The People's Train

by Thomas Keneally

  We would never be far from talking about her husband. But, our bodies having moved like delirious machines, I did not yet notice it.

  14

  The leader in Brisbane of O’Sullivan’s Australian Socialist Party was a waterside worker named Thompson, who notified the attorney-general that our first large meeting was planned to take place on a Sunday afternoon at the end of winter in Albert Square.

  He received a reply in these terms: Queensland is a Christian state, and the Christians, who are in the overwhelming majority, must be safeguarded on the Sabbath from the ungodly utterances of a few atheists.

  Surely enough, we members felt bound to make our point – a freedom of speech campaign. Walter O’Sullivan sent a telegram from Melbourne backing our resolution and wishing he could join us. But despite his mistrust of parliaments, he was attempting to get a resolution concerning Home Rule in Ireland taken up by the elected socialists in the Victorian legislative assembly.

  Hope Mockridge and Amelia Pethick also expressed themselves ready to raise their voices in Albert Square in defiance of Hope’s former employer, the attorney-general. I urged Hope not to attend the gathering or test the issue. She could then be counsel to those who were arrested, if there were arrests. Giving up the chance to assemble could be her self-sacrifice. As for Amelia, she should stay away on the grounds that the Queensland police had no affection for her after the hatpin affair. I’d had a hard time dissuading Rybakov from turning up – I feared a damp cell might be bad for his lungs.

  That Sunday, a drizzly winter’s day, I got to Albert Square early. I moved uncertainly around the city council’s lawns and flowerbeds as the sun came out and young couples anxious to escape their parents’ eyes began to turn up with blankets to settle themselves on the drying lawns.

  Paddy Dykes was another early arrival for the rally, to be in one corner of the square. He turned up in the suit he always wore, a ginger-checked affair that would suit most men for a picnic. Because he was negligent about his clothing, this suit had become his uniform.

  Expecting the cops, Tom? he asked me.

  Not yet. We are an assembly of two.

  Isn’t that enough to be a crime in this bushwhacker state? He smiled then and leaned towards me. Remember I told you about the fellow in the pub at Woolloongabba? The fellow who made certain claims about Bender’s tram? Well I’ve met up with him. I went to the pub with my unionist friend and here’s this big solid fellow, all the charm of a trapdoor spider on a shithouse step. Well, he used to put dynamite in drill holes for the railway. And he claims to have thrown the Palace bomb.

  Is it a reliable claim?

  He said that for his services he’s been given a house in Toowong. He named the street. It turns out to be the case all right. I went to the registrar-general’s and filled out a form to see the title to the house. I found it was bought for him by the Queensland Securities Company. So then I enquired into that company.

  You’re a genuine ferret, Paddy, I told him.

  He grinned crookedly. Yeah, but I’m not the one who’s hiding up a hole. Anyhow, one of the principal men of this Queensland Securities is Freeman Bender of Brisbane Tramways. There are two other directors of Brisbane Tramways who share that honour with him. I also sighted the stamp-duty cheque signed by Bender himself. Howzat! Clean bloody bowled!

  I was genuinely interested now. That means Bender employed the man?

  Yes, said Paddy Dykes. Quid pro bloody quo!

  Are you going to tell this story in the Worker?

  Yes, Tom. But the authorities here don’t listen to the Worker. I’ve also passed the details on to a scribe of my acquaintance at the Brisbane Telegraph, as fine a crusty old rag as you could get. It’ll be harder to shut him up. Set deep in his wrinkled face, his eyes blazed. When it becomes known, said Paddy, Bender’s credit will be blown in Brisbane. The man in the pub told me Bender’s angry because too much mercury was used in the bomb. If it got out he was involved, his toff mates who were injured wouldn’t forgive him. Talk about a pork chop at a synagogue! They’re the ones who’ll drive him out of town. He’ll have to go home and pick on coalminers in Pittsburgh.

