The red dust had taken to this particular lane and was patrolling it like an officious policeman on his beat. It would come past in a willy-willy, that rolled down the middle of the beaten stretch of dirt between the railway and the stock-yard fence, twitching the few straggling gum trees, sifting a few dry straws for evidence, nodding the dead thistles. There was no corner the dust did not search out. Despairing of finding another camp, the little troupe just settled where they were in the lane. The children were tired and wanted their tea and began to cry. Red dust lay in a film on the food; it went to the bottom of the kerosene tins of water. The horses stood switching their tails, their heads drooped away from the stinging grit. The flies were so thick they committed suicide in hot tea, in anything left uncovered, and they crawled and buzzed so that it was a weariness to wave them away and a sickness to endure them.
Thirty-Bob went one way, the Apostle another, Deafy a third, each looking for a better place to camp. The dusk closed down and the wind dropped. The mosquitoes came out, at first only in squadrons of a few million at a time. Then the main army arrived from the direction of the irrigation canal.
Thirty-Bob came back with the news that the cannery wouldn’t be starting on the apricots for a week, and that their old camp by the channel was occupied. The Apostle and Deafy had no better luck. Mrs Tyrell fretted, but everyone was too tired to make any further effort. There was no feed for the horses in the lane, so in low undertones it was decided to duff them in on the banks of the canal, and get them out before dawn, when the inspector would be riding round.
It was a hot, still night. The clouds had closed down like a blanket beneath which the earth lay, a fever patient, burning, tortured, stifling, unrelieved. The clouds did not mean it would rain. They would clear away by morning, but they made the darkness and the chanting of the mosquitoes more unendurable.
Over by the deserted rice store three small fires burned, and shadows showed about them in the smoke. The Millions Club was in darkness, but the occasional spurt of a match and a low murmur of voices told that it also was occupied. Presently in the quiet a voice rose in denunciation; it was a voice like a rusty lawnmower.
‘The workers!’ the voice rasped, ‘the workers wouldn’t wake up if you put a bomb under them.’
Thirty-Bob groaned. ‘Kerist!’ he exclaimed. ‘Ain’t it bad enough with a rotten camp and heat and mosquitoes, without having Burning Angus and the Dogger into the bargain?’
27
I
The Stray went to Mrs Dexter for information about a job in the cannery. Mrs Dexter had worked there every season since the cannery was built; and travellers were always told: ‘Go to Mrs Dexter and she’ll put you wise.’
Mrs Dexter’s camp was less a camp than a defiance thrown in the teeth of the town. There was so much furniture in the tent that there was room only for Mrs Dexter to sit in the doorway among her geraniums and aspidistras, an implacable figure. She owed life a grudge, and life seemed to return the hostile glare with which she regarded it. Her habit was to nod her head gloomily at any piece of news and remark: ‘I could have told you that — ah! and more. But I don’t believe in talking.’
Steadfastly regarding the town that had turned its back on her, she sat motionless all day in her doorway, dignified, stout, permanent as a Sphinx, or, as some less poetic person put it, ‘like a bump on a log.’ Mrs Dexter’s grievance against Boswell was a concrete one. A worthy widow woman, she had not only brought up two sons in the sweat of her brow, but had saved enough to buy a little piece of land on which the sons, otherwise not notable for diligence, had built a house. Here Mrs Dexter had settled very happily, only to discover that the man who sold her the land did not own it — he had a lease which expired nine months after the house was built. The land then reverted to its rightful owner, and Mrs Dexter had nowhere to go. The unrighteous lessee had vanished with her money; she could not remove the house she had built, and she had no case for a lawyer to fight. Everyone said it was a shame; but, since there was nothing else to do, poor Mrs Dexter had perforce to move all her furniture out by the railway fence and sit beside it, hoping that next season, if her varicose veins were not too bad for her to stand, she would be able to redeem her fallen fortunes by the same hard work in the cannery which had previously built them up.
