A Town Like Alice
She took the three pairs downstairs and showed them to Al Burns on the veranda; Al fetched two or three of the other men, and Mrs Connor came to have a look at them. ‘That’s what happens to the alligator skins in England,’ Jean said. ‘They make them up into shoes like that. Pretty, aren’t they?’
One of the men said, ‘You made them yourself, Miss Paget?’
She laughed. ‘Ask Mrs Connor. She knows the mess I’ve been making in the bedroom.’
The man turned the shoe over in his hand. ‘Oh my word,’ he said slowly. ‘It’s as good as you’d buy in a shop.’
Jean shook her head. ‘It’s not,’ she said. ‘It’s not really.’ She pointed out the defects to him. ‘I haven’t got the proper brads or the proper fixative. And the whole thing’s messy, too. I just made it up to show you what they do with all these skins that Jeff brings in.’
‘I bet you could sell that in Cairns,’ the man said, stubbornly. ‘Oh my word, you could.’
Sam Small said, ‘How much does a pair of shoes like that cost in England?’
‘In a shop?’ She thought for a minute. ‘About four pounds fifteen shillings, I should say. I know the manufacturer gets about forty-five bob, but then there’s purchase tax and retailer’s commission to go on.’ She paused. ‘Of course, you can pay much more than that for a really good shoe. People pay up to ten pounds in some shops.’
‘Ten pounds for a pair of shoes like that?’ ‘Oh my word.’
Jeff was out of town up the river visiting his traps, so she could not show him the shoes that day. She left them with the men to take into the bar and talk over, and she went to have a bath. She had discovered how to have a bath in Willstown by that time; Annie had showed her. The Australian Hotel had a cold shower for ladies, which was usually a very hot shower because the tank stood in the sun. But if you wanted to wallow in hot water, there was another technique altogether.
Where the water from the bore ran off in a hot stream, a small wooden hut had been constructed spanning the stream, at such a distance from the bore that the temperature was just right for a bath. A rough concrete pool had been constructed here large enough for two bodies to lie in side by side; you took your towel and soap and went to the hut and locked yourself in and bathed in the warm, saline water flowing through the pool. The salts in the water made this bath unusually refreshing.
Jean lay in the warm water, locked in the little hut alone; the sunlight came in through little chinks in the woodwork and played on the water as she lay. Since she had seen Jeff Pocock’s alligator skin the idea of making shoes had been in her mind. From the time that she had first met me and learned of her inheritance she had been puzzled, and at times distressed, by the problem of what she was going to do with her life. She had no background of education or environment that would have enabled her to take gracefully to a life of ease. She was a business girl, accustomed to industry. She had given up her work with Pack and Levy as was only natural when she inherited nine hundred a year, but she had found nothing yet to fill the gap left in her life. Subconsciously she had been searching, questing, for the last six months, seeking to find something that she could work at. The only work she really knew about was fancy leather goods, alligator shoes and handbags and attaché cases. She did know a little bit about the business of making and selling those.
She lay in the warm, medicated water, thinking deeply. Suppose a little workshop with about five girls in it, and a small tannery outside. Two handpresses and a rotary polisher; that meant a supply of electric current. A small motor generator set, unless perhaps she could buy current from the hotel. An air conditioner to keep the workshop cool and keep the girls’ hands from sweating as they worked. It was imperative that the finished shoes should be virgin clean.
Could such a set-up pay? She lay calculating in her bath. She had discovered that Jeff Pocock got about seventy shillings for an average alligator skin, uncured. She knew that Pack and Levy paid about a hundred and eighty shillings for cured skins. It did not seem to her that it could cost more than twenty shillings to trim and tan an alligator skin, and her figures were in Australian money, too. The skins should be much cheaper than in England. Labour, too, would be cheaper; girl labour in Willstown would be cheaper than girl labour in Perivale. But then there would be the cost of shipping the shoes to England, and an agent’s fees.
