The Far Country (13 page)

“I don’t see how you can keep people here if they want to go,” the girl said. “After all, what’s the Commonwealth or Empire or whatever they call it these days—what’s it for? You can to go Australia if you want to, can’t you?”

Sanders said, “You can at present, but it’s got to be controlled. People can’t always do the things they want to.”

“I’m sick of the word control,” said Jennifer. “We didn’t have to have all these controls before the war.”

“No,” said Sanders. “We had three million unemployed instead.” He leaned across the table. “I’ll give you a better reason than the money why people ought to stay here.”

“What’s that?” asked Forsyth.

“To do a good job for the world,” said Sanders. “I’ll tell you. Here in England we’ve got the most advanced form of government of any country in the world. It’s experimental, and I know there’ve been mistakes. Some things that have been tried out aren’t so hot, like ground nuts in Tanganyika, and they’ve had to be written off. But what this country has tried to do, and what it’s doing, is to plan a new form of government and put it into practice, a new form of democracy where everyone will get a square deal. When we’ve shown it can be done, the world will copy it, all right. You see. But it can’t be worked out if people are allowed to run away to other countries. It’s their job to stay here and get this one right.”

Jennifer said, “You mean, one ought to stay here because there’s an experiment in Socialism going on, and if we go away we’ll spoil it?”

“That’s right.”

Forsyth said, “Too bad when the guinea-pig escapes from the laboratory before the research is finished. It kind of spoils the experiment, Miss Morton.”

There was laughter, and Sanders flushed angrily. “It’s not like that at all. It’s for the good of everyone to stay in England. This is the most advanced country in the world.”

Forsyth said, “Maybe. I’d trade the brave new world for an old-fashioned capitalistic porterhouse steak.”

Jennifer said, “If there’s one thing that would make me want to go and emigrate it
’s
what you’ve just said—that one’s got to stay here for the sake of an experiment.”

Morrison laughed. “She’s got a bourgeois ideology,” he said. “She’s nothing but a ruddy Kulak, Sanders.”

Jennifer went back to her work that afternoon, but the incident stayed in her mind, and rankled. She had no particular aversion to Mr. Sanders; indeed he was a healthy, youngish man who had been an officer in the R.N.V.R. during the war and had commanded an L.C.T. in the invasion of Normandy. What irked her was the display of Socialist enthusiasm that pervaded her office, which seemed to her slightly phoney. It was manifestly impossible for anyone who derided the Socialistic ideal to progress very far in the public service; if a young man aimed at promotion in her office he felt it necessary to declare a firm, almost a religious, belief in the principles of Socialism. Jennifer felt instinctively that Mr. Sanders was less concerned with the Brave New World than the progress of Mr. Sanders in the Ministry of Pensions, and she wondered what would happen to his views if an election should bring in a Conservative Government.

In the meantime she felt constrained and restricted by bureaucracy; it could not seriously be true that she would have to stay in England if she wanted to go. Abruptly the thought of going to Australia for a time became attractive to her; if they said she couldn’t go, she’d darned well go.

On Monday she got a cable at her boarding-house. It read,

She stared at this in amazement that she could have got an answer to the letter she had written only a week before; it made Australia seem very near. Frequently when she wrote on Sunday to her parents in Leicester and missed the evening post she did not get an answer till Thursday; true, Jane Dorman had cabled, but even so … Jennifer felt as if Jane Dorman lived in the next county, and Australia no longer seemed to be upon the far side of the world.

It wouldn’t do any harm to find out about it, anyway. She made a few discreet enquiries and took Tuesday afternoon off on a pretext that she had to help her father clear up Ethel Trehearn’s estate, which was totally untrue. She went up to London and visited the P. and O. office and the Orient Line next door, and Australia House, and Victoria House. She returned with a great mass of literature to study, fascinating windows opening upon a strange new world.

On the Thursday she wrote to the Orient Line and put her name down for a tourist-class passage to Australia five months ahead, the earliest date that she could get a berth. She sent ten pounds deposit, on the assurance of the company that this would be returnable if she changed her mind and didn’t go. She wouldn’t really go, of course, but it was nice to know she could go if she wanted to….

