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Authors: Arthur Phillips
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there is. You hear in the courtrooms and in the cinema all sorts of fancy-dress explanations why someone becomes Prime Minister or kills his neighbours. But if you listen hard, it's all just the same five balls, juggled up in the air, decorated with distracting words. No one ever did a damn thing but for one of those five.
Which brings us to the tale of Paul Caldwell and Catherine Barry, Bolshevik and former librarian, a tale of a power-hungry traitor, a manipulative woman playing on the emotions of a vulnerable young man, leading the weak into cor• ruption. The story of Paul's tragic death in Egypt begins right here, when he's eight or nine years old in Sydney, pushed towards his doom by Catherine Barry, cold, dangerous, terribly beautiful.
I am surrounded by my reconstructions of Miss Barry's words (July 10th, 1922), a typically self-justifying letter from her, an interview I did with her brother (July 11th, 1922), and the summary I wrote for my final report back to London. I also have the letter from Ronald Barry (the brother), engaging me to find any evi• dence of Paul Caldwell's survival and, if he was alive, to procure his address dis• creetly. Ronald, I'm sure, meant to kill Caldwell. It obviously never came to that, and it's fair to point out no one'd ever hired me to protect Paul Caldwell.
So my memory's feeling well-primed, no matter the shouting coming from
some of my housemates, feebly battling for control of a partial set of torn playing cards. When you consider that I took notes, expanded them into full speeches when I got home, rewrote them again for my report to London, and am now fleshing them out further for you here, our readers should get a convincing pre• sentation, but by all means you should add whatever you feel they still need.
Here we are then. Paul's eight or nine or ten. This is before winning the heart of Mrs. Hoyt at age nineteen, before snake acts in the circus, before lightening pockets in the market. This is a little boy going to the state school. He's a quiet, sullen little fellow, no surprise. He absorbs his share of beatings from Eulalie and the men she keeps. But he has no feeling at all for his fellow victims, his half sib• lings, because when Eulalie's not whacking him about, she's holding him on her lap and telling him that those other filthy kids aren't on his level, since he's the son of the great gentleman Barnabas Davies, lost at sea, drowned on his way back to Australia to take Eulalie and Paul to London. "Paul's mother was so blinded by her respect for the rich, there she was feeding notions of class superiority to the boy, even in the midst of their brutal poverty and oppression," said one of the Bar¬ rys, I didn't note which. They were both virulent Reds, you see, Macy, not to shock you, but we have them down under, too. A dark and infectious philosophy the Bolshie Barrys imbibed, and they cherished it, even after it sunk them.
Paul was—except for one quirk—nothing special at school, according to Ronald Barry, his schoolmaster. He kept quiet. Filthy, of course, like most of the very poorest kids, but disciplined enough to sit still and do as he was told. "Mostly we were just trying to move the poor bastards along and keep them out of trouble," said Ronald. "Not permitted to educate them at all, really. Just op• pression by other means, pretending to teach them something, to dull them enough to accept the conditions the owning class had in mind for them."
Then one day they do a little lesson on Egypt. Egypt's a place in the desert, very old and pointy buildings, and the pagans in the old days, they didn't know about Our Lord yet, so when their kings died, they wrapped them up in bed- sheets and said they lived forever. "I probably added something along the lines of 'The pyramids were built by working folk, forced to labour for their brutal kings,' " says Red Ron. And then they pass around a little picture book, and then on to the day's arithmetic.
Well,
Which brings us to the tale of Paul Caldwell and Catherine Barry, Bolshevik and former librarian, a tale of a power-hungry traitor, a manipulative woman playing on the emotions of a vulnerable young man, leading the weak into cor• ruption. The story of Paul's tragic death in Egypt begins right here, when he's eight or nine years old in Sydney, pushed towards his doom by Catherine Barry, cold, dangerous, terribly beautiful.
I am surrounded by my reconstructions of Miss Barry's words (July 10th, 1922), a typically self-justifying letter from her, an interview I did with her brother (July 11th, 1922), and the summary I wrote for my final report back to London. I also have the letter from Ronald Barry (the brother), engaging me to find any evi• dence of Paul Caldwell's survival and, if he was alive, to procure his address dis• creetly. Ronald, I'm sure, meant to kill Caldwell. It obviously never came to that, and it's fair to point out no one'd ever hired me to protect Paul Caldwell.
So my memory's feeling well-primed, no matter the shouting coming from
some of my housemates, feebly battling for control of a partial set of torn playing cards. When you consider that I took notes, expanded them into full speeches when I got home, rewrote them again for my report to London, and am now fleshing them out further for you here, our readers should get a convincing pre• sentation, but by all means you should add whatever you feel they still need.
Here we are then. Paul's eight or nine or ten. This is before winning the heart of Mrs. Hoyt at age nineteen, before snake acts in the circus, before lightening pockets in the market. This is a little boy going to the state school. He's a quiet, sullen little fellow, no surprise. He absorbs his share of beatings from Eulalie and the men she keeps. But he has no feeling at all for his fellow victims, his half sib• lings, because when Eulalie's not whacking him about, she's holding him on her lap and telling him that those other filthy kids aren't on his level, since he's the son of the great gentleman Barnabas Davies, lost at sea, drowned on his way back to Australia to take Eulalie and Paul to London. "Paul's mother was so blinded by her respect for the rich, there she was feeding notions of class superiority to the boy, even in the midst of their brutal poverty and oppression," said one of the Bar¬ rys, I didn't note which. They were both virulent Reds, you see, Macy, not to shock you, but we have them down under, too. A dark and infectious philosophy the Bolshie Barrys imbibed, and they cherished it, even after it sunk them.
Paul was—except for one quirk—nothing special at school, according to Ronald Barry, his schoolmaster. He kept quiet. Filthy, of course, like most of the very poorest kids, but disciplined enough to sit still and do as he was told. "Mostly we were just trying to move the poor bastards along and keep them out of trouble," said Ronald. "Not permitted to educate them at all, really. Just op• pression by other means, pretending to teach them something, to dull them enough to accept the conditions the owning class had in mind for them."
Then one day they do a little lesson on Egypt. Egypt's a place in the desert, very old and pointy buildings, and the pagans in the old days, they didn't know about Our Lord yet, so when their kings died, they wrapped them up in bed- sheets and said they lived forever. "I probably added something along the lines of 'The pyramids were built by working folk, forced to labour for their brutal kings,' " says Red Ron. And then they pass around a little picture book, and then on to the day's arithmetic.
Well,
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