Union Belle (21 page)

Ellen went red. ‘You wouldn’t have let me wear anything else.’

‘No, I most certainly would not. Anyway, your father was doing well at work, bringing home plenty of money and working every shift he could get so we could buy this house and everything we needed for it.’ Gloria sat back in her seat. ‘Oh, I had such hopes for your father, Ellen. He was clever as well, you see, and I thought with a little bit of application he could go for his tickets and work his way up to at least mine manager. Then we could go about town with our heads held high and be proud of everything he’d achieved.’

‘All miners can hold their heads up, Mum, it’s a good, honest job.’

‘Yes, I knew you’d say that, and so unfortunately did your father. It took me a few years but I finally realised he had no intention of being anything other than what he was. He wasn’t even interested in working up to under-deputy. All he cared about was that bloody union of his.’

Ellen knew all this. ‘But, Mum, those were your dreams, not Dad’s.’

‘I know that now, dear, but for years I was so sure he’d want the same things as I did. I couldn’t understand why he wouldn’t.’ Gloria took a long sip of her sherry. ‘Are you sure you don’t want another one?’

‘Positive. But if you knew he didn’t, and that he was never going to, why didn’t you ever let up on him? Why couldn’t you just let him be the way he was?’

‘It was just our way. Your father loved me, Ellen, and I loved him, very much, in spite of the way it might have looked. We’d gone on like that for so long, what was the point of changing? What would we have gained?’

‘A bit of peace and quiet?’

‘We tried peace and quiet, dear, and we didn’t like it. It was…boring.’

Ellen turned her empty glass around on the table, watching the tiny bit of sherry left in the bottom swirl from side to side. She was beginning to feel a little angry at her mother’s admissions; what good were they now?

‘Did you ever tell him?’

‘Tell him what?’

‘That your dreams were just that, Mum, dreams. Selfish ones, too, if you don’t mind me saying so.’

Gloria regarded her daughter thoughtfully, glad to see the spark in her that Alf had so admired was still strong, even if he would never see it again. ‘Oh, I know they were selfish. And yes, I did tell him, eventually.’

‘Good.’

‘Because I owed it to him.’

‘I’ll say you did. You didn’t give them up, though, did you, your dreams?’

‘No, we just agreed that he didn’t have to listen to them any more. It was a good arrangement, it suited us both.’

Ellen frowned. ‘Why did you owe him?’

There was a short pause, then Gloria said, ‘Because he did
something, and it was the kindest, most decent thing anyone has ever done for me. It was after I made a mistake.’

‘What sort of mistake?’

‘I left him.’

There was a stunned silence while Ellen gaped at her mother.

‘You
left
him?’

Gloria nodded. ‘When Hazel was nine.’

‘But…she never said anything.’ Ellen could hardly believe what she was hearing.

‘She wasn’t there, she was staying with your grandmother. We were, well, we’d been having problems, your father and I, and we thought it would be better if she was somewhere that wasn’t so…fraught.’ Gloria finished her sherry and poured herself another one, although this time it was only half a glass. ‘Just after she’d gone, I was in town one day at the bank and there was a new man there, behind the counter, showing something or other to one of the clerks. I’d never seen him before and I knew right away he wasn’t from Huntly. He was wearing the most beautifully cut suit and his hair was all brilliantined and he looked so smart.’

Ellen wasn’t sure now that she wanted to hear this.

‘So I smiled at him,’ Gloria went on, ‘and he smiled back, and when he asked me would I meet him for lunch, I said yes. I can’t explain why I said it, Ellen, so don’t ask. And it started from that. He was from Hamilton and was only in Huntly for a week and when he went back I went through to see him. He had a little two-bedroom cottage in Collingwood Street and we met there.’ She picked up her sherry glass, then put it back down without drinking. ‘I thought your father and I were coming to a parting of the ways, and I just didn’t have the energy left to keep on trying. I was so disappointed with him, Ellen, I just couldn’t be bothered.’

‘Because he wouldn’t be a mine manager?’

‘I suppose so, if you want to put it like that. And Ray was everything I thought I wanted in a man. He was clever, he was educated, he had a good, professional job. There was just something about him, although I really couldn’t tell you what it was. When I was with him he made me feel, oh, I don’t know, that I was safe, that nothing bad would ever happen again. Something like that, anyway.’

Ellen avoided her mother’s eyes. She wanted to keep on feeling angry at her but she couldn’t, she felt too hypocritical.

‘We met for about a month, then one day he told me he loved me and couldn’t live without me. He said if I left Alf, he’d marry me as soon as my divorce came through. By then I was so besotted I would have done anything for him. So I did leave your father. I left Hazel, too, and by Christ that was hard, although she never really knew what was going on. I just walked out and went to live with Ray, and I was so happy, Ellen, I’d never known happiness like it. Then, about a month after that, he came home from work one day and told me he’d changed his mind, and could I please leave by the end of the week.’

