The Mothers

by Rod Jones

  ‘Four hundred blokes from Millers Ropes in Yarraville are out. Bert Davies says Kinnears will be next.’

  Kinnears was closer to home. ‘Why have the rope workers gone on strike?’ Alma asked.

  ‘The blokes at Millers went out because the bosses wanted them to take delivery of some New Zealand hemp.’

  ‘Is there something wrong with New Zealand hemp?’

  ‘No!’ Alfred let out a snort. ‘You see, the hemp was moved from the port and brought to the factory gate by scabs.’

  Alma carried the children’s boiled eggs to the table in the pot and placed one in each of the wooden eggcups in front of them. She was mortified to have been made to sound foolish. She resolved to learn all she could about the strike from now on. She sawed off the tops of the eggs and Teddy and Olive dipped in their crusts. Alfred had turned back to his newspaper.

  ‘I see there was another brawl outside the Troc on Saturday night.’ He caught Alma’s eye and smirked.

  ‘What’s the Troc?’ Teddy asked, eating his egg.

  ‘It’s the pictures,’ Alfred said. ‘Haven’t you ever been to the pictures?’ Teddy shook his head. Alfred said to Alma, ‘We should take them to a matinee one Saturday.’ He turned to Teddy. ‘Would you like to go and see Tom Mix?’

  Teddy looked imploringly at his mother. ‘Can we go?’ he begged her. Teddy had seen pictures of Tom Mix in his cowboy hat in magazines.

  ‘One day,’ she said. Alma didn’t have the threepence admission to the stalls and, now that he was out of work, Alfred could not spare the money either.

  Alfred told Teddy how the Dingoes got into fights with other pushes. Sometimes they fought with razors. Teddy looked on in fear and fascination as Alfred took his straight razor from his jacket pocket, opened it, and ran his thumb over the honed blade.

  ‘What nonsense are you talking about now?’ his mother demanded.

  Mrs Lovett disliked newspapers. Everybody in Footscray read the Advertiser to hear the latest news of the strikes, but she didn’t. ‘Man’s quickest interest is in the misfortune of others, and that’s what newspapers are for,’ she said. ‘Apart from that, you should not be telling such things to the boy,’ she added.

  ‘If they try anything on me, I’ll be ready,’ Alfred said, closing the razor and putting it back in his pocket.

  Alma understood that Alfred was boiling on the inside. He was angry with her, angry to be out of work, angry with the world. There was a part of him that wanted to get into a fight.

  ‘Oh, look what’s on at the pictures,’ Alfred said. ‘The Millionaire’s Double with Lionel Barrymore. I wouldn’t mind being a millionaire’s double for a day or two!’ His face broke into a broad smile. It was the first time Alma had seen him smile since she had told him her news.

  One afternoon, on her way to the henhouse, she passed Alfred, sitting by himself on the back step with a bottle of ale. He refilled his glass and drank it straight down. There were streaks on the inside of the glass from drinking too fast. With every drink, the devil showed more clearly in his eyes.

  When she came back, he was standing on the step, barring her way.

  ‘You know, Tuppence, I’ve been thinking. It’s a fact that you’re a married woman.’ His mouth was smiling, but his eyes were not. ‘And since you’re a married woman, there’s not much I can do about it.’

  Whenever a man began by saying ‘it’s a fact’, it meant that this indisputable fact put her at a disadvantage. Alfred loved facts; he couldn’t abide anything that couldn’t be proven in black and white. Still, he did love horses, she had to admit that, and a horse was something more than just a fact.

  She saw the furrow in his upper lip, the groove of stubbornness. Not so long ago, she had liked the shape of his mouth. She had admired his determination. Now it made him look as though he had set himself as an enemy against her.

  ‘When you first came to my room,’ she asked, ‘was it just a visit?’

  ‘It wasn’t just a visit.’

  ‘That’s what I thought, too.’

  She waited for him to say the words of love that wouldn’t come. She’d felt all along that, because she was a married woman, he thought she should have known better.

  Alfred said, miserably, ‘I didn’t mean to get you into trouble.’

  ‘I know you didn’t mean it.’

  ‘But there are ways of fixing trouble.’ Alfred crossed his arms and leaned against the doorway.

  ‘What do you mean?’ Alma felt suddenly afraid. She had sometimes heard whispered stories of women who knew how to do things with wire coathangers. Occasionally, there were accounts in the newspaper when things had gone wrong in seedy boarding houses in the slums of Fitzroy and Collingwood.

  ‘I heard there’s a doctor in Williamstown who might be able to help.’

  ‘Is that what you want?’

  He took a cigar from his jacket and clamped it in his mouth. He held the match in his hand, but did not light it. He seemed to change his mind, or perhaps he lost his courage. ‘This is a waste of time,’ he said, and stepped aside to let her through.

  Alma took in a deep breath. ‘Very well,’ she said. ‘I’ll go. But you’ll have to come with me.’

  They set out for Williamstown the next morning. The strike was at its height. In Ballarat Road they saw a group of strikers yelling abuse at a truck that had just pulled into the loading bay of a factory. There were two men in the cabin—‘volunteers’, presumably.