  This exciting conversation was interrupted by the arrival of Thompson with a banner we helped him unfurl. Australian Socialist Party. There were quite a few men from the unions, Australians and Britons and others, perhaps two dozen. Since the Salvation Army was allowed to campaign and play band music and march on the Sabbath, Suvarov, with his theatrical tastes, turned up in a Salvation Army uniform with a donation box in his hands. The little crowd was swelled further by a young Lena striker who had decided to stay here in Brisbane after the others left, a hulking young man named Podnaksikov. Freckles on his face, which mining in Siberia had subdued, had come blazing out in Brisbane.

  As we stood around the little rostrum, Thompson, a thin fellow whose face looked prematurely seamed, advanced to a low sandstone wall, climbed onto it, and began to speak earnestly about the right of assembly. The ban was not for our sake, and not for the sake of respectable householders whose Sunday rest was in any case disturbed by the sound of massed religious brass bands, but for the sake of capital and its underpinnings.

  It was not the best of speeches. I looked around. Families with children were turning up for picnics on the broad lawns behind us. I had a feeling that we were so small in number, and Thompson so little a threat to good order, that we would not be noticed. Ten minutes in, however, I saw the navy blue of police converging from the streets on either side of the square. We were about equal in number and they moved among us, arresting us one by one, taking us to enclosed horse-drawn wagons parked in Ann Street.

  Two constables descended on me. The horrors of the old feeling of being constrained, something I thought I’d got over long ago, returned to me as they pushed me along.

  Thompson called, No resistance, please, comrades. Show them who we are!

  The police had the batons, after all, and were the same big muscular yokels one generation removed from Scotland and Ireland who had broken up the strike march.

  Hope, whom I hadn’t noticed until then, rushed forward to the senior policeman at the corner of Ann Street.

  Inspector, she said, I am counsel representing these men.

  All right, miss, said the older policeman with distaste, as if she were declaring her flesh for sale.

  You are a base man, I called to him, and he came over to me, raised his elbow (being shorter than me), and dug it into my skull behind my ear. Through my pain I heard Hope cry, Say nothing, Tom, it just gives them further cause.

  As I was hustled a few steps, I had the depressing sight of two policemen wrestling with young Podnaksikov. Please, I said, Inspector, please let him go. He was just wandering past.

  The inspector spat at my feet and walked away.

  Paddy Dykes was at first arrested but soon let go, since a policeman remembered him as mixing with reporters from the better Brisbane papers.

  I’ll stick with these blokes, he told a police sergeant.

  You’ll push off when you’re told, you bastard.

  I don’t bloody want to push off and I don’t have to.

  The sergeant belted Paddy’s ear sideways with the stub end of his baton. Here was a gendarme, Queensland-style, beating up a man even because he insisted – unsuccessfully – on being arrested.

  In Suvarov’s case – though he claimed to be a Salvation Army man who had been looking for donations among the ungodly – they believed not his uniform but his glottal Russian accent, and he shared a wagon with myself and two other men on the way to being charged for violation of the Assembly and Affray Act.

  Even then, as we jolted companionably in the back of the wagons off to police headquarters, I thought, they surely cannot punish two dozen men listening to a boring speech on a Sunday morning.

  We were taken down to the police cells we had occupied once before. Some men were bored. Not Podnaksikov though, who sat trembling and inspecting his own hands fo
r what palmists pretended to see there: a lifeline.

  15

  They had taken Suvarov’s Salvation Army jacket and cap away and left him shivering overnight. Not a large thing in the history of his sufferings, but in the morning I could see that he was feverish and more hollow-eyed than would have been normal in the circumstances. He had made his assessment more finely and accurately than me, and presumed we would be attacked. The survivor of the Lena massacre, Podnaksikov, looked like a large child who had wandered into a kingdom whose rules he did not understand. The question that occupied us now, as it hadn’t that morning, was: could we be truly imprisoned, and in that case how much did the Boggo Road prison of Queensland resemble the prisons of the tsar?

