… rises on an acre of hummocky paddock sloping down to the river where, until recently, cows grazed: sleek Jerseys with lustrous brown eyes, demure lashes and swollen udders slopping milk and cream for the billycans of the city. The cows have given ground. They have fallen back toward the east, dawdled off downriver to tough little farms grubbed from the wetlands of flax and raupo. They have made their unhurried retreat, tails flicking, green shit dribbling into circular pies in the dust, while their former pasture has sprouted an overnight mushroom growth of surveyors’ pegs. Their paddocks now feature among the advertisements in the daily paper as Barchester Estate, where might be found ‘Charming sites overlooking the river. A delightful situation close to the city.’ Plans and particulars concerning the estate’s development might be obtained from the auctioneers and estate agents, Craddock McCrostie Co., whose sales at 12 noon every Saturday in their rooms on Cashel Street have been, they report with quiet pride, ‘conspicuously successful’. Those in search of bargains in Farm, City and Suburban Properties cannot do better than attend.
The bargain has been struck, a charming site secured, a design selected from a massive catalogue supplied by the builder, and now the residence is taking shape. It is a skeletal thing as yet, poised on a small regiment of totara piles dug into a sandy ridge in defiance of any biblical caution. Bearer and joist, stud and brace. The frame is of totara dragged from the peninsula hills, for it is impervious to rot. More totara clads the structure, laid in horizontal rows of weatherboard like the overlapping feathers of waterfowl. Water will be shed from board to board as it is shed feather to feather.
The interior, too, is finely dressed in timber from a single pine that took seed a thousand years before the sawyers sought it out and set to its destruction, boots scraping for a purchase on muddy ground, sweat soaking woollen vests, as the blade cuts deeper then deeper yet until the tree groans and falls, taking with it that dense habitation of bird and insect and multitudes of living things. Trimmed, dragged to the mill by straining oxen, cut and sliced and here it is: rough-cut rimu nailed to totara stud, both timbers still green so that they will hold straight and true as they dry, slowly, slowly.
This sarking is nailed in place by a young man from Alsace, a miner, son of miners, come to see for himself exactly how life might be lived in the workers’ paradise. This idyll in the South Seas described to him with accompanying lantern slides by a lecturer from the SPD to a roomful of men like himself, scrubbed up for night class, though the coal dust can never quite be expunged from the crevices of the body: a gritty rim at groin and hairline, black crescents beneath the fingernails. The lecturer, in stiff collar and woollen suit, was from Strasbourg, and his eyes were alight with enthusiasm behind wire-rimmed spectacles as he quoted the observations of a fellow socialist, Albert Métin, a man who had visited this distant place and discovered the Workers’ Paradise of minimum wage and maximum hours, pensions in old age, compensation for injury, compulsory arbitration in dispute. The great estates of the wealthy had been seized and broken into many smaller holdings, 176 properties redrawn as 3500 farms where plainer men might make their living. And all, said the lecturer, tapping the lectern for emphasis so that a lantern slide of a worker’s cottage, sturdy and snug within its own garden, jiggled on the screen. All, he said, without bloodshed! Without revolution! Without, according to Métin, any debate whatever concerning social doctrine! Yet here it was, made manifest beneath a benevolent sun. The peaceful and inevitable triumph of good sense. Socialism! The faith and hope of the working man, ‘for when the masses,’ said the lecturer, glancing at the wall clock and reaching for Liebknecht by way of rousing conclusion, ‘have become socialists, the time of militarism will have come to an end!’ The slide of cottage and garden dwindled to a dot, the lecturer stuffed his papers into his case and left at a run to catch his train. And the young man with his dirty nails emerged onto the street, chill rain falling through smoke-grimed air, filled with new resolve.
Denniston, when he finally reached it, was not quite the paradise he had imagined. He arrived in spring. Drizzle and fog cloaked the dank hills, and mining was as it had always been: the descent into darkness and the uneasy knowledge he had never been able, quite, to set aside, of the great weight of earth above his head.
But in this country, released from tradition and custom and the weight of the past, it was possible to change. He could walk away from the dark. He could lay aside his shovel and take up a hammer. He could become a carpenter.
