Hunger Town (3 page)

‘They are too poor. These little things represent a lot of money to them.' But in the face of their puzzled hurt she relented and I kept my row of tiny brass jars well polished so that if they ever visited my cabin they would not be disappointed in me.

My father was scathing about their poverty and working conditions. ‘Bloody British,' he stormed. ‘Think they own the bloody world. Built their empire on the backs of these poor bastards.' And for once my mother didn't disagree.

On hot days they were like children having fun. They jumped or dived from the deck of our hulk, clambered up and down the Jacob's ladder. Ganesh made a mock of his British masters by holding his nose and strutting stiff-legged to the side before he jumped over. They discovered the delights of swinging in the bosun's chair across the water and then catapulting themselves from it with a great splash.

I watched enviously.

‘Come,' they called. ‘Come.'

‘I can't swim.'

‘Come. We'll teach.'

‘Can I?'

My mother was anxious. My father disappeared, supposedly to find some jobs. I heard my mother mutter that he always avoided decisions.

Eventually, as they trod water circling the ladder, a ring of happy inviting faces, she let me climb down.

‘Don't let go,' she called.

But Ganesh drew me away from the ladder, protectively supporting me, and gradually I felt the water hold me up. They encouraged me to dog paddle from him to the ladder and cheered my efforts.

So I learned to swim.

When they climbed from the water to dry themselves their thin cotton garments clung about them and with surreptitious curiosity I peeped at the shape of their bodies. In the library under H I had found a history of art and looking at the illustrations of the sculptures I realised for the first time what a man's body looked like. I secretly noted how the thin clothes clung to a little knob between the boys' legs. Guiltily, I hid my curiosity from my mother but maybe she detected it for she complained to my father that their clothes were too revealing.

‘But to spoil their fun … They can't be much older than she is. What do you think, Niels?'

He mumbled something.

‘Yes,' she said, but sounded doubtful.

The boys continued to visit and they continued to throw themselves off the ship into the water. I continued to swim with them and observe their shape. And, of course, I had now read Aristophanes and knew about Lysistrata. I knew that it was a rude play but understood little. Now, with the help of the Greek statues and the wet clothes on the boys, I began to put two and two together.

When I was fifteen my father found me work in a local cafe at the Port where the wharf labourers went for lunch. I had protested angrily, ‘I don't want to spend my life slinging hash in some down-and-out dump.'

My father had responded with equal anger. ‘You're not going to be a lazy spoiled woman.'

‘I want to stay at school,' I said.

My mother looked troubled. ‘We can't keep you at school. You have to earn your keep.'

‘Yes,' he was short, ‘things are getting bloody tough. There are a lot of poor unemployed bastards now and we're going to have more strikes on the wharves. Do you realise what will happen to my work if the ships are idle?'

I was silent. I had seen poor men at the Working Men's Club.

My work at the Chew It began at eight o'clock and I walked there from our hulk. The timber wharves were short and square and stuck out into the river like a row of ground-down molars. I crossed the wide bitumen thoroughfare webbed with rail lines and lipped by huge warehouses that flanked the shore side. Often a pall of black smoke from the copper smelter and ship smoke stacks hung in the still morning air, immovable until the sea breeze dispersed it.

I wound my way into Lipson Street, which was always busy. Horse drays and motor vehicles jostled and manoeuvred for space on either side of the railway line that ran down the centre of the road. Little dockside engines, collecting wagons of cargo, trundled all day to and from the port. The clanging of their warning bells was incessant. Sometimes it was a relief to turn out of the crowds into Jane Street, the little lane where I worked at the Chew It.

The dump served thick soup, hunks of bread and stew. Smelling of onions, boiled cabbage and rancid fat, it was ridiculed as the Chew It and Spew It. Most of the labourers knew my father and except for an occasional leer kept their distance and their hands to themselves. Usually I was called Duck or Love or Girlie, never Judith. If they wanted my attention they shouted across the room. But usually they were patient, indifferent to the style of serving, or even the taste of the food, so long as it was hot and heaped generously on their plates.