‘But why?’ Ellen said, imagining how absolutely devastated her mother must have been.

‘He told me he was married,’ Gloria said, ‘separated but still married, and that he and his wife had decided to try again. So I packed my things and I came back here and asked your father to take me back.’

‘And did he?’

‘Well, obviously.’

‘Well, you’re right, then, that was a very kind and decent thing for him to do.’

Gloria lowered her eyes, took a very deep breath and placed her manicured hands flat on the table. Then she
looked straight at Ellen. ‘No, that wasn’t the decent thing, not really. When I came back I was pregnant. With you.’

Ellen felt faint. ‘What are you saying?’

‘I’m saying, sweetheart, that your father wasn’t really your father, although we told everyone you were his. That was his idea. I’m so sorry, Ellen, I should have told you long before this, but I just couldn’t.’

Gloria watched as a succession of emotions flowed across her daughter’s face—disbelief, anger, bewilderment and hurt, one after the other.

‘I’m so sorry,’ she said again. ‘So you be very careful with that Jack Vaughan, Ellen, or you might just end up as sorry as I’ve been for the last thirty years.’

June 1951

T
om jammed his hat further down on his head and took a last deep drag on his cigarette. He was nervous, but it was more from anticipation than fear.

Lew was on his left, Vic on his right, and Pat and Frank were behind them. They were outside the Civic Theatre on Queen Street, waiting for the march to start. Bert had cried off, saying that if he was bashed on the head by a baton Christ only knew what might happen to his kids. The others understood, and there were no hard feelings. Jack was also missing, as he’d had to go out to the back of Waingaro first thing this morning with his truck to pick up a couple of sheep.

The crowd seemed huge to Tom, and the atmosphere crackled with tension and expectation. They were saying there were close to a thousand of them here today. There were even women taking part, members of the Auckland Women’s Auxiliary, including Jock Barnes’ wife; Tom could see them lining up at the front, carrying placards advertising a public meeting on Sunday at the Auckland Domain.

The word came to move and they started off, slowly but steadily, keeping four or five abreast on the left side of the street. Shoppers and bystanders stopped to look; some booed but the majority cheered, or so it seemed to Tom anyway. But they’d not gone far when the marchers at the front slowed and then came to a halt.

‘What is it?’ Vic said, craning his neck to see what the hold-up was.

Then the mutter filtered back through the marchers: it’s the cops, the cops, the cops.

‘Here we go,’ Lew said, dropping his smoke on the ground and grinding it out with his boot heel.

Pat said, ‘Fuck it, I’m going up for a look. Who’s with me?’

Off they went, weaving through the column of stalled marchers and dodging individuals who’d had a good look at the wall of police blocking the street and turned around.

‘Fucking hell,’ Tom said when he finally saw them. There seemed to be hundreds of them, lined up in rows with their batons out and their cars blockading the road.

An officer near the front stepped forward and announced through a bullhorn that the marchers had five minutes to disperse.

For two long minutes almost nobody moved, and it seemed that Queen Street had fallen almost totally silent. Then suddenly there was an eruption of yelling and scuffling as the first row of about seventy police charged, raising their arms and swinging their batons down onto anyone within reach. Tom winced as he saw one of the women go down, falling to her knees and scrambling to get out of the way. Behind him he heard Pat roar, and felt him push past in his eagerness to have a go at the cops.

‘Keep an eye on him,’ Tom yelled to Frank, ‘or he’ll end up in the bloody paddy wagon!’

Then, heart thumping, he was level with them himself, a line of blue uniforms moving forward and laying into people right, left and centre. As the front line broke, the second wave surged forward. The marchers were all unarmed, but fighting back viciously with fists and boots. There were men on the ground already, and Tom saw one bloke stagger past holding his hands over a bleeding wound at the back of his head.

He was struck on the shoulder then, with such force he nearly went down, and he thanked God he was wearing his heavy overcoat. He righted himself and spun around, coming face to face with a cop raising his baton for another go. Tom ducked, and again the blow landed on his shoulder. The cop reached out and grabbed him by the lapel.

‘Get your filthy fucking hands off me!’ Tom swore, wrenching himself free.

He felt anger exploding out of him, anger and pent-up fear at all that had been happening over the last few months. He hit out, caught the cop a solid blow on the cheek and knocked his helmet off.

Then he was pushed from behind and almost went flat on his face, but on glancing over his shoulder saw he’d merely been collected by a knot of flailing, punching men. He looked quickly around for the other Pukemiro men, caught sight of Vic going hand to hand with a cop, and elbowed his way over to him. He kicked out and caught the policeman a good one on the shin, then gave him another one as he reeled back, just for luck. It wasn’t sporting, two men onto one, even if the one was a cop, but too bloody bad.

