The Denniston Rose (4 page)

AT the Brake Head Mr Dickson, Company manager, has stayed back for a word with mine manager, Mr Denniston. The rest of the official party has plunged off the edge, teeth clamped to hold in place rocketing stomachs and hearts, until Con the Brake slows them just in time to arrange laughing, hearty faces for the women at Middle Brake, who have laid out bacon and egg pie and corned
beef sandwiches and are now busy holding back the children until the men arrive.

Up top, Mr Dickson’s wink at two late-comers, wandering back over the plateau, gives way to a frown when he recognises Totty McGuire, whose dress now has a new set of stains.

‘It’s not the thing, young Tom. Mr McGuire’s daughter.’

Tom looks back stoutly but it’s Totty who answers. ‘Tom wants a job, Mr Dickson. You must need carpenters up here.’

‘You’re right, we do.’

‘We could build accommodations up here. And our own. Maybe a boarding house if you’d help us. And we could run it.’

Mr Denniston, mine manager, a progressive man and well liked by the men, speaks up.

‘We could do with some solid accommodation, sir. Tents are no comfort to a man in winter up here. Boarding houses, now,’ he laughed and gave Tom a cuff, ‘we may not be quite as fancy as that yet.’

Mr Dickson frowns. ‘Don’t be too sure, Robert. Coal up here is as good as any I’ve seen in the world. And I know my coal.’ He looks out over barren rocks and scrub, but what he sees are the bags of coal, stacked high and waiting for transport, an underground city of roads and crossroads driven through hard coal, an army of miners and miles of rails. He sees money pouring in and an easing of the heavy debt his Company owes. Mr Dickson is an optimist on this fine day. ‘I’ll wager you a pound to a penny,’ he says, ‘that we’ll have boarding houses, shops, streets — schools even, within the year. Two at most,’ he adds, because he is also a mean man who hates to lose a bet.

He turns back to Tom. ‘I’d be happy to give you a job, young Tom. I know your dad’s work and he’s sound. I’ll help with the building of the boarding house, too — on a proper financial basis,
mind. But this is no place for a woman, Tom, let alone a well-bred one.’

Totty is getting up speed to reply when Con the Brake, never one to hold back in a good debate, joins in with his thick foreign tongue.

‘We are bred all sorts up here, sir; she might not be so out-class as you think. Also,’ he adds with some pride, ‘I am thinking to bring a woman to the Hill. They will come, sir; we must have them.’

Robert Denniston, mine manager, nods. ‘We must have them. And will.’

Mr Dickson still shakes his head at the thought of the stir back in Westport, of Mrs McGuire’s desolation. But Tom grins widely and offers his hand to the big man who has argued his case. ‘Tom Hanratty, carpenter,’ he says.

The giant removes one paw from the brake-wheel and shakes briefly. ‘Conrad, me,’ he answers. ‘Known up here Con the Brake. Welcome then.’

Three years later, when Rose and Evangeline Strauss arrived, Hanrattys’, on the muddy lane known as Dickson Street, was a fine guest house: six rooms and a basement under, and respectable, all four sides wooden, not like the icy iron sheds most people built. The other landmark home was Con the Brake’s great log house, which Rose missed on her first night, for though it was down at the Camp, Con had chosen the highest, driest spot, away from the rattle of the mine and the damp of the cliff. This fine edifice he had built for his beloved Mrs C, from fine West Coast beech logs felled by himself in the gorge and hauled up on the Spinner, a dangerous contraption of ropes and chutes that brought all the timber up from the river below. An outlandish, foreign castle of a place it was, Con’s log house, standing among the temporary tents and shacks of the Camp like a whale in a school of dolphins. It was even grander than
the home of the new mine manager, Eddie Carmichael, who’d replaced Mr Denniston the previous year.

Hanrattys and Rasmussens: homes and families that would become life-lines to Rose, and dangerous rivals to her mother’s ambition. Scobies too, in a way, though they, of course, were different.

MR WILLIAM DICKSON, the managing director of the Westport Coal Company, despite his breeding, could develop a good rage if the occasion called for it. One such occasion was when the list of his twenty miners, recruited in England, and now disembarked at Nelson, was laid on the varnished wood of his office desk in Westport by his new mine manager Eddie Carmichael.