On the Friday she got a bulky air-mail letter from Jane Dorman in Australia, twelve days after she had written. Enclosed with it were four pages of advertisements in newspapers of situations vacant in Melbourne for secretaries and “typistes”, at salaries that made her blink. Jane Dorman wrote six pages, ending,

“As regards the money, do keep it as I said in the cable. Aunt Ethel was terribly kind to us a long time ago when we first got married, and I am only so deeply grieved that I didn’t realise before that she was in need of help, because now we’ve got so much with the wool sales as they are. Of course, we all know that it can’t go on, but the debt upon the land and stock is all paid off now so everything is ours, and even if wool fell to half its present price or less we should still be all right, and safe for the remainder of our lives.

“I need hardly say how much we should like to see you out here with us. We live in a country district a hundred and fifty miles from Melbourne. I don’t suppose you’d want to live the sort of life we do, because it’s very quiet here, rather like living in the depths of the Welsh mountains, perhaps, or in Cumberland. There’s not a great deal for young people here unless they’re keen on the land, and my children are all living now in the cities, Ethel and Jane in Sydney and Jack in Newcastle, about a hundred miles north of Sydney. I expect if you came here you’d want to work in Melbourne, and I am sending you some pages from the
Age
and the
Argus
to show you the sort of jobs available. Everybody is just crying out for secretaries, it seems, and you’d have no trouble at all in getting work.

“I do hope that you will decide to come, and that before you take up work you will come and stay with us for as long as you like, or as long as you can stand the country. I do so want to hear about Aunt Ethel from somebody who knew her. I had not met her for over thirty years, of course, but we wrote to each other every two or three months. I can’t really think of her as old, even now.

“Do come and see us out here, even if it’s only for the trip.

“Yours affectionately,
“J
ANE
D
ORMAN.”

Jennifer had no very close friends in Blackheath, but she sometimes went to the pictures with a girl called Shirley Hyman who lived in the room below her. Shirley worked in the City and was engaged to a young man in a solicitor’s office; she was with him every week-end but seldom saw him in the week. That Friday evening she was washing her hair for his benefit next day, and Jennifer went down to see her, papers in hand.

She said, “Shirley. Have you ever thought of going to Australia?”

Miss Hyman, sitting on the floor before the gas stove drying her hair, said, “For the Lord’s sake. Whatever made you ask that?”

“I’ve got a relation there,” said Jennifer. “She wants me to go out and stay.”

“What part of Australia?”

“She’s outside Melbourne,” Jennifer said. “I’d get a job in Melbourne if I went.”

“Perth’s the only place I know about.”

“Have you been there?”

Miss Hyman shook her head. “Dick’s always going on about it,” she said. “He wants us to go there when we’re married. He thinks he knows a chap out there who’ll take him on, as soon as he’s got his articles.”

“Are you keen on it?”

“I don’t quite know,” the girl said. “It’s an awful long way away. When I’m with Dick it all seems reasonable. There’s not much future here and if we’re going, well, it’s better to go before we start a family. But … it’s an awful long way.”

“I’ve been finding out about it,” Jennifer said. “I got a letter back from my relation in twelve days. It doesn’t seem so far now as it did before.”

“Is that all it took?”

“That’s right.” She squatted down before the stove with Shirley and produced her papers and pamphlets. “There’s ever so many jobs, according to these advertisements.”

They turned over the brightly-coloured emigration pamphlets she had gleaned in Australia House. “Dick’s got that one—and that,” said Shirley. “It looks all right in these things, doesn’t it? But then they wouldn’t tell you the bad parts, like half the houses in Brisbane having no sewage system.”

“Is that right?” asked Jennifer with interest.

“So somebody was telling Dick. He says it’s all right in Perth, but I don’t believe it is.”

“What do people do?” asked Jennifer. “Go out in the woods or something?”

They laughed together. “They’ve cut down all the woods,” said Shirley. “I was reading somewhere about Australia becoming a dust bowl because they’ve cut down all the woods.”