She wondered if Pack and Levy would sell for her. She knew that Mr Pack had been lukewarm for a long time about the manufacturing side of the business. They did sell other people’s products, too – those handbags made by that French firm, Ducros Frères. Pack and Levy sold those, although they made handbags themselves …
The major problem was not the business, she thought. In Willstown both labour and materials were cheap; the business end of it might well be all right. But could she train the sort of girl that she could get in Willstown to turn out first-class quality work, capable of being sold in Bond Street shops? That was the real problem.
She lay for a long time in her warm, medicated bath, thinking very deeply.
That evening as she was sitting in her deckchair on the veranda, Sam Small came to her. ‘Miss Paget,’ he said. ‘Mind if we have a talk?’
‘Of course, Sam,’ she said.
‘I been thinking about that pair of shoes you made,’ he said. ‘I been wondering if you could teach our Judy.’
‘How old is Judy, Sam?’
‘Fifteen,’ he said. ‘Sixteen next November.’
‘Do you want her to learn shoe-making?’
He said, ‘I been thinking that anyone who could make a dinkum pair of ladies’ shoes like that, they could sell them in Cairns in the shops. You see, Judy’s getting to an age when she’s got to do some work, and there ain’t nothing here a girl can do to make a living. She’ll have to go into the cities, like the other girls. Well, that’s a crook deal for her mother, Miss Paget. We’ve only got the one girl – three boys and one girl, that’s our litter. It’ll be a crook deal for her mother if Judy goes to Brisbane, like the other girls. And I thought this shoemaking, well, maybe it would be a thing that she could do at home. After all,’ he said, ‘it looks like we’ve got everything you need to do it with, right here in Willstown.’
‘Not buckles,’ Jean said thoughtfully. ‘We’d have to do something about buckles.’ She was speaking half to herself.
She thought for a minute. ‘It wouldn’t work like that, Sam,’ she said. ‘You think that pair of shoes are wonderful, but they aren’t. They’re a rotten pair of shoes. You couldn’t sell a pair like that in England, not to the sort of people who buy shoes like that. I don’t think you could sell them in any first-class shop, even in Cairns.’
‘They look all right to me,’ he said stubbornly.
She shook her head. ‘They aren’t. I’ve been in this business, Sam – I know what a shoe ought to look like. I’m not saying that we can’t turn out a decent shoe in Willstown; I’d rather like to try. But to get the job right I’ll need machinery, and proper benches and hand tools, and proper materials. I see your point about Judy, and I’d like to see her with a job here in Willstown. But it’s too big a thing for her to tackle on her own.’
He looked at her keenly. ‘Was you thinking of a factory or something?’
‘I don’t know. Suppose somebody started something of the sort here. How many girls would you get to work regular hours, morning and afternoon – say for five pounds a week?’
‘Here in Willstown?’
‘That’s right.’
‘How young would you let them start?’
She thought for a minute. ‘When they leave school, I suppose. That’s fourteen, isn’t it?’
‘You wouldn’t pay a girl of fourteen five pounds a week?’
‘No. Work them up to that when they got skilled.’
He considered the matter. ‘I think you’d get six or seven round about sixteen or seventeen, Miss Paget. Then there’d be more coming on from school.’
She turned to anot
her aspect of the matter. ‘Sam, what would it cost to put up a hut for a workshop?’
‘How big?’
She looked around. ‘About as long as from here to the end of the veranda, and about half as wide.’
‘That’s thirty foot by fifteen wide. You mean a wooden hut, like it might be an army hut, with an iron roof, and windows all along?’
‘That’s the sort of thing.’
He calculated slowly in his head. ‘About two hundred pounds.’
‘I think I’d want it to have a double roof and a veranda, like that house that Sergeant Haines lives in. It’s got to be cool.’
‘Ah, that puts up the cost. A house like that’d cost you close upon four hundred, with a veranda all around.’
‘How long would that take to build?’
‘Oh, I dunno. Have to get the timber up from Normanton. Tim Whelan and his boys’d put that up in a couple of months, I’d say.’