As for her two sons, they called themselves drovers; but the only signs of their profession were ten dogs, each tied to a separate stake about the camp, each with a separate kennel and a deep hole worn in the dirt where the unhappy animal dragged its length of chain. The sons lounged about, waiting for a job to leap out at them, and despite their convenience to the stock-yard, nothing ever did. They had suggested to their mother that she go with them ‘on the track’; but old Mrs Dexter refused to leave her furniture, now sadly deteriorated by the weather; she refused to leave Boswell, which she had known before ever there was an irrigation channel or a cannery, when it was just a dusty little collection of shacks in the middle of some sheep paddocks.
After all, she could sit in her doorway tragically demonstrating the hardness of heart that was Boswell; she could advise all strangers, particularly female strangers, and condescend to them, and tell them her story, and receive much more sympathy than she could have done anywhere else. In her own way, she enjoyed it all, enjoyed being bitter and giving warnings against trusting anyone.
‘Look where it’s brought me,’ she would say, shaking her head. ‘Just being too trusting. I never thought I’d come to this.’ And people deferred to her and respected her and were sorry for her.
‘You’ll need to register as soon as you can,’ Mrs Dexter told the Stray. ‘The first to register gets on first. Last year there was thousands of women came and no jobs for them.’
The Stray’s face lengthened.
‘One year there’s too many here, then the next year they think it’s no use coming and there’s not enough,’ Mrs Dexter continued. ‘Though I will say, there’s not such a tough crowd the last few years. I can remember when the girls at the cannery set on the union organiser and tore off all his clothes. Not a shred on him, and them laughing and booing him as he ran. A rough crowd, they used to be.’
‘Why’d they do that?’ The Stray was intrigued. She wondered why she had not visited this cannery before.
‘They wanted to strike for more pay, and he advised ’em not to. Took off all his clothes, they did, and tore ’em up. But it’s not like that now.’ The light of enthusiasm in the Stray’s eye made Mrs Dexter feel that perhaps this new acquaintance was not among the nice women who now came to the cannery. ‘A quieter lot you wouldn’t wish to meet. Of course, there’s a good deal of drinking and fighting still, but you don’t need to mix with them that does it.’
The Stray hypocritically agreed.
‘You’ll have to buy a pitting-knife, but they buy it back from you when you leave. It’s only a few shillings. Then you’ll have to buy a uniform; that’s only six shillings. They don’t buy that back, of course.’
She gave the Stray further directions: whom to see at the registry office, and what to say.
‘Tell him you haven’t any money,’ she advised. ‘He’s a very decent kind of man, and he mightn’t ask anything for registering you.’ The Stray was dismayed at the cost of getting a job, counting up the shilling here, the few shillings there, that she must spend.
‘Some wear rubber gloves,’ Mrs Dexter advised, ‘but they’re no good. You can throw ’em away by evening because the caustic soda eats them. Others wrap cloths round their hands, but I don’t wear anything. You’d better get a rubber apron if you don’t want to ruin your uniform. The bosses like you to look decent.’
That was all very well, the Stray thought ruefully, but unless she could raise a loan from Ma or Thirty-Bob, she would have no earthly chance of getting the uniform.
‘They run the peaches through the caustic,’ Mrs Dexter explained, ‘and that takes the skins off. Then you take your pitting-spoon and spit the peach … and give t
he stone a twist … here I’ll show you.’ She produced a curved knife. ‘This is the fastest way …’
By the time Mrs Dexter had told the Stray a few more things that might be of use to her, Miss Phipps had wandered up.
‘Some come to the cannery thinking they’re going to make a fortune,’ the old lady was saying. ‘But the boarding-houses charge them thirty-five shillings for board, and a girl’s lucky if she can make two pounds, to begin. Of course it’s different with you; you don’t have to worry about board.’ She nodded at Miss Phipps. ‘Is your sister going to register, too?’
‘Oh, yes, indeed,’ Miss Phipps cooed. ‘Lovely money.’
‘You want to watch out you don’t slice half your hand off,’ Mrs Dexter advised. ‘Of course, they’ve got nice rest-rooms for them who faints; and if you do slice your hand, they put you on compo …’ Seeing them puzzled, she explained: ‘Compensation money while it heals. But mostly,’ she added, ‘a woman just gets her hand bound up and goes on working. I’ve seen women with their hands cut to ribbons working away for dear life. They couldn’t afford to stop. You got to expect to cut yourself a bit at first.’
