Hunger Town (37 page)

Harry was euphoric, excited and restless. ‘Do you think that now we'll really know how a communist state works and what it's like to live in one? I wonder if they really pay people to learn to dance. I've heard, Jude, that any poor person can now go to the Bolshoi Ballet for next to nothing. We can't do that here.'

But I detected in him a certain anxiety, even fear, that what he heard might dispel his beautiful dream.

‘You go,' he said nervously. ‘You and your mum and dad. I've work I really must complete.' But I was adamant. I didn't tell him that I had guessed the cause of his reluctance, but if there was an illusion to be lost then he'd better get over it now.

The building, once used for theatricals, was now better known for holding boxing matches. It seated over a thousand people and it was packed. We were lucky to find some seats. Nathan was fussing on the platform, organising a row of chairs behind the speaker's podium and ushering an entourage of guests on to them.

‘Who are they?' I asked Harry.

‘I don't know their names but I think a good few come from Sydney and are literary coves.'

My father eyed them speculatively. ‘Toffs from Sydney,' he muttered to my mother. She put a reproving hand on his arm and he winked at me.

Nathan spoke at length with one of them.

‘Ted Sloan?' I asked Harry.

He was tense. ‘I suppose so.'

I studied Ted Sloan with his round babyish face and small mouth. He was neatly dressed and of medium height and didn't look particularly radical—but then neither did Nathan nor Harry. Somehow the innocence of their ordinariness made even more nonsense of the vitriolic newspaper attacks on sinister Bolsheviks secretly conspiring to overthrow the state. Ted Sloan looked more fitted to an accountant's office with ledger and pen in front of him.

Nathan cleared his throat into the microphone and called the audience to order. He mumbled his words of welcome and turned away from the microphone so that his speech introducing Ted Sloan only reached us in isolated words.

I grimaced at Harry. ‘Did you say that Nathan has improved at public speaking?'

He shook his head. ‘Heaven only knows why he doesn't let someone else do it.'

Ted Sloan was both competent and assured. He adjusted the microphone to his height, thanked Nathan and the Adelaide Communist Party for inviting him, made a couple of flattering comments about the beauty of the city and a disparaging joke about Sydney which went down well. The row of disciples behind him smiled and nodded. It was a trifle patronising and insincere because none of the well-dressed visitors on the platform would have given a moment's thought to living in Adelaide, no matter how clean and beautiful it was. And, communist sympathisers or not, they wouldn't have lived in the Port in a month of Sundays. But I had learned from sending out my cartoons how parochial Australia was and how stupidly competitive our capital cities were.

Ted Sloan spoke for an hour. His speech was very long, very dry and thick with statistics—which I lost track of as soon as he uttered them. What I recalled was sparse. He began with a brief history of Russia since the revolution in 1917; the effects of four years of what he called ‘the imperialist war'; and the disastrous drain on the country of the three years of intervention as Britain, France, Japan and America conspired to overthrow by force the new Soviet state. It was important to realise, he insisted, how exhausted the infant state had been and the mammoth efforts required to restore the economy. The wars had completely dislocated industry; mills and factories were at a standstill; mines wrecked or flooded; antiquated iron and steel industries in a state of collapse; agricultural production pitiful.

The people of the Soviet suffered acute food shortages and queued for bread, fats and meat. Clothing, kerosene, soap and other basic necessities were simply not available. Rumblings of social discontent threatened the very basis of what had been so dearly won.

He irritated me. I supposed that we had come to hear about Russia, but, even so, he set my teeth on edge. Where did his awareness of his own country come into it? A speech like this at the Port would have been given short shift. The Russians might have been hungry but we, too, knew all about starvation. No doubt they rumbled with discontent but our battles had been fiercer than rumblings. Why didn't he look about him in Australia?

I glanced around me. With a few exceptions, the people near me were better dressed and better fed than those at the Port. It was clear that hunger hadn't brought them out.

