The Dickens Boy

by Tom Keneally

  ‘Well, there you have the convict Magwitch, disqualified from life in England, giving our hero Pip his colonial fortune. Have you ever noticed how close to Plorn is Pip? It’s my theory the old man wrote it specially for you.’

  This idea served to dry up my tears.

  ‘If Magwitch could make a fortune in Australia,’ said H, ‘how much more could a robust and free and well-founded boy like you make?’

  We went through the boat train, with a final wave to the guvnor. There were tears in his eyes, but I knew the busy city day at the premises of his magazine in Wellington Street would seize and console him.

  ‘My dearest Plorn’, his letter read,

  I write this note to-day because your going away is much upon my mind . . . I need not tell you that I love you dearly, and am very, very sorry in my heart to part with you . . . It is my comfort and my sincere conviction that you are going to try the life for which you are best fitted. I think its freedom and wildness more suited to you than any experiment in a study or office would ever have been; and without training, you could have followed no other suitable occupation.

  What you have always wanted until now has been a set, steady, constant purpose. I therefore exhort you to persevere in a thorough determination to do whatever you have to do as well as you can do it. I was not so old as you are now when I first had to win my food . . . and I have never slackened in it since.

  The guvnor’s letter then urged me never to take mean advantage of another, and never to be hard upon people in my power.

  As your brothers have gone away, one by one, I have written to each such words as I am now writing to you, and have entreated them all to guide themselves by this book [the New Testament] . . . as questionable as the barbaric Old Testament might be, and putting aside the interpretations and inventions of men.

  You will remember that you have never at home been wearied about religious observance or mere formalities.

  He concluded by asking me to say night prayers, as he did, writing, ‘I hope you will always be able to say in after life, that you had a kind father. You cannot show your affection for him so well, or make him so happy, as by doing your duty.’

  As it turned out, my stay at Eli Elwah would last only twelve hours in all, and even now my memories of the place are painful. After travelling north by train, then west on the long Murray River, I arrived at a little town named Moama where I made arrangements for the bulk of my firearms and books and bush saddles, my clothes and tools and other impedimenta, to be taken to Eli Elwah by dray. After that I travelled north by coach until it stopped, then continued on my mare, Coutts, a bay with a white blaze. I had bought her in Melbourne on Alfred’s advice and named her in honour of the guvnor’s friend Miss Coutts.

  Coutts appeared to have great stamina, which the man who sold her to me said was because she had some Waler in her, explaining Waler was the name of the New South Wales breed of horse that had emerged from a melting pot of thoroughbreds, Arabs, Cape of Good Hope Dutch breeds, Timor ponies, with a little Percheron or Clydesdale thrown in for ruggedness.

  My thoughts on horseflesh were interrupted when I came upon a lantern-faced boy drover who was very amiable and forded some creeks and lagoons with me, which he told me the colonials called billabongs. According to the drover they were astonishingly full for this time of year.

  And so I rode into Eli Elwah station one morning to see a fine old homestead house, with drovers’ huts, a blacksmith forge, cook and carriage houses, with a camp for blacks off by a fringe of trees along a creek. It seemed to me that everyone had visible, understandable functions, and I liked that. An ageless-looking manager with a mahogany face welcomed me in a looping accent that showed he was born here, or had been here a long time. He told me his name was McGaw and that I had better stay in the homestead with someone called Britton. He informed me, I thought unnecessarily, that if he let this man Britton loose in the drovers’ huts half of them would bugger him and he wouldn’t even notice.

  He told me the time for dinner, and that his wife was away so I needn’t dress in either a formal or semi-formal way. A drover’s wife who was McGaw’s housekeeper then showed me to my bedroom – a pleasant room with a bed, a desk and a long window giving onto a veranda.

  I changed my boots in the long melancholy twilight and wore a tie and jacket to dinner. There was another young man with gingery hair, moustache and complexion standing behind a chair at the set table in the dining room. This was clearly the earlier-mentioned Britton, who was probably two years or so older than me.

