Looking at the children’s mothers, many of whom are extraordinarily rough and ready, it’s clear that many lines have been crossed.
Tomboys such as Halley have also crossed the line. Busy with fires and dead things and making stuff, she hasn’t learnt the limits of what a girl’s allowed to do. And quiet, nervous Albie, another odd man out. His father is Uncle Zach upstairs, and he’s not pleased that his twin boys are so different. They look the same, those two, pale blue eyes, sandy hair and freckled as eggs you cannot tell apart. But Andre is always in trouble, which is right for a boy, while Albie keeps to himself. He’s clever, you’d think to look at him, sensitive, but proving very slow on the uptake. Even after many hidings, he won’t change from playing with dolls and teapots borrowed from the small ones who’re too little to say no.
All by himself, Albie sets up his blanket house in the shadows of the big trees, maybe imagining that no one can see. But his father . . . ? Uncle Zach is always watching.
At Kenneth Gardens, if your surname’s Murphy, the norm is that children from solid working-class families, families trying to make good, these children must not play, ought not to play, are strongly discouraged from playing, with kids whose parents are clearly lower class.
Which to Halley and Jen seems to be almost everyone.
From what they can gather, top of this category are people who at any time do bad swears (you must use your imagination, because Halley is not allowed to tell exactly what), and people who say kaffir, coon, munt, pekkie, or wog. Plus koelie, koelie mary, or sammy.
Be careful, also, of people who play loud music, and drink, either during the day or for most of the night. Men who hit the bottle, who can’t hold their drink like gentlemen, and hit their wives. Any men who chat up women on the off chance, hoping to score.
Chippies who smoke in public, appear in curlers outside, shout like fishwives, and swan around like floozies. Or strut. Any form of. Either braless, or wearing inappropriate clothing. Which includes any daywear which is black, gold, net or lace, and high-heeled, open-toed shoes. Particularly red. Oh, and leopard print is a dead give-away. These women may pretend to be housewives, but they are hussies and tarts. Strumpets.
Slags who can’t be bothered to hold their stomachs in. They’ve let themselves go; they are so far gone they don’t even care.
However, Halley knows to be careful. You can think the words which describe these women, but you must never use them. Her mother says the words are coarse, like the women.
And then in the category of offspring: in addition to the many children whose legs weep with the stigmata of Natal sores, terribly contagious and slow to heal, Halley and Jennie are not to play with children who are dirty, and probably have lice; those who say snot, and who have it (wet or crusty) under their noses. Children who say they live ‘that side there by the shops’, or who indiscriminately call adults they do not know Aunty and Uncle, without polite first names, or – heaven forbid! – Tannie and Oom.
And they mustn’t touch the grubby babies who are left to stew in sodden or soiled nappies, a disgusting rash chafing their inner thighs. Toddlers who are still in daytime nappies after age two, or who are using a dummy or a bottle, the same. Especially if this comforter hangs from a tatty length of string around the neck. Oh, and kiddies who are allowed to go to the tearoom in vests and knickers.
Further, Halley and Jennie must steer clear of families where there’ve been brushes with the law. For this, they must stay especially alert. One clue will be if they hear the words chookie or clink, then they must come home straight away. And obviously they’re to avoid the flats which already have a bad reputation; the ones where the sons are skollies or ducktails, and where there’s the bad kind of cigarettes. And they mustn’t assume that only boys are bad news. Some girls shoplift, or they’re just loose, tanning topless on the balcony. The standard line here is like mother like daughter.
And yet most of these fine distinctions are not merely of Nora’s making; they’re run of the mill, for in keeping with the times, many tenants work hard to set up and maintain the complex minor machineries of human differentiation which correspond to the big engines that keep the country running, regardless of what unhappy life gets crunched in the works.
Though for Halley, there is such a contrivance of prohibitions and restrictions, proprieties and transgressions, that it’s impossible to distinguish the well founded from the merely groundless, the morally persuasive from flimsy platitudes of precious personal taste.
Plus there’s the question of her father, which complicates things.
What she knows of her father, he’s handy. Mechanically inclined, people say, as if he’s tilted towards a machine and is going going gone.
Yes, her mother says, he’s down the tubes, and for Nora, that’s that.
Though Halley knows. She’s found out a thing or two by nosing; knows her mother keeps her father still, those bits she can. Like the unframed black-and-white photograph, a print so big that Nora’s had to press it flat in the back of the only book where it fits. Which is the Reader’s Digest Marvels and Mysteries of the Animal World.
So it’s a proper, serious photo, like the portraits of Halley and Jen in their smocked baby dresses and matching bonnets, taken by Norman Partington Studios.
A young man squats to inspect a titanic machine. The curved flank, though a hulking tonnage, is calmed beneath his hand. It’s all colossal cylindrical drums, bulging boilers, giant gibs, menacing cogs with enormous teeth and a piston whose stilled shaft is larger and longer than can be possible. But also there are small pieces. Finicky.
Leaning gently on the beast, the man is peering inside, his eyes asking What ails?
Their combined energy is throttled, yet both man and machine are distinguished by a tense, kinetic apprehension. The man’s nostrils flare, his jaw not exactly clenched, but still a degree too tight. Both expressions imply that he is impatient to get on with things, or has been instructed to do something he considers a waste of time.
This, Halley knows, is a ship’s engine. And this is her own miraculous father, way down in the engine room, bolted below decks within the bowels of the ship. A man among many, men mere flukes in the gut of a whale yet party to a digestive tinkering that serves an obscure intestinal purpose, the black clouded diesel belching across the oceans of the world.
Her father is a marine fitter and turner, whatever that means, and he must concentrate as he checks a component. Perhaps he’s shrouding toothed wheels, aiming to increase tooth strength where the amount of the increase will depend on the form of the tooth to which it is applied, and by clothing the pinion up to its pitch line, the threat of shearing failure – should the wheel be subject to unavoidable shocks – may be averted?
Something like that. On the passage bookshelf in Ixia Court is a thick study text called Machine Design, Construction, and Technical Drawing for Young Engineers. Neither new nor recent. 1919. Filled long years ago by Henry J. Spooner, C.E., M.I.MECH.E., M.INST.A.E., A.M.INST.C.E., F.G.S., F.R.M.S., HON.M.J.INST.E., ETC., with intriguing shapes and lines, shaded areas and sectional views, all to enable a young man to piece and disassemble, refit and subsequently make things whole. And such words to work through! The language is an enticing machinery of Couplings and clutches; Engine eccentrics; Stepped, helical and screw gearing; Piston packings; Bullivant’s patent rope clips and clamps.
The young men. They must be old now, she thinks, holding the book, or gone, tracing how insects have made tiny, angled tunnels through the pages, random letters disappeared. Some she can figure out from their neighbours; others remain total guesswork. A maze of sinuous boreholes. Musing, she sections the uneven tubes by opening the book here, and half through, and there, place-marking the pages with her fingers. Then welds a long, continuous length by closing the book into a single, thick chunk.
The eaten volume is a repository much too large for her to handle. Most of it is so specialised she can no more process the details than say, even with a knowledge of mirrors