‘Let them rot in Nelson, then!’ he had shouted to Eddie Carmichael. ‘I’ll not have one of those nippy bastards within twenty miles of a Company mine!’

‘We need the men, sir.’

‘We’ll use the old goldminers, Eddie. They won’t make trouble.’

‘Aye, and they won’t fill our orders neither. They’re too slow, sir. And that’s only the half of it.’

Mr Dickson had sighed and tapped the paper on his desk.

‘Look at it, Eddie. Cast your eye down the list, man. Chapel, every one. I asked for good solid Catholic miners.’

But Eddie, in his best jacket and waistcoat, watch chain properly spanning his stomach, stood his ground. He had come all the way in to Westport to argue with his boss and would not go home without a fight.

‘They are trained miners, sir, and they have come half round the world in expectation of a job …’

‘I wouldn’t give them a job, Eddie, if they could hew at double the rate.’

‘Which they no doubt can, sir.’

Mr Dickson turned around from the window to eye his blunt manager, who had interrupted him twice now. The man fidgeted, his boots scraping at the polished floor of the Company office. Mr Dickson let the pause develop, then spoke with the full weight of a voice that was known, in Westport, to be a fine baritone.

‘I will not be responsible for importing the scourge of unionism into the colony. It will ruin the Company. We simply cannot afford troublemakers. No, Eddie; no Chapel men. That is my last word.’

Eddie looked sideways out the window, more than ready to be somewhere else but as stubborn as his employer.

‘We cannot know they will be unionists. I will speak to them …’

Mr Dickson brought his soft white hand down slap! on his desk; came around nose to nose with Eddie Carmichael.

‘You will do no such thing! A Chapel miner is a union miner; that is common knowledge. Look here — it’s in black and white. Their leader, Josiah Scobie, is a lay preacher, for pity’s sake! I tell you what, Eddie: Midland collieries back Home are fobbing them off on us! Getting rid of their trouble-makers. I specifically stated no unionists and look what we get! A Chapel preacher!’

He ran a well-manicured finger down the sheet of paper.

‘And look at this! Look at all these Scobies. Josiah Scobie, Chapel preacher; six working Scobies; a female Scobie and three Scobie children. They will breed whole armies of new unionists unless they are stopped. No! I will not have them! Now, please, I have other work to attend to.’ He held open the door in a manner that somehow propelled Eddie’s worker’s boots out into the street before he knew what they were doing.

In this way Josiah Scobie, his two brothers, his wife Mary, their six children, and seventeen other men, every one with a miner’s ticket, had found themselves stranded in Nelson, their expectation of a better life severely dented.

‘Well, you must think of something,’ said Mary to her raging husband, ‘for the whole family was persuaded by your fine rhetoric to immigrate and you are now responsible for their welfare.’

‘It is the Company should be responsible!’ stormed Josiah. ‘They have brought us here under false pretences!’

‘I hear there is work to be had clearing the land, Josiah.’

As indeed there was. For the next six months Scobies’ Gang earned a fine reputation in the district. They were small-bodied, mostly, these Midlands men, but wiry as springs and could clear twelve acres a day, cutting all timber and scrub two feet in diameter and down. There’s plenty of good farms around Murchison that owe their start to Josiah Scobie and his gang.

But it was not what the men were born to. They missed the coal, the rough jokes down the mine at smoko, the closeness and camaraderie. Banter sounded different out in the open air. Swinging an axe was hard enough work but had none of the precision and excitement of hewing at a good seam a mile underground.

‘Wait another week or two,’ said Josiah to his men. He leaned on his axe in a new-cleared patch where a stream ran clear over marble pebbles all the colours of the rainbow. Their cutting had
disturbed clouds of insects, and cheeky fan-tailed birds swooped and dived through the buzzing feast. On a warm rise Mary and the three youngest were waiting with a picnic lunch.

‘Hey, young Brennan!’ laughed Josiah, tossing his youngest into the air. ‘We can’t have you learning soft ways, can we? How can we make a good miner of a lad who’s never had coal dust up his nose?’

