Last Day in the Dynamite Factory

by Annah Faulkner

  ‘Anything you can tell me,’ he says, willing her memory out of mothballs.

  ‘You know she worked at Myer?’

  ‘Yes, designing clothes. But I don’t know how she got the job in the first place.’

  ‘The whole family came down from Brisbane for a holiday; Ma’s cousin, Gregor, his two girls and their mother.’ Julie pulls a face. ‘Posh side of the family. A bit, you know … but the girls were nice. A few years older than me. Alice brought a dress and a coat with her she’d designed and made herself. A real smart outfit. She took it to Myer and showed them and oh, maybe a few months later, they offered her a job. Her parents didn’t want her to take it but she was eighteen and could do what she wanted.’ Julie tweaks an eyebrow. ‘She did, too. That was Alice. Lovely girl. Nice clothes, nice figure, nice person – you know – in herself. Always pulled her weight. Every night after tea she’d do the washing-up then sit at the table, designing. She’d get that involved Ma had to remind her to go to bed. Must have been good at her job; I remember some raises – she always bought us presents when she got a raise.’ Julie stops to accommodate a cough. ‘I don’t remember her getting pregnant but I do remember when she began to show.’ She nods at the memory. ‘Ma expanded all over. Alice just got a great big balloon out front, low down. I was always worried she’d fall over.’

  Chris smiles. ‘How did your parents take the news?’

  ‘Oh. Shocked, at first. Not the sort of girl you’d expect … well, a baby without a husband? But the biggest shock was her wanting to keep it. Not that Ma and Pa were the sort to judge – never cared what people thought and they loved kids. Alice quit Myer when she found out; had it in mind to get her job back later. Took in sewing until you were born.’

  ‘Didn’t she get money from my father?’

  ‘Gosh, Chris, I don’t remember. I know she was determined to put money by for your future, your education. You would want for nothing. That’s why she went to the factory so soon after you were born – for the money.’

  Factory?

  ‘Poor thing.’ Julie gazes at her hands. ‘Those terrible hands. I’ll never forget them.’

  ‘What …?’

  ‘You know; from the dynamite. Blistered, they were, like raw meat.’ She shakes her head. ‘Awful, especially her being so good with a needle. Sorry.’

  ‘No … keep going.’

  ‘You don’t want to hear this again.’

  ‘Yes, Julie, I do. Her sister didn’t talk about it much.’

  ‘Can’t blame her, can you?’

  ‘No.’ Chris gropes for words. ‘But I’m getting older and there are things I need to know.’

  Julie releases a gale of smoke. ‘By the end of the shift she couldn’t touch anything. Not even you.’

  ‘She was, ah – doing what, exactly?’

  ‘Wrapping geli.’

  ‘Wrapping …? If the stuff was so caustic, why didn’t she use gloves?’

  ‘Gloves?’ Julie looks incredulous. ‘You couldn’t use gloves – geli’s too unstable. You had to be incredibly careful wrapping that stuff – drop it and it’s all over.’ She looks at Chris suspiciously. ‘How much do you know?’

  He clenches and unclenches his fingers. ‘I know she was killed.’

  Julie narrows her eyes. ‘You don’t know anything. Do you know who your father is?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Then ask him.’

  ‘I have and he won’t tell me. You’re my last hope.’

  Julie sighs, setting off another bout of coughing. ‘S’cuse me.’

  Chris leans forward and touches her knee. ‘Julie, I must know. I have to know what happened. I’ll go mad if I don’t.’

  ‘You’ll go mad if you do.’ She picks at the olive-green velour on the sofa with nicotine-stained fingers. ‘You didn’t know she worked in the factory.’

  He shakes his head.