There would be extra buildings needed for the tanning and the dyeing of the hides. ‘Tell me, Sam,’ she said. ‘Would people here like something of that sort started? Or would they think it just a bit of nonsense?’
‘You mean, if it kept the girls here in the town, earning money?’
‘That’s right.’
‘Oh my word,’ he said. ‘Would they like it. They’d like anything that kept the girls at home, so long as they was happy and got work to do.’ He paused thoughtfully. ‘It isn’t natural the way the girls go off a thousand miles from home in this country,’ he said slowly. ‘That’s what Ma and I was saying the other night. It isn’t natural.’
They sat in silence for a time. ‘Takes a bit of thinking about, Sam,’ she said at last.
When the Dakota came next Wednesday she left Willstown for Cairns. She took two days to get there because that was the unhurried way of the Dakota; they left Willstown in the afternoon and called at various cattle stations with the mail and correspondence lessons for the children from the school at Cairns, at Dunbar and Miranda and Vanrook. With the last of the light they put down at Normanton for the night, and drove into the town in a truck.
The hotel at Normanton was similar to the hotel at Willstown, but rather larger. Jean had tea with the pilot, a man called Mackenzie; after tea she sat with him on the veranda. She asked him if anyone made shoes in Normanton. ‘I don’t think so,’ he said. He called out to an acquaintance. ‘Ted, does anyone make shoes round here?’
Ted shook his head. ‘Buy ’em from Burns Philp,’ he said. ‘Want a pair of shoes mended?’
Jean said, ‘No – I was just curious. They all come from the cities, do they?’
‘That’s right.’ Ted rolled himself a cigarette. ‘My wife’s sister, she works in a shoe factory down at Rockhampton. That’s where a lot of the shoes come from. Manning Cooper, at Rockhampton. That’s where Burns Philp get ’em from.’
Jean asked, ‘Was your wife’s sister born round here?’
‘Croydon,’ he said. ‘Their Dad used to keep a hotel at Croydon, but he give up; there wasn’t work for two. Mrs Bridson’s is the only one there now.’
‘She’s not married?’
‘Who? Elsie Peters?’
‘That’s the one who works at Manning Copper, is it?’
‘No, she’s not married. Got to be a charge hand now, with a lot of girls under her.’
When he had moved on Jean asked the pilot, ‘Who was that?’
‘Him? Ted Horner. He runs the garage here.’ She noted the name for future reference.
They flew on to Cairns early the next morning; she drove into the town and went to the Strand Hotel. Cairns, she found, was a prosperous town of about twenty thousand people, situated rather beautifully on an inlet of the sea. There were several streets of shops, wide avenues with flower beds down the middle of the road; the buildings were all wood and most had iron roofs. It looked rather like the cinema pictures she had seen of American towns in the deep south, with its wide broad sidewalks shaded by verandas to enable you to look into the shop windows in the shade, but it was almost aggressively English in its loyalties. She liked Cairns from the start.
She wrote to me from there. She had written to me twice from Willstown, and at the Strand Hotel she found a letter from me waiting for her that had been there for some days, on account of her delays. She wrote,
Strand Hotel,
Cairns,
North Queensland
MY DEAR NOEL,
I got your letter of the 24th when I arrived here yesterday, and you will have got my two from Willstown by this time. I wish I had a typewriter because this is going to be a long letter. I think I’ll have to get a portable soon in order to keep copies of my letters – not to you, but I’m getting involved a bit in business out here.
First of all, thank you so very much for telling me what you did about Joe Harman. You’ve evidently been very nice to him and, as you know, that’s being nice to me. I can’t get over what you say about him rushing off to England and spending all that money, just to see me again. But people out here are like that, I think. I could say an awful lot of rude things about Australians by this time, but I can say this, too. The people that I’ve met in the outback have all been like Joe Harman, very simple, very genuine, and very true.
And now, about Willstown. I don’t know if Joe Harman will still be so keen on marrying me when he sees me; six years is a long time, and people change. I don’t know if I’ll be keen on marrying him. But if we were to want to marry, what he told you about Willstown is absolutely right.