Some of the marchers were scattering onto the footpath now, or heading back down Queen Street, and Tom didn’t blame them.

Then the paddy wagons started to arrive, sirens wailing and lights flashing.

Pat saw them too. ‘Time to go,’ he said.

Tom followed him as he shoved his way out of the melee, stepping over a cop on the ground, a young bloke with most of his front teeth missing and his nose smashed. He looked dazed and bewildered, and just for a moment Tom felt sick at what was happening. He thought about stopping to pull the boy up onto the footpath, but pushed the idea away and headed up the street for the rear of the
town hall, where they had all agreed to rendezvous if they were split up.

He and Pat were the first there, but Vic and Frank soon appeared, Vic with a split lip and Frank with one sleeve completely missing from his coat.

‘What a pack of bloody
thugs
,’ Frank said. He surveyed his torn sleeve. ‘Jesus H. Christ, Milly’s going to kill me when she sees this.’

They all laughed a bit too heartily.

‘Christ, did you see those bastards?’ Pat said. ‘I’ve never seen such brutality in all my life!’ He stopped, remembering some of the other stoushes he’d witnessed, and been party to, in his lifetime. ‘Well, not from the bloody cops, anyway.’

‘Did you see that poor joker with the blood pouring down his face?’ Vic said. ‘He couldn’t even see where he was going and they still kept having a go at him!’

‘A couple of the women were knocked down, too,’ Frank said. ‘Did you see that?’

Pat spat. ‘Yeah, bastards.’

Lew arrived fifteen minutes later, having gone the long way round to circumnavigate the police who, after successfully dispersing the marchers, were now roaming up and down the streets looking for likely suspects.

‘Bloody hell,’ he exclaimed as he hurried up to them. His hat had disappeared and there was blood on his coat.

‘Did you cop one?’ Tom asked, nodding at the stain.

‘Eh? No, it’s someone else’s, I think,’ Lew said. ‘I hope,’ he added, patting himself down theatrically and making a show of looking for wounds.

‘You’d know, mate,’ Tom said, flexing his aching shoulder. ‘Those batons are fucking solid.’

He was sore, but elated. His heart was no longer thudding in his ribcage, but he still felt exhilarated, wondering
whether it was like that when a bloke went into battle: the stomach-churning anticipation, the sharpness of sight and sound and the great rush of adrenaline.

Lew rolled himself a smoke, his hands shaking slightly. ‘What now?’

‘Nearest pub for a beer, I reckon,’ Vic said.

Pat shook his head. ‘Cops’ll be all over the place. Best if we just disappear, I’d say. We’ll stop at Mercer for a couple on the way home.’

Frank’s brother had lent Frank his car—on strict instructions that only Frank could drive it as he was the sole member of the group who didn’t drink—so today they had the luxury of being able to make their way home in their own time.

Frank’s brother was very wise.

Tom got home at half-past eight that night, reeking of beer and having a bit of trouble standing up.

Ellen was ropable. ‘Where the hell have you been?’ she demanded.

‘Stopped off at Mercer,’ he said, sitting down heavily at the table. He was knackered and his head was starting to ache. He looked around blearily. ‘Where’s the boys?’

‘Next door.’

‘Where’s the boys?’ mimicked Fintan, who had migrated back into the kitchen now that the weather had turned cold.

‘Oh, shut up, you mouthy little shit,’ Tom muttered.

‘No, you shut up,’ Ellen said, standing in front of the sink with her hands on her hips. ‘Look at the state of you!’

‘Don’t nag, woman.’

‘I’m not nagging, Tom McCabe, I was worried sick. You said you’d be home by four o’clock.’

‘I said
about
four o’clock.’

Ellen tapped her watch hard enough to stop it. ‘Well, is this about four o’clock? Is it?’

Tom’s stomach rumbled, reminding him he hadn’t eaten anything since breakfast.

‘I suppose you couldn’t cook me some eggs?’ he said.

There was a brief pause before she walked over to him, bent down and shouted in his face, ‘
Cook your own bloody eggs
!’

They stared at each other for a moment, both shocked, then Ellen sat down and burst into tears. Tom moved to touch her, then thought better of it. He wished he’d brought some beer home.

‘It’s been on the radio all afternoon,’ she said, fishing a handkerchief out of the sleeve of her cardigan. ‘They said there was a riot, and that twenty-two demonstrators were treated for serious wounds.’ She blew her nose. ‘They said there were bottles being thrown and attacks with sticks!’

‘Batons, more like,’ Tom said.

‘And when you didn’t come home I had visions of you lying in the hospital with your head split open…’ She burst into fresh tears.

