The People's Train by Thomas Keneally Read Free Book Online Page A

and said, Come with me now, Mrs Pethick. I will find a car to take us to South Brisbane and I’ll make you better with Russian tea.
    She said, Oh, that would be nice! But ask Hope too. For I need a chaperone, you know.
    There were a few trams running, crewed clumsily by special constables, but Amelia Pethick’s principles would not permit her to catch them. We did find a man from the Clerks’ Union to drive us to the Samarkand. We invited him in with us, but he told us he’d rather park in the shade of a nearby banyan tree and sleep – despite the falling pods and the bird droppings, he said.
    Once we were seated in the teahouse, Amelia drank thirstily of the tea.
    Oh, you have revived me, Mr Samsurov, I was ready to wilt. You know, I have been here in Brisbane since I was twenty-eight years old but have never got used to this terrible heat. My late husband had no problems with it. He was a muscular man, like you.
    And she went straight from this reflection about heat, as if she remembered similar descriptions of Russian heat mirages from novels, to raise a question about my country, the one everyone seemed to raise first.
    Surely your tsar cannot last much longer?
    I’m afraid the liberals and the gentry have grown fond of him again. The ordinary people they used to admire have proved too unwashed to be good company.
    Yes, said Amelia, most bourgeois people are so delicate in the nostril. But I married a stevedore, so I know about sweat.
    For a second, I could see a passionate young woman behind the older and sturdy one – running away with her lover from London to the colonies.
    I explained that in 1905 and even later there had been a lot of fighting in the streets and glass was broken, and the liberal press, initially sympathetic to the strikers, now began to lay the blame entirely at their door. I did not go on to explain that where opinion did not work to blacken the rebels, the army brought in the artillery, as in engineering shed No. 5 at Kharkov, where I was flattened to the floor by a shell burst and woke to find someone’s entire naked leg seeping by my cheek, like one of the carcases I later toted at the Brisbane meatworks.
    I am sure, said Amelia, that our beloved premier, Mr Digby Denham, would follow if possible the same principles as your tsar, because power, like water the world over, always finds the same level.
    Hope mentioned that her husband, who knew Mr Denham, said there would be militia corps sent out to deal with us.
    Chocolate soldiers and little chocolate gods! said Amelia. How easy it is to buy people with the smallest morsel of authority.
    A Trades Council car was waiting for us outside, but Amelia decided not to get into the machine. I don’t need a ride from here, Hope. Let Tom walk me back home over the bridge. It’s a lovely evening.
    Hope argued and argued with her but Amelia would not be moved and said she was thoroughly revived. Amelia and I set off down the street and up onto the bridge footway. The evening had turned cool and windy; women crossing towards us from the direction of the city were hanging onto their hats.
    I am sorry you must escort an old lady, Tom, Amelia told me, her own hat turned down against the strong, cleansing wind.
    I told her I was honoured.
    Hope would rather be here. You would probably rather she was. That’s normal.
    I told her, I don’t quite understand Mrs Mockridge. I don’t understand her motives or her class.
    Oh, her class is nothing to her. You are not confused by me and I’m the daughter of a baronet.
    I looked at her. The wind cut at her fine features.
    Yes, and married a socialist stevedore and would do it again. Certainly. Again. I have had a wonderful life here, she said. And it is not over. But I miss my husband. He was a man of true courage, true force. We lived like a pair of gardeners in our little cottage, as happy as Roman philosophers. And we believed this was the crucial age. When everything would be broken and re-made, as we had