Friday night and the street was dead. There were a few cars outside the Central Hotel but no-one else was in sight. Yet what had he expected? Friday nights were things of the distant past. This was not the town frozen in his memory. His remembered town was thriving. He walked up one side of the main street and down the other. Empty shops, none of the small grocers of his time, no milk bar, in fact, nothing as he remembered it.
He had been on his way to his daughter’s up north and it had not been too far off his route. An extra hour to satisfy his curiosity. But he was finding that fifty years away was too long. It might have been better if he had not come.
This was where he had spent his school days and started work at the bakery, Harland’s Bakery. Just one of three in the town. Three and a half thousand people and they had had three bakeries each one producing its own pies, buns plain and cream, sally luns, slab cakes and assorted small cakes besides their bread, brown and white, and that again in a number of popular shapes. And this with minimum staff and by modern standards, primitive equipment. Looking back, he found it hard to believe. They must have been either supermen or masochists.
And there had been three butchery firms. Each with its own farmland and slaughterhouse. Now the town had no butchery, no bakery. A hot-bread shop didn’t count. Meat and bread now came from the supermarket and was trucked in from outside. Probably a lot of the bread was from one or other of his plants. From which one he could not be sure. He had been out of the day-to-day running of the company for some years now.
Competition between the local bakeries in the old days had been fierce but the bread was fresher and crustier than it would ever be again. Really fresh bread died the death when deal-frame slicers and those old wax-paper wrapping machines came out. Bread for slicing needed a few hours to firm up.
Mondays and Fridays had been their big days. Mondays for fresh bread after the weekend. Kids piling up at the bakehouse door wanting a loaf for their lunches. Friday was sale day when every
WHAT WAS. Page 2 last cocky and his wife came to town. The men gravitated to the saleyards, buying, selling, or not, and filling up with pies from the caterers booth. The women-folk did the shops and the tearooms went through record amounts of tea and cakes.
He had normally gone home to sleep at mid-morning after the last deliveries to the shop. Out to it usually for a good nine hours. But on Fridays, he would be up again at five, his mum would have an early tea ready, and he would fancy himself up, plaster on the Brylcream, and turn himself every which way in front of the mirror looking for the first approach of the dreaded acne. Friday was the big night in town, a social occasion, with most of the population turning up on the main street.
On Fridays the pictures started earlier, seven thirty instead of eight. They were a social occasion too. You wore a sports coat and tie and the manager would be in the foyer dressed in his dickey suit to greet everyone. Now, the old Deluxe had gone the way of every other small-town theatre.
Before the pictures there had been nothing much to do. The pubs closed at six and he had been too young anyway. Unwelcome at the billiard rooms, he and his mates would mooch up and down, look at the shops, debate the availability of passing sheilahs, make the usual smart remarks, and they’d argue, argue over everything. If only he knew as much now as he thought he knew then. And every few weeks they’d go in a bunch for a haircut.
Even having a haircut was a social thing. Any day, when he knocked off at mid-morning, he could have walked in and found an empty chair but it wouldn’t have been the same. There needed to be a crowd, full benches, the air thick with smoke and noise, the barbers, the Webbers father and son, flat out with their clippers, giving their picks for Ellerslie or predicting the outcome of tomorrow’s senior game.
The smell of Bay Rum came back to his nostrils. He saw in memory the big mirrors with the Art Union tickets hanging on a clip, the old team photographs on the wall, and those prints of the dogs, those tough dogs who wore hats, smoked cigars, and played pool or poker. The piles of Australian Post, Pix, and Wide World Magazine which had been his distorted window on the world outside. He
WHAT WAS. Page 3 heard again the swish of the water spray as the barbers did the final shaping with hand and comb.
“Would you like some cream on it sir?” It was short back and sides as a matter of course. They had no crazy hair styles in those days. No unisex either.
And his first car. The oil-hungry Rugby. That first Friday night when he and his mates cruised up and down, up and down, to the cries of derision from lesser mortals on foot. Sheer jealousy of course. He had thought he was made. Now he could buy any car he fancied, and he’d had many, although he now tended to stick with the B.M.W. as being reliable and not too ostentatious. But no car had given him the pleasure, the feeling of power, of that first one.
‘Small-town’ tended to be used in a derisory way but he was a small town product with the fondest memories of small town existence, memories which he was ready to admit had become idealised by time. One was known, one’s family was known, one belonged as to a select group. His ambition in those far off days had not reached beyond the town. Small towns are self-centred. His great dream had been to buy Tom Harland out or maybe even take over Greenwood’s who were a trifle larger and somewhat better equipped. As things had worked out , he had exceeded his dreams by many thousands of times and had long since reached the emptiness that comes with having no dreams left.
The time had come when his family had moved away. He had been only too eager at the time to get out of the small-town strait-jacket: to go where the action was. So obviously it wasn’t all sunshine as he remembered it. In fact, he had vowed then that he would never come back. And for fifty years he had kept that vow. But today he had been nearby and the temptation had become just too much.
Supposing that his family had not moved away. Would he have become a master baker here only to find himself gradually forced to the wall by cheap bread from the big boys in the city? As it was, after much scrambling and more than a little luck he had become one of those big boys who had put
WHAT WAS. Page 4 the small firms like Harland’s out of business.
How much had his own success contributed to the town’s decline? None probably. As elsewhere, the surrounding countryside was depopulating. Farms were being combined into ever larger units. He was also aware that the Dairy Company, one of the mainstays of the community for ninety six years, had amalgamated to a distant megasite the previous year. The farmers would be getting a few extra cents a kilo but it could only be at the expense of local services. In fact he had noticed on his ramble that whereas there had once been four banks, there was now just the one and two machines.
He had always been all out for progress and been loudly dismissive of the mental cripples who could not accept that change was necessary. But now he found himself depressed and angry. Angry at the amorphous THEY who had done THIS to HIS town.