‘This is Sarah McGowan, Mary. She is the foreman of the shop and she will teach you what you need to know.’ Sarah was a tall freckled girl with hair that was almost, but not quite, red. Her blue eyes flicked up and down and I was conscious that although my boots were cleaned and polished, they were also shabby.
‘And this is Eileen O’Connor. She has been with us for almost a year now, isn’t that right, Eileen?’
‘Yeth, Mr Kenny.’ Eileen’s voice was a soft lisp. She smiled tentatively at me.
‘Well, I’ll leave you girls to show Mary around the shop. Later on, Mary, I’ll get Mr Sands to show you the printing works at the back. He knows more about that side of things than I do.’
Mr Kenny lifted up a flap in the counter and went towards the back of the shop.
Just before he disappeared behind a green curtain he turned. ‘I’m counting on you to show Mary your duties, Sarah. After you are married, Mary will be foreman here.’
He left silence in his wake.
‘I—I’m pleased to meet you,’ I said.
‘Nice to be a friend of the boss’s,’ Sarah sneered, crossing her arms and leaning back against the shelves.
I should have expected this. After all, Sarah had worked hard to become foreman. It was natural that she should resent a stranger just walking in and taking her job, even if she was leaving.
‘Yes,’ I said, ‘it is nice. Mr Kenny is a very generous man.’
‘I worked here three years before I was made foreman.’
I nodded. ‘I know I have a lot to learn.’ I spoke as calmly as I could, and smiled at both the girls. I have to make them like me. I couldn’t bear to work with anger all around me. Sarah sniffed, but uncrossed her arms.
‘Well, you’d better be quick about it. I get married in two weeks.’ Sarah had a strong Irish accent but she spoke so crisply it didn’t sound Irish at all to me. I was accustomed to the soft, slow brogue of Mrs L’Estrange. ‘Here’s your apron. The shop opens at 8.15 sharp. We’re to be here no later than eight to set up for the day. The printing works starts at seven, so there’s always something to do if the shop is made ready early. Whenever there’s a quiet time, we go through to help the boys in the packing department. You get half an hour for dinner and there’s a room out the back where you can eat it but we don’t because the men eat there. If Mr Kenny or Mr Sands isn’t in they let us eat lunch in their offices, but usually we have to go to the park. You can’t go to dinner until after the dinner-time crowd has gone back to work, so have a big breakfast.’
I nodded and tied on the apron. Sarah slapped a long book down in front of me. It was beautifully covered with printed paper, a design of vines and leaves forming a rectangle around the title: ‘Catalogue of Commercial Law and General Stationery, Sands, Kenny & Co. Victoria Stationery Warehouse, Melbourne.’
‘You can take that home with you for the first week or so. You have to know every item in that catalogue and the prices for each.’
I nodded again. The catalogue had an index: two-and-a-half pages of items I would have to memorise. Blotting paper, brief paper, brown paper, drawing paper, parchment and vellum. Cloth envelopes, linen envelopes, mourning stationery. Things I had never heard of: ever-point pencils, copying presses, manifold writers. Things I had heard of but never seen: debenture paper, ivory tablets, bills of exchange.
‘We’ll start you off on something easy,’ Sarah said. ‘Eileen, show her the paper.’
Oh, the paper! I loved the different papers, their smell and feel, textures as different from one another as roses from lilacs. I remember astonishing Father Woods, years later, by asking him to write our Institute of St Joseph’s constitution on extra superfine glazed large post paper. He had no idea what I meant, which was a surprise to me. I think it was the first time I ever knew more than he did.
Even though I loved the papers, I can’t say I enjoyed my job all that much. It was a long, tiring day. The customers arrived with a rush at 8.30.
‘Monday is always our busiest day for office supplies,’ Eileen whispered as she showed me how to take cash and write a receipt for envelopes.
A steady stream of clerks came through the door and demanded debenture papers, promissory notes, marking ink, superfine blue wove paper, royal-sized account current books with 960 pages, minute books, guard books for filing letters and invoices, and superfine middle blue laid envelopes.
It was like another country where they spoke a foreign language. I’m sure I looked as frazzled as I felt, but Sarah kept an eye on me and came to my rescue when I was lost. Despite her stern manner she was very kind.
Later in the day, clerks or merchants from the local shops came in for ticket-writing ink, receipt books, ledgers and Indian rubber bands.
Everybody wanted pens. Not what we would call pens, now, the fountain pens we are so used to (God bless Mr Waterman, who invented them!). ‘Pens’ in those days meant just the nibs. The penholder was bought separately. There were so many kinds of pens. Steel pens, cold pens, Edinburgh pens, and ordinance pens for a copyist in the Lands Department, and best swan quills for the solicitors in the Imperial Chambers next door. At 35 shillings for a hundred they seemed shockingly expensive to me. But I supposed white swans were rare in Australia and black quills wouldn’t do at all.
***
The clerks from the lawyers barely looked at us. They ordered their goods staring over my shoulder and spoke only to each other: ‘We’ve a tort on tomorrow under Justice Barry. Three copies of the argument to be made before six tonight and not a decent quill in the place.’ ‘Better Barry than Stawell. He thinks torts are beneath him.’ Then they’d laugh together.