Tom closed his eyes, not too drunk to realise what had probably been going through her mind.

‘I’m sorry, love, I didn’t think.’

‘No, you didn’t, did you?’

‘Ah, love, what can I say?’ He pushed himself unsteadily to his feet and put his arms around her, leaning down so his face was against her hair.

‘You smell nice,’ he said. ‘Have you just had a bath?’

‘No,’ she said, pulling away.

‘Well, you smell nice.’

‘You smell like a brewery.’

He sat down again. He wanted to tell her about how it
had felt, being right in the middle of the fight, the excitement and the adrenaline and the conviction that, after all these bloody weeks of being on strike, he was finally taking some sort of real stand against the government, even if it was only by having a go at the cops. But going over in his head how he might describe it to her, he realised it could easily sound quite stupid now, like a game of bull-rush for grown men. Perhaps it even had been. In fact, the more the booze wore off, the more it did seem like that.

He beckoned to her. ‘Come and give me a proper cuddle.’

She came over reluctantly and he pulled her onto his lap and gave her a good squeeze. Normally this made her giggle, but tonight she just sat there, rigid and unmoving, so he let her go.

She patted his arm awkwardly and stood up. ‘Your dinner’s in the oven,’ she said, then went into the hall.

Tom was as crook as a dog the next morning. He managed to get dressed, but his head was pounding and his mouth tasted like the bottom of Fintan’s cage. Ellen put breakfast in front of him, but his stomach heaved at the sight of it and he decided he’d be better off going down the back first. Halfway down the path his guts cramped violently, and by the time he opened the toilet door he couldn’t decide whether to put his head over the bog or his bum on it. With a hand clamped over his mouth he made a rushed detour to the shed for a bucket, then lurched back to the toilet, dropped his pants and sat down.

He felt marginally better when his bowel had emptied, but thought he should stay seated for a bit longer, just in case. He wouldn’t be drinking Waikato again in a hurry.

He sat there, his trousers pooled around his ankles, his
head in his hands and his arse on fire, feeling wrung out both physically and mentally. His elation from yesterday had dissolved, leaving him morose and with the certain realisation that he couldn’t go on pretending that everything was all right between him and Ellen.

She had changed, there was no doubt about it. He’d caught her several times lately staring off vacantly, and when he’d asked her what was she thinking about, each time she’d said ‘nothing’. But she was preoccupied and he knew it, and it was driving him around the bend. She usually did talk to him when she had something on her mind, but not this time, and he was feeling left out and increasingly anxious. No, not anxious, scared.

And it wasn’t just Alf dying like that, either, or the revelation that he hadn’t been her real father, although both of those things had knocked her all to the pack. The day she’d come home and told him about it he thought he was going to have to get Dr Airey in, she was that white and shaken. Bloody Gloria—all her airs and graces and her fancy furniture, and she had a secret like that! Alf must have been a saint, taking in a child that wasn’t his. There weren’t many blokes about who’d do something like that.

No, it was more than that, and it had started before Alf had his accident. He couldn’t put his finger on it, but whatever it was, it had been there all right. Ellen had never been a short-tempered sort of woman, and she was nearly always reasonable even when he wasn’t, but lately all sorts of things had been getting on her nerves. If he dropped his clothes on the floor in the bedroom, or left the paper spread out on the kitchen table, or came into the house with his boots on, he certainly knew about it these days. It wasn’t that she nagged at him, she still very rarely did that, but her mouth would go all thin and she’d whip around tidying up and refusing to meet his eye.

And last night, shouting at him to cook his own eggs—she’d never in their married life done anything like that before. He’d been a bit pissed, it was true, and coming home drunk had never impressed her, but she’d always tolerated it. And it could have been a lot worse—he hadn’t been blind drunk, and he hadn’t passed out or thrown up everywhere. It wasn’t as if he did it regularly, either, just now and then; he wasn’t another Alf, hardly ever at home, or Stan Mason, whom everyone knew regularly belted his wife after he’d been on the booze.

So why had she been so angry? He knew she’d been worried because he was late, but the way she’d looked at him, almost as though she despised him, had scared the hell out of him. Somewhere in the back of his mind he had the vague but terrifying sensation that she was slipping away from him, just a little bit each day, but slipping away nevertheless.

Sometimes he’d catch her watching the boys, sometimes with love, sometimes with sadness and sometimes as though she couldn’t recognise them, as though someone had come along and plonked two kids she’d never met before at her kitchen table. And they knew something was up, too. Davey, who didn’t often confide in him, he was ashamed to admit, had asked him last week if Mum was sick, and he hadn’t known what to say. Finally he’d said no, she just had a lot on her mind at the moment. But he’d seen that even Davey was no longer satisfied with that answer.