  The next morning the public prosecutor let go a few of the men arrested the day before, but no one of Russian background, so poor Podnaksikov was among the twelve of us brought up to the court above to be charged with violating the Act. Bail was refused for such desperate criminals as had dared come together for a dull speech in Albert Square, a frightful assault on society. After we came down, Hope was permitted three minutes to talk to us through the bars. To me it was like a conversation across a river.

  If you plead guilty, you’ll get lesser prison time or perhaps a fine, she said.

  Do you have a defence ready for a not-guilty plea? Thompson asked her, as I held her eye through the bars.

  Yes. There is a good argument for not guilty. But this judge has a closed mind.

  What do you think we’ll get for pleading not guilty?

  She put her long-fingered gloved hand to her brow for a second and shook her head. Then she looked up. Surely not more than two months.

  I thought, I can manage that. I’ve managed years!

  Obviously Suvarov consoled himself with the same thought. His revolutionary daring came surging back.

  Then are we solid? asked Thompson. Are we solid, comrades, all together? Not guilty?

  Most growled yes.

  Very well, gentlemen, said Hope with great dignity. I shall argue to the limit for you all. But you must help me, Thompson. No inflammatory remarks. You understand?

  How I adored her then, but perhaps differently, like a child in a storm finding a kindly aunt.

  Cuffed by the wrists and ankles – always a strange unutterable experience and of course reminiscent of our pasts – we were not brought up to magistrates, the lowest order of the judicial system, but taken by cart to the district court, and when our black carriage entered its yard and we hobbled out, the number of police in the yard proved to us that we were in more trouble than we should reasonably have been. Our anklets were removed. Stumbling up the stairs to the court, I noticed that the jury box was empty. The Act, it turned out, did not allow for a jury for our offences – a sign that the authorities desired a certain result. We now stood up on orders from a court clerk. From the dock I saw a black-robed judge enter and sit on the bench. At the prosecutions table, three wigged men represented the state. Below me at her table, Hope turned, looking strange since she too wore her legal wig and gown, a nun of the law, lovely and humane, the gloss of sweat on her upper lip, which madly I took as a message to reassure me that under all the pomp of the court lay the accustomed veins and glands of life and passion.

  Suvarov claimed the right to the use of an interpreter, just to hold the court up. He was full of tricks like that, little time-consuming ploys. Annoyed, the judge ordered Suvarov’s trial delayed a day, which was probably more of a result than Suvarov wanted.

  The state’s prosecutor now put his case against us. We had known we could not assemble without the police commissioner’s consent, and we knew we would have been very properly refused it, since a British and Christian society wisely did not let those who intended to destroy it discuss their plans in the open air in the hearts of capital cities on Sundays. And unless possessed by a malign spirit of disruption, we certainly should not do so at a time when a recent strike had shown how disaffected many were with society, and when men like these men, Your Honour, men who were anarchists or the friends of anarchists, had thrown an assassin’s bomb into the midst of leading citizens!

  When Hope rose it was to the evident disgust of the judge.

  Yes, Mrs Mockridge? said the judge. I hope your esteemed husband is well.

  Thank you, Your Honour, he is improving. And, despite the wild rhetoric of the prosecution, I would not defend the men who had in any way harmed him. There is no evidence these men threw any bomb and it’s improper to drag that in.

  I see your argument, said the judge, with obvious contempt.

  This appearance might be doing neither Hope nor us much good. I began to feel that nausea which the idea of blank walls and foreshortened space brought up in me. The fear of the eye in the peephole in the doorway which, once glimpsed, vanished – or, more horribly, didn’t vanish and didn’t seem to blink.

  Having enough strength nonetheless to endure, I conveyed none of this to my counsel as she bravely argued the common law on assembly. The individual was possessed of a sovereignty that gave free persons the right to associate with each other in exchanging ideas, just as obviously as they could do so to make a commercial contract. Free sovereign citizens considered a crime had been committed only when there was damage to persons or property. The prosecution knew this, and that was why they had raised the matter of the attack on Mr Bender’s special tram in court. These men abominate that attack! None of them approved of it.

  The prosecution called the inspector who had spat at my feet. He told the judge that some of the accused were lucky they had not been arrested for assaulting police.