  Soon after, McGaw entered in shirtsleeves, as was his managerial right, and riding boots. He looked distracted and was holding a cut page of newspaper thick with text, which he put on the table by his plate and continued to read for a while, before looking up at me and asking, ‘You met Archie Britton?’

  After Britton and I made affirmative noises McGaw nodded and sat down in his place, where he continued to read the newspaper.

  ‘How are things at the new dam site?’ he asked Britton without looking up.

  ‘The men are working with a will,’ said Britton with an accent that had a bit of Yorkshire in it. ‘The Chinese men working on the scoop are thorough tigers.’

  ‘I was told they were good before I hired them,’ McGaw murmured, his gaze still on the newspaper. ‘I wanted a depth of seven feet at the wall. Are they delivering that, do you think?’

  ‘According to my measurements, Mr McGaw,’ said Britton, who seemed at home here, which I felt a bit cheered by.

  McGaw now looked at me from dark creases within his leathery face. ‘I think Britton’s a bit overawed, Dickens. You are very clear proof that the great man exists.’

  ‘I’m afraid I’m a very ordinary fellow,’ I said, long practised at people making a nod towards my father’s literary fame as a prelude to addressing me.

  ‘I’d say I was overawed!’ declared Britton. ‘Who wouldn’t be?’

  ‘Well,’ I assured the two men again, ‘I don’t have my father’s gifts.’

  ‘But what sort of a pater was he?’ asked Britton, wanting, good fellow that he was, only to hear the best of my immortal sire.

  ‘We used to have plays and cricket matches in the garden. When boys from school visited us they would be in awe and trembling, but after an hour or so of fun and games they’d say, “By Jove, Dickens, your guvnor is a stunner and no mistake!”’

  This was exactly what Britton wanted to hear, and he laughed as if reassured that God in his heaven and Charles Dickens’ power to charm boys in the garden were two signs that all was right with the earth. Even McGaw looked amused.

  ‘And you play cricket?’ Britton asked.

  ‘Yes. I’m told by kind people I’m an all-rounder. Middle-order batsman and medium-paced bowler.’

  ‘We have a station team,’ Britton told me. ‘We’re playing Burrabogie a week from Saturday.’

  It felt as though things were falling my way. The cricket team at Higham had asked me to bat for them whenever I was home during the past two years. My batting figures were better than I had implied.

  ‘I read this surprising press report,’ McGaw said, looking at me and tapping the newspaper clipping by his plate.

  McGaw’s reflections on what he had read had to wait a while due to the arrival of the drover’s wife and a little black girl carrying dishes.

  After serving the three of us soup, the woman called, ‘All set, Mr McGaw?’ to which he replied, ‘Set as houses, thanks, Molly.’ She and the black girl disappeared.

  ‘Yes,’ said McGaw, patting the newsprint again, ‘there were some troubles in your house, I believe. With your ma, was it? I wouldn’t mention it except – well, here it is. In your pa’s words.’

  ‘My parents separated years ago,’ I said, blushing. ‘And the press make too much of it,’ I added. Generally when I blamed the newspapers people nodded sagely and said, ‘Well, we all know about the press, don’t we?’ And the conversation then moved blessedly to other
matters, but McGaw wasn’t finished.

  ‘This is a piece in the Argus,’ he said, ‘but reproduced from something called the New York Tribune. It quotes your pa as saying, “Mrs Dickens and I have lived unhappily together for many years. Hardly anyone who has known us intimately can fail to have known that we are, in all respects of character and temperament, wonderfully unsuited to each other.”’

  McGaw turned his dark, lizardy gaze up at me again, saying ‘Did he really write that, d’you think? “Wonderfully unsuited?” Or is that made up?’

  ‘He would put it differently now, I think,’ I replied. ‘But, you see, at the time there were so many rumours around.’ I despised myself for defending the guvnor as if he were the accused. ‘I was only six, but even I knew people made too much of it all.’

  McGaw slowly returned his gaze to the text, and again read. ‘“I suppose that no two people, not vicious in themselves, ever were joined together who had a greater difficulty in understanding one another.”’

  ‘All this is exaggerated,’ I said, as if it might save me, or as if McGaw would pity me and leave off.

