A Town Like Alice (26 page)

The old man wagged his head. "I been huntin 'gators since I was a boy," he said. "I reckon I knows 'gators by this time."

Al said, "He's got an alligator skin to show you, Miss Paget." To the old man he said, "Show her your skin, Jeff. I bet she's never seen a skin like that in England."

Jeff Pocock took the sack and opened it, and took out a small alligator skin rolled up. "Course," he said, "I cleaned and trimmed and tanned this one myself. Mostly we just salt them and sell 'em to the tannery like that." He unrolled the skin before her on the floor of the veranda. "Pretty markings, ain't they? I bet you never seen a skin like that in England."

The sight of it brought back nostalgic memories to Jean of red buses on the Great West Road at Perivale, and Pack and Levy Ltd, and rows of girls sitting at the work benches making up alligator-skin shoes and alligator-skin handbags and alligator-skin dressing-cases. She laughed. "I've seen hundreds of them in England," she replied. "This is one thing I really know about. I used to work in a factory that made these skins up into handbags and dressing-cases." She picked up the skin and handled it. "Ours were harder than this, I think. You've done the curing very well, Jeff."

Two or three other men had drifted up; her story was repeated back and forth in other words, and she told them all about Pack and Levy Ltd. They were very interested; none of them knew much about the skins after they had left the Gulf country. "I know as they make shoes of them," said Jeff. "I never seen a pair."

A vague idea was forming in Jean's mind. "How many of these do you get a year?" she asked.

"I turned in eighty-two last year," the old man said. "Course that's a little 'un. They mostly run about thirty to thirty-six inch-width of skin, that is. That's a 'gator about eleven foot long."

Jean said, "Will you sell me this one, Jeff?"

"What do you want it for?"

She laughed. "I want to make myself a pair of shoes out of it." She paused. "That's if Tim Whelan can make up a pair of lasts for me."

He looked embarrassed. "I don't want nothing for it," he said gruffly. "I'll give it to you."

She argued with him for a little while, and then accepted gracefully. "We'll want a bit of calf skin for the soles," she said, "and some thicker stuff for building up the heels."

She fondled the skin in her hands. "It's beautifully soft," she said, "I'll show you what to do with this."

Chapter 7

Jean made that pair of shoes working upon the dressing-table of her bedroom; to be more exact, she made three pairs before she got a pair that she could wear.

She started off upon Tim Whelan. Tim had made lasts for shoes from time to time, working for various cobblers; the outback woodworker must turn his hand to anything. Jean lent him one of her shoes and lent him her foot to measure in his carpenter's shop, and he made a pair of lasts for her in mulga wood in a couple of days. She asked Pete Fletcher about leather for the soles and heels, and he produced some pieces of tanned cow-skin which were about the right thickness for the soles, and a piece of bull's skin for building up the heels. The lining was a major difficulty at first till somebody suggested a young wallaby skin. Pete Fletcher went out and shot the wallaby and skinned it, and the tanning was carried out by a committee of Pete Fletcher and Al Burns and Don Duncan, working in the back of Bill Duncan's store. The business of this pair of shoes assumed such an importance in the life of Willstown that Jean put off her trip to Cairns for a week, and then another week.

The wallaby skin for the lining was not ready, so Jean made up the first pair with a white satin lining that she bought in the store. She knew every process of shoe-making intimately from the point of view of an onlooker, and from the office end, but she had never done it herself before, and the first pair of shoes were terrible. They were shoes of a sort, but they pinched her toes and the heels were too large by a quarter of an inch, and they hurt her instep. The satin lining was not a success, and the whole job was messy with the streaming perspiration of her fingers. Still, they were shoes, and wearable by anyone whose feet happened to be that shape.

She could not show shoes like that to the men downstairs, and so she set to work to make another pair. She got Tim to alter the lasts for her, bought another knife and a small carborundum stone from the store, and started again. For fixative she was using small tubes of Durofix, also from the store.

In all this work Annie took a great interest. She used to come and sit and watch Jean working as she trimmed and filed the soles or stretched the wet alligator hides carefully upon the lasts. "I do think you're clever to be able to do that," she said. "They're almost as good as you could buy in a shop."

The second pair were better. They fitted Jean moderately well, but the wallaby-skin lining was uneven and lumpy, and the whole job was still messy and fingermarked with sweat. Undaunted, she began upon a third pair. This time she used portions of the wallaby skin that were of even thickness, having no means of trimming the skin down, and when it came to the final assembly of the shoes she worked in the early morning when the perspiration of her hands was least. The final result was quite a creditable shoe with rather an ugly coloured lining, but a shoe that she could have worn anywhere.