The tables were of rough wood covered with newspaper. It was easier to replace the food-stained sheets than scrub down the tables. However once a week it was my job to do this and, armed with a scrub brush, a bucket of soapy water and a gutful of resentment, I lathered and sweated and my arms, my back and my neck ached and I hated my father, who continued to extol the virtues of manual work.

The years had not made me more feminine. My mother reproved me for my unrefined language and manner but there was little reality in her admonitions for apart from her I had few practical examples. I had grown up in a world of men and the women I read about in books were fantasies from another world.

I had worked my way through the library to S and was now reading Shakespeare's plays. It had been a strange process, as if the books I read were the measurement of my growth. I wasn't certain whether I understood more in them because I had acquired more years or whether a pool of accumulated knowledge gave me an illusion of maturity beyond my years.

I was not a pretty girl, although my mother defended my appearance by saying I had a strong face. When I complained of my appearance one day my father surprisingly said, ‘Yes, a strong face. That's why we called you Judith. Many years ago I saw a painting of Judith slaughtering General Holofernes and I thought, with luck I'll have a daughter like that. Strong.'

My mother laughed. ‘She won't go slaughtering anyone. You think action can solve anything.'

In my mirror a square heavy-jawed face stared back at me. My nose was straight and so was my mouth, more sullen than serious, and un-smiling. My hazel eyes weren't too bad, I supposed. I wore my heavy long blonde hair dragged off my face and in a plait down my back. Like ‘a brawny Norwegian peasant girl' my father said, ‘a toiler in the vineyards not a lily of the field'.

My father's biblical knowledge surprised me.

‘His father was a pastor,' my mother smirked.

‘My grandfather?'

‘Yes, your grandfather.'

‘And as mean an old bastard as ever was,' my father snorted. ‘Religion's just another sort of tyranny. And when did it ever help the working man? I ask you that, Eve. Religion is the opium of the masses.'

He confronted my mother as if she were the defender of God, the Church and all religious belief, but she only patted him on his hand and said, ‘How cruel to send you to sea when you were a mere child.'

In one of his about-turns he said, ‘It was the making of me.'

Years later I realised he was not defending the mean old bastard of his father but his own successes. He couldn't bear to think that neglect had in its own way defeated him. This was my father's vulnerability.

As for myself I was growing bored with his constant references to ‘the working man' and ‘the working class'. I was beginning to wonder if it was a belief almost as tyrannical as religion.

Usually labourers were the only customers at the cafe. So the shabbily dressed but clean young man who came regularly for a cup of tea and a bun puzzled me. I glanced at him as I hurried to and fro from the kitchen, but he ignored me. He always had a book on the table and never lifted his head from his reading. When he absently ordered the same tea and bun I amused myself with a private bet: threepence if he mumbled his thanks, sixpence if he looked up, a shilling if he did both.

The more he ignored me the more challenges I set myself. My gambling debts mounted. I would take myself to the pictures if he looked at me. The new picture house at the Port was very glamorous. Maybe I would buy myself a new dress if he spoke to me. Maybe his eyes were grey or blue or brown. If none of this happened I promised myself I would help my mother do the washing and not complain.

I continued to lose my money, didn't go to the pictures, didn't buy a new dress and did lots of additional housework.

Why I bothered to pay myself my self-imposed debts I don't know. It was silly, but it all allowed me to think about him. I was far too curious about him. But to intrude on his privacy risked a humiliating set-down, far worse than years ago trying to wave to the swimmer.

Nonetheless, one day in a moment of courage and defiance I asked him what he was reading. He glanced up at me and I realised that his myopic eyes hidden behind thick glasses saw me through a haze.

‘Marx,' he mumbled, ‘
Das Kapital.
'

I had come across Marx in the library and battled with
Capital
.

‘In German or in translation?' I now knew what translation meant and I expected he should appreciate my learning but before he could respond someone yelled, ‘Hey, Duckie, you serving or what?'

I flounced around and shouted back, ‘What do you mean “or what?” Wait your turn.'

