Potato Factory

by Bryce Courtenay

  Mary’s nose had not yet stopped bleeding by the time it became her turn for an interview. The chief clerk, a coarsely corpulent man with a sanguine complexion and the remains of fiery red hair on the sides of a completely bald pate, looked at her with disapproval, shaking his head in a most melodramatic manner. ‘What’s the name, girl?’ he asked.

  ‘Mary, sir, Mary Klerk.’

  ‘Bloody Mary, more like!’ The men in the queue laughed uproariously at this joke. ‘G’warn scarper! Be off with you, girl. ‘Aven’t you been told, clerkin’s a man’s job!’

  The men clapped and cheered him mightily and pleased with their response the chief clerk played further to the crowd, for he’d witnessed the earlier incident with the clown in the top hat. ‘What’s to become of us if we allow a monkey on our backs?’

  There is precious little charity in a queue of starving men, most of whom had a wife and young ones to feed, and soon upon Mary’s arrival in any employment queue, a familiar chant would go up:

  Mary, Mary, Bloody Mary

  Who does her sums on bead and rack

  Go away, you’re too contrary

  You’re the monkey, the bloody monkey

  You’re the monkey on our back!

  The chant was to become such an aggravation that few prospective employers were prepared to even grant her an interview for fear of angering the men. The men, in turn, found it impossible to understand why a woman with a trim figure, of Mary’s young age and class, could not make a perfectly good living on her back. More and more they came to regard it as entirely reprehensible that she should attempt to steal the bread from their mouths and allow their children to starve and, moreover, that she should attempt to do so with the help of a foreign and heathen contraption made of wood, wire and beads. They told themselves that a screen that quivered and rattled and ended up doing sums had a distinct smell of witchcraft about it.

  As the weather turned colder and the queue more desperate, the resentment against Mary grew out of all proportion. In the fevered imaginations of the unemployed clerks Bloody Mary’s presence in a job queue soon took on all the aspects of a bad omen. When they returned home empty-handed to their ragged and starving families they had come to believe that her presence had ‘soured the queue’, so the luck they all felt they needed to gain a position had gone elsewhere.

  Mary’s face had grown gaunt for lack of sufficient nourishment and, in truth, there began to be a somewhat simian look about her. With her large green anxious eyes darting about and her head turning nervously this way and that, expecting danger from every corner, the men began to believe increasingly that she was an incarnation of some evil monkey spirit.

  Her dress too began to be much the worse for wear and hung upon her thin frame to give Mary an altogether morbid appearance, her black cotton skirt and blouse, and modest bonnet and shawl, together with her worn boots peeping below the frayed edges of her skirt, all showed the wear and tear of the long hours spent standing patiently in every kind of inclement weather.

  While there were tens of thousands of women in a similar state of dress, their own wives being of much the same appearance, they saw in Mary’s forlorn and ragged clothing the black cloth of a witch’s weeds. The monkey chant, as it became known, grew increasingly threatening in tone and it took the utmost stubbornness and will for Mary to present herself at an advertised location for a job interview.

  Yet Mary persisted well beyond the dictates of commonsense and into the province of foolishness. The long hours spent at reading and writing and the childhood application she had demonstrated with the complexities of mathematics had somehow convinced her that within her capacity lay a destiny beyond her humble beginnings. Mary’s father had told her almost from infancy that her abacus would be her salvation and she could not believe that she might end up like her consumptive silkweaver mother or the sad, destitute and drunken shipping clerk she knew as her father. She saw herself achieving something well beyond the modest expectations of a laundry maid, though quite what this could be was past anything she could imagine. She felt certain that this destiny would all begin, if only she could obtain a position as a clerk.

  After six months Mary had used up most of her savings and had repeatedly changed her place of residence, on each occasion moving to a cheaper lodging house, until she ended up sharing a foul room with a family of five in the very cheapest of netherkens in Shoe Lane.

  She would wake at dawn each morning and, with no more than a drink of water and without allowing herself to think, set out to seek employment, fearful that, should she pause to contemplate her increasingly desperate position, she would give up altogether and take herself to Waterloo Bridge and commit herself to the dark, foul river.