  ‘Look, Chris. I was only fifteen; I’m hazy on details. I do know that not long after you were born she applied for her job back at Myer. They didn’t have anything to offer but promised they’d contact her when they did. So she looked around for something in the meantime and there was work going at the munitions factories. Footscray, Maribyrnong and somewhere else – can’t remember. Not making guns by then but still producing dynamite. There was a lot of road-building going on after the war, land-clearing, quarrying, mining – that sort of thing. Alice got a job wrapping dynamite. It was good money, real good; she earned half as much again as she had at Myer and that was good. Dangerous, but. Four girls in a hut and all the huts spread out with mounds of dirt between them so if one went up it didn’t set off all the others. The chemicals were terrible – gave them headaches, made them sick in the stomach and their hands … That stuff, nitroglycerine or whatever, made their skin yellow and peeled it right off. When she wasn’t at work Alice sat around trying to grow new skin. Couldn’t even hold her baby.’ Julie looks at him sadly. ‘You. She’d kiss your face and blow on your tummy and make you laugh and Ma would put you in her arms, but she couldn’t touch you. She never complained; she said it wasn’t forever and plenty had it worse. The things she told us … Every week, some bloke’d lose a finger because there were no guards on the assembly lines. And the girls – some of them came from farms and dynamite was hard to get so they’d nick a few sticks here and there and hide them in their underclothes. And, you know, those chemicals ate right through them into …’

  Chris takes off his glasses and scrubs his eyes.

  Julie smacks her knees. ‘Okay. That’s enough. Not another word. I’ll make us a cuppa.’

  ‘No! Please don’t go – I need to know, Julie. How – how long was she there?’

  ‘Three months, maybe less. The worst part was … It was her last day. She was happy. Real happy. Myer had found her a job and she was going to hold her baby again. She went to work all excited. But just before knock-off time …’ Julie’s voice drops. ‘At least it would of been quick.’

  ‘What …?’

  She fixes him with her sad eyes, then lowers them.

  ‘Bang.’

  Right there, in the middle of the field.

  Right where Grandpa wanted to grow potatoes. The old camphor laurel tree had been hacked off two feet above the ground, and when the hopeful twig sprouted up from the stump, Grandpa and Tom snuffed that out too. Chris had lit the wick himself, watched it flare and hiss; then high-tailed it across the field and crouched down with Grandpa and Tom behind the shed.

  For a long time there was no sound except blood pounding in his ears. Then, an almighty crack! whump! and the stump flew into the air. It seemed to hesitate for a moment, then split, one half sailing over the road into Tom’s paddock, the other half exploding into the sun. Then down it came – a hailstorm of clay, roots and stones clattering on the tin roof of the shed.

  Quick, maybe. But not neat.

  Chris had never forgotten how far pieces of that stump went. How far his mother? Her flesh, blood and bones ripping through the air, landing in bright spongy patches on roofs until the sun baked it dry, the wind blew it away and rain swept it into the drains. How much of Alice Mary Johansson did they salvage? Hair, fingers, eyes? Pieces of dress, underwear, stockings with seams up the back, a girdle? How much of his mother made it into a coffin?

  Julie comes from the kitchen with a tea tray and props herself over the magazine table like a cat over a litter tray. She puts out dainty floral cups, sugar, milk, tea and Lemon Crisp biscuits.

  Chris licks his lips; his mouth is parched and swollen. ‘Did …?’ Did what? What more is there to ask; what more to know? ‘Did my … Was it in – in the papers?’

  Julie shrugs. ‘I suppose it would of been. I don’t remember. Milk?’

  ‘Yes – no. Is there a library around here?’

  ‘Box Hill. Just down the road.’

  He slumps in the seat of his rental car and peers at his watch. Three hands seem more than his brain can process. The clock on the dash is less ambiguous,
three simple digits: 2:55 pm.

  He puts his hands on the steering wheel. They’re trembling; he must be cold. He switches on the engine and fiddles with the temperature control, but there doesn’t seem to be any heat.

  Library.

  Library. He puts the car in gear and releases the clutch. The car jerks forward and stalls.

  Handbrake.

  Chris stares through the windscreen.

  Might be better to walk.

  He gets out and walks along the footpath. Cars, buses, trucks flash and rumble past, packed with lives – dreary, dreamy, desperate. Architects, accountants, cleaning ladies, cooks, crooks, palmists and priests, keepers of the gates to heaven and hell. Plans. His mother had plans. For him, for his future, and for her own. Twenty-one years old. Chris walks into a power pole and cracks his head.