She took the three pairs downstairs and showed them to Al Burns on the veranda; Al fetched two or three of the other men, and Mrs Connor came to have a look at them. "That's what happens to the alligator skins in England," Jean said. "They make them up into shoes like that. Pretty, aren't they?"

One of the men said, "You made them yourself, Miss Paget?"

She laughed. "Ask Mrs Connor. She knows the mess I've been making in the bedroom."

The man turned the shoe over in his hand. "Oh my word," he said slowly. "It's as good as you'd buy in a shop."

Jean shook her head. "It's not," she said. "It's not really." She pointed out the defects to him. "I haven't got the proper brads or the proper fixative. And the whole thing's messy, too. I just made it up to show you what they do with all these skins that Jeff brings in."

"I bet you could sell that in Cairns," the man said, stubbornly. "Oh my word, you could."

Sam Small said, "How much does a pair of shoes like that cost in England."

"In a shop?" She thought for a minute. "About four pounds fifteen shillings, I should say. I know the manufacturer gets about forty-five bob, but then there's purchase tax and retailer's commission to go on." She paused. "Of course, you can pay much more than that for a really good shoe. People pay up to ten pounds in some shops."

"Ten pounds for a pair of shoes like that? Oh my word."

Jeff was out of town up the river visiting his traps, so she could not show him the shoes that day. She left them with the men to take into the bar and talk over, and she went to have a bath. She had discovered how to have a bath in Willstown by that time; Annie had showed her. The Australian Hotel had a cold shower for ladies, which was usually a very hot shower because the tank stood in the sun. But if you wanted to wallow in hot water, there was another technique altogether.

Where the water from the bore ran off in a hot stream, a small wooden hut had been constructed spanning the stream, at such a distance from the bore that the temperature was just right for a bath. A rough concrete pool had been constructed here large enough for two bodies to lie in side by side; you took your towel and soap and went to the hut and locked yourself in and bathed in the warm, saline water flowing through the pool. The salts in the water made this bath unusually refreshing.

Jean lay in the warm water, locked in the little hut alone; the sunlight came in through little chinks in the woodwork and played on the water as she lay. Since she had seen Jeff Pocock's alligator skin the idea of making shoes had been in her mind. From the time that she had first met me and learned of her inheritance she had been puzzled, and at times distressed, by the problem of what she was going to do with her life. She had no background of education or environment that would have enabled her to take gracefully to a life of ease. She was a business girl, accustomed to industry. She had given up her work with Pack and Levy as was only natural when she inherited nine hundred a year, but she had found nothing yet to fill the gap left in her life. Subconsciously she had been searching, questing, for the last six months, seeking to find something that she could work at. The only work she really knew about was fancy leather goods, alligator shoes and handbags and attache cases. She did know a little bit about the business of making and selling those.

She lay in the warm, medicated water, thinking deeply. Suppose a little workshop with about five girls in it, and a small tannery outside. Two hand-presses and a rotary polisher; that meant a supply of electric current. A small motor generator set, unless perhaps she could buy current from the hotel. An air conditioner to keep the workshop cool and keep the girls' hands from sweating as they worked. It was imperative that the finished shoes should be virgin clean.

Could such a set-up pay? She lay calculating in her bath. She had discovered that Jeff Pocock got about seventy shillings for an average alligator skin, uncured. She knew that Pack and Levy paid about a hundred and eighty shillings for cured skins. It did not seem to her that it could cost more than twenty shillings to trim and tan an alligator skin, and her figures were in Australian money, too. The skins should be much cheaper than in England. Labour, too, would be cheaper; girl labour in Willstown would be cheaper than girl labour in Perivale. But then there would be the cost of shipping the shoes to England, and an agent's fees.

She wondered if Pack and Levy would sell for her. She knew that Mr Pack had been lukewarm for a long time about the manufacturing side of the business. They did sell other people's products, too-those handbags made by that French firm, Ducros Frères. Pack and Levy sold those, although they made handbags themselves…

The major problem was not the business, she thought. In Willstown both labour and materials were cheap; the business end of it might well be all right. But could she train the sort of girl that she could get in Willstown to turn out first-class quality work, capable of being sold in Bond Street shops? That was the real problem.

She lay for a long time in her warm, medicated bath, thinking very deeply.

That evening as she was sitting in her deckchair on the veranda, Sam Small came to her. "Miss Paget," he said. "Mind if we have a talk?"