Mary smiled at her husband. ‘Well, now, I think a woman might grow fond of the “soft ways”. You could do worse, Josiah, than set up in business here. There is more than enough work.’

The dark man only laughed at his wife’s teasing. ‘What’s this? Daughter and grand-daughter of the best mine managers in the Midlands? You would miss the collier’s life as much as any of us. Eh, young Brennan?’

But there was something in the way Mary looked out over the bush, a dreaminess in her movements, that told Josiah he had better get his family settled in a proper mining town before too long. This gentle land was undermining generations of a more gritty tradition.

‘Three weeks at most,’ he promised his men, ‘and we’ll be back underground. I hear that the Company’s in trouble. They need us, lads, and they’ll come crawling.’

The men nodded. News was filtering north that the West Coast coal mines were losing good orders. Coal coming out was of mixed quality — too much stone in it. Output was irregular. Frank Scobie nodded dourly at his brother.

‘Aye. You can’t expect those fly-by-night Johnnies from the goldfields to know what we learned with our mother’s milk. They’ll call for us.’

At that very moment, as it happened, a letter from Mr W.H. Dickson, Westport Coal Company, and addressed to Josiah Scobie, was travelling up by Royal Mail Coach. The Company had suffered a bad winter. At Denniston snow and storms had devastated the tiny
community. Men were walking off the plateau in droves. Now, behind on orders, almost bankrupt, and with a lucrative shipping contract for steaming coal in the offing, Mr Dickson was desperate. Methodists, unionists: he was forced to hire whoever he could find.

‘We are all hired!’ said a jubilant Josiah, waving the letter, ‘and our young ones will have work too. Here is the beginning of our new life! Let us thank the good Lord and pack our belongings forthwith!’

THE jubilation is somewhat dampened on arrival at the bottom of the Incline. A grey mist lies over the bush. The wagons appear out of it, descending and ascending eerily. Mary climbs aboard a wagon willingly enough and gives the twins a hand up. She has seen coal wagons before, though never ridden in one. But as the wretched jerking thing rises she loses her balance and tumbles backwards, with the twins, several bundles and the bed-head on top of her. For a moment she fears she will fall out, and screams aloud as the jagged ends of cut branches tear past, a nose-breadth away. The twins, white-faced, grab at her, as much frightened by their capable mother’s screams as by the ride itself.

At Middle Brake they come level and stop. Mary sits in the wagon, pale and trembling. It seems there is yet another climb ahead of her. She realises the twins are whimpering, needing her comfort, but she cannot move. If she even inches one hand upward to brush back her hair she knows she will crack, lose control, jump out of the wagon and walk away downhill on her own two feet. Somewhere below, she supposes, Josiah, young Brennan in his arms, is rising, tumbling and crashing, the older boys and their belongings with him. Somewhere above, her friends and relatives will be standing on the plateau, this new and terrifying home, high in the mist. Mary Scobie feels utterly isolated, in a no-man’s-land
of rails and machinery and running men. Giant trees loom out of the mist wherever she looks; no sign of streets or houses or the comforting sign of washing hanging to dry. It seems impossible that any kind of civilisation can survive even higher on the Hill, as people below call this place. The light and warmth of Nelson seem a lifetime away.

It is the first time in her life Mary Scobie is not in control of herself and she cannot bear it.

A cheerful fellow is at the back of her wagon, running it over rails, forward, backward, forward again at a changed angle. He’s talking to her but Mary stares ahead, rigid, feet collapsed under her, petticoat soaking wet. She has wet herself.

The fellow shouts advice, grins and jumps down. Mary feels another jerk as her wagon is hooked up to the menacing rope, stretching up and out of sight. She whimpers with the twins as the whole nightmare begins again. She is incapable of holding on; is as disembodied as one of her bundles of linen. Up they go, rattling, swaying, bodies and possessions threatening to shake out over the treacherous slope of the back wall of the wagon. The rise is almost vertical. At some point a full wagon careers past, going down, trailing a plume of coal-slack. Damp mist and coal dust cling to them. Mary can’t believe she is making these terrible noises.

