One Life: My Mother’s Story

TIME HAD a different meaning after Christopher was born. It wasn’t measured by the clock, but by the baby. Time to feed him, to change his nappy, to play with him, to take him out in the pram. Nance loved to watch him sleeping, loved to feel him feeding and know that her body was all he needed. It was as if she’d gone to another country where all the big things became small things, and the small things were all that mattered.

There was a little garden at the back of the flats and she loved to put him on a rug there and laugh with him at the new wonders of his world. Fingers! Leaves! Birds! When she leaned in to kiss his fat cheek she could see herself tiny in his eyes. It was a bond more profound than anything she could have imagined, frightening in its power.

Ken loved the baby too, made a popping noise with a finger in his cheek that made Christopher laugh. Carried him around the room, jiggling him and singing, This is the way the ladies ride, ladies ride, ladies ride. She’d think, He’s changed, it’s going to be different. But soon he’d hand Christopher back and it would be as it always was. He had papers to go through, or a meeting to go to.

At work every day, Ken didn’t have the timeless moments with Christopher that she loved so much. Nance would have felt sorry for him if she thought he missed them. He loved his son, she knew. But she’d come to see that something in her husband was stunted. Grand, overwhelming feelings frightened him. He was content with something smaller. Perhaps I can’t blame him, she thought. It’s that cold upbringing he had. It’s left him embarrassed by emotions. Having feelings meant going into some part of himself he wanted to keep hidden.

He was out more and more with the comrades. Took elaborate precautions, setting off briskly from the front gate towards La Perouse when she knew he was really going to Paddington, his Trotsky papers rolled up in a newspaper so he could get rid of them quickly. She thought all the cloak-and-dagger stuff was ridiculous until one night he came home shaking. He and another man had been putting pamphlets in people’s letterboxes along Selwyn Street in Paddington when the coppers were suddenly there. Tipped off, Ken said. He legged it, got away down a dunny lane, strolled out to Oxford Street and jumped on the first bus. They got the other man, put the cuffs on him. He’d do time. Distributing subversive literature. Six months and a five-hundred-pound fine.

She knew Ken wouldn’t have wanted to be caught. Imagine him in a cell with some burglar, and a bucket in the corner! At the same time, she thought there was a flicker of him wishing that he hadn’t been so smart in getting away.

Christopher was two months old when his uncle Frank’s unit was sent to Timor. Three months later, the impossible happened: Singapore fell to the Japanese. It was gone, and with it more than a hundred thousand captured soldiers.

Then the news came that the Japanese had taken Timor. That was all the paper said: Japanese forces landed on Timor Island yesterday, according to reports from Tokio. Australian troops there would be expelled. Then there was no more mention of Timor. Frank and all the men with him had vanished into a great silence.

Now the Japanese were bombing Darwin. The Sydney Morning Herald issued a special call for unity, self-sacrifice and confidence in facing the enemy and printed a booklet, What to Do in the Case of an Invasion.

Nance woke up every morning with the thought, Is he still alive? The war became personal, every action a bargain with fate.

One Saturday afternoon, out walking with Christopher, she passed a Catholic church and glanced in through its wide-open doors. It was full of people waiting to go into confession. There was a sense of light and warmth and a cheerful family mood. Her feet took her in.

She joined people at one of the side altars, thinking from the crowd that this must be the saint who looked after soldiers. The statue above the altar was like the ones she’d scoffed at years ago, that sure-of-herself schoolgirl. She didn’t know whether she believed or what she believed, but she needed to be here, with all these other people looking for comfort.

An older woman turned away from the altar and made a place for her. Nance saw her tears, put out a hand and touched her arm. Took a candle and lit it from one that was already burning. Christopher twisted in her arms towards the lights, the dozens of frail bending flames, bearing all those prayers upwards.

Coming out she felt less alone. Others, longing for their own soldiers to be safe, would light their candle from hers, and the murmuring mass of longings would become one river of entreaty. Keep him safe.