  One bitterly cold morning she left her miserable lodgings at dawn to be the first in line for a clerk’s position advertised in a warehouse on the south bank of the Thames at Saviour’s Dock. This was one of the vilest slums in London, and the mist lay thick on the river, and the streets were dimmed to near blindness by the sulphurous-coloured smog from the first of the winter fires.

  Huddled at the entrance of the gate and near frozen, Mary was thankful that her presence would be concealed by the thick fog. The misted air about her was filled with the groans of masts and cross stays. In her imagination, the dockside took on the shape of a jungle filled with the wild and fearsome growls of fantastical creatures, while the howl of the wind through a dozen mizzen masts and the slap of loose canvas became the spirits of the dead which had come to protect her from the living, the men who would soon be lined up behind her and who had the capacity to frighten her beyond any perceived ghosts.

  She had not eaten for two days and in her state of weakness must have fallen asleep, for she was awakened by the toe of the gateman’s boot placed against her buttocks.

  ‘Be up now, the gov’nor will be on ‘is way soon!’ a gruff voice demanded. Mary stumbled to her feet, clutching her shawl about her thin shoulders. ‘Blimey, if it ain’t a female!’ the voice exclaimed in surprise.

  A large man dressed in a military great coat with a shako, polished like a mirror, upon his head stood towering over her. It was the shako cap, complete with its scarlet and white cockade and braid, otherwise devoid of any regimental insignia, that gave the man his fearsome authority. Mary had expected the customary gateman in cloth cap, woollen scarf, corduroy breeches and workman’s boots, the advertisement having instructed simply that the queue would commence at the gate under the gateman’s supervision.

  ‘Yessir, I be enquirin’ about the billet advertised. The one for a clerk?’

  ‘Well then, I s’pose it ain’t against the law now is it?’ The gateman twisted the corner of his large moustache. ‘It’s a pretty rum turn, but I can’t see that it be against the law. First is you? You shall ‘ave your interview, miss.’

  Glancing fearfully at the formless shapes of the men disappearing into the fog behind her, Mary felt suddenly safe and strangely hopeful. She told herself that such an unpropitious day must surely bring her luck. The first good omen had been that the men standing directly behind her were strangers and seemed not to recognise her. The ones behind them, pale shapes in the mist, would surely have among them a great many who were acquainted with her, but these had not yet become aware of her presence in the thick yellow fog.

  The gateman turned away from her to address the vaguely defined line of men stretching away behind Mary.

  ‘Now then, gentlemen, me name’s Sergeant William Lawrence, late of the 40th regiment, veteran o’ the Peninsular War, wounded in action at the Battle o’ Waterloo. I am the gatekeeper ‘ere and I’ll brook no interference. It will be one at a time through the gate, no pushin’ and shovin’ and no idle chatter, if you please!’

  There was a murmur in the crowd at the sound of a carriage rattling over distant cobblestones and then the rumble of its wheels as it drew onto the wooden dock-side and shortly afterwards came to halt at the gate, the horse snuffling and shaking its head, blo
wing frosted air from its distended nostrils.

  Mary, who stood close enough to see clearly, observed a small, very fat man alight. He was dressed in a heavy coat which swept to within an inch of the ground in the manner of a woman’s skirt, his shoes being quite lost from sight. He wore a top hat which sat upon his head down almost to his eyes and rose alarmingly high into the air for a man so short. The remaining space between head and shoulders was wrapped in a woollen scarf so that in the uncertainty of the mist the whole of him took on the proportions of a very large perambulating bottle. The gatekeeper snapped to immediate attention and gave the bottle shape a rigid salute, his jowls and side-burns quivering with the momentum of it.

  ‘Mornin’, Mr Goldstein, sah!’ Sergeant Lawrence shouted at the very top of his voice as though addressing the commander of a battalion of soldiers who was about to embark on a parade inspection.

  ‘Goot mornink,’ the bottle replied in a muffled voice. Then, without glancing at the line of men it entered the gate and waddled into the mist towards the unseen warehouse not twenty feet away.

  The gatekeeper, pushing his hand between two brass buttons and into the interior of the great coat, pulled from within it a watch chain which soon enough produced a large, though not expensive-looking, watch. Glancing down at it from under his peaked cap he addressed the queue.