Miss Phipps did not seem to be as enthusiastic as she had been. ‘A woman’s hands,’ she declared, regarding her own stubby fingers, ‘should be her first care.’
‘ ’Tain’t my hands.’ Mrs Dexter misunderstood. ‘It’s my legs. I can hardly stand up for the pain now, and what they’ll be like after a week at the cannery …’ She gave a little groan of anguish. ‘But I don’t want to be camped down here the rest of my life.’
At the registry office, much as Mrs Dexter had predicted, the man in charge took one shrewd glance and said: ‘Sixpence for men, but we don’t charge anything for women to register.’ They thanked him.
Betty had come with Dancy and Miss Phipps, and when he asked Betty’s age, they all assured him that she was older than she looked.
‘It’s the worst of being little,’ Betty said ruefully. ‘But when me and Harley gets some money, we’re going to buy a wedding ring. That’ll show them.’
But when the cannery started, there were younger girls than Betty, and older women than Mrs Dexter — women with white hair and grim, wrinkled faces — all kinds of women; slatternly harridans; stout, respectable matrons; flirtatious, fashionably-dressed, little things giggling to each other; girls in groups chattering; girls in twos and threes, all kinds and shapes and sizes.
Some of them had just come with friends to look over the cannery and talk to old acquaintances. They hung about under notices that said: ‘Strictly No Admittance’ and ‘Trespassers Will Be Prosecuted.’ Others hobnobbed with strangers, comparing cards from the registry office, joining the long queue that filed past a small window where a couple of harassed men strove to sort out the particulars of each applicant. Those waiting chewed gum and ate oranges. Some had brought children with them, despite the rule that no children were allowed on the premises; but they argued that the cannery had not properly started yet.
Beside a huge heap of boxes Chris Crane had established himself, with a fountain pen, a book of union tickets, and a big, thick account-book. As each woman was employed, she went straight to Crane to pay her union dues, and there were many, like the Stray, who could only pay the ten shillings required of them from their first wages.
‘That’s all right. Yes, that’ll do,’ Mr Crane kept saying. His keen eye roved the crowd, particularly the group of men lounging and waiting around the landing outside the entry. Chris Crane had the memory of an elephant, and he was out for blood. Already he had vetoed nine men who, to his personal knowledge, had been working as strike-breakers in Orion. This cannery of the Boswell Co-operative Fruit-Growers’ Society was ‘A Hundred Per Cent Union’; and anyone the union vetoed, the cannery refused.
The management had had too much trouble in the past not to realise that it saved money and time if they kept the union friendly. The board of management, most of them growers, were a reasonable body of men. The cannery was a model cannery with a cafeteria room for the women when they fainted, and a matron to attend the sick, and a dormitory for girls that charged only seven shillings a week. In fact, in the workings of its welfare committee, the cannery had as good a reputation as in any other department. The cannery took pride of place over the packing-shed because it was bigger; and over the Store that distributed all the farmers’ needs by reason of its more intricate organisation.
There was in the town and on all the farms around a feeling that the cannery ‘belonged’ to Boswell. The townspeople loved it, they were proud of it, they took visitors to see it; and the cannery basked in this affection and was reasonably kind to the eight hundred women who assembled beneath its great roof, with its three hundred men, to add their quota to the two-hundred-and-fifty thousand cans of fruit that issued daily from its maw. The very children in the town knew that the cannery had turned out nine-and-a-half million cans last season; and could talk about ‘local ripe’ and ‘export ripe’ and ‘local green’ and ‘export green’; just as the children of a wheat farmer can tell you the rainfall in inches and points for the district.
The cannery was so big that most of the new recruits spent the day before they came on to the job in exploring. They went in and out gaily, upstairs and down, peering at the great vats where the syrup boiled; the twisted pipes and the shining taps; the piles of coal for the furnaces; the trucks shunting to and fro; the grimy engine-rooms; the great machines where sheets of metal were stamped into lids, rolled and soldered into cans, clattered away in trolleys to be filled.
