|
||
|
|
|
 |
|
|
|
||
|
|
Issue No. 126 | 01 March 2002 |
|
||
|
||
|
|
|
|
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
I Don�t Like Sprouts
Interview: Clean Hands Corporate: Out of Asia Unions: Tears, Real And Crocodile, At The Ansett Wake Economics: Labour�s Capital: Individual Or Collective? History: Mardi Gras: The Biggest Labour Festival? International: Driving A Hard Bargain Review: In Bed With a Sub-Machine Gun Satire: Whitlam Forgives Kerr: "At Least He Didn't Dismiss A Rape Victim" Poetry: Dear Mother
The Soapbox The Locker Room Week in Review
 More on Harry BridgesWell Done, SplitterRepeating History
|
|
|
Review In Bed With a Sub-Machine Gun
***************** The only time I have ever slept in the same room as someone who kept a submachine gun under the bed, and a large pistol under the pillow, was on my first night in the Pensi�n La Plata. It had been a very long day. After settling affairs with Don Jos�, I went to meet Victor Oliva, who had a flat near the Plaza de la Trinidad, only a few hundred metres away. Victor was a shortish, swarthy , friendly man, with a head of black hair that looked like a thick little rug. His fair-haired wife, Maria, who answered the door, spoke only Spanish, but Victor maintained a fairly rapid flow of English, delivered self-consciously in such a thick and mumbled granadino accent that some of it was lost on me (you can only ask people to repeat themselves so often, and anyway, he was doing far far better in my language than I could do in his). Yes, Victor would be glad to offer me some English classes at Idiomas when teaching began in September - he had been taking the English classes himself, and was delighted to be presented with a native speaker. There wouldn't be enough work for me to live on - not at first, anyway - but Granada was a small place, word would get around fast, and no doubt I would soon pick up enough private lessons to get by. He already had two French speakers helping him out. One was Claude, who had left France in a hurry, Victor told me with a slight smile, because of certain activities he had engaged in during the Second World War. The other - Marie No�lle le Pape, a postgraduate student working on Federico Garcia Lorca - was a guest in their flat but was out with a friend at the moment. Maria, Victor explained, was a Fern�ndez Montesinos, and thus related to the Garc�a Lorcas. The poet's mother and one of his sisters were back living in their farmhouse, the Huerta San Vicente, just outside the city - I would be taken to meet them when I had settled in. One of Maria's uncles, a member of the Socialist Party, (the PSOE) had been mayor of Granada in July 1936, and was executed, like the poet, who was his brother-in-law, and a great many others, when the local garrison rose and took the city over. Victor came from a conservative family, I believe, but had been a student in Madrid when the Civil War broke out, and fought for the Republic. He had spent two years in a camp after the Nationalist victory. Things could have been worse; many were being executed. It helped to have a family on the winning side. This was a remarkable conversation for a first meeting. I had taken a liking to Victor and Maria from the moment I saw them; they must have sensed this, and responded immediately with warmth and trust. It was not rare, nor is it rare now, to meet Spaniards almost in passing, and feel an instant two-way charge of understanding and good fellowship that can pass unexpectedly through even the most forbidding of barriers. My first memories are of a childhood in a Newcastle dotted with makeshift camps for the unemployed. Nearly every day my mother made sandwiches to give to the men who came to the door asking if we had any odd jobs, for we were amongst the lucky ones, and could spare food. My father was employed by the Railways Department, and was never out of work, though for quite some time he worked only three days a week. The walk to Cook's Hill Primary School took me past a huge tine shed, known as the Diggers' Camp, outside which the returned soldiers who lived there smoked and chatted around the open fire while they boiled their billies. There was a slogan painted in white on a concrete bridge over a canal nearby: 'Land of Soap and Dope'. When I went to the pictures, there were always two newsreels, and current affairs documentaries, including a series called The March of Time. Sitting there in the dark waiting for the big picture to come on (The Lives of a Bengal Lancer, Beau Geste, Under Two Flags, A Tale of Two Cities The Road to Glory, The Dawn Patrol, The Last Train from Madrid), patrons caught flashes of the real world: Italian planes bombing Abyssinians, as Ethiopians were then known; huge torchlight processions by night in Germany, and by day, rank after rank of singing Brownshirts marching with shovels over their shoulders ('They'll be rifles before long', my father would say); Russian parachute troops jumping from huge planes; Japanese bombers over Shanghai; crowds cheering the German Army as it marched into the Rhineland; barricades in Spanish streets, and shells bursting in the centre of Madrid; the bristling guns of the steel-turreted Maginot Line. In 1939, the disasters, from the point of view of those like my father who believed that we were heading for another world war, came one after the other in ominous succession - the collapse of Republican Spain, the dismemberment of Czechoslovakia, the growing tension in Eastern Europe. One of my last memories of primary school is of a group of us gathering in the playground around Mr Bartholomew, a very dashing and popular young teacher. Poland was under attack, war had been declared, and we had just heard that Mr Bartholomew had volunteered for the Air Force. It was scary, yet thrilling - Cook's Hill Primary