  ‘I shall allow five minutes for Mr Goldstein to settle and then the first in the line will proceed through the gate to the door! You will oblige Mr Goldstein by knockin’ on the outside door, whereupon you will remove your ‘at and proceed in an inwardly direction and without waitin’ for an answer! Mr Goldstein will be in the office to the left of the door upon which you shall again knock and then immediately enter! For them what is ambidextrous and ‘asn’t ‘ad the misfortune to ‘ave been trained in ‘is Majesty’s military forces, the left side is the side what’s got the coat-stand!’

  Anxious laughter came from the mist as men strained to catch every word, fearful of the consequences of making a mistake.

  The imperious Sergeant Lawrence looked down at his watch again and then glanced sternly at Mary.

  ‘Goldstein, you understand, miss? Mr Goldstein!’

  Mary nodded, feeling herself beginning to tremble.

  Mary knocked on the outer door of the warehouse and then, without waiting for a reply, did as she had been told and entered. To her left was a heavy, freestanding coat-stand on which hung the overgrown top hat together with its owner’s coat and scarf. Behind it was a door with a frosted glass upper panel on which in gold relief lettering was the name Jacob Goldstein, Prop. The door seemed designed especially for Mr Goldstein, for it was not an inch higher than five feet though one and a half times as wide as one might normally expect an office door to be. Mary tapped nervously on the surface of the glass, her heart pounding in her ears, her knees feeling light, as though they might give at any moment, and the palms of her hands were wet.

  ‘You must be here comink, please,’ a voice answered in an accent which Mary immediately recognised. She had spent her childhood around Rosemary Lane and the Whitechapel markets and the accent was unmistakably that of a German Jew.

  Mary entered and curtsied to the man, who sat well back from a large desk. He was dressed in a morning suit and his huge stomach, she felt certain, would not permit his very short arms to reach to the edge of the desk, the top of which contained a pot of blacking and a goose quill pen, a large writing tablet and a medium-sized brass bell of the kind a schoolmaster might use to summon his pupils from play.

  ‘Good mornin’, Mr Goldstein,’ Mary said, summoning all her courage into a nervous smile.

  Mr Goldstein seemed astonished to see her and commenced immediately to bluster.

  ‘Ach! Vot is dis? A vooman? You are a vooman! Vot is vanting a vooman here? You are vanting to see me, ja?’

  ‘I come about the job, sir. The assistant clerk. . .the position what was advertised?’

  Mr Goldstein’s bewilderment persisted and Mary added desperately, ‘It were advertised on the ‘oardings, sir.’

  ‘You are a vooman and you vant you can be a clerk?’ Mr Goldstein was now somewhat recovered, though still plainly bemused.

  ‘I’m most ‘appy to do a test, anythin’ you want, sir! Please, your ‘onour, er, Mr Goldstein, don’t send me away, give me a chance, I can do it, gov. . .honest I can!’

  Mary was suddenly conscious of Mr Goldstein staring at the region of her waist and that the merest semblance of a smile had appeared on his moon-round face.

  ‘Abacus!’ He pointed a fat finger at her midriff. ‘You can use, ja?’

  ‘Yes, sir, Mr Goldstein, your honour, since I was a brat. . .er child, give me a sum, any sum you like, sir.’

  ‘In Armenia, also ven I vos a Kind! Das ist wunderbar!’ he chuckled. ‘You are vonting I should give you some sums? Ja, I can do zis!’

  Whereupon, to Mary’s astonishment, he pushed his chair violently backwards. She now saw it to be on tiny wheels and possessed of a seat which could swivel. She observed that the points of his highly polished boots only just touched the floor. Using them to gain a purchase Mr Goldstein spun himself around so that the chair, with his fat dumpling body within it, flashed past her astonished face fully four times, much like an egg in an egg cup turned into a merry-go-round.

  When it came to a halt Mary could see that Mr Goldstein now sat considerably closer to the ground and that his boots were planted firmly upon it. Propelling himself towards the desk his stomach now fitted neatly beneath it, the desktop coming to just under his arms.

  ‘A test? Ja, das is gut!’ He pointed to the abacus. ‘From vere are you learnink zis?’

  ‘My father, sir. ‘E were in the East Hindies.’

  ‘He is Chinee man?’

