Free Hunger Town by Wendy Scarfe

protesting women with bayonets. Let them try their tricks here. Our river is as good as the Swan. We’ll show them.’
    My mother interrupted them to call them to afternoon tea but my father continued to dominate the conversation until she put a hand on his arm. ‘Give the boy a break, Niels. I’m sure he’ll come again and there’ll be time to tell him more of your stories.’
    â€˜Yes, yes, of course. I didn’t mean to bore you, Harry. But you youngsters need to know what is what. Get the right ideas now and you won’t go wrong in the future.’ He laughed a little self-consciously and in a rare moment I saw him not as a virile young man enduring the hardships of Iceland and windjammers but as a man approaching middle age. He had married late and was now in his late forties. Physical work had taken its toll and his arms had begun to develop an aged skinniness.The backs of his hands, once fair-skinned, had sunspots. He wanted to impress and I was grateful to Harry for his patience.
    Harry assured him that he wouldn’t go wrong in the future. Then, turning to me, said, ‘By the way, Judith, your friend Nathan often comes around at the foundry.’
    â€˜He’s not my friend, Harry.’
    Winnie poked me in the ribs, rolled her eyes at my mother, and shook her head, denying my denial.
    â€˜Stop it, Winnie,’ I said, ‘my mother will think …’
    â€˜And what should I think?’ My mother was quick.
    â€˜Resigned,’ I said. ‘I met him at the Chew It and Spew It. I told you about the soup incident.’
    â€˜Oh, that.’ She dismissed any suspicion she might have had and I threw a warning look at Winnie, who grinned naughtily at me and said, ‘Her hero, Mrs Larsen.’
    I was growing tired of Winnie aligning herself with others to embarrass me but I was curious and asked Harry, ‘Why does Nathan come around the foundry?’
    â€˜He talks to us when he can and gives us leaflets on workers’ rights and about the Free Speech meetings. The boss always shouts that he’ll have him for trespass but can’t because he joins us when we have a smoke-o and that’s usually off the premises.’
    My father looked thoughtful. ‘This Nathan’s a smallish chap with a quiet manner and spectacles? A communist, I think. They’re not a bad lot. Just too fixed in their ideas.’
    â€˜And that coming from you, Niels?’ My mother laughed.
    â€˜Well,’ he said, caught off-guard, ‘well, there are lots of groups in the labour movement.’
    â€˜All with fixed ideas.’ She was caustic. ‘All disagreeing with each other.’
    She got up and cleared the table. ‘Now, for heaven’s sake, let’s have a rest from politics.
    â€˜We have a piano, Harry. Perhaps you’d like to give us a tune.’
    We had been sitting in the galley but now my mother led the way into a larger cabin converted to a sort of sitting room. Harry approached the piano as if it were some religious icon. His face glowed. He ran his fingers lightly and lovingly over the woodwork. ‘May I?’ he asked, but before anyone could reply he lifted the lid and struck a few notes. ‘It’s well tuned,’ he said, and, comfortably confident, pulled out the piano stool and sat down.
    My mother hovered beside him. ‘Do you need some music?’
    â€˜Can’t read it,’ he laughed. ‘Never learned. But here is,’ and he launched into ‘If you knew Susie like I know Susie, Oh, oh, oh what a girl’.
    Winnie had said that he had rhythm in his bones and she was right. In the zest and joy of his playing I felt the real Harry was revealed and wondered if he was the same man who had listened so earnestly to my father. Now he was playing ‘When my Sugar walks down the street’ and this morphed into ‘Nothing could be finer than to be in Carolina’. Finally he