Jack’s Radicalization Event

Joseph Colthorpe grunted as he read the morning paper delivered to their small convenience store serving one of Fairdale’s suburbs. Those were the days when outside of the central business district these kinds of stores served the suburbs of all towns. Not everyone in town was rich enough to possess one of these emerging methods of personal transportation, a car or motorbike, and either took a bus to town or rode bikes if the distance was too great.

Grocery requirements of a home were kept in a typical suburban store within easy walking distance so people could replenish their daily needs along with things grown in their backyard gardens. There were no refrigerators and freezers, but the icebox served items such as milk and meat safe protected meat from insects but allowed ventilation.

It was also the place where people could access local news in print or in person and magazines that introduced the folk of this town to places they could never afford to visit so they devoured every word inside papers and magazines and supplemented this as the family sat together in front of their radio of an evening to listen to a broadcast version of the news and enjoy a current soap opera before children were ushered off to bed while parents attended to necessary final household chores. Magazines were kept around the homes for rereading periodically.

As a small home was attached to the back of the Colthorpe shop facing the suburban Springs Road Joseph would use this evening time with children in bed to stock take and prepare his orders for the next time an itinerating salesman would come around to replenish his stock. The town still had fruit, meat, bread, milk and vegetables delivered by horse and cart, but some were weekly deliveries to the different suburbs in turn so the suburban shop kept a limited stock of these items. Horse wagons were beginning to be squeezed out by delivery motor trucks.

While Joseph would be performing his evening shop duties his wife May would spend her time listening to the radio while she knitted woolen garments or darned sox or made clothing on her foot pedal sewing machine which she was expert at. People commented on the clothing Joseph and his children wore and he proudly acknowledged his wife’s talent. May also supplemented their modest earnings from the shop by stitching clothing for the residents of the suburbs.

Joseph and May had five children, a modest number considering the average for children in a household for those days. William was their oldest and he was followed by Susan, Jack Mildred and Nancy. May experienced a series of miscarriages after that and the doctor had intervened surgically to see she didn’t have any more as he could see May was beginning to break down under these continued disappointments sapping her health. Joseph, who was not aware of the doctor’s intervention, wondered why May was unable to provide more children for him.

But having seven people occupying the cramped space at the back of the shop for living quarters caused considerable friction among the children. Joseph, as an authoritarian by tradition, bullied them into submission but while the children were too frightened of him to argue this created a simmering resentment that built up over the years and eventually had to explode.

Joseph’s life was all shop management. He spent long hours from early morning receiving stock from itinerant salesmen and tending shop making sure he was up early enough to receive daily deliveries of fresh milk newspapers and magazines. If he was not quick enough to get to the front when these early morning deliveries were left at the main door then community urchins would rush in to sample what was lying at the front door to share with their families. This was not a wealthy town. It largely consisted of a population that had remained after the gold mines had been worked out and mostly served the needs of a scattered population farming the river valley within a twenty-five-mile radius.

Joseph’s ancestors had been in the same trade but as he was not the eldest in the family, he’d been given a modest sum of money and left the capital city Eastport to travel to this town Fairvale where he heard the gold rush had delivered a population of those seeking their fortune in gold and figured he could earn his own fortune delivering household goods they needed for their survival. Initially this had been a good move as his business flourished but as gold gradually played out and the town population shrank as people fled to newly discovered gold fields the business was just enough to provide modest living for the family.

Joseph married May soon after his arrival in Fairvale. It was more a marriage of convenience than a marriage of love. He needed someone to share his life work and she’d been glad to leave her parents constantly moving to follow the gold rush madness. But the marriage had worked, and Joseph and May were happy together and supported each other. Joseph’s parents had migrated from London where their ancestors had operated stalls in the main city market. May’s parents were Irish and had been shipped as convicts to Australia because of their political opposition to the British who ruled Ireland at that time. If religion was not mentioned in the house, there would be relative peace between husband and wife.

