Hunger Town by Wendy Scarfe Page A

My mother told me that often he woke in the night, sweating with terror from a nightmare in which he had killed a shoveller. As a child I simply accepted the gangs of men moving about our hulk but now, with Joe’s death, I observed their terrible work. This, too, was a grand killer of men.
    The Chew It and Spew It was so hot that one day I fainted and had to be driven home by a friend of my boss. My mother pursed her lips when she saw my white sweating face. ‘That’s enough,’ she told my father. ‘She’s not going back.’
    But through 1928 unemployment was worsening. He had a permanently worried look and constantly urged my mother to save what she could. She scrimped on everything.
    I lay on the deck on a mattress with cool cloths over my head. He was distressed. ‘I don’t know what to do, Eve. On a union count we guess one in five of our men is out of work and this bloody government is talking of bringing in immigrant labour to undercut our wages.’ He was grim. ‘I’d like to see those immigrant scabs employed as coal lumpers. That’d be a joke. The government would need to import an army of giants to take on that job.’
    It was the first cry of despair I had ever heard from my father and it wrung my heart.
    Later I said to my mother, ‘There is the hundred pounds from Joe.’
    â€˜No!’ she was fierce. ‘We’re not going to take everything from you.’
    I returned to the Chew It and Spew It.
    Harry had agreed to help advertise the next street meeting by putting up posters around the area. This was part of a continuous campaign to defeat the ban on street meetings. Before an illegal meeting was held volunteers went out at night and secretly stuck up posters on walls, trees, lamp-posts, shop windows, giving the date and place of the next meeting. Sometimes posters were distributed during the day at shopping areas but there volunteers had to be fleet of foot to escape watching police.
    The three of us, Winnie, Harry and I, were to say that we were going to the Saturday night pictures and afterwards I was to spend the night at Winnie’s home. I felt guilty lying to my mother and uncomfortable seeing the easy charm with which Harry beguiled her. Sometimes Harry’s duplicity bothered me.
    In my mother’s eyes nothing could be more innocent or more desirable. That I was included in Winnie’s family life delighted her. She constantly worried about my isolation on the hulk and I realised she feared I might suffer the same loneliness that she experienced. It was not that she didn’t go out or have women friends but because of the difficulties in visiting us she couldn’t have that easy drop-in lifestyle.
    When friends visited it was usually as a result of a formal invitation. They expressed amazement at our different way of life and mother preened herself on their admiration for the strangeness of it all. She showed them over the hulk. But their visits were intermittent and rare and often relationships died for lack of proximity.
    â€˜It’s out of sight out of mind,’ my mother sometimes remarked bitterly, ‘and it’s always me who has to make the visits. They won’t bother to come this far although it’s only a tram ride from the Semaphore and a bit of a walk along the wharf.’
    But I knew that it was also the problem of the times when we were docked. Finding us at home was unpredictable and friends grew tired of trying to visit when times convenient to them were not possible for us.
    I also felt guilty at involving Winnie.
    â€˜She’ll love it,’ Harry was casual, ‘and we need her. You have to stay somewhere and I need you.’
    â€˜But her parents won’t love it.’
    â€˜Come on, Judith, put your outsize conscience in your pocket. You’re always worrying about something.’
    â€˜Yes.’ But I was doubtful.
    Harry came for me with his usual assurance