Hunger Town

Contents

PART 1

Judith and Harry

PART 2

Waterside Warfare

PART 3

Political Cartoons

PART 4

A Separation

PART 5

The Search

Part 1:
Judith and Harry

THOSE FURTIVE SHADOWY FIGURES, gliding along the wharf or scurrying like rats seeking a hole to hide themselves, haunted my childhood. Unbidden, they hovered always at the edge of my dreams. Even as an adult. Awake, I told myself that they were only poor destitute sailors who had jumped ship and now searched fruitlessly for a new berth. Often they were Indian or Chinese, unable to speak English, adrift in that no-man's land where all is foreign, inexplicable and threatening. Without money, they scrounged to survive.

Early one morning when night shadows on the sea had barely lifted I saw one swimming near our hulk. With one hand and clumsily treading water he grabbed at scraps of food waste my mother had thrown overboard with the slops. At first I thought the sleek hair smooth on the round head was a seal but then a sliver of sun transfixed him and he swam in a circle of light. I saw his face and his eyes moist and black. He stared at me expressionless, snatched a piece of soggy crust, stuffed it in his mouth, swam back to the wharf and clambered up the ladder. His clothes stuck to his thin angular body and where the sun burnished the folds of wet cloth they glistened like fish scales.

I raised my hand to wave, to acknowledge his cleverness—a piece of soggy bread did not seem distasteful to me. His trick, so like a seal, delighted me but he did not look back from the wharf and I lowered my arm feeling foolish. I had intruded and there was something I had failed to understand.

I didn't tell anyone about the swimmer but for several weeks afterwards I observed what my mother put in the slops bucket and when she wasn't looking I added one or two slices of bread. On other quiet mornings, when the sea clicked and ticked and sniffled rhythmically against the side of our ship and the sun made spangled streaks across a calm surface, I waited at the railings for the man to swim out and claim the bread. But he never came again.

Others came at night, always skulking along the wharf, deeper patches of feline black with murky edges. Faceless, they glided out of the gloom, passed our hulk and were drowned in the sea of darkness.

I was eight and in those days we lived on a hulk in the Port Adelaide River. My father's job was to supply coal to the large ships in the Outer Harbor that could not enter the river, and to work the winches. When our hulk was not engaged in coaling it was moored to the wharf and it was at these times that I saw the shadowy men.

My father kept a gun and I often watched him oil and clean it. His wariness of the ‘wharf rats', as he called them, sat oddly beside the stories he told me of his agility and courage on the masts and riggings of windjammers. He had no fear of the sea but an uneasy almost superstitious dread of those wraith-like creatures. His fear was catching, but I separated those ghostly apparitions from the swimmer with the piece of bread. He had been no more frightening than the occasional stray dog scavenging for food.

One dark night I saw two men fighting on the wharf. One was tall and heavy, the other shorter and thinner. The tall man struck the other so fiercely that his feet lifted off the ground like an acrobat and he fell with a thud even I could hear. The tall man then kicked him while the other scrabbled to escape his boot, scrambled to his feet and ran. As the tall man turned towards me I saw from my porthole that it was my father. He came quietly up the gangplank, stole across the deck and entered his and my mother's cabin. I heard them whispering. Then there was silence. I never told him what I had seen, but some days later, as he oiled his gun, I asked him if he were afraid of the wharf rats. For some moments he was silent and I thought that he had not liked my question. Then he said, ‘When I was a boy I had an uncle in Denmark and from there we would skate across the straits to Norway. In winter the sea froze and the ice was a white road. I was only a boy but all my companions were big men. I can't abide puny, weak men.'

‘But weren't you scared of falling into the sea?'

‘No.'

‘Could you swim?'

‘We all could swim. Not that that would have done us much good. To fall through ice is the end.'

‘Did someone teach you?'

He laughed. ‘No one taught us anything. We learned ourselves, the hard way. That's what men do.'

I recalled the swimmer with the bread stuffed in his mouth. He, too, must have taught himself, as men did.

‘Are all the wharf rats puny?'

‘Yes, the waste from ports. Anywhere in the world. No good on land, no good on ships.'

‘I can't swim,' I said.

‘No.'

