and which the enclosed newspaper clippings describe fairly, though Red Ron of course called them dishonest. “There was a night of arrests,” he told me, stamping out his cigarette. “World events were heating up—the War, the Russians—and we were right in the middle of it, and the authorities were a little overwrought. One of our meetings was broken up, and we were taken to gaol, roughed up a bit. I was worried for Cass, because I lost sight of her right at the beginning and she was taken away by a different route. Now it wasn’t a crime to talk about Communism—Australia wasn’t as far gone as the USA—but conspiring to overthrow the Government, well, that’s something else. Of course we weren’t doing any such thing. But the police said they’d found explosives and the addresses of politicians and policemen that we were targetting for assassination, and we had been corrupting youth, and Cass and I had a peculiar sort of unmentionable brother-sister relationship.” Ronald mildly denies it: “Now I ask you, Ferrell, we weren’t madmen. Organising strikes, encouraging resistance, fighting against the proposed War conscription, showing up the corrupt state for what it is—all that was our line. But this police inspector Dahlquist tells the newspapers he’s broken up a ring of Communist child-kidnapping assassins. Pictures of us with our names, and pictures of the very old explosives he’s found under the floorboards under the cot in the room where you-know-who had lived for years. That’s when I knew who had done this to us, even if I hadn’t heard from him in ages, even if Cassie tried to deny it, telling me I was confused by my emotions. Not a bit of it: the rotter had spun a story for the police, and if you ask me, it was all just a love letter to Cass, just his way of saying he still thought she was the best girl in the whole world, six years after she’d broken what we were supposed to believe was his heart.” A dozen of them spent a month in prison, and one of their number lingers there still, the one who actually procured and stored the explosives. “God knows why,” claimed Ron. “And of course the damn things were never used, just sat under a floor for a half dozen years. Cassie and I, we weren’t even leaders in the movement, you know, Ferrell. We were just idealistic people. Cassie still is. I’ve had my fill of it.” So spoke the schoolmaster become barman, talking to me out back behind the pub where he was working in ’22, one of the few places that would employ him.
The police had their bomber, but they’d also overreached, taken in a lot of people like the Barrys who hid behind laws saying they could think and say what they liked, and in the end there wasn’t much to argue before a jury, and the child-napping charges were rather too risky a thing for public courts, especially when Eulalie Caldwell’s meant to be your star witness and silver-tongued, troublesome Catherine Barry’s prepared to defend herself with talk of Christian charity. Be that as it may, society had the comfort of seeing the Barrys dispatched from their posts of public trust. A bit of actual proletarian labour no bad thing for such people. In 1922, in her cramped room, she was still singing about Comrade Lenin’s immortal accomplishments that would ring through history forever, and from where you and I sit, Macy, it’s hard to say she didn’t back a winner, even if he was a devilish one.
So we say farewell to the Barrys, July 10 and 11, 1922. Ronald returns to wiping down the bar. Catherine primly shakes my hand as if I’m poison, goes back outside to trim the stems of customers’ roses. They curse Paul Caldwell and the upright Inspector Dahlquist when they should curse their own arrogance. (I didn’t remind them of that, of course, as Ronald had engaged me to find Paul if he was alive. Looking for an address of a man who’s dead, that’s an undemanding way to earn one’s daily wages, I’ll admit.)
I won an audience with Inspector S. George Dahlquist the next day, to understand the relation between the arrest of Caldwell at the circus and the arrests of the Barrys, both of which