  Wake up.

  Library … where’s the library? He rubs his head. Just down the road. He comes to a real estate office and a video shop. In the video shop a young bloke with more holes in his face than a pegboard, and all of them filled with rings, points back down the footpath the way Chris has just come. He stares at the boy’s finger, a ring with a skull. Hard and fleshless.

  Come on.

  At the information counter of the library Chris explains what he’s after. The librarian leads him to a row of microfiche machines and summons The Argus newspaper to the screen. ‘Your best bet,’ she says, and leaves him to browse.

  He stares at the screen. A date. He needs a date. October. October the what? No – he can’t have forgotten already. Can’t be the first, and the second was a Sunday. He scrolls through to the third.

  The Argus

  Melbourne, Monday 3 October 1949.

  (Price 2d.)

  MARRIED COUPLE DIE IN MOTOR CYCLE CRASH

  The couple were a Mr and Mrs Cupples.

  Funny. Not funny. Dead. He was twenty-seven and she was forty-one.

  ONE POLIO DEATH YESTERDAY

  A 22 year old woman died from polio and three others were hospitalised, including a nine month old baby girl.

  Bertie – how old was she when she got polio?

  Concentrate!

  He trawls through ten days’ newspapers with the eerie awareness his mother might have read these same articles. Except she couldn’t have turned the pages …

  THUNDERSTORM BLOWS UP SUBSTATION

  Did she feel anything?

  A BOOM IN HOUSE PRICES

  EXPENSIVE NEST

  A hotel licensee, alarmed to discover money missing from his till, found a rat’s nest lined with £150 in notes.

  WOMEN WANT PLACE ON JURIES

  A deputation (was) made to the Attorney-General by women demanding they be allowed to serve on juries. Mrs Barry said that in a recent trial following an alleged illegal operation, two young women had been sentenced to death by a jury of ‘12 good men and true’.

  Chris’s eyes zoom in.

  Unforgettable Grief

  ‘… the father of the unfortunate girl who died from the operation and her sister, who was then in the condemned cell at Pentridge, came to my home appealing for intercession. I shall never forget his grief as long as I live,’ she said. ‘But this is the point – it is women who are standing trial for their lives while men are the guilty parties. The married man responsible for the death of one girl and the sentences of death for murder being passed on two other women was regarded by the law as an entirely innocent party.’

  Women pay.

  And the men – the pious, hypocritical bastards with their rampant dicks – where were they when the sentences were handed down? When the baby was aborted or born and adopted? When the rope was knotted? Where was his father when his mother was blown to hell?

  Chris gets up, walks an unsteady circle around the room and sits down again.

  The price of smokes will go up 1d.

  There!

  A modest paragraph wedged between Myer Emporium’s advertisements for books and handbags:

  WOMAN KILLED

  A factory worker was killed in an explosion of dynamite when recent violent storms cut through Victoria, tearing down electricity lines and plunging entire suburbs into darkness. The woman was Alice Mary Johansson of Box Hill. The storms tore the roofs off houses and caused thousands of pounds’ worth of damage to crops.

  Nineteen words.

  Nineteen words for twenty-one year old Alice Mary Johansson. Clothing designer/seamstress/unmarried mother of Christopher John/packer of her own death. Nineteen words scattered between storms, blackouts and torn-off roofs.

  October the thirteenth, 1949.

  Nineteen words. And thousands of pounds’ worth of crops were damaged.

  Eleven storeys below him, the river reflects a city’s life. Crimson, purple and gold dance across the water in a festive jig. On this clear, cold winter’s night of 1998, Chris is forty-nine years away. Time is no buffer against memory.

  No memories.

  No memories, but something else: knowledge. Knowledge, at last, of his mother, and of his father. His father failed his mother in the most fundamental way. If Ben had taken care of the woman he claimed to love she’d never have had to wrap dynamite. She might still be alive now.

  Alice.

  Mum.

  He’s glad, now, that Jo forbade him to call her Mum, or Ben Dad. Apart from that sole concession to his mother’s role in his life, they buried her, locked up the memories of her life and death and threw away the key. And with it, her life’s meaning and its legacy. All too hard.