‘Should I teach myself?'

He tweaked my hair, a casual dismissive gesture. ‘Of course not. You'll drown.'

But now when I stood at the railings and looked at the sea I thought about the swimmer and imagined my father skating on a fragile ice-bridge above seething depths and my world became divided between people who could swim and those like myself who couldn't. There was no ice here but what if some day I, too, had to skate across the sea and falling through it found it was the end?

The sea was my constant companion. Sometimes in the early morning a mauve mist shrouded it and on a moon surface our ship lay suspended between sky and sea. Then the fog would lift, not all at once but as if the sun took fistfuls and shook it apart. The sea had a voice. It moaned and sighed, sobbed, gulped and hiccuped, and on still nights its muffled rolling rumble reminded me that it crashed on distant beaches. There were constant smells: the sour stench of wet ropes, damp wood hot and sweetened from the sun, the dense gluggy smell of oil, and the hot acrid metal smell of the winches. There was the comforting smell of coffee and bacon and hot toast from my mother's galley and the thick juicy onion smell of stew. And all these smells belonged to our hulk and the sea and were different from the smell of land houses. These smelled of polishing wax, soap and confined spaces.

The sea seemed no longer benign. To fall into it was the end. Where once I had gazed no deeper than the surface, now I peered into the depths, searching for those imagined dead sailors my father sometimes recalled.

‘Lost souls,' my mother had sighed.

‘Lost bodies,' my father had guffawed. ‘Don't be sentimental. Anyone can get another soul, but once a body's fish food—pouf! No more—soul or body.'

Were those bodies there? I searched the limpid surface. Below it deepened to cloudy green and finally became an impassable dark wall. They wouldn't be held down by stones, as in a graveyard. They might pop up at any minute and stare at me with moist black eyes. What if the puny wharf rat had died during another swim and any time I might catch a glimpse of him?

When I was very small and on deck I had had a heaving line attached to me to save me from falling overboard, but now I had grown out of it. My father made me a swing, a bosun's chair suspended from the yardarm and I delighted in flying upwards and outwards over the railings and the sea that glinted beneath me. It was this activity that brought to a head the problem of whether I should learn to swim. My mother was always ahead of my father in foreseeing consequences. He mocked her caution. They argued about my swing. ‘It's dangerous,' she said in her no-nonsense voice.

‘Rubbish!'

‘And if she falls?'

‘If, if, if,' he mocked. ‘It's always if with a woman. If she takes no risks she'll never grow.'

She pursed her lips. ‘I'm her mother and I say it's dangerous. She can't even swim.'

He muttered rebelliously but she was adamant: either the swing was cut down or I learned to swim or both. He conceded grudgingly, ‘Then I'll teach her to swim.'

My mother looked doubtful and shook her head.

Impatient, he roared, ‘Isn't that what you want?'

She was tight-lipped. ‘Don't shout at me. And if you teach her to swim, don't shout at her.'

Suddenly he laughed and folded her in a bear hug. ‘Two women to order me about.'

‘Oh, you,' she protested, struggling free and rearranging her clothes, but she was smiling.

My father's teaching methods were rough. He was not a patient man. He tied a rope about my waist and shakily I climbed down the Jacob's ladder, trembling with excitement and terror. At first he held the rope firmly. I flailed with my arms and legs, while he yelled instructions, to use my arms as paddles, to kick harder. The water was very cold. I had no swimming costume and my skimpy clothing clung about my limbs. I tired quickly but after a few moments my father had convinced himself that I had the hang of it. He relaxed the rope. Instantly the water closed over my head. I worked my arms and legs frantically, struggled to the surface, sucked a breath, screamed, filled my mouth with water and again submerged.

The sea became my battleground. Now it was harder to reach the surface, to breathe. I fought but again my mouth and eyes filled with water and blindly I choked and panicked. Then the rope tautened and I found myself gaspingly on the surface. I screamed again, a piercing terrified wail, ‘like a lost seabird' my mother later told me. It was my mother's terrified face I first saw as together they dragged me on to the deck. I continued to wail.

‘Stop that noise!' my father shouted at me. ‘You're not going to die.'