At last they jerk over the brow and come horizontal. Some giant of a man, peering through the window of his shelter, his hands welded to a brake-wheel, shouts a greeting; another someone jumps on behind and runs them onto a siding. Mary can’t move. She is lifted out, scarlet with shame at her wet undergarments, her tears. This is not at all how Mrs Josiah Scobie imagined arriving at her new home.

Frank, her brother-in-law, approaches, then hesitates and looks away. Mary stands, a trembling twin pressed at each side, into her
skirts. She is a dark island, surrounded by snaking rails and scattered coal. Wagons and workers weave around her, but there she stands until Josiah Scobie takes her gently by the elbow and walks her step by step down to the Camp, where they will sleep a night or two before moving their possessions to the new Company accommodation further up the plateau.

Within an hour Mary Scobie is shaking out mattresses, spreading blankets, handing bread and dripping to hungry children. She is once more manager of a large household. But her world has been shaken and will never feel quite secure again.

Josiah stamps his feet at the door and smiles to see his wife making order among the bedlam of children and possessions. A chicken runs in with him and everyone laughs to see young Brennan dancing and shooing it out.

‘Well, lads,’ Josiah says to his sons, ‘did you see that coal? Clean as a sailor’s whistle. Hard, bright stuff.’ His eyes are shining. ‘I’ve been up to see Eddie Carmichael and I’m to start straight in as a deputy. Underviewer soon, like as not. There is a great seam, they say — eight, ten feet high in places — running true, chain after chain. And others just waiting to be opened up. We are sitting on a mountain of good steaming coal! Aye, Mary; we have come to the right place.’

Mary straightens from the beds. She pushes back a damp strand of dark hair.

‘Well, I pray the good Lord you are right, Father, for I will not be leaving until they have built a proper road up and I may travel down in a horse and trap.’

The older boys laugh to see their mother so fierce.

‘Nay, Mam, it’s as nifty as a fair ride. Did you see me tumble?’

‘You never held on, Mam! I stayed upright, didn’t I, Andy?’

‘I’m going down again tomorrow! Who’s coming with me?’

Mary rounds on them all. ‘Well, you may laugh, but just wait
till one of you takes a fall in the mine. How do we get to a doctor?’

‘Everything comes and goes on the Incline,’ rumbles Josiah. ‘We will get the hang of it in time …’

Mary grunts. ‘Just as well I have seven men to care for. I will need to keep myself busy, stuck up here and no way out.’

‘Aye, my dear, it is a challenge, but a worthwhile one. And we may do some good in time. We will organise the men in the end, never fear.’

Josiah Scobie unpacks his Bible, greets the men under his care as they crowd into the hut for the evening prayers.

In the distance, near the Powerhouse, men are singing; a lively song with accordion underlying it. Feet are stamping on wood in time to the music. In another direction, somewhere in the Camp, a man and a woman are shrieking at each other, accusations tearing the air. Mary frowns. Drunk, it sounds like. But any human sound is welcome if it overrides the groan of the wagons on the Incline and the resounding silence of the trees below.

Inside their hut, in the glow of oil lamps, Josiah prays. Twenty or so sturdy heads are bowed with him. Mary holds the twins tightly, as if they are life-lines, and prays too.

Outside, perched on an upturned box, Rose peers in. She sees the bare white necks of the men and their pink ears. She sees a single woman, dark and fierce in her prayer. She does not see young Brennan, who is under blankets, excused prayers because of his age and the tiring journey.

‘Grant us, oh Lord,’ says Josiah, ‘the strength to do Thy work here at Denniston. Give us strong arms for the hewing of coal, and love in our hearts for the condition of our fellow men, believers and unbelievers, united here in this lonely corner of Thy world. In the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, amen.’

‘Amen,’ echo the men, their voices a roll of thunder against the
thin wall where Rose leans. She sees a dark wall of shoulders rising to sing:

In the ‘encircling gloom’ outside Rose smiles. The mournful plodding tune has, for a moment, drowned the shouts of her parents. She stays there for a while, pressing against the wood as if to absorb the warmth inside. Then the door opens, boots crash out into the night, and Rose, unseen, plods back through the mud to the far corner of the Camp, where, stoic, because it is the life she’s used to, she will put herself to bed.