  ‘No, sir. . .er, Mr Goldstein, ‘e were a Dutchie, from ‘Olland.’

  Mr Goldstein reached for his quill and dipping it into the small pot of blacking he hastily scrawled an elaborate equation on the pad in front of him. Then he pushed it over to Mary.

  Mary examined the problem scrawled on the paper tablet. Then, laying it down, she placed her abacus beside it and began immediately to move the beads across the thin wire rails, her long, slender fingers blurring with the speed of her movements. She hesitated once or twice before once again sending the bright beads flying. In a short time she slapped the last bead into place and stood back looking down at Mr Goldstein. There had never been a more important moment in Mary’s life.

  She looked up to see that Mr Goldstein was smiling and holding a gold hunter open in his hand. Mary announced quietly, though her heart was once again pounding furiously and she fought to keep her breathing steady, ‘Eight ‘undred and sixty-two pounds. . .at eleven pounds, fourteen shillin’s and sixpence ha’penny a case, sir. . .er, Mr Goldstein.’

  ‘Gut! Gut, young lady, in vun half minute! Now ve can see, ja?’

  He placed the watch down on the desk and sliding open a drawer produced a large ledger which he opened and examined for a moment, running his fat index finger down several columns until it came to rest.

  ‘Ja! Das is gut! And also schnell!’

  ‘Beg pardon, sir?’

  ‘Very fast!’ he beamed. ‘You can write also in ledger?’

  He pointed to the pad on which he’d written previously and returning his quill into the blacking pot he handed it to Mary.

  ‘Please. . .Numbers, also vords, let me see?’

  Mr Bishop had not only provided books for Mary from the master’s library but, upon her beseeching him, had on several occasions found old ledgers for her to copy out. Mary had studied these assiduously, emulating their neat columns and precise language a thousand times until she knew the contents of every page in her sleep. Now she wrote carefully in the well-formed and almost elegant copperplate she had studied so hard at the hands of her young Oxford lover, and later for countless hours on her own, to perfect.

  34 cases @ a total of six hundred and twelve pounds no shillings
and eightpence= seventeen pounds, one shilling and sevenpence halfpenny per case.

  Then she repeated the sum in neat numerals directly below this sentence. She handed the quill and pad back to Mr Goldstein.

  Mr Goldstein examined Mary’s writing for a sufficient period of time for her to grow anxious that she might have made a mistake. Then he looked up, his expression stern and businesslike, shaking a fat finger with a large gold ring directly at her as in admonishment.

  ‘I pay eight shillink for vun veek and Saturday only no verk. Half-past seven you are startink, eight o’clock you are finishink. Tomorrow half-past seven o’clock report, if you please, Mr Baskin, who is also here the senior clerk.’

  Mr Goldstein pointed his stubby finger at the abacus, ‘Gut!’ he said.

  Unclenching his remaining fingers he patted the air in front of him as though he were patting the abacus in approval, giving Mary the distinct impression that he had not employed her, but her frame of wooden beads.

  Mary had to restrain herself from bursting into tears of joy.

  ‘Thank you, sir, Mr Goldstein! You’ll not regret it! Thank you and Gawd bless you, sir!’

  Mr Goldstein grunted and taking up the bell on the desk he rang it loudly several times. Mary now became conscious that, in the short time she’d been in Mr Goldstein’s office, the warehouse had filled with the hum of people going about their work. Now the buzz and clatter stopped as the bell rang out.

  ‘Mr Baskin!’ Mr Goldstein shouted into the sudden calm.

  Presently a tall and very thin, Ichabod-Crane-looking man, stooping almost double, opened the wide door and entered the office. Mr Goldstein, writing in the ledger, ignored his presence for a full minute while the man stood with his hands clasped in the manner of a mendicant, his head downcast and his eyes avoiding contact with Mary.

  Looking up from his ledger Mr Goldstein pointed directly at the abacus.

  ‘Tomorrow Miss. . .’ he suddenly realised that he had not enquired as to Mary’s name, ‘. . .Miss Abacus!’ he added suddenly and smiled at Mary. ‘Ja! I can call you this!’ He returned his gaze to Mr Baskin, ‘Tomorrow she is startink vork. You show her varehouse, please!’