boys had their own Errol Flynn, and dreamed of glory. In 1940,. ith the war almost into its sixth month, the train ride from Wickham out to Newcastle Boys' High School at Waratah took you past the railway yards at Broadmeadow, where alongside the line there still stood a settlement of neat little corrugated-iron huts with names like 'Emoh Ruo' painted near the door, and tiny hardens bordered by whitewashed stones. These had survived from the Depression, which had given Newcastle a higher unemployment rate than Germany had suffered before Hitler's rise to power. My father was very far from being alone when he used to say that if we won this war, we must never go back to the world we had known before it. But his opinion was by no means universal - the United Australia Party was still in power in Canberra; and the Prime Minister was still Robert Gordon Menzies, until his government fell in August 1941. By 1944, we were living in another world. Terrible things had been done since 1939, and were still being done in that sixth year of the war, as we all knew, though there were still many terrible things that we did not know of, and there were more yet to be committed. I found it painful to go to the cinema and endure the cheery triumphal patter of the commentary from the screen as we were shown yet more footage of bombs falling away from a Lancaster or a Flying Fortress, and we blew yet another European city to smithereens, just as the Germans had done only a few years before to Guernica, Warsaw, Rotterdam and Coventry. If so much bombing of cities had to be done to beat Hitler, as it was argued at the time, it was nothing to crow about. It was a time of hope, too, with the end of the war in Europe now in sight, victory certain, and concrete plans emerging for reconstruction that would avoid the worst blunders of the years that followed the end of the First World War. And that last year of high school was an intellectual and emotional delight. On the staff at Newcastle Boys' High there were men of all persuasions, and several of them joined final year students after school hours for debates on current affairs. There were two from Catholic Action, and two from the Communist Party. One of the latter was Bill Gollan. He taught History, and whatever I thought or came to think of Stalinism and the Communist Party, I never lost my respect for him. For me, he remains the archetype of the honest, dedicated believer in what he imagines to be a doctrine of universal liberation. Deceived, and perhaps self-deceived, like a great many other decent people, he was an intellectual victim of that deadly mythologising of Marx by a messianic party that turned the multifarious and often stimulating writings of an economist, political analyst, historian, sociologist and philosopher into a religion, with its pope, priests, and inquisitors. But many who opposed the Communists both then and later did no better. Some, like Bob Santamaria, later to split the Australian Labor Party on the issue of anti-communism, were already thoroughly at home in the tradition of pope, priests, and inquisitors. Then there were the liberals, like the calm, reasonable and caring Fred Hyland, another history teacher, and Jock Anderson, who took us for Economics, and told us something about JM Keynes, though he wasn't on the syllabus. Ron Holland, an Andersonian, who took 5A for English honours, introduced us to Gerard Manly Hopkins, Ezra Pound, TS Eliot, and Auden and James Joyce, and brought in his contraband copy of Ulysses. He loved poetry, and encouraged us to write it, introduced us to Meanjin, and was delighted when two of us got a couple of things published in a little magazine called Barjai. We were invited to attend several sessions at the Workers Educational Association, already run by Harry Eddy, another Andersonian, although I don't remember actually meeting Eddy until a couple of years later, when I was on visits to Newcastle from Sydney. All in all, it was a lucky education. At the turn of 1945 I could scarcely wait to get to Sydney and into Arts I. When the Leaving Certificate results were published, I was earning some money picking oranges in an orchard near Gosford. The boss let me off early, and I rushed into town to send Norma Brigden a telegram that read 'Le jour de gliore est arriv�'. The post office clerk was puzzled, but when I explained what it was about, he smiled, to my great embarrassment, congratulated me, and sent it off. It all turned to ashes when I was informed that I had matriculated for Economics only, but I was determined to go to Sydney. On the train from Newcastle just before first term began, I had a sort of epiphany: whatever it took, I would hold onto all the things I wanted to do, and do all I could to remain, or to fashion myself into, the sort of person I wanted to be. If this meant disappointment for my parents, I was sorry for them, but that's how it was. The essential thing was to be free, and to be as creative as one could with whatever talent one had. Whatever happened in the future, no matter how tough or how unpleasant, would all be experience, and it would be up to me to make something of it. It was a fusion of all these elements that brought me to Granada. I had been interested in Spain for years. I had liked the Spaniards I met when I was passing through on the way to England in 1952, and the very look of the country fascinated me. Spaniards had to endure the Franco regime whatever they thought of it - why6 shouldn't I put myself in their position for a while? go through what they were going through? find out what it was like to live and work within a totally different culture, one that had fallen under a police state? Of course my position could not really be the same as theirs, for most Spaniards had no choice in the matter in those