  He did not.

  ‘But they say that these are your pa’s own words. Are they wrong?’

  ‘No, but you have to understand . . . when he wrote that he was in a desperate state . . . And people were being mean towards my Aunt Georgie. I don’t know . . . I was a child, as I told you, Mr McGaw.’

  ‘I mean, we all know about troubles in marriage,’ he continued, sniggering. ‘You don’t get to know a person by marriage but only by staying married. But if it was as bad as your pa says, why did he marry your mama in the first place?’

  Before I could answer, he read on. ‘“For some years past, Mrs Dickens has been in the habit of representing to me that it would be better for her to go away and live apart; that her always increasing estrangement made a mental disorder under which she sometimes labours – more, that she felt herself unfit for the life she had to lead as my wife and that she would be better far away. I have uniformly replied that we must bear our misfortune and fight the fight out to the end, that the children were the first consideration, and that I feared we must bind ourselves together ‘in appearance’”.’

  Britton looked away and concentrated on the prints of stallions on the wall, embarrassed for me.

  ‘Mr McGaw,’ I began sternly, before being interrupted by the housekeeper and the girl coming back to set up our plates with roasted lamb and vegetables.

  Britton took the time to discuss my ship with me and I tried to give a polite account of my voyage on the sailing ship Sussex, mentioning my good cabin and my friend, William Dempster, who’d been on board with me. I lamented I wouldn’t see much of him because he was bound for Western Australia.

  The woman and child served our meal, and we discussed my journey out under sail, and the fear many had of steamships being set alight by a spark from the engines.

  After the women left we set to on our dinner, and even McGaw spent time purely relishing it. But after a while he looked down at the newspaper report again.

  ‘Edward,’ he said, ‘I trust you’re willing to discuss these matters. You are not so tender in feeling as to avoid these issues, are you?’

  ‘No,’ I declared. I didn’t feel I had had the chance to say otherwise. ‘But –’

  ‘What about this then?’ he interrupted. ‘“Nothing has, on many occasions, stood between us and a separation but Mrs Dicken’s sister, Georgina Hogarth . . .”’

  ‘My Auntie Georgie,’ I said wearily, hoping it might remind him he was addressing living and breathing entities. It didn’t.

  ‘Why would she stay on after your father had sent her own sister away?’

  ‘For us,’ I cried. ‘Purely for us.’

  But the beggar went on reading. ‘“From the age of fifteen she has devoted herself to our house and our children. She has been their playmate, instructress, friend, protectress, adviser, companion. In the manly consideration towards Mrs Dickens which I owe my wife, I will only remark of her that the peculiarity of her character has thrown all the children on someone else, indeed on her sister. I do not know – cannot by any stretch of fancy imagine – what would have become of them but for this aunt, who has grown up with them, to whom they are devoted, and who has sacrificed the best part of her youth and life to them.”’

  I knew the guvnor had written a letter for the papers, but I hadn’t heard it read so coldly and so cruelly.

  Again, he raised his eyes to mine. ‘Manly consideration towards Mrs Dickens . . . ?’ he asked with a frown.

  ‘You need to understand, Mr McGaw,’ I warned, ‘he was provoked by malicious people. You see, he was answering the most malicious rumours at the time.’ But had the guvnor not realised that papers would re-publish his letter whenever they were short of copy?

  ‘“I hope that no one who may become acquainted with what I write here can possibly be so cruel and unjust, as to put any misconstruction on our separation, so far. My elder children all understand it perfectly, and all accept it as inevitable.”’

  McGaw breathed in emphatically. ‘But let me see here, Edward. It gets very confusing. First he defends your aunt, and then he goes on to mention another “spotless young creature”, someone as innocent and pure as your sisters, and malicious persons who spread rumours about her. Very confusing to a colonial reader, I would say.’

  I was not about to tell him the ‘spotless young creature’ was Miss Ternan, who the guvnor had tried to help in her career as an actress. Now and then she visited Gad’s Hill, but she was bad at cricket.