I tried to stop my teeth chattering but now great shivers attacked me and I couldn't stop shaking and sobbing. Between wrapping me in a blanket and trying to soothe me my mother raged at my father. ‘You fool, you thick-headed fool!' she stormed. ‘Never one moment's careful thought. You idiot! You thick-headed, impatient idiot!'

She helped me up and continued to mutter, ‘Fool, idiot, brainless. I had to marry the stupidest man alive,' and as she led me away I glanced back to see my father looking ashen-faced and guilty.

She brought me warm clothes, a hot drink and tucked me into bed with a hot water bottle. All that day she refused to look at my father and I caught him throwing anxious, beseeching glances at her. I felt sorry for him. Their troubles seemed to be my fault. I had failed to swim. I had caused all this misery.

‘I'll try harder next time,' I promised my father, in a whispered attempt to ease the anger between them.

‘There won't be a next time,' he snarled, turning his temper on me.

And I never forgot this small injustice.

The bosun's chair also seemed to be at fault. Now the thought of flying over the sea filled me with horror and I shuddered. But my father refused to cut it down. My mother was not to be drawn. To my father's ‘Do you want me to take it down?' she was surly. ‘Do as you please.'

I didn't use it again but it occupied my thoughts as a kind of private dare, a challenge to my courage. What if, one day, I again flew over the sea? Half of me wanted to show the other half that I was not afraid.

My father was a six foot three blond Norwegian. He had no formal education and could only read haltingly. But as a boy he had led a tough life with the Icelanders and could speak their language as well as Norwegian and English. He married my mother, a woman also tall and strongly built, and living on a hulk was his compromise between life on the land and on a windjammer.

Our hulk was ‘a de-luxe class ship converted' I heard my mother tell a friend. My parents had a large bedroom, two cabins joined together. I had no idea what ‘de-luxe' meant but the beauty of my parents' bedroom entranced me. The walls of various inlaid wood glowed in different shades and had a satin touch. There were no portholes, only windows looking over the upper deck, some with patterns of birds and flowers in coloured intricate designs. Light through these windows fell in strands on the polished woodwork turning it to emerald and crimson and sapphire. Then, when I ran my hand across the silky smoothness, colour stained my fingers. I had a small cabin with a bunk bed on the wharf side of the ship. From my porthole I watched the shadowy wharf rats and they seemed little different from the hungry, nervous cats and dogs that also searched warily.

My schooling was irregular. Sometimes when my father had to work the winches and unload the coal it was impossible to row me ashore and walk me to school. My mother often did this but not in rough weather. We had very few books on the hulk.

‘The best education a man can get is from life. Schooling,' my father told my protesting mother, ‘is a waste of time.'

‘And for a woman?' My mother was sarcastic.

He looked nonplussed. ‘A woman? She'll marry I suppose.'

‘And be as ignorant as you?' she snorted.

Instead he took me to the Working Men's Club. She told him it was unsuitable for a child but he over-rode her concerns about its rowdiness. ‘It's the best education,' he asserted. ‘She can see how most people have to live and educate themselves. I'm not going to have her growing up a lazy privileged snob.'

‘Much chance of that,' my mother flared. ‘She doesn't even know how to wear girl's clothing.'

And it was true, although it didn't concern me. I lived in boys' clothes because they were more adaptable on the deck of a ship.

‘She only mixes with men,' my mother continued. ‘She's growing up. It's unsuitable.'

It was his turn to snort. ‘She's still a child.'

‘Then you should take her places suitable for a child and not a men's club.'

But he won the day. She brought out her full arsenal of surly unbreakable silences but he ignored her and went about his tasks whistling.

‘My father says working people have to educate themselves,' I quoted piously.

‘And that's why you need to go to school, if only to get the rudiments of learning. And I had to marry an uneducated man.'

It was a variation on her complaint that she had married the stupidest man in the world. As I grew older I wondered why she had married my father. One day I heard them shouting at each other and saw her throw a plate of stew at him.

I froze, horrified at such violence and fearing his reaction, but he only glanced down at himself, picked off a few bits of meat, gave a great guffaw of laughter, enfolded her in his arms, and kissed her loudly with smacking lips. She responded and soon they were both roaring with laughter.