I appraised him cynically as he continued with his idyllic over-blown view of Comrade Lenin and Comrade Stalin overcoming the insuperable obstacles in their mammoth task to lead the way forward. He said he had seen, with his own eyes, the inspirational developments during the first five year plan. Comrade Stalin had roused the nation with his call to patriotism and loyalty to communism: ‘We are fifty or a hundred years behind the advanced countries,' he had declared. ‘We must make good this distance in ten years or they crush us.'

‘He has inspired his countrymen,' Mr Sloan asserted, ‘by making the working people the heroes of the new Soviet state.'

I could almost hear the jeers and cat-calls of our workers in the Port at accepting any more sacrifices for the state. I, too, was suspicious of the state and of heroism demanded for any state. For what purpose? I wondered. This sacrifice? To inspire us to do what the Russians had done? To hold the line against capitalism? Perhaps even fascism? It seemed a utopian dream.

‘There is a great spirit of hope abroad in the Soviet,' Sloan claimed. ‘I have seen the new industrial expansion,' he boasted. ‘The huge hydro-electric schemes, the magnificent iron and steel works, the locomotive and chemical works, and all this progress has exceeded what was expected.'

It was all too pat, too easy, I thought. What was he leaving out?

But his praise grew even more lavish. ‘The collectivisation of the numerous small uneconomic farm holdings has tripled agrarian output and the enthusiasm of farmers for new methods and new agricultural machinery is astonishing. From being ignorant peasants they now all strive to acquire a technical intelligence. Schools are being built, education, the arts and science flourish.'

I shook my head in disbelief and glanced at Harry. He was attending but his mouth was pursed reflectively.

The phalanx of supporters behind Sloan failed to give him their full attention. They wriggled on their seats, glanced at their watches, polished their spectacles and whispered to their neighbours. It was obviously a speech they had heard many times.

And, to me, Sloan's enthusiasm seemed rehearsed as he climaxed grandiosely, ‘And believe it or not, comrades, I saw, actually witnessed, strawberries under special scientific conditions growing in frozen Siberia.'

The audience, which up until now had sat in increasingly bored politeness, came alive at this detail and I supposed that it would be the one fact they constantly quoted about Russia's progress. My thought was proved correct when a small article in the next day's
Despatch
was headlined RUSSIANS GROW STRAWBERRIES IN SIBERIA.

At the close of his speech he urged us all to support the Australian Soviet Friendship Society, emphasising that now the time was ripe to unite in peace and brotherhood and resist all further imperialist wars.

As we made our way out of the theatre through the crowded aisle someone called my name. I turned around to discover that one of the entourage from the platform was pushing his way towards me.

‘Miss Larsen,' he called. ‘Miss Larsen.' He reached my side breathless. He was a tall, well-built man, nattily suited, and his skin wore the gleam of good food and money. How different from so many people at the Port whose skin was muddy or grey or blotched with sores.

He smiled at me engagingly. ‘Miss Larsen. Well met.' And he held out his hand. I shook it.

‘I'm Kevin Han …' In the noise I lost the last part of his surname.

He kept on shaking my hand enthusiastically. ‘I've been an admirer of your cartoons for several years. Just when I think there's nothing good in a newspaper I turn the page and there is a Judith Larsen cartoon to delight and challenge me. You will join our Soviet Friendship Society, won't you? I know that everyone would be thrilled if you honoured us with your patronage and perhaps,' his eyes twinkled, ‘we can inveigle you into doing some drawings for us. Have you ever tried to draw a strawberry farm in Siberia?'

We both laughed. Overcome by his effusiveness I was flattered but also wary. ‘Thank you,' I murmured. `

But just as I turned to introduce him to Harry someone grabbed his arm and pulled him away. He glanced back at me ruefully but was swallowed up in the crowd.

Harry was quiet during the train ride home. We walked with my mother and father from the station to see them to the hulk. My father was silent. Finally he said, ‘Neat little bloke, wasn't he? Wouldn't go far as a lumper.'

‘Oh, Niels,' my mother laughed, ‘he'll have brains not brawn.'

‘Humph,' Dad snorted. ‘I'm always a bit suspicious of people who swallow all they're told. They've sure dished it to him. And he dished it to us.'

‘And you think he hasn't actually seen it at all?' Harry was thoughtful.