It’s just terrible there, Noel. There are some places in the outback where one could live a fully and happy life. Alice Springs is a grand little town. But Willstown’s not one of them. Noel, it’s absolutely the bottom. There’s nothing for a woman there at all except the washtub. I know that one ought to be able to get along without such things as radio and lipstick and ice-cream and pretty clothes. I think I can get along all right without them – I did in Malaya. But when it comes to no fresh milk and no fresh vegetables or fruit, it’s a bit thick. I think that what Joe told you was absolutely right. I don’t think any girl could come straight out from England and live happily in Willstown. I don’t think I could.
And yet, Noel, I wouldn’t want to see Joe try and change his way of life. He’s a first-class station manager, and he’ll do very well. I asked all sorts of people about the way Midhurst is run, and it’s good. I don’t say it couldn’t be better if he travelled a bit more widely and saw what other cattle breeders do, but relative to the other stations in the Gulf country, Midhurst is pretty good and getting better every year. The last manager let it run down, so they tell me, but Joe’s done a good job in the two years that he’s been there. I wouldn’t want to see Joe try and make his life anywhere else, just because he’d married a rich wife who couldn’t or wouldn’t live in Willstown, where his work is.
Of course, you’ll probably say that he could get another station near a better town, perhaps near Alice. I’m not sure that that would be very easy; I’ve thought a lot about that one. But if it was possible, I wouldn’t like it much. Midhurst is in good country with more rainfall than in England; for a life’s work it seems to me that the Gulf country is a far better prospect than anything round Alice. I wouldn’t like to think that he’d left good land and gone to bad land, just because of me. That wouldn’t be a very good start for a station manager’s wife.
Noel, do you think I could have five thousand pounds of my capital? I’m going to take the advice you always shove at me, and not do anything in a hurry. If when I meet Joe Harman he still wants to marry me, and if I want to marry him, I’m going to wait a bit if I can get him to agree. I’d like to work in Willstown for a year or so myself before committing myself to live there for ever. I want to see if I could ever get to adapt myself to the place, or if it’s hopeless. I don’t want to think that. I would like to find it possible to live in the Gulf country even though I was brought up in England, because they are such very, very decent peop
le living there.
I want to try and start a tiny workshop, making shoes and handbags out of alligator skins. I told you about that in my last letter. It’s work I know about, and all the materials are there to hand in the Gulf country, except the metal parts. I’ve written a long letter this morning to Mr Pack to ask him if he would sell for me in England if the stuff is good enough, and to let me know the maximum price that he could give for shoes delivered at Perivale. And I’ve asked him to make me out a list of the things I’d want for a workshop employing up to ten girls and what they cost; things like a press and a polisher with the heads for it, and a Knighton No 6 sewing machine.
The sewing-machine is a heavy duty one for leather and that’s the most expensive single item. I should think the lot, including £400 for a building to work in, would cost about a thousand pounds. But I’m afraid that’s not the whole story. If I’m going to start a workshop for girls, they’ve got to have something to spend their wages on. I want to start a shop to sell the sort of things that women want.
Not a big shop, just a little one. I want it to be a sort of ice-cream parlour with a few chromium-plated chairs and glass-topped tables. I want to sell fruit there and fresh vegetables; if I can’t get them any other way I’ll have them flown in from Cairns. There’s plenty of money in the outback for that. I want to sell fresh milk there, too; Joe will have to play and keep a few milking cows. I want to sell sweets, and just a few little things like lipstick and powder and face cream and magazines.
The big expense here is the refrigerators and freezes, of course. I think we’d have to allow five hundred pounds for those, and then there’s the building and the furniture – say £1200 the lot. That makes, say, £2500 for capital expenditure. If I have five thousand of my capital, I should be able to stock the shop and the workshop and employ five or six girls for a year without selling anything at all, and by that time the income should be coming in, I think. If it isn’t, well that’s just too bad and I shall have lost my money.