When she got home Ken was at the kitchen table reading a newspaper. She knew it must be the Socialist Worker because that was the only paper he bothered with now. He called the others pabulum. She’d had to ask him what it meant. It was part of the Trotsky language, like Fourth International and Dictatorship of the Proletariat. She thought he was probably right about the newspapers, they put the best face on things, but they had to because otherwise everyone would give up, and God knows what would happen then, to Frank and to all of them.

She saw the headline where Ken was reading—‘Don’t Fight the Capitalists’ War!’—and felt a spurt of rage.

Ken, she said, Max and Frank are over there. You know that. My brothers. They need more men to go and help them.

Oh, not fools, Nance, he said. Only, well, naïve. I’m sorry about Frank, but the sooner one side or the other wins this war, the better. The worse things are, the sooner they’ll be better.

She was so angry she couldn’t speak. She went into the bedroom and stood at the open window, trying to breathe. The Trotsky idea might be right in some ways. She knew all the arguments about the bosses’ war. But what Ken said about her brothers was like the vegetarian-Quaker prattle thing. How could he be so calm about it, so smug? She was ashamed for him, and for herself too. This was the man she’d married, a man lacking in proper feelings. She didn’t want to spend her life with a man like that.

As she jiggled Christopher and shushed into his ear she realised how narrow her choices were. She might have left, that day she’d said she had to wash the windows, but having a child changed everything. At a pinch you could live in a boarding house with a baby, but how would you pay the rent? If you went back to work to pay the rent, who would look after the baby?

Meg had called marriage legalised prostitution and she was nearly right, except it wasn’t marriage that made it so, it was having a child. How ruthless nature is, she thought, that the joy of having a child makes you willing to walk into that trap.

On impulse she decided to visit Bert at the farm in Guyra. She didn’t know if she was ready to leave Ken for good, only that she couldn’t go on sitting in that flat with him reading about the capitalists’ war. She might stay for a week, or she could keep extending the visit until it was a new life. There was nowhere else she could go.

Bert was pleased to see her but he wasn’t going to change his routines. Every morning he harnessed up the Clydesdales and went out ploughing. He didn’t believe in tractors, thought they compressed the soil. He’d come back from the paddocks when it got too dark to see, eat his chops and potatoes, have a few glasses of whisky and go to bed. He and Nance didn’t talk much. They were both thinking about Frank but there was no point in talking about him, because they didn’t know if he was dead or alive. Nothing else seemed worth remarking on.

Green Hills was ten miles from town. Bert had a truck but she’d never learned to drive and he didn’t have time to teach her. There were no neighbours, no shops down the road, nowhere to take the baby in the pram even if she’d had the pram with her. Once a week Bert drove to Guyra for supplies. Nance went with him, gabbled at Mrs Mackie in the grocer’s for the pleasure of having another human to talk to. At least out in the paddocks Bert had the Clydesdales. They were good listeners.

When a letter came from Ken she ripped open the envelope and read it right there in the post office in front of old Mr Moorhouse. She’d left no hint that her trip to Guyra was anything more than a visit, but his letter was full of warmth and promises. He’d be different, he’d be a better husband, he’d make her happy. She thought, Never underestimate this man.

She didn’t believe him, because she didn’t think he could change the way he was made, any more than she could. Yes, he’d make an effort for a while, as he did if they had a row about something. He’d buy her a bunch of flowers and for a day or two he’d make a great splashing to-do of the washing-up, sit with her after tea and make her laugh. She knew now that the funny stories were carefully worked up. He’d think of the story and then lead the conversation around so he could tell it. His parents’ house had never been called Banksias. Still, even after she knew his charm was a fib, she found him hard to resist when he laid himself out to please. If only he could understand that she didn’t want a performance. What she wanted was for him to talk to her, ordinary conversation about real things. People, and feelings, and what it meant to be alive in the world.

It wouldn’t be any different in Sydney, but she couldn’t stay at Green Hills. She had to write back and say she was coming home, because what else could she do? At last a card came from Frank.

I am now in a Japanese prisoner of war camp in Java. My health is excellent. The Japanese treat us well so don’t worry and never feel uneasy. Hope all well. Write soon. Love, Frank.