  I heard a fluting woman’s voice from the public gallery. It was Amelia Pethick, holding an umbrella. Shame! Lies! And under oath, Your Honour!

  The judge told the usher in the public gallery to remove that woman. Before the usher reached her, Amelia rose. She said, I shall move at my own pace and willingly. I’ve always despised perjurors.

  In his one wise act of the day, the judge let her contempt slide by, and she departed.

  Hope called Thompson to the stand. She asked him was he the Queensland president of the Australian Socialist Party?

  He said he was.

  How many members do you have on your books?

  Across Queensland?

  Yes.

  In the whole state, twenty-seven.

  This number amused the prosecution side and the judge.

  So when you called a meeting on Sunday did you expect a crowd?

  I didn’t expect a great crowd, but...

  He was going to say he had hoped for it, but Hope cut him off and thanked him.

  But then the prosecution got to him. If he didn’t expect a crowd, why did he go to the biggest meeting place in Brisbane?

  In its summing up the prosecution asked for a prison term and a fine for each of us. We will see how deep are the pockets, said the prosecutor, of the Australian Socialist Party and its anarchist friends.

  Hope asked the judge to respect the spirit and not the letter of the Assembly and Affray Act.

  The judge chastised her in his summing-up for not knowing that statute law overrode common law, a very basic principle. Then he sentenced each of us to two months’ imprisonment and a fine of ten pounds. He warned us that he would make it more severe if there was a repeat of our offence, but he had taken some account of the fact that we were working men and our wages were limited. (The next day he took seven hours before giving Suvarov two months but a fine of twenty pounds.)

  I looked towards my cherished barrister in her ridiculous legal wig. She was the living water, and I would lose her in my isolation.

  16

  When a man is imprisoned he goes into a different state. The man walking the shore cannot imagine himself underwater because when he is underwater he is a different being. Prison is like being underwater yet being able to breathe in some diminished way.

  Another danger is that though you know the judge said two months, someth
ing in you, the trapped beast, suspects forever.

  I had remembered none of this when I had assembled that Sunday at Albert Square. But when I came down from the dock with the ot hers, I needed to battle a new sickness, or a revival of an old one – that sense of my own nullity, such as I had not felt since the days in the Alexandrovski, the Nikolayevski camp, or the miserable cold camp in the trapped valley of Vorobyeva.

  I had often seen and occasionally passed Boggo Road jail. It was a high-walled square fortress with a gate set well back from the street. Arriving there shackled we were told by the warden we would not be put with murderers, so we had no excuse not to reform our behaviour. We would be allowed to keep our street clothes unless they proved verminous. The section into which we were then marched, each of us with his blanket, his dixie can, tin mug and bar of coarse soap, was three layers of cells high. We were put one by one in cells barely seven feet long and five wide. There was a bed, a chair, a slops bucket in each.

  The guards were Britons or else the children of Britons, together with some South Africans from a prison that had closed down at the Cape. They were thus in most cases men who had a strong reverence for the Majesty we had offended. As they moved in and out of our cells, depositing us each in our own suite, they joked along in harsh accents that fell off the prison ceiling like bricks of sound. You could have sworn the fall of these sharp-edged sonic clumps could wound a man.

  Once I was locked in I was suddenly utterly well in soul and body again. There, as if delivered by God – the God of equity, not the God of the churches which, as Gorki says, are God’s tombs – I saw the trace of stencilling around the walls, as if this tiny dog box had once housed a long-serving prisoner who relieved the vacancy of the walls with little blue fleurs-de-lis. They could still be dimly made out running around the cell at about shoulder height. The little symbols told me that at some time in the past, a man without the writings of Martov or Plekhanov or Gorki to sustain him had breathed here at length and in a sort of resigned version of himself. The immediate comfort drawn from these little blue markings was that I was able to assure myself, You too can certainly remain Artem in this space. The lack of air and the cancellation of dignity need not take you away from what is written at the centre of your flesh and blood.