I turned back to the reader but his head was again bent to his book. Neither my comment nor my shouting had drawn his attention. A memory from a childhood fairytale made me smile. He was a male version of
The Princess Who Couldn't Laugh
, only his fault was he couldn't converse. I'd take no further notice of him. And why should he notice me? I was a nobody, an unbeautiful, uneducated waitress in a slop shop. Depression engulfed me. This shabbily dressed reader of books who ignored me had no idea how I boiled with a passion to escape my drudgery.

He continued to come for his tea and bun. I continued to plonk it in front of him with a terse, ‘Will that be all?' and I stopped making bets with myself. If he didn't care to look at me then it was his business and I tried to shrug off my disappointment.

As most of the lunchtime diners were regulars a new visitor rather better dressed than most and with a disdainful air took my notice. We had only a fixed menu and as I put his soup in front of him he picked up a corner of the newspaper-tablecloth on his table and said, ‘What's this?'

I didn't like his tone. ‘A newspaper?' I was tart.

‘Yes, I can see that it's a newspaper, girlie, but what's it doing here? Don't you throw newspapers in the bin?'

The patronising ‘girlie' angered me. ‘Yes, after you've made a mess on it.'

He looked at me coldly with his thin eyes set too close to his nose.

‘Take it off,' he said.

‘No.'

‘Take it off! I won't eat my meal on newspaper. I don't make a …' he hesitated, as if spitting out an unappetising word, ‘mess.'

‘Then there is no need to take it off.'

I dumped his soup in front of him. Some spilled over the edges of the plate onto the paper.

‘Oops,' I said, ‘so sorry,' clearly not meaning it. He froze an instant and then before I realised his intent he threw the bowl of soup at me. It was hot. My thick woollen skirt saved me from being burned but I felt the heat of it on my thighs. The blood drained from my face and then rushed back so that my face as well as my legs felt on fire.

‘You bastard!' I shouted. ‘You bloody bastard!'

A moment of abrupt silence fell on the room. Then, as one, every man in the room, except for the
Das Kapital
reader, was on his feet. Chairs scraped back or crashed over as they surged towards me. The soup thrower was hauled to his feet and in a circle of angry threatening labourers shrank miserably. His disdain had gone and his face had the quality of a hunted rabbit.

‘I've seen him about,' someone growled. ‘ He's a boss's man.'

‘Organising scab labour, are you? A dirty scab yourself?' And they pushed him around the circle.

He pleaded piteously. ‘No, fellows, no, just eating lunch.'

‘Then you're a spy?'

‘No,' he bleated.

‘Listening to our talk were you?'

‘No.'

‘Insulting our Judith?' For the first time I heard them speak the dignity of my name.

‘Didn't mean anything.'

‘Not mean anything when you threw your soup at her?'

He was silent and wary. The shifty feral silence of a hunted animal. He cringed.

‘Apologise and call her “lady”.'

‘Apologies, ma'am,' he whined.

‘Louder! And she's not the Queen.' Someone prodded him.

‘Apologies, lady,' he screeched.

‘Oh, let him go.' The
Das Kapital
reader had, unbeknown to me, approached the melee. ‘Let him go,' he repeated, ‘we have other things to worry about beside a single bloody blackleg.'

They hesitated and I was surprised they accepted his authority.

The soup thrower was hustled out the door and given a hearty shove that sent him tumbling. As he scuttled away they shouted with laughter and slapped each other on the back as if triumphant.

Meanwhile the reader had returned to his book.

I stood hesitating in the middle of the room but finally approached him. ‘Thank you,' I said. ‘If there had been a fight I might have lost my job.'

‘Yes,' he said and looked up. ‘Better change that skirt. So you understood bits and pieces of
Das Kapital
?'

Surprised, I stared at him. He had actually heard me earlier and remembered what I had said. At my obvious astonishment a slight smile lifted the corners of his mouth.

‘Amazing,' he said. ‘She understands some Marx. Quite amazing.' He returned to his reading.