Rude. Rude and ill-bred. But perhaps they didn’t like having to do the shopping.
As the door opened and closed behind them the din of the traffic swept through like an explosion.
It was a long way away from the quiet and peace and fun of Erindale. By lunchtime on my first day, I had a headache from the noise of the carriages in the street. My feet and back ached from standing behind the counter and I was beginning to hate the lawyers’ snobbish clerks.
‘I don’t want to catch you leaning against anything, or sitting on the stepladder,’ Sarah said. ‘If a customer comes in, we have to be waiting, ready to serve them. Besides, if you’ve got time to sit down, you’ve got time to put that new batch of envelopes on the shelves.’
I nodded—all I seemed to do with Sarah was nod—and eased from my right aching foot to my left aching foot. Through the soles of my boots I could feel the pounding of the printing presses working in the back of the building. It was not so much a noise as a shaking; over and over and over, the vibration travelled up through my bones. My head began to pound in sympathy. Offer it up for the Holy Souls in Purgatory.
‘Quick, here’s Mr Sands,’ Sarah hissed, and twitched my apron straight.
‘Good afternoon, Mr Sands,’ Eileen and Sarah chorused and curtsied. I followed suit.
‘Humph. Afternoon. Mary, is it? Come now, I’ve a moment or two to spare.’
Mr Sands was a lean, businesslike man with long, bony, ink-stained fingers.
I followed him through to the printing floor at the rear of the building, where there were presses of every size, from the great ones that made maps and engravings to the small ones for handbills and personal stationery. To one side, the engravers worked.
‘Never go over there, girl,’ Mr Sands said. ‘They work with acid. Eat your fingers away if you touched it.’
I could smell it, a sharp tang under the headier scent of ink.
At the other end the boys worked packing the orders for customers. They were young—around 13, 14—and all were thin and growing out of their shirt cuffs, their wrists clearly showing the bones. But they seemed happy enough, grinning and chatting to each other as they worked, although I didn’t see how they could hear each other over the constant clamour of the presses.
‘Right. Come back some other time, I’ll show you more.’
That evening, before I left, I went reluctantly to the door of Mr Kenny’s office. It had to be done, but I felt sick with embarrassment.
‘Come in, come in, Mary. How have you got on?’
‘Very well, thank you, sir. I’m very grateful to you for the opportunity.’
‘Nonsense! Happy to help.’
I bit down on my tongue to stop my lips shaking. No more biting my lip.
‘I—I’m hoping you may be able to help me again.’
Mr Kenny frowned.
‘I’m sorry, Mary, but we just don’t have room for John in the packing bay. I explained to your father—’
‘It’s not that, Mr Kenny. You know, since Papa lost the job at Back Creek, we’ve been staying at a—a place, in Collingwood.’
A ‘place’. A horrible back slum, with rats creeping along the rafters and a shared privy. And to get that we had to borrow from Mrs Stuart.
‘Aye.’
‘Well, now that I have a job, I’d like to move the family to our own house. I’ve found a place in Richmond, but the landlord wants a month’s rent in advance and I’ve saved only enough for two weeks.’
Mr Kenny nodded. His kind eyes were shrewd as well. ‘You want an advance on your wages.’
My cheeks burned red. If he doesn’t help us, we’ll be living on bread and dripping for a month, and the bread will be an act of charity from Mrs Stuart. ‘Is it possible?’
‘Aye. Aye, we can manage that. How much do you need?’
The relief was like a cool breeze on a sweltering hot day. We could move tomorrow. Maggie could organise things. And Annie. I could depend on them to help Mamma.
After Father Woods and I started the Institute of St Joseph in Adelaide, we nuns went out begging on the streets to raise money to feed the hungry who poured into our providence every day and night. We begged to feed ourselves and to pay the rent on our school. The society ladies I met—so generous, most of them—would ask me how I could bear to beg for our food. I used to laugh. ‘God has trained me for it,’ I would say. ‘I’ve lived on charity for most of my life.’
It was a terrible cross to bear in my childhood and young womanhood, but I see so clearly how our poverty prepared me for the poverty of the convent—and prepared Lexie and Donald, too, for their lives in God. It’s always true, that the cross God sends you is a gift, given not only so that you may share Christ’s pain and so lessen it, but also to make you ready for other gifts of grace. I have taught children who had untroubled, unfettered lives, lives without illness or poverty or fear, and it is always hardest to teach those children to feel for others, to understand the needs and burdens of others. They take so much for granted. Parents want their children’s lives to be without pain, and of course it is their duty to guard and love and protect them. But a childhood without any pain at all, I have come to see, is one that ill-prepares the child for adulthood.
Perhaps that was the problem with my father. He encountered no check until he was an adult, and had no resources to deal with it, no flexibility of understanding, for all his academic brilliance.
***
Work became easier as time went on. I became accustomed to standing all day, every day, although my back kept a small ache at the base of my spine that only disappeared when I was walking to and from Richmond each day.
The noise was a problem, but I was determined to ignore it. What were headaches, after all?
