The Potato Factory

'If you knows what you're looking for in a crowd, my dear, then you can read it like a book.' He looked down at Hawk. 'A crowd be composed o' what, Mr Dark Thought?'

Hawk looked at Ikey with his big serious eyes. 'Folks?'

'Folks! That be a right and splendid answer, very clever indeed!'

'What sort o' folks, Mr After Thought?' he asked Tommo.

'Very ugly ones what stinks!' Tommo replied, waiting for the giggle to come from Hawk.

'Well, well, well and we are the pretty ones what smells perfect are we then?' Ikey said. 'I stinks meself and I am not very pretty I admits. So be the crowd all like me? Like Ikey Solomon?'

'All sorts of different folks,' Hawk replied for Tommo.

'Yes! With all sorts o' different needs and deeds,' Ikey replied. 'Needs and deeds, that be what you have to learn, my dears. If you knows what folks needs, you can begin to understand their deeds.'

Ikey would patiently teach them how to spot the pickpocket, and to listen to the chatter of a tout, to notice the gestures and the patterns of speech of the confidence trickster, how to know when a man was a liar or a cheat. How body language was almost always the first way to judge a man.

'Then, when you've seen how he stands or sits or walks or uses his hands and his head, and he fits into a pattern, then, when you talks with him you listens with your stomachs, my dears.'

'Your stomach!' Tommo laughed. 'Be me belly button me new ear then?'

'That be most clever of you, Mister After Thought, most clever and to be remembered. "Let your belly button be your most important ear!" '

'Have you got a very big belly button then, Ikey?' Hawk asked. 'Big as your ear?'

'Huge, my dear!' Ikey slapped his pot belly. 'Nearly all be ear what's constantly listening.'

The two boys found this very funny. 'So what does you do with your ears on your head?' Hawk asked.

'Now that be another most clever question, Mister Dark Thought.' Ikey pulled at both his ears. 'These be your listening eyes.'

'Eyes can't listen!' both the boys shouted.

'Oh yes they can! If they be ears!' Ikey said solemnly.

'But ears can't see,' Hawk said emphatically.

'Oh yes they can! If they be eyes! Ears what is eyes and eyes what is ears is most important in the discovery o' human nature!'

'How?' they both chorused.

'Well, human speech be like pictures, only word pictures. When we speaks we paints a word picture what we wants others to see, but we only paints a part o' the picture what's in our heads. The other part, usually the most important part, we leaves behind, because it be the truth, the true picture. So your ears have to have eyes, so they can see how much o' the real picture what be in the head be contained in the words!'

'How then are eyes become ears?' Hawk asked.

'Well that be more complicated, but the way we moves our hands and heads, and folds our arms or opens them up, scratches our nose or puts our fingers over our lips, tugs our ear, twiddles our thumbs or fidgets, or puts one foot on the instep o' the other like Tommo be doing right now, that be what you calls the language o' the body. If you listen to the language o' the body with your eyes and sees the picture in the mind with your ears, you begins to get the drift o' the person, that is if you listens…'

'Through the ear in your belly?' Hawk shouted, delighted.

'Bravo! If he don't feel good in your stomach, then always trust it, my dears! Bad stomachs and bad men go well together!'

Tommo appeared to pay less attention to these lessons, but Hawk silently absorbed everything Ikey told him. Unlike his previous pupils in the Academy of Light Fingers, neither Tommo nor Hawk suffered from hunger and cold, homelessness or a lack of love. Privileged children only embrace the more difficult lessons in life when their survival is threatened and then it is often too late.

Both Mary's boys showed an early proficiency in numbers and constantly used the abacus, but once again it was Hawk who most quickly mastered the mysteries of calculation. By the time Ikey took them to the Saturday races Hawk carried his own small abacus and could calculate the odds in an instant and send them by sign language to his brother. Tommo would stand well outside the betting ring but where Ikey could glance up at him while he worked, and as he began to prosper as a bookmaker he came to rely increasingly on the two boys.

Mary spent as much time as she could spare with the boys tramping on the great mountain, and at Strickland Falls, and soon they knew the deeply wooded slopes and crags well enough to spend long hours exploring on their own. They hunted the shy opossum, who slept during the day in hollow tree trunks, and searched for birds' eggs, though Mary forbade them to gather the eggs or trap the rosellas and green parrots not yet able to fly, but which were sufficiently well feathered to sell in the markets.

Once, close to Strickland Falls, Hawk had his arm deep within the hole in a tree trunk looking for birds' eggs when he was bitten by a snake. Within a couple of minutes he had presented his puffed and swollen forefinger to Mary, who was fortunately working at the new buildings for the Potato Factory.

Mary lost no time and, consulting Dr Forster's Book of Colonial Medicine, she applied a tourniquet high up on Hawk's arm and sliced open the bite with a sharp knife, drawing a deep line down the flesh of his forefinger while ignoring his desperate yowling. Then she sucked the poison from the wound, spat it out, and applied a liberal sprinkling of Condi's Crystals or, as it was called in the book, Permanganate of Potash. Though Hawk's hand remained swollen for a week, his forefinger recovered well, the scar from Mary's over-zealous cut being more damaging and permanent in its effect than the serpent's bite itself.

Mary was a strict mother who expected them to work. They gathered watercress and learned to tickle the mountain trout, and hunt for yabbies, the small freshwater crayfish abundant in the mountain streams, so that they would often bring home a bountiful supply. Sometimes they sold what they caught or gathered at the markets. They collected oysters off the rocks in the bay and set lobster traps, and both boys could swim like fish by the time they were five years old. At seven they were independent and spirited and in the rough and tumble of life in Hobart Town, where children of the poor grew up quickly and street urchins scavenged to stay alive, they mostly held their own. Though they would often enough come home to Mary torn, bleeding and beaten, robbed of the pennies or even a mighty sixpence they had earned.

Hawk's dark colour was almost always the problem, with the street urchins taking great delight in going after him. If Tommo and Hawk saw one of the gangs approaching and escape proved impossible, they ran until they found a wall and then, with their backs to it, would turn and fight their opponents. If they were not outnumbered they gave as much as they got and more. The street urchins learned to regard them with respect and to attack only in sizeable numbers, engaging the two boys just long enough to steal their catch, a brace of wood pigeons or several trout, a clutch of wild duck eggs or a couple of opossum.

Mary would patch them up, but offered little in the way of comfort. She loved her precious children so deeply that she often felt close to tears when they returned home with a black eye, bleeding nose or a thick lip. But she knew it was a hard world, and that they must learn to come to terms with it.

It was Ikey who finally gave them the key to a less eventful life. The two boys appeared at breakfast one morning, Tommo with both eyes shut and a swollen lip, and Hawk with one eye shut and a bruised and enlarged nose.

'Been in the wars, has we, then, my dears?' Ikey said.