“I don’t think that can be right,” said Jennifer. “They’ve got
some
woods left, or they couldn’t have taken these pictures.” They bent together over the pictures in the pamphlet about Tasmania, showing wooded mountain ranges stretching as far as the eye could see.

“They probably kept those just to make these pictures to show mutts like us,” said Shirley sceptically. “It’s probably all desert and black people round behind the camera.”

They laughed, and sat in silence for a time.

“What do you really think about it?” Jennifer asked at last. “Do you think it’s a good thing to do?”

The girl sat playing with her hair-brush on the floor beside the stove, thoughtful and serious. “Dick expects to be successful,” she said presently, “and I think he will. He’d have more opportunity
out there, with new things starting all the time as more people get into the country.” She raised her head, and looked at Jennifer. “And, anyway, what’s the good of being successful in England? They only take it all away from you, with tax and supertax. The way he looks at it, if we stay in England he’d do best in some Government office and get a pension at the end. He wants to be on his own, though.”

There was a pause. “I don’t know what to think,” Shirley said at last. “I’d never thought of leaving England, up until the last couple of months. It seems a horrid thing to do, as if one ought to stay and help to get things right. Dick says there’s too many of us in the country. I don’t know. If somebody’s got to get out, I wish it wasn’t me.”

“Do you think it would feel strange?” asked Jennifer. “Would people like you in Australia?”

“I don’t know. There’s such a lot of English people there already, I think one would find friends. People who hadn’t been out there so long themselves. I think it’ld be like going to live in Scotland for a job. They talk with a funny accent, some of them, you know.”

“I don’t think it could be as bad as the Scotch accent,” Jennifer said. “I went to Edinburgh once, and I couldn’t understand what some of the people were saying—porters and cab drivers, you know. I don’t believe Australians are as difficult as that.”

“You’re all right, of course,” said Shirley. “You could come back if you didn’t like it. You could save the cost of the passage home. It’s different for us. If we went out, we’d have to go for good.”

“I know,” Jennifer said slowly. “The trouble is, I believe I might like it, and stay there for good. I don’t want to do that….”

The little ties that held her to her own land were still strong, ties of friendships, of places that she knew, of things she had grown up with. She went on with her work and life in Blackheath for another three days, uncertain and irresolute. On the following Tuesday she got a telegram from the Orient Line,

November the twenty-third was in two days’ time, and if she took this she would have to sail within a fortnight. Her first reaction was that she couldn’t possibly go. It was too soon; she hadn’t made up her mind. She got the telegram on her return from work; Shirley Hyman was out that evening, and there was nobody else with whom she could discuss the matter.

It was impossible for Jennifer to stay in her room that evening; she was too worried and restless. She had her tea in an abstracted daze, and walked across the heath and took a train for Charing Cross, knowing that it was in her power to have done with that
heath and with that train. It was not raining but the night was cold and windy; the chilly draughts whipped round her on the platform in the darkness. In Australia it would be high summer….

The train was unheated owing to fuel shortages, and she was very cold by the time she got to Charing Cross. She went out of the station and turned eastwards up the Strand, and there she met a disappointment. She had hoped that the bright lights and the traffic would be stimulating and cheerful, and that England would hold out a hand for her to hang on to. But the shop windows were all dark because of fuel rationing, and the Strand seemed sombre and deserted, with little life. She was there now, however, and very cold; she walked eastwards quickly for the exercise. She stopped now and then to look into a shop window in the light of an arc lamp, but there was no joy in it.

Warmth and feeling were coming back into her feet as she passed Waterloo Bridge. She went on past the Law Courts, down Fleet Street, empty and dark but for the street lamps and the lights and clamour from the newspaper offices. By the time she reached the bottom of Ludgate Hill she was warm and comfortable again and beginning to wonder why she had come there, and where she was heading for. There was no point in walking on into the City. She moved up the hill at a slower pace, looking for a bus-stop, and so she came to St. Paul’s Cathedral, an immense black mass towering up into the darkness from the blitz desolation that surrounded it.