‘Can't say, lad. But he wouldn't admit it.'

‘It would be dishonest,' my mother said, ‘if he hadn't actually seen it.'

‘Maybe he believes he's seen it,' I suggested.

‘Fairies at the bottom of the garden.' My father was cynical.

‘I would have liked to ask him if Nathan is correct and they pay people to dance. But it seemed such a naïve question,' Harry said.

My father slapped him on the back in a comradely style. ‘And that's the problem, Harry. He mightn't be prepared or able to answer a simple question. All these falderal statistics—anyone can cook those up.'

Harry was silent.

Later when we went to bed he said to me out of the darkness, ‘People need to believe in something, Jude.'

‘Maybe. It depends.'

‘On what they believe in?'

‘And who judges the value of that?'

He sighed. ‘Do you really believe that they're growing strawberries in Siberia?'

‘I suppose it's possible. Science is doing more and more for us all. But I think it has a magical flavour to it as if the Soviet is a modern-day Camelot. The notion that something is ideal always troubles me, Harry.'

He didn't answer me immediately and I thought he had gone to sleep. Then he said, ‘I don't know whether I care all that much for this deification of Comrade Stalin or the Soviet Union. I thought communism was about people being equal, not big bosses. It's great that even poor people can now go to the ballet but that's there and we're here and I wonder if we need to find our own way, Jude. What do you think?'

But I was too nearly asleep to answer him intelligently.

Our lives fell into a more or less peaceful routine. It was a relief to have no dramatic events to cope with, no major demonstrations, no direct confrontations with police. The poverty of the Port was unremitting but we had even become accustomed to that.

Harry worked every Friday and Saturday night at the dance hall in the Semaphore and, sometimes with Winnie, Ruby and Lil, I also went to the Saturday night threepenny hop. Harry's small dance band was lively and he was always popular as a pianist. But to Ruby's disappointment he no longer joined the girls on the floor for a quickstep. ‘See what marriage has done,' she mourned. ‘Now he's just an old sober sides.'

‘Don't tease, Rube.' I defended him but I was aware that the flirtatious Harry had been replaced by a more serious man. I got tired of asserting that it was not marriage but devotion to the Communist Party that had sobered him. They really never understood.

Sometimes Miss Marie came to supper. She always brought food to help with the meal. My mother would have been mortified if one of her visitors contributed something to the table but I accepted gratefully and without embarrassment. There was rarely enough food in my larder to feed extra people. They understood because most of them were in the same boat. We had what we called a share-as-you-go system.

I always called her Miss Marie although these days she responded, ‘Dear Judith, please call me Marie. I'm not your instructor any more. We are friends,
n'est-ce pas
?'

‘
Oui
,' I replied teasingly.

‘Or,' she added, ‘you could call me Stella, which is my real Aussie name.'

‘Stella,' I mused, ‘it's a pretty name and suits you. But no, I think you'll always be Marie to me.'

‘And so, how is communism these days, Harry?' she quizzed him, and although her tone held a gentle mockery he neither took offence nor tried to argue with her. And together they would sing a duet:
Sur le pont d'Avignon, l'on y danse, l'on y danse
, as she had taught him the French words.

‘Do you know any Spanish?' he asked her on one occasion.

She was surprised. ‘Not a lot, but a
soupçon
, from brief visits. Enough to get by. Why,
mon ami
?'

‘No reason,' he was vague.

Later he said to me, ‘She's such a pretty woman, Jude, and has a very sweet voice.'

I agreed. ‘I miss my classes with her now that my course is finished but I still frequently call on her opinion.'

‘She's not a communist, is she? But I feel there's something there, perhaps some hope for her.'

‘Oh, yes, Harry. I'm sure there's something there. But I wouldn't hope too much.' He knew I was laughing at him but as always took it in good part.

Mrs King was pleased with the drawings I sent her and they appeared regularly in
Women Today
. The article about the exploitation of young women and girls in factories had taken my attention. For years I had concentrated on the destitution and despair caused by unemployment. It had not occurred to me, and I took myself to task for this, that in the present climate of lowered wages girls would be particular victims.