days, while I was a volunteer, so to speak, with a foreign passport. But there was much to be learnt for all that, and I was eager to learn it. When I left the Olivas, there was not the slightest problem in deciding what had to be done next - within an hour or so a letter to Darcy had disappeared into the foreign mail box at the post office. Back in my room at La Plata, a thorough search of every possible nesting place in my clothes and haversack for funds that I might have overlooked failed to turn up anything but a little French and British shrapnel that was useless in Spain. In those days of controlled exchange rates, the Australian pound was worth three-quarters of the pound sterling. A pound sterling brought about 120 pesetas in London, but the rate in Spain was fixed at about 100. Pesetas came in notes of 1000 (a million pesetas was known as a kilo, because that was the weight of a million in 1000 peseta notes), 100, 50, 25, 5 and 1. The one-peseta note carried a portrait of Don Quixote looking extremely dejected, as well he might, for these little notes were nearly always so filthy that one would have preferred to handle them only with tongs. There was also a brown one-peseta coin, known popularly as a castana (a chestnut). The peseta was divided into 100 centimos, and these came in coins of 50, which had a hole in the centre; 10, made of aluminium, bearing on one side the copy of an ancient inscription showing an Hispanic auxiliary cavalryman, and known as the perra gorda (the fat bitch); and 5, similar to the 10, but smaller, and known as the perra chica (the little bitch). My collection of Don Quixotes, chestnuts, and bitches of assorted sizes was worth about 10 pesetas all told. I fought hard to stay awake for dinner than night. They didn't start serving it till about 9.30p.m., the normal time in Spain. I don't remember what I ate, but I do remember nearly losing my front teeth. It was a very hot night. There was drinking water on every table, but it came in a large earthenware pot called a pipote, which had a curved handle over the top, a largish opening at one side through which it was filled, and a spout on the other. This vessel held about 4 litres when full, and was very heavy. My fellow diners simply lifted it up high with a confident swing, tilted it sharply, and allowed a jet of cool water to bounce down their throats. When they had had enough, the pipote was given a practised jerk that cut the stream of water dead, and was placed back on the table. No mouth ever touched the clay spout. Not a drop of water was spilt. On the trains, fellow passengers had taught me how to do this with a small leather wine bottle, a bota, and by the time I reached Granada I had acquired a certain degree of expertise, though at some cost - my clothes must have reeked like the Market Street entrance to the Queen Victoria Building in the days when Penfolds stored their fortified wines in the basement below it. Anxious to blend in with the locals, I swung the pipote into the air, came within a hair's breadth of dental disaster, and poured about a litre of water over my head, a performance that attracted a certain amount of attention. Don Jos� hastened across with a dry cloth and condolences, then dashed out to the kitchen, and came back with a glass. I never did succeed in mastering the pipote, but this perilous artefact has long vanished from Spanish restaurant tables, anyway. Even then, it was only to be seen in establishments that catered for clients on a very tight budget, though all open-air workers used it, and many still do. Dinner over, I staggered up the stairs to bed, dragged by clothes off, and was probably unconscious before my head hit the pillow. The next thing I knew, I was emerging from sleep as though from a powerful anaesthetic, and there seemed to be loud noises in my head. But no, they were coming from the door, and they were getting louder. I went to the door, and opened it a crack. There was Don Jos�, an anxious and apologetic expression on his face, and he launched forth instantly into a speech that I could not follow at all. Next to him stood a heavily built character wearing the dark green uniform, black cross-belts, and shiny patent-leather helmet of the Civil Guard, a large holster at his hip, a Schmeisser submachine gun on a sling over one shoulder, and a bag of some kind at his feet. He gazed at me with interest while Don Jos� gestured and shouted in an effort to make me understand what was required. When my landlord pointed at his companion, put his hands together under his head as he leaned that to one side, and made snoring noises, it dawned on me that I was going to have company. There is nothing that makes you feel so vulnerable as standing there in a situation like this with nothing on, so, making friendly signs, I got back into bed, said 'Beunas noches', and pretended to close my eyes. Don Jos� vanished, and the Civil Guard entered, disrobed, put on some pyjamas, propped his Schmeisser carefully up against the wall near the door, then thought better of it and placed it under his bed. He hung his holster up, slid the pistol out, and put that under his pillow. Then he switched off the light, and climbed into his bed with a great sigh and a murmured "Buenas noches'. When I awoke the next morning, he had gone, and gone for good. I never did find out why he had spent the night there, though I am sure it had nothing to do with me. The Civil Guard always operated in pairs - if you saw one on horseback out in the country, or standing guard near a highway, you could be certain that the other was close by, even if you couldn't see him. Perhaps my room companion had an offsider sharing another room in La Plata.
|
| Search All Issues | Latest Issue | Previous Issues | Print Latest Issue |
|
© 1999-2002 Workers Online 
|
|
