NO MEMORIAL

New Zealand Listener, Volume 20, Issue 509, 25 March 1949, Page 16

NO MEMORIAL

Written for

"The Listener’ ||

by

AUGUSTUS

ISS RITCHIE throws back the bed-covers and glides to the light-switch — it is cold and dark now at 5.45. She begins to dress. Miss Ritchie is thirty-eight, Scottish, a pale fat woman. Her hair is pale and lies without vigour clése to her ears, and swings without verve: loosely at the back, Her eyes are blue, and pale too. Two soft lobes of cheeks flop down to a small sad mouth, from which her chin and throat descend again in a double pouch, soft and white into the neek of her dress (she is dressed now). She is a big woman. Her neatness is a felt conflict -between the descending amplitudes’ of her bosom and waist and the rigid scaffolding’ of: corsets. Along the passage, past three doorssix boarders are asleep there-and so down the stairs, flowing swiftly past Mr. Broughton’s door. Mr. Broughton is her oldest boarder. She did not need to knock because he was awake all night, coughing his tobacco cough, She turns into the kitchen. It is big and scrubbed and silent. The stove is cold and silent. All the cupboards are closed and life is suspended. It feels as though the darkness and the cold have come oozing in through the damp panes of the window, silencing, settling on everything until all the circulation of the kitchen has congealed never to flow again. oa But Miss Ritchie is used to reviving this corpse, laid out so neat and bleak, this corpse of an early morning kitchen. Her swift fat hands are busy with paper and kindling. There is a sharp scratch of a match, and the pulse of life beats hesitantly again in the stove; catches, and goes gasping away through the resounding flue-lungs. More wood to keep it going while she washes at the sink. Miss Ritchie can never ‘ appear scrubbed, but she looks always well sponged down.

HE man on the radio, who comes on soon after the light (for he is on the

same switch, by a flex along the ceiling), is very gay. Miss Ritchie is used to having him so gay and forgives him because he too has to get up early. "Break o’ day!" she thinks, "It. doesn’t sound like alarm-clocks and no hot water in the service. Break o’ day sounds Scottish-though she never heard anyone in Edinburgh say Break o’ day-Yot’re up airr-ly the morrn! But here they say "early" with no "r," and "mawning."

All this time she is busy about the breakfast. This house (my own in nine years now!) holds fourteen boarders, all men. Miss Ritchie never takes in girls; there is always’ trouble, Of these fourteen there are ustally about four stu-

dents, eighteen-to-twentyish. There is also a group of grocery or cletical young men who are over twenty. Then there are the "lost men"-in their middle-age with no connections, no past and no future. They are, she sometimes thinks, like derelict grey ships, still in some sort of sea-going trim, but with no owners, no guiding principle, no course, no momentum, Lastly there is a sort of surf of about four men, who come and go, surging up at times to the fourteen limit and re-, ceding again, always of the same type, rising and falling, coming out» of the street and being sucked back into it almost before their names are ‘known. : Miss Ritchie never sees them again. They are usually youngish, and by their hands seem to deal with machinery or radios. She hardly has time to place them before they are bundling away again, sometimes in a knock-about little car, sometimes trailing radio-sets, pianoaccordions, clutching these squeaking, shoddy household gods, the arks of their rattling covenants, shuffling on with their cant of valves and cylinders, their creed of second-hand snips and flannel bags. HESE men had many things in common, Each paid down his "board" weekly, and assumed thereafter that his bed would be neatly re-arranged; his room tidied no matter in what a turmoil of overcoats, shoes, dirty socks, abandoned pyjamas, crammed ashtrays, dirt, and blood-stained towels or littered magazines he chose to leave it; his castoff clothing collected, washed, mended and ironed; and his meals ready promptly when hé was on time, or held back when he was late. It was Miss Ritchie’s daily miracle to perform all,

these tasks, as well as to: polish the brass notice and doorstep, shine up the stained’ wood surrounding the lino, "do.

