rumour came from but it ran through the town like a bush fire, leaving a residue of fury as hot as flame.
The State government, concerned by vanishing coal stocks, had decided to break the strike by bringing in non-union labour to re-open the pits. They were determined to bring the miners to their knees, so the rumour said. By force, if needs be.
Confirmation came from union headquarters in Sydney. The non-union men would be arriving in the town the following week.
‘They try to come in here they’ll be torn to pieces,’ Dorrie promised.
‘No violence,’ the union warned. ‘They’ll be escorted by armed police. Any trouble, there’ll be shooting.’
‘We’ve been out ten months! We can’t let them walk over us now!’
The union had long ago written off the miners’ strike as a lost cause. At headquarters there was no shortage of those who would not be sorry to see Dorrie Ballard fall on her face.
‘Settle for what you can get, that’s our advice to you.’
But the owners, too, had caught the whiff of victory. Now more than ever they would give nothing.
Dorrie sent messages to every mine throughout New South Wales. Each message was the same.
‘They break us here you’ll be next.’
Within days she had her reply. Eyes glowing, she told Ted, ‘There are thousands coming. Thousands! We’ll beat the bastards yet.’
The town was abuzz with excitement when the first contingent of miners arrived. Proudly they carried their union banners before them as they marched in and the streets were hung with bunting and lined with cheering crowds, and the first group of men had barely settled in before the next arrived. All day they kept coming, all the following day. By evening eight thousand men had come to Stansridge to join the strikers in their determination to repel the scab labour, should it arrive.
Few believed the owners would be fool enough to try it.
‘They’ve left it too late,’ Dorrie declared triumphantly. Oh, the joy of sensing victory at last. ‘They’ll never dare bring in the scabs, not now. The town’s an armed camp.’
They waited. A day; another day. Tensions eased. For the first time for weeks men dared to smile. What did we tell you? They’re not game to try anything. Not now. We got ’em licked.
It was a good feeling. At the strike headquarters there had still been no word from the owners but for the first time in months people started to plan. What you doin’ for Christmas? Eat. Everyone felt the same. A good feed, that’s what we’ll have. A real good feed.
There was nothing much for a union organiser to do except wait and waiting was hard on the nerves. Dorrie decided to get some fresh country air into her lungs. For years her bike had been as much a trademark as her red sash. Now she wheeled it up the hill out of town, mounted and rode across the creek into green country. The sun was pleasant, there was a light breeze and Dorrie rode with head high, enjoying the current of air flowing about her neck.
She’d had a strange life, no doubt about that. The anguish of Jamie’s loss had never quite gone. To this day she wondered what could have happened to him. Always she thought how somehow, miraculously, Jamie might have survived, that one day she would be reunited with him.
He’d be thirty-nine by now, she scolded herself. You’d not know him if you walked into him in the street.
It was hurtful never to know what had happened to your child. At least she knew what had happened to Lukas. After he got to Sydney he had carried on painting but something had gone out of his work and he had never fulfilled the promise of his early years. In 1915, at the age of fifty-one, he had enrolled as an ambulance driver in France. In 1918, in the assault on the Hindenburg line, he and his ambulance had been blown to pieces by a shell.
‘Bloody fool,’ Dorrie said to the countryside around her. ‘What business did he have getting tangled up in a war at that age?’
And what are you doing, she thought, if it isn’t getting tangled up in a war? And you’re sixty!
For half an hour more she rode, then turned back. A patch of trees, half a mile long
and two hundred yards wide, crowned the hill overlooking the town. As she approached the trees the sun slanting through the dusty leaves flashed on something bright. Dorrie frowned. Saw it move. Saw, a moment later, another flash a few yards to the right of the first.
She drew to the side of the track. She thought for a minute then dismounted and continued cautiously on foot. A path, barely visible, wound through the trees. Looking at the ground Dorrie could see the marks of many hoof-prints in the dust. As though the realisation had brought them to life, she heard the snort of a horse, the jingle of a bridle. She stepped silently off the track into a patch of scrub.
She heard them before she saw them, the snort and whicker of animals, the low murmur of men’s voices. Moving as delicately as the breeze, Dorrie parted the branches and looked deeper into the wood.
There must have been twenty horses, all well groomed and equipped. Leather saddles and bridles glowed in the sunlight. Behind each saddle the stock of the carbine gleamed with oil. The men were young, fit-looking, with knee-length boots and crossbelts across their chests. Each had a cavalry sabre hanging from his belt. The uniforms were blue, with high collars and silver facings.
Police.
What was a troop of mounted police doing in the woods half a mile from town?
Only one explanation. To escort the strike breakers when they arrived. The owners had not given up after all.
I must get back, she thought. I must warn the town. But, before she could move, heard hooves clopping along the path behind her. Dorrie froze, not daring to turn her head, hoping to be invisible against the background of scrub.
‘You!’ A harsh voice dispelled such dreams. ‘What d’you think you’re doin’, eh?’
‘Spying,’ the officer said. His lips twisted as though the word had left a filthy taste in his mouth. ‘What did you say your name was?’
Dorrie, standing in front of him with a beefy trooper on either side of her, ignored the question.
‘I was going for a ride. On my bicycle.’