  My dinner lay cooling before me, but molten steel had begun to flow through my veins. Two of the malicious persons referred to were Thackeray’s daughters, Minnie and Annie, who we’d been friends with when we were little. During his life Mr Thackeray would come to Gad’s Hill and play cricket. He and my father would also devise plays and give all us brats a part in them. Then, one day when I was six, the guvnor called us all together and told us that our former friends the Thackerays had betrayed us with vicious rumours. That was the year everything changed, with Mama going back to her other family’s house, taking my eldest brother, Charles. It was also the year the guvnor grew old.

  ‘Do you know who this “spotless young woman” is?’ McGaw asked, bully that he was.

  ‘You are not a gentleman, Mr McGaw,’ I declared, choking with something broader than rage, more demanding than panic. I wanted in truth to kill him.

  ‘I am a bloody gentleman, you know,’ McGaw insisted. ‘I was quoting your own deathless pa, after all. Come on, Dickens, don’t be like that. You need a thick hide to be successful in the bush.’

  ‘Damn you, Mr McGaw. I won’t stay under your roof and I will not stoop to work for you.’

  ‘You’ll feel different in the morning. Look, let’s have a nobbler and make peace.’

  ‘You are lucky I don’t demand honour,’ I said furiously.

  ‘Demand what?’

  ‘A duel, a trial of honour.’

  McGaw turned to a flushed Britton, who was sitting, looking at us wide-eyed. ‘A trial of honour? Can you believe this bloke?’

  ‘My father is a gentleman, Mr McGaw, whereas you are a lout.’

  I got up and walked away from the table, and was in the corridor before he called out after me, with some anger in his voice, ‘I’ll let all that guff go till tomorrow. We’re all bloody human, you know. Me, you, your immortal pa.’

  It felt like shame was devouring me from inside – shame for my guvnor, for my mama, for Aunt Georgie, for myself, for the entire breathing world. I had to leave McGaw or kill him.

  2

  Back in my room I packed into my saddle bags and valise the few items I had already unpacked, retrieved my shaving gear, then left the room and sought the front door of the homestead.

  I heard McGaw call, ‘Are you going to join us, Dickens?’ as I walked away, up the hall and out into the night. I made my way to the drover’s quarters and
asked a man to saddle my mare. He did it, only asking once where I meant to go. I told him it was not his business, to which he reacted as if democracy demanded a person was required to tell any inquirer all their intentions.

  ‘I am leaving,’ I told him then.

  ‘Tonight?’

  ‘Instanter,’ I said. ‘As fast as I can.’

  ‘Nice saddle you’ve got,’ he said as he put my best Australian saddle on Coutts. ‘But watch for rabbit holes.’

  ‘Open the homestead gate for me, will you?’ I asked him. ‘I would appreciate it.’

  He did that and I cantered out, my shame and outrage still larger than the immensity of stars. Utter darkness soon consumed me and I put poor Coutts into a gallop for relief. If we killed ourselves it would be a sweet release at least for me. What I had been through, and the just rage I carried, crowded out everything normal.

  It was a long ride. I rested in a few raw slab-timber public houses on the way to a little town named Deniliquin. Southwards then, I reached the great trench of embankments and maze of billabongs where the River Murray ran and so the stage road. I was by then in a more equable frame of soul, and still glad I had made a protest against the abominable McGaw. I reached Melbourne after three days’ travel, and took a room at the Savage Club, for which the Dickens name and the patronage of Mr Rusden qualified me. Then, after putting on a good suit, I made my way to the grand freestone Parliament at the top of Bourke Street, and presented myself at Mr Rusden’s office. But on being admitted, I found myself treated like a miscreant.

  ‘I cannot disguise that I am severely disappointed with you for passing up such an excellent position,’ he told me. ‘One not at all easy to procure. What caused you to move away without reference to me or your brother?’

  ‘Please don’t tell my father, Mr Rusden.’

  ‘He’d expect that I would,’ he replied and I felt that Rusden’s letter would join all the unsatisfactory reports on me from a range of schools that had distressed the guvnor and convinced him I could not apply myself. But my defence in this case was the unutterable McGaw.