  ‘You fucking scab,’ she heard a man call out.

  ‘What did you say?’ the driver challenged him.

  ‘I said you’re a fucking scab.’

  The driver revved the engine, but could not move as the door of the loading dock was closed. One of the other strikers jumped on the step up to the lorry door and yelled, ‘You little cunt. I’ll get you!’ He punched the driver, knocking him out of his seat. The other strikers swarmed onto the truck and pulled the two volunteers onto the ground. The last Alma and Alfred saw of them was the strikers taking the men to the vacant lot overgrown with thistles beside the factory.

  When they got to the station there was a handwritten sign: there were no trains running that day. They could try to get a bus all the way to Williamstown, but the buses were running infrequently because of the strike. They spent the day instead walking along the streets near the river, looking at the deserted wharves, the ships with their cargo still waiting to be unloaded. At three o’clock they headed home to Empire Street.

  On their way home, they saw a meeting of unionists in the street outside Kinnears. They stood on the corner of Ballarat Road to watch. There were hundreds of men from Millers and Kinnears. Wives stood at the side of the roadway, some of them with children in their arms. There was pride in their faces.

  Alfred told Alma that a meeting of the Sugar Workers’ Union on the 19th of August voted not to unload the Kadina. Five days later, there were a hundred and fifty men outside the gates waiting for those who had been at work that day. Members of the Artificial Manure Trades Union had walked out at the Mount Lyell Company in Yarraville rather than handle a ‘black’ cargo of superphosphate.

  As they left Kinnears and walked home down the street, Alma heard people singing:

  Solidarity forever,

  For the union makes us strong.

  I could do with a b
it of solidarity, she thought. Still, seeing those people made her realise that she was not alone in facing hardships that winter.

  Neither she nor Alfred mentioned Williamstown again.

  A notice on a lamppost while she was out shopping caught Alma’s attention. A demonstration against rising food prices was to take place on the banks of the Yarra river. ‘I want to go,’ she told Alfred, when she got home.

  ‘What for? You haven’t got a job and you’re not a member of any union.’

  ‘The price of tinned meat and kerosene has doubled since the war began. Bacon, butter, flour, tinned fish, oatmeal and cheese have all gone up by half.’

  ‘What do you expect? The capitalist class is running this stupid war.’

  ‘Will you mind the children? Or I could ask your mother.’ Alfred looked suspicious, as if she were trying to put something over him. ‘You’ve never shown any interest in protest meetings before.’

  ‘But you approve of people standing up for their rights, don’t you?’

  ‘I’ll ask Mother to look after the children. I’ll come with you.’

  The trains were running that day. They travelled from Footscray Station to Flinders Street, crossed the Yarra at Princes Bridge and from there they could already see a great crowd gathered on the flat ground near the boat sheds. Women in the crowd were hooting and swearing at scab tram drivers going past. Two women were standing in a car with a banner reading ‘Workers of the World Unite’. One of them was giving a speech through a megaphone.

  ‘That’s Vida Goldstein,’ Alfred told her.

  A public nuisance, she was called in the newspapers. A monster of her sex. Still, Alma thought, I wish I were confident enough to stand on a car and give speeches. Now, more than ever, she felt timid and insecure. The sound of those shrill, angry voices both thrilled her and made her afraid. Alma had already noticed the squads of uniformed policemen assembled under the trees, watching.

  From Yarra Bank they marched to the commonwealth parliament in Spring Street. Just as Alma and Alfred passed the Flinders Street clocks, half a dozen mounted policemen tried to disperse the crowd. All around them, people joined arms and held firm. The police horses withdrew. Alma felt proud to be part of this great company of people united in their cause. Alfred said he reckoned there must have been twenty or thirty thousand people marching with them up Collins Street.

  On the 9th of September, the general strike collapsed, though some unionists held out. Some of the strikers were not reemployed. In Footscray there were band recitals and vaudeville nights to raise money for unemployed strikers. Needy children were billeted out with families still in work.

  Finally, the rope workers went back on the 20th of September, and the failure of the strike was complete. The night of broken glass, the newspaper called it: Adela Pankhurst and Jennie Baines led thousands of women from Richmond, Port Melbourne and South Melbourne in a rampage through streets darkened by the continuing shortage of coal. Butcher shops in Swan Street, the posh emporiums of Collins Street and the Dunlop factory in Montague all had their windows smashed.

  Alma wished she had been in their number. She understood the anger of those women. As well as her morning sickness, the usual nausea and vomiting she had suffered with the other two children, she often felt a rising urge to scream. A part of her wanted to descend into that kind of violence, marching with the women through the dark, throwing bricks, smashing windows, screeching out her hatred and frustration.

  Alma’s newfound political feelings were further inflamed when she read that Merv Flanagan, a striker in New South Wales, had been shot and killed by Reginald Wearne, a strikebreaker and brother of a conservative New South Wales parliamentarian. When the ruling class started shooting workers, Alma imagined that revolution might not be very far away.