  Yet Chris was complicit in her exclusion too, accepting feeble responses to feeble enquiries and giving scant thought to Alice’s courage in keeping a baby under such socially and economically hostile circumstances. In the wordless way that families have, he, Jo and Ben colluded to keep the past – its pain and its mess – out of their well-pressed lives. Let the dead stay dead.

  Like the truth about Liam.

  Different. So different.

  His mother’s death reflected her courage; Liam’s death was a meaningless tragedy, an event beyond explaining. The thought that shit simply happens makes him feel sick, but unless he can convince himself that God had more important plans for his mother and his brother, that’s the fact of it. He removes his glasses and rubs gritty eyes. His head aches from where he banged it against the pole, his body from exhaustion. He lies on the bed and closes his eyes …

  … His mother takes a stick of dynamite and rolls it in a sheet of paper. The hut is hot, stifling, the heat intensifying every minute until it’s unbearable and Chris feels he’s going to explode and he rushes to the door but it’s locked. He bangs, kicks, beats and yells … and wakes, drenched in sweat.

  He peers at his watch: ten thirty. The room is suffocating; he’s forgotten to turn on the air-con. Across the river Southbank twinkles. He gets up and sets the thermostat, undresses and crawls into bed. Waits for sleep.

  Nothing.

  On the ceiling he can make out the shapes of the sprinkler and down-lights. Sometimes at home he lies in the dark like this, staring at what he knows is there rather than what he can see. Even without glasses his eyes register the slow turn of the fan, the dip and sway of the shadows of trees on the wall. This is when he hears the sound – the sound of his cells ageing every millisecond; the sound of one less breath.

  He shuts his eyes and a waking dream forms; visions of a young woman walking to work in a hut set between muffling mounds of dirt. She sits at a table with other young women rolling dynamite in waxed paper. She watches her skin turn yellow; feels it peel. But this day she refuses to think about it because this is her last day. In a few hours she’ll walk through those gates for the last time, with a wad of hard-earned pounds in her pocket. Pounds for her baby’s future.

  What did she want for him?

  Same as anyone wants for their kids. Life lived to the hilt. Not dribbled through your fingers like a broken egg.

  Chris falls into dreamless sleep for a few hours, then tosses f
itfully for the rest of the night. Early in the morning he gets up, puts on runners and heads for the lobby.

  As he steps from the lift the cabinet once again halts him. He bends to examine its glowing flanks and the tightness in his chest surrenders to a sigh. Such elegant understatement in the interwoven light and dark timbers and lean lines broken by the swelling curves of the handles. He examines the tag again. Peter Semple. Nobody he’s ever heard of. Yet in each meticulously executed process, Peter Semple is revealed. His vision, his passion, his laboriously loving craft.

  By their fruits you shall recognise them.

  He has no memories of his mother; everything he knows has been inherited from other people. Yet in their stories she is visible – her life and her death. She is visible in himself, in her passion for design and creation, in the joy of realising a dream from first imaginative spark to final stitch of fabric or coat of timber wax. This is what would have sustained Alice in her days at the dynamite factory: dreams of what she would do when she got her career and her skin back.

  How much of Alice is he? Could he have done what she did?

  Wouldn’t you work in a dynamite factory for your kids?

  Chris is first across the threshold of the State Library in Swanston Street at ten o’clock. Two hours later he’s researched everything he can find on women working in post-war munitions factories and there’s precious little. From bits and pieces in documents, articles, pamphlets and first-hand accounts, he gathers an impression of life in the factories.

  The girls worked in timber huts surrounded by earth mounds and tin sides so that if one blew up, it didn’t take the others. Sheep grazed between the huts to minimise the risk of sparks from mowers. There were four girls to a hut. Clothing was a plain serge or wool smock. No buttons, fastenings or jewellery of any sort in case it interfered with the gelignite. Large slabs of geli were delivered via a two-way cupboard and cut into pieces with a wooden knife. These were put through a machine to make sausage-like pieces which were then wrapped by hand in waxed paper, with both ends folded tightly.