Here and there someone’s bicycle had been wheeled in to the engine-room or the can-making department, so that the owner could keep an eye on it, and this casual appropriation of space by a stray bicycle was tolerated as long as the foreman did not trip over it. Men hung their coats where they thought they would be handy, and were grieved if a machine chewed them up. There was a casual and friendly air, even at the most furiously busy places.
The cannery hissed and steamed with the great green vats, like ten tame railway engines rearing up to the glass roof, where lattice shutters screened off the worst of the heat. Though, as the Stray and her mates found, with a temperature of over a hundred outside, it was much more inside, and the provision of beds for those who fainted was a desperate necessity. The cannery had to work when the fruit was ripe; and this was at the hottest time of the year, the apricots just before Christmas, then, after a break of three weeks, the peaches and nectarines.
More and more the place seemed like Hell, as the weeks wore on, and the temperature rose; nerves were frayed; tempers developed blisters of hate. A simmering haze rose up over sorters, packers, canners, pitters, speckers on the belt cutting out specks from the fruit; they worked with a maniac energy, ready to drop from exhaustion, too busy to talk. As soon as the whistle went, the women would run to their corners and begin work as though their lives depended on it. Soon the sweat would be pouring off them. The barrow-men on the pitting-floor rushed up with fruit; the men pulling down boxes, bringing cans and taking them away were cursed or bribed by the women to work faster. Minor grievances developed, as a woman felt that her neighbour was given cans and she neglected; complaints and squabbles arose over someone taking a place that was closer to the supply but belonging to another woman.
The closers soldering down can-lids, the men taking off fruit as it came through the cooker, the tappers-out, the stackers — they all felt that they were being simmered in this cannery, as though it were a great red vat; their very life-blood running away and trickling from them in a syrupy sweat.
Even when Miss Phipps cut her hand very badly and was led out to be stitched, the Stray worked on, wasting not a moment. She knew that the ‘fat fraud,’ as she termed her companion, would now loaf round the camp on compensation. But though she cut her own hands, though she was ready to faint from the terrible heat, she clung grimly to her determination to make money. Whatever happened, she would work and work. Snow would be comi
ng out of gaol, and they would need everything she could earn.
Little Betty worked beside her like one possessed. How would the busker ever get to the city if she did not earn the money? And he must, he must get a chance. Thirty-Bob, with his accustomed luck, had got a job wheeling a barrow at one of the packing-sheds; but the busker and Deafy could only lounge about and curse and hope for better luck when the peaches started and more men would be put on. Presently, they both found a chance picking apricots; and it was hotter and harder, they claimed, than stewing in the cannery. They had a long way to go; but they drove out in Thirty-Bob’s cart, taking a fresh horse each day, so that it would get the benefit of the grazing. They even debated moving out and camping at the farm where the picking was done; but it would have been too much of a hardship for ‘the girls,’ so Deafy and the busker put up with the long, hot ride; while Mrs Tyrell silently endured the heat and ants and flies of the stock-yard camp, and sat sewing pot-holders and minding the children.
By the time the knock-off whistle blew, everyone was always too tired to do anything but just get back to camp and lie in whatever shade there might be. Sometimes they went mad and went up town for beer; but the Stray, always so generous, was frightened even to spend sixpence.
Jimmy and the Tyrell children ate oranges all day. They would go to the packing-sheds with a sack and take away a new load of rejects each morning. The men were only too willing to give it to them, for if the children did not eat it, it would have to be carted out of the town and buried in pits. Eating too much fruit ‘upsets their insides,’ Mrs Tyrell complained. It had been the same in Orion, where cherries were easy to come by; but she was glad for the children to have the fruit, for in such hot weather they could not eat the meals she prepared — meat stews and bread for the most part, or just bread and jam. All the women wanted was tea. They drank tea by the gallon, black, with plenty of sugar. The camp was so hot, so hot and dusty, and the insects crawled and bit like a million red-hot needles, so that they could not sleep.
The Battlers Page 39