the shopping, stoke the coal stove and the water-heater, and maintain an ait of flaccid and unhappy imperturbability. She was not always unhappy either. For if at times there came over the kitchen radio (which was tuned permanently to the commercial station) one of her traditional Scottish tunes she might be heard to join in with a tremulous soprano. Her accent would deepen. Perhaps she would be carried back to some dripping grove by the waters of Leith, running near the grey and mouldering spires of Edinburgh, which she had left for a new life in a new country. The men would come to their meals in whatever clothes they wore at work -the students in creaseless grey trousers and sports coats with all sorts of enterprising pullovers beneath, the grocers and clerks in more chaste combinations of the’ same, the derelicts in drab suits, greasy at the button-holes, with ash-smeared waistcoats and white collars set upon wan, coloured shirts. Some of the men’s hands were hideously stained with nicotine. The mechanics had yellow nails in black oval frames. No tribute was deemed due to the snowy cloth, the gleaming cutlery, and the vase of flowers set in the midst. THEN one course of the meal was served, Miss Ritchie would retire to the kitchen next door. It was customary to raise a laugh at the expense of any shortcoming in the cooking. This was one of the half-dozen traditions which to the initiated gave a sense of complacency and security in a changing world. To each of the regulars there was some specific piece of raillery attached, and variations on each of these themes provided a suitable greeting and also constituted much of the conversation. It was partly for this reason that the surf-men came and went unknown. Since boarders must eat and sleep seven days a week, and since there are fifty-two of such weeks in the year, it may be supposed that life held little variety for Miss Ritchie. Yet punctuating the endless drudgery of her existence was one variation. This was Mr. Broughton. He had been boarding with Miss Ritchie for so many years that no one -imagined any previous arrangement. It was unthinkable for example that Mr. Broughton had one day come to the door and asked to be taken in. His stalwart permanence had come to mean variation even to Miss Ritchie to whom mechanical routine was life. Mr. Broughton worked on the wharf down at Lyttelton, which meant he was always an hour late for his meal in the evening. He was therefore permitted to eat in the kitchen. He had no roof to his mouth, and whether it was through consciousness of this defect or through natural taciturnity, he rarely spoke a word to anybody. He always wore the same rugged trousers and coat, and, beyond shaving and the ceremony of renewing the water in his denture bowl, he seemed to refuse any deference to the toilet. $ Miss RITCHIE would be ironing or darning when he came in at night. She would rush to bring his dinner from the oven. Then she would talk to him loudly to get over the racy persuasiveness of the radio medicine men. She would tell him who had come and who had left; of news from Scotland; of the (continued on next page)

SHORT STORY

(@ontinued from previous page) difficulty in getting vegetables or in getting the washing dry. And Mr. Broughton would be falling, upon his food with a relish that was more complimentary than a thousand words of praise. He would also respond to her confidence with his hollow grunt from time to time. When he had finished he would brush up his crumbs, scrape his bones into the waste bin, and wash up his plates. He would refill his cup with tea and roll himself a cigarette. Then he would sit perhaps for an hour, flicking off his ash into the palm of his hand, slopping an occasional mouthful of tepid tea, and listening with his eyes on the fender while Miss Ritchie prattled on and the radio serials were gay and anguished and unending. About eight o’clock he would mumble "Good-night," and trudge off to bed. For he was in his fifties and had to leave at six-thirty every morning. This had been going on for years. T is eleven o’clock in the morning. Miss Ritchie is busy-‘busy for the luncl®"’ The doorbell rings and she pulls off her apron, dabs her hair with qa fat busy, hand, and bulks swiftly along the gleaming passage. It is a man from the wharf who briefly explains about Mr. Broughton, how the doctor said it was heart failure. Back in the kitchen she sits down on the white-enamelled chair. The radio is shouting. Trembling, she gets up and switches it off. A great and steamy

silence comes pressing down all over her. Her chin and cheeks are shivering as she *sits with chubby hands idle in her lap. Defenceless for once, she allows wave on ‘wave of self-pity to well up through her. Boarders! Boarders! moan the cringing little waifs of an old forgotten pride, and sharper, nagging harpy voices jab at her with "Wash, scrub, mend, clean"’-as though all the forces of dust and cobweb, grease and dirt, and the demands of bodies, which she had kept at bay ceaselessly, ploddingly, enduringly, hour-long, day-long, year-long, now rise in mockery of her. Weaving through the fabric of her misery come the coarse grey threads of a school-age memory, the voice of a great grumbling Scotsman: All work is noble-work is alone noble-happiness, unhappiness, all that was but the wages that thou hadst -not a coin of it remains with. thee, it is all spent, eaten. She rocks to and fro slowly in her great grief. Nothing created. Only endless reparation, bustle and toil to feed and wash and mend, and be forgotten. Not a coin of it-spent, eaten! Everybody could not create. No, but at least there was procreation-there might have been children and grandchildren who would look back, perhaps,.and remember her. She clasps her trembling fat hands upon her full and empty bosom and yearns for bone of ‘her bone and flesh of her flesh. Suddenly the lid bubbles up from a pot, there is a sharp hiss of steam, and Miss Ritchie stumbles across to the stove, to see to the meal.