It was Frank’s writing but the words were someone else’s. Never feel uneasy. That was out of a phrasebook. The men must have been told what to write, she thought. Still, behind the words was the only message that mattered: when the card was written, Frank was alive.

The war was going so badly that no one made a fuss when the government started conscription, all able-bodied males between eighteen and thirty-five unless they worked in an exempt occupation. The conscripts were only supposed to fight on Australian territory, but New Guinea was Australian territory and so they were there, fighting the Japanese. Men who weren’t fighting had to register with Manpower. Manpower could send you to work anywhere.

Ken was beside himself. An outrageous erosion of liberty, he called it. She took him on. She didn’t care, she said. Not if it helped them win the war and get her brothers home safe. He looked at her in surprise and she realised she’d been shouting. But he wouldn’t yield. Thinking like hers was what they counted on, he said.

Nance caught herself banging the saucepan down on the stove in frustration and remembered her mother at Rothsay. She began to look forward to the letter that Manpower would send Ken. No matter what he says about the running dogs of imperialism, she told herself, he won’t be able to avoid the war now.

He came to her one afternoon and said, I’ve closed the practice, Nance. Been offered a job on the waterfront.

Not Manpower, he said. The comrades arranged it. I’m to be a boilermaker’s labourer, Nance.

Ken, a soft-handed intellectual, being a boilermaker’s labourer! It seemed ridiculous, although it made some kind of sense when he explained. As a Trotskyite he had to throw his lot in with the workers. The proletariat. The revolution wasn’t going to start in a suburban solicitor’s office, after all.

He didn’t believe in the capitalists’ war, so he couldn’t let himself be put to work making bullets. The comrades had made sure he’d be working on merchant ships, not warships. He was as proud as if he’d been made a judge. Saw himself, she realised, as a latter-day Trotsky: an intellectual who wasn’t afraid to live out the reality of his beliefs.

She was already imagining the pity she’d get from everyone. One day the wife of a solicitor, the next of an unskilled labourer. But she wasn’t going to let them pity her. She’d rather be thought a fool. She came up with all sorts of ways to square it with herself. She should be proud of a husband who was willing to get his hands dirty, doing hard honest labour. And even if she didn’t agree with them, she had to respect his convictions. After all, she’d come back from Guyra knowing she had to make a go of the marriage, and standing by your husband was part of that. She told herself that it was the side of Ken she liked best: not to do the ordinary, never to swim with the current.

All the same, a little voice deep inside reminded her that boilermaking was an exempt occupation. Oh, you sneak, Ken!

The comrades had organised for him to work on a French ship, the Ville d’Amiens. He got a boilersuit and some strong boots and the first day she made him a couple of sandwiches and a thermos of tea and tried not to think how the brand-new boilersuit gave the game away. She should have rolled it in the dirt and washed it a few times.

He came home that night full of what he’d seen. She’d never seen him so excited. His job was to grasp a red-hot rivet with tongs, slide it into the hole in the steel, and hold it up while Big Andy bashed the end flat. He showed her the red blisters on his hands. His innocent pride in being a worker made something curdle in her, thinking of all the men and women in the world for whom heavy dangerous work was all that stood between them and hunger.

As the days passed his innocence turned to a sly knowingness, an insider’s world-weary cynicism about the foreign land of the proletariat. It was a terrific discovery that the workers had tricks to beat the bosses. At the start he’d worked too hard, too eagerly. Make a show, Ken, they’d told him. Just make a show. That meant you worked when the boss was about, and when he wasn’t you found a corner where you could sit and yarn. One man had a second job where he worked the night shift, and spent the day asleep on a little nest of blankets on top of one of the Ville d’Amiens’ boilers.

Ken interpreted the glee that the workers took in cheating the boss as a sign that they were ripe for revolution. She didn’t argue, but she thought it was rather that Ken was seeing for the first time the world she’d come from, a world where you had to look out for yourself. No money in the bank, no grand slogans. If you could get away with cheating the boss in some small way, that was your little bit of power, the only kind you’d ever have. Whereas, in truth, Ken was playing at being a worker.