  She read of the dramatic events in Russia. The Bolsheviks had seized power in St Petersburg. Lenin proclaimed, ‘Today has begun a new era in the history of mankind.’

  Something marvellous was happening. A new chapter in the history of the world, and she was part of it! The news from Russia unleashed a delirium of longing in her, like love. It was the way she used to feel as a girl, stuck in her drab existence, scrubbing pots for her mother, when a phrase of music reached her through the open window and lifted her heart.

  The future stretched ahead, full of possibilities. People would cast off their narrow attitudes. Women would no longer be judged on whether or not they were married. Men and women would live together as equals, united in the dignity of their work. The new society was like a promise to Alma’s unborn child.

  She was thrilled when, in December, the second conscription plebiscite was defeated. Billy Hughes’s jingoism had split the Labor Party, and now militants rose to leadership in the unions, the Wobblies, the Syndicalists, the One Big Union. In a few short months, the Melbourne Trades Hall was flying the Red Flag.

  But this fever of happiness did not last. Alma was still pregnant, still married to another man, still dependent on the kindness—and the decisions—of others.

  ‘Brighten up, Tuppence,’ Alfred told her. ‘I’ll be starting work at the iron foundry next Monday. It’ll feel good to have a few bob in my pocket again. We might even have enough for you to have your baby like a lady in the hospital.’

  Alma felt the ghost of the future move over her, a premonition of great privation and suffering ahead, the line of fate she had felt that first day, back in Footscray Park. She had been forced to get married because she was pregnant with Teddy. Now she was with child again, and this time it would be worse because she wouldn’t have a husband. But what choice did she have? Yes, she blamed Alfred. She had to blame somebody. She compared him with an impossible ideal and found him wanting. She dwelled on his faults and not his qualities. Little things about him irritated her. The way he failed to pronounce the aspirate in the word ‘hospital’, for example. Alfred always watched the reaction of the other person before he took the next step; it was uncertainty which, every now and then, tipped over into bravado and sudden anger. He was sensitive about his height, too. All that was why he got into fights.

  As she grew bigger, Alma spent most of her days indoors. The Lovetts still wanted to keep her a secret from the world. ‘There is nothing that perks up the spirits of the neighbours like the news of a pregnant girl,’ Mrs Lovett told her.

  Mrs Thomas no longer came in on Mondays to use their copper, but she still poked her head over the fence. Alma overheard her asking Mrs Lovett slyly, ‘That niece of yours still staying with you?’

  Oh, she knew, all right. Everyone in Empire Street must have known. They would have seen Mrs Lovett walking the children to school. When Alfred left the house for work at the iron foundry, there was something furtive and ashamed in the way he cycled off quickly, looking neither left nor right.

  Mrs Lovett’s unspoken rebuke—to Alma, to Alfred, to herself—hung over them. She told Alma that she forgave her. But Alma knew that sometimes forgiveness came hard.

  She felt troubled in her spirit. It was this feeling of apprehension that kept her imprisoned inside the house in Empire Street. She became a creature of the shadows, hiding in the sleep-out during the day, or spending hours alone in the parlour, practising the piano, so she would not have to face Mrs Lovett. Some days she was too scared even to go down the back to use the lavatory for fear that Mrs Thomas would stick her head over the fence and speak to her.

  Alma had tho
ught her guilty feeling would have faded with time, but she knew in her heart that was not the way these things worked. An official document, a wedding ring, would have changed everything. And yet, in another way, Alma knew it would have changed nothing.

  The war on the Western Front ground on. In March, a new German offensive began, when they got to within thirty-five miles of Paris. On the evening of the 9th of April, while she was boiling some bacon bones to make soup, Alma’s waters broke and Mrs Lovett prepared her own bed in the front room for the lying-in.

  The children were sent to stay for two nights with Mrs Edmondson, who helped Pastor Goble in circumstances such as these. For short periods, she took in the children of deserted wives, the unemployed and the homeless.

  Teddy and Olive had been curious, of course, about the baby. Olive in particular often asked, ‘When is the baby going to come?’ Teddy was more reticent. He still adored Alfred: it could have been out of loyalty to him, sensing something shameful, that Teddy was quiet about the baby.

  During the night the pains began, but they were infrequent, and Alma knew the hard part was just beginning. She had forgotten the pain with her other two children, every part of it completely wiped from her memory. Now it all came back to her, and she reached above her head and gripped the cold bars of the bedstead, bracing herself.

  Mrs Lovett sat beside Alma in a low rattan chair. When the pains became severe, she soaked the corner of a towel in hospital brandy and let Alma suck on it. She had folded the blankets, stored them away and fitted a rubber sheet over the kapok mattress. Next to the bed on a small table she had piled some old towels. A white enamel jug, chipped in places, stood next to the basin on the washstand. In the kitchen, the kettle had been on the boil all night. There was to be no doctor, no midwife. Mrs Lovett had delivered babies before. If there should be complications, she would send Alfred on his bicycle to fetch Doctor Greaves in Ballarat Road. In the meantime, Alfred was to keep away.