The work itself wasn’t complicated. I took the catalogue home every night for a week and studied harder than I’d ever studied before. By Saturday I could quote for the most complicated order of stationery, ledger books and accessories that any customer could ask for.
Two weeks after I started work, Sarah left to get married. Mr Kenny and Mr Sands presented her with a white linen tablecloth and printed her invitations for free.
‘My Robert is back from the goldfields in New Zealand and with my savings we’ve got enough to buy ourselves the draper’s shop on Little Lonsdale Street.’ Sarah was smiling broadly for the first time.
Mr Kenny nudged me. ‘You next, eh, Mary? How about that young clerk from next door?’
I smiled, as one had to when people said those sorts of things. The clerk was named Matthew Polkinghorne. He worked for Mr Clay, a solicitor with rooms in the Imperial Chambers next door, and had gone from ignoring me to courting me after I had told him that we were unfortunately out of stock of Roscoe’s Digest of the Law of Evidence at Nisi Prius and pronounced the Latin correctly.
He asked if he might walk me home. The last thing I needed was a complication like a beau. Besides, Mr Polkinghorne had entirely too grand an opinion of himself, with his nose in the air ignoring the other girls like they were dirt. And he wasn’t even handsome. Not that you should even be thinking about that, if you’re going to be a nun!
People have asked me, from time to time, if I regretted giving up marriage and a home and children of my own. When they do, I can’t help thinking about poor Matthew Polkinghorne. I laugh. What a life he would have had if I’d married him! Me, always yearning for a life I could never have as a wife and mother; him, knowing he was a second choice to my vocation. Even the consolation of children would, I think, have turned sour—assuming I would have been able to have children. The women’s troubles with which I was beset most of my life might have prevented it, and how empty would our lives have been then!
‘Thank you, but my brother walks me home,’ I said to Matthew Polkinghorne, and handed him his parcel of legal notepaper.
Mr Kenny had helped John find a job at the Swanston Street railway station. He was 15 and, like the boys in the packing department, had outgrown all his clothes. Maggie had made over a coat and trousers of Papa’s, and it was sometimes as though a young version of Papa was walking beside me up Collins and Spring streets, onto Wellington Parade and past the Police Barracks.
But John was far steadier than Papa, who still could not seem to find work.
‘It’s not right for a man to depend upon his children,’ he said over and over. But there did not seem to be any work for an educated man who held strong political opinions and held forth about them at every gathering. The Back Creek experience had marked him as ‘unreliable’.
Papa even tried for labouring work, but the foremen took one look at his soft hands and laughed. He spent a great deal of time at St Francis’s, helping the priests with their accounts and their sermons.
‘Shame they can’t pay you,’ Maggie said tartly. Mamma hushed her.
‘It’s your Papa’s privilege to help the work of God.’
I agreed, and yet ... Mamma had decided to take in boarders, to try to cover the rent, at least. It meant a great deal of work for her—not only looking after the children and Papa, but doing the men’s laundry and dinners as well. She had never been a strong woman, and the constant work took its toll.
Mrs Stuart had written only that week asking for the money we owed her, as she had had unexpected expenses.
I wrote back that evening, sending her three of the five pounds we owed (all we had in reserve) and apologising for not being able to send all.
‘My dear Mrs Stuart, On account of Mamma’s hand being stiff from hard washing she has had ... and she won’t let the girls help her, as she ought ... I now write instead of her ... I cannot tell you how poor Mamma felt at not being able to send you your own in due time. She was wretched, and last week went out to Grandfather’s to try and sell the heifer ... Twelve miles and she walked the whole way ... but on arrival there, found that a most unjust advantage has been taken of her, the beast having been sold, and it was with the greatest difficulty that she managed to redeem her ... And Grandfather gave her the beast to begin with! Bu
t at least we got two pounds ten for her and with my ten shillings savings ... will you now please receive the three pounds which we send you, and believe that, until the other two are paid, we can have no rest.’
***
I told Mrs Stuart our other news. John was to be promoted when the new railway line opened. With two wages coming in the family was safe, but until we could pay off our debts and have some savings behind us, I couldn’t rest easy. Life changed suddenly so often. I finished the letter but felt low at having to reveal our poverty yet again to Mrs Stuart.
If Papa had not written that letter to the newspaper, none of us would have had to be humiliated, and I could have gone back to Erindale, happy with the girls, blessedly studying in the library, instead of working until my feet swelled and my back ached and my head pounded with the thumping of the presses ... Christ is the vine, we are the branches. God prunes us to make us bear better fruit. It was hard to believe that sometimes. Christ hadn’t lost that job. Papa had.
***
Business was booming. Mr Kenny beamed as he came through the shop each morning. The company took on another girl, Katie Sinclair, and suddenly I found myself explaining the shop to Katie as though I were an expert. Three months, I realised. I’ve been here three months.
The printery was becoming known all over Australia. The Sands and Kenny Melbourne Directory, which listed all the streets by suburb, who lived in them and what their trade was, were becoming a byword in the city. Every post office had a copy, every office messenger used them. Mr Sands smiled smugly when another order came in for multiple copies. The directories had been his idea. ‘The whole life of the city, in one book,’ he said.
The Black Dress Page 12