"Of course, Sam," she said.

"I been thinking about that pair of shoes you made," he said. "I been wondering if you could teach our Judy."

"How old is Judy, Sam?"

"Fifteen," he said. "Sixteen next November."

"Do you want her to learn shoe-making?"

He said, "I been thinking that anyone who could make a dinkum pair of ladies shoes like that, they could sell them in Cairns in the shops. You see, Judy's getting to an age when she's got to do some work, and there ain't nothing here a girl can do to make a living. She'll have to go into the cities, like the other girls. Well, that's a crook deal for her mother, Miss Paget. We've only got the one girl-three boys and one girl, that's our litter. It'll be a crook deal for her mother if Judy goes to Brisbane, like the other girls. And I thought this shoe-making, well, maybe it would be a thing that she could do at home. After all," he said, "it looks like we've got everything you need to do it with, right here in Willstown."

"Not buckles," Jean said thoughtfully. "We'd have to do something about buckles." She was speaking half to herself. She thought for a minute. "It wouldn't work like that, Sam," she said. "You think that pair of shoes are wonderful, but they aren't. They're a rotten pair of shoes. You couldn't sell a pair like that in England, not to the sort of people who buy shoes like that. I don't think you could sell them in any first-class shop, even in Cairns."

"They look all right to me," he said stubbornly.

She shook her head. "They aren't. I've been in this business, Sam-I know what a shoe ought to look like. I'm not saying that we can't turn out a decent shoe in Willstown; I'd rather like to try. But to get the job right I'll need machinery, and proper benches and hand tools, and proper materials. I see your point about Judy, and I'd like to see her with a job here in Willstown. But it's too big a thing for her to tackle on her own."

He looked at her keenly. "Was you thinking of a factory or something?"

"I don't know. Suppose somebody started something of the sort here. How many girls would you get to work regular hours, morning and afternoon-say for five pounds a week?"

"Here in Willstown?"

"That's right."

"How young would you let them start?"

She thought for a minute. "When they leave school, I suppose. That's fourteen, isn't it?"

"You wouldn't pay a girl of fourteen five pounds a week?"

"No. Work them up to that when they got skilled."

He considered the matter. "I think you'd get six or seven round about sixteen or seventeen, Miss Paget. Then there'd be more coming on from school."

She turned to another aspect of the matter. "Sam, what would it cost to put up a hut for a workshop?"

"How big?"

She looked around. "About as long as from here to the end of the veranda, and about half as wide."

"That's thirty foot by fifteen wide. You mean a wooden hut, like it might be an army hut, with an iron roof, and windows all along?"

"That's the sort of thing."

He calculated slowly in his head. "About two hundred pounds."

"I think I'd want it to have a double roof and a veranda, like that house that Sergeant Haines lives in. It's got to be cool…"

"Ah, that puts up the cost. A house like that'll cost you close upon four hundred, with a veranda all around."

"How long would that take to build?"

"Oh, I dunno. Have to get the timber up from Normanton. Tim Whelan and his boys'll put that up in a couple of months, I'd say."

There would be extra buildings needed for the tanning and the dyeing of the hides. "Tell me, Sam," she said. "Would people here like something of that sort started? Or would they think it just a bit of nonsense?"

"You mean, if it kept the girls here in the town, earning money?"

"That's right."

"Oh my word," he said. "Would they like it. They'd like anything that kept the girls at home, so long as they was happy and got work to do." He paused thoughtfully. "It isn't natural the way the girls go off a thousand miles from home in this country," he said slowly. "That's what Ma and I was saying the other night. It isn't natural."

They sat in silence for a time. "Takes a bit of thinking about, Sam," she said at last.

When the Dakota came the next Wednesday she left Willstown for Cairns. She took two days to get there because that was the unhurried way of the Dakota; they left Willstown in the afternoon and called at various cattle stations with the mail and correspondence lessons for the children from the school at Cairns, at Dunbar and Miranda and Vanrook. With the last of the light they put down at Normanton for the night, and drove into the town in a truck.

The hotel at Normanton was similar to the hotel at Willstown, but rather larger. Jean had tea with the pilot, a man called Mackenzie; after tea she sat with him on the veranda. She asked him if anyone made shoes in Normanton. "I don't think so," he said. He called out to an acquaintance. "Ted, does anyone make shoes round here?"

Ted shook his head. "Buy 'em from Burns Philp," he said. "Want a pair of shoes mended?"

Jean said, "No-I was just curious. They all come from the cities, do they?"