He is Friedrich. His mother called him Frédéric, with her native uvular ‘r’, but that was just at home, where they might be as French as they pleased. At school, he was Friedrich, because it was simpler that way in a place that switched identity as regularly as a clock ticking: now French, now German. The border swinging a few miles to the east, a few miles to the west.
Frédéric. Friedrich. And now Fred, though his workmates insist on calling him Fritz. It’s a joke, a strange Anglo-Saxon joke, like asking him on the first day on this job if he could go and ask Bingham the foreman for the glass hammer. ‘Glass hammer?’ he had repeated, forcing his mouth to the shapes of this flat New Zealand speech.
‘Yeah,’ they had said. Taffy and Curly and the others whose names he had not yet mastered, heads down, grinning as they rolled their cigarettes and drank the bitter brown stuff they insisted on gulping mid-morning with every appearance of satisfaction. This thin smoko, when back in Forbach their German brothers paused for their zweites Frühstück of beer and sausage. The glass hammer was clearly a joke, but he went along with it, for were not all working men united in this, their good humour, as in all things? They gave their bodies, their hands and backs, to toil. With their sweat they created the wealth of the world, wealth seized by 10 per cent of the population, by those fat capitalists, Krupps and Siemen and the rest of them — while the working man and his weary wife and sickly children lived like pigs. Working men were united in this, too: their suffering, and the struggle to ameliorate that suffering. Germans and Americans, Englishmen and Frenchmen, and here, too: these New Zealanders, sniggering as he sets off on his fool’s errand, to find the glass hammer. United in their common cause. United by laughter. As he laughs also and answers to any name his brothers care to bestow on him.
The main thing is that he is above ground, not buried deep. He’s perched upon a ladder, his hammer striking each nail dead centre. He likes the sound of it, ringing in the open air. He likes the way he has become accurate and fast. He likes the flex of his boots on the ladder rung. He likes the feeling of doing something that is clear and has a purpose. He is making a house and what could be more purposeful than that?
He is fixing in place lengths of sarking, roughly cut, the stuff with knots and imperfections, the signs of the saw still visible. It doesn’t matter, for it will never be seen. Its function is to brace, lending its invisible strength to the whole framework, holding everything steady.
Over the sarking they will nail a web of scrim, coarse woven jute that had its beginning in a Bengal bog, as a tall green reed with its roots down deep where the sacred river abandons herself to the sea. Men have waded through mud to cut its stems, small girls and women have clawed out the soft core with nimble fingers, and the fibres have hung and dried and been carried off in the dusty holds of ships to Dundee. And there they have been sprayed with whale oil, boiled from the bodies of the great creatures that swim in all magnificence along the sweep of coast a few kilometres from where Frédéric/Friedrich/Fritz perches on his ladder in the morning sunlight. Someone has discovered somehow that whale oil renders jute fibres malleable enough for machine weaving. More girls and women have stood at their looms, lungs filling with dust in the deafening clatter. And other men, other workers, have heaved the woven stuff into other ships and here it is, carried back across the world to this place, where it is being unrolled and nailed into place over the carcasses of dead trees. Over it will be pasted paper patterned with pink roses and acanthus, purple grapevines on an acid-green lattice, irises and tulips reduced to their stylised essence. Mouldings will frame the imagery of the flowery mead, scotia and skirting board and ceilings of rimu and floors of matai and windows framed with more totara and a roof overhead of corrugated iron, and the whole will sit, bare as an egg and newly painted, on an acre of cleared earth on a ridge overlooking a river.
Frédéric lifts his hammer, hits a nail square, one of a chorus of hammers at work, a saw grinding back and forth, back and forth, a young man singing on the roof: Oh! Oh! Antonio — that would be the one they call Taffy who fancies himself as a bit of a singer — Oh! Oh! Antonio, he’s gone away from overhead where his brothers, the workers of the world, are mortaring bricks on chimneys, tall chimneys varicoloured and cantilevered around the pot, another of the architect’s little flights of fancy. Left me alon-io, all on my own-io …
The nail slides through the sarking and into the stud, straight and true.
Birdsong, the sound of …