But this present scene was a morning, and Joseph had retrieved stock left out front of the shop to defeat urchins waiting for their chance of a free taste of milk or a free paper for the family to read. May had looked up from putting food on the table for her husband and children while Joseph scanned the newspaper from cover to cover before putting it back for sale. The children did the same with the comics delivered and were careful to scan them so no one could tell they’d been used before placing them back on racks for sale. May had heard her husband’s grunt of displeasure. She spoke.

“What did the newspaper report that put you into one of your moods.”

“The big department store on Fernvale’s main street is expanding and will be selling an expanded variety of things that will likely affect small suburban stores like ours.”

May laughed.

“People will still come here as it’s too far for them to walk to town so what are you worrying about?”

“They have the money to bulk order from the city and with the opening of a rail line to Fernvale they’ll end up controlling distribution prices. Presently salesmen are delivering to us, and they get their stock from the capital and work on a low margin to compete. But if the owners of the department store can put them out of business bulk buying, we’ll have to deal with them. I wonder if that means we will have to make a trip to town to get our stock now if salesmen go out of business trying to compete? I hear the same people are investing in a milk factory too and will be negotiating with farmers to supply their milk there for distribution.”

May shrugged and shouted for the children to come to the table for their breakfast before she supervised loading their bags with school lunch.

“We’ll survive, now come and eat your food, Joseph.”

William supervised as he shepherded his siblings off to school. He’d drop off Mildred and Nancy at the Elementary School on the way and he, Susan and Jack would then hike to the high school. After school William would gather his sister and brother from their respective classes, and they’d head back to the Elementary School to pick up Mildred and Nancy. The girls had no problems at their respective schools as they were focused on study and drank in every bit of information they could gain. Jack was a problem. Often quarrel with the other kids and teachers at High School.

William was thick set and tall like his father so no one would challenge him, but Jack was smaller in stature like his mother and the bigger boys in his class who respected William’s size often complained to him about his brother rather than attempting to set Jack right. Jack was in and out of the principal’s office for acting up in class and the principal had visited his father at the shop to warn that if this behavior continued Jack would be expelled from school.

Joseph held his peace while the principal spoke then called William to look after the shop while he, the principal and Jack had an understanding in the house lounge. William understood from the screams coming from inside the home that Jack was being punished in front of the principal. The girls fled into the shop with William while that punishment was being administered. Jack was very sober after that beating and the principal departed with permission to give Jack a taste of the stick if he stepped out of line in future. Those were the days when strict punishment was administered in the belief it would make a child a better citizen.

William kept an eye on Jack after that. He didn’t want to see that kind of punishment administered to his brother again and gently encouraged him to behave and develop an ambition to make a good name and career for himself in life. Jack realized his elder brother was trying to protect him from further punishment but his smoldering resentment against his father slowly transferred to his elder brother too. It was OK for him to be so condescending as the shop would be his to run eventually and his sisters would mature and get married but what about him.

Would he be relegated to the position of shop assistant to his elder brother. He knew his parents didn’t have enough money to set him up in a business of his own so what future did he have? The more he thought about it, the more his resentment grew. While Jack sought to keep his fury private and under control William and his siblings noticed this latent anger and eventually May, who was very insightful, took him aside to find out what was troubling her son, who she dearly loved.

The latent fury in her son found its release. Not in shouting but in a measured calm torrent that shocked and wounded his mother. She knew at that point that there’d be an ugly situation in future but resolved to keep this from Joseph who knew would react to discipline his son and she knew that this would have counterproductive disastrous results. A person this angry could do things that had the potential to destroy the family, and she was fearful of her husband’s safety too. She’d talk with Joseph to see he didn’t add to the fearful release of this anger in her son in a life-threatening way.

Jack had a long-term plan in mind. He befriended children belonging to the owners of the town’s largest department store at high school after that incident with the principal and his father and made sure to keep his behavior in check. The owners of that store were a branch of an extended rich family in the capital city Eastport controlled by the eldest son and his heirs, and the three remaining brothers of this family, the Birch’s had taken their share of their father’s estate and settled in Fairdale.

To be continued.

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