He told her that on Friday afternoons, when the foreman was sleeping off his lunch, some of the men went across the road to where the tarts advertised they were open for business by hanging a pair of long-johns out the window. The idea excited him. Not so much the sex, she thought, but the long-johns. The code. Being in the know.

She didn’t ask, and he didn’t say, but she doubted that they would have asked him along. He thought he was one of them but she was pretty sure he wasn’t. He made her laugh with his stories of Big Andy and Little Andy and the others, but was Big Andy at that moment making his wife laugh with stories of the fellow who’d come to work in a spotless new boilersuit and didn’t know which end of a spanner was up?

To be closer to Ken’s work they left Maroubra and took a flat in Cremorne, where he could get the ferry straight across to the docks. One night they were woken by a great booming, heavy enough for the teacups to rattle in the cupboard. She knew straight away it was bombs. It was impossible, bombs were what happened in London, but she ran into the little room where Christopher was asleep and snatched him up. If there were bombs, even dream bombs, she was going to die with him.

Next morning it was on the radio. The Japanese had got into Sydney Harbour and torpedoed the warships at Woolloomooloo. War, unreal, in black and white on the newsreels, was suddenly among them. The harbour, shifting and sparkling, was like a wound where infection could pour in.

Mrs Gee rang up. Nance had never heard her voice unsteady with feeling before. You’ve got to come to us, Nance, she kept saying. You’ll be safer here. Nance held Christopher in the crook of her arm, thinking, Yes, we have to go. Refugees, like those lines of people she’d seen on the newsreels labouring along with suitcases. How do you decide what to take? A warm coat and nappies for the baby, or the family photos and the watch you were given for your twenty-first?

Once they were at Strathfield she could see that Mrs Gee was sorry she’d spoken. She wasn’t a woman who liked babies, had no patience with a doting mother. Oh, let him cry! she said. You’re spoiling him! It was just the four of them in the house, plus the baby, because Peter and Dick were away at the war, Babs had got married and Bud was always out, no one seemed to know quite where.

Ken’s parents were bewildered by their son’s Trotskyite convictions and especially by the boilermaking. His father scrupulously never reproached, but his mother wasn’t shy about telling Ken he was throwing himself away on this communist nonsense. At dinner, across the expanse of mahogany, Ken turned a blank surface to what was going on around him. She had to admire his ability to withdraw. Wished she could do the same sometimes.

For her there was no escape, alone in the house with her mother-in-law. The best part of the day was after lunch, when she could put Christopher in the pram and get out into the empty streets of Strathfield. She’d walk until Christopher cried to be fed, and even then she’d find the long way back home.

They took the first flat they saw in the area, the back half of a house in nearby Ashfield, with gaunt gloomy rooms that never got warm. Ashfield was a poor man’s Strathfield, the streets narrower, the houses smaller, but the same privet hedges and crazy-paving. In Ken’s terms, Strathfield was bourgeois but Ashfield was the even more contemptible petty-bourgeois, an awful secretive genteel poverty that strained to pretend.

But he didn’t care where they lived. The Trotsky meetings took all his time when he wasn’t at work. There were three or four a week now. Sometimes the comrades met at the Ashfield flat. Only members were allowed to be at the meeting, so Nance sat in the kitchen listening to the murmur behind the closed door. She was supposed to answer the bell if anyone rang and keep them talking while the comrades got away out the back.

One night the meeting was longer than usual. When everyone had gone, Ken came out with a bundle of papers and an anxious look about his mouth. The papers would land them in jail if they were found, he said. He’d been given the job of keeping them safe.

Why does it have to be you, Ken? she said. Have they forgotten you’ve got a wife and child? She heard her anger and knew how thin her layer of tolerance was.

Ken was trying to pull up a corner of the lino. In one of his Edgar Wallace stories the lino would have peeled back and the boards would have been conveniently loose, but the Ashfield place was solidly built. She emptied the biscuits out of the Arnott’s tin and pushed it at him. Put them in there and bury them under the house, Ken, she said. I’m not going to have those things in here!