The Dickens Boy

by Tom Keneally

  We came to a cleft by the side of the track, surrounded by bushes and shaly rock. ‘This is Fiddle Glen,’ Fred told me. ‘Yandi’s uncle Cultay told me it never dries even when the creek does in the sense you can always at least dig for water there, and get it.’

  He took grain from his pocket and held it in his palm, the two little yellow finches came in, perching on his sleeve, and ate it and were off.

  ‘Is Staples still talking to God?’ Fred called out to Dandy.

  ‘Only when he has p-pain in his side from his old w-wound,’ Dandy called back.

  ‘Does it worry you still?’

  ‘N-no. Staples and G-G-God are harmless enough old fogies.’

  ‘What does he say to God?’

  ‘He still d-d-discusses his brother-in-law being decapitated at Sevastopol and, above all, why the surgeons used c-caustic on the wound in his own side. “Your son had a wound in his side,” he tells the D-Deity, “and you didn’t pour l-lunar caustic on that. You saved it for the 10th L-Light H–Hussars.” That sort of thing.’

  ‘Odd,’ said Fred Bonney.

  We came upon sheep by the thousand on the far side of a suddenly wide-open bank of the creek, in country that was rocky yet still full of vegetation. The English word ‘flock’ did no justice to these great accumulations of sheep. Only the term ‘mob’ suited them. The three dogs had been growling for some time, and became instantly excited when whistled signals from Dandy and Fred gave them permission to unleash themselves. Even so, at first they approached the mob easily, as if the whistles contained a caution not to startle or stress the population of lambs.

  ‘To the left with me, Mr Dickens,’ cried Fred, riding to contain the mob and splashing through the waterhole.

  I would never have imagined that a few men and three dogs could encircle and drive such a sheep’s army as we did, all south-east towards the hut. The enablers were the dogs, and the joy with which they herded in response to whistles from my two comrades was something to behold. I could not tell these whistles apart, but Fred and Dandy could make the dogs run clockwise and counter-clockwise, advance, retreat, go gentle, go hard.

  At noon, whistled instructions had the dogs keeping the animals still while we rested and ate damper and mutton and boiled our tea. We brought them into the well by four in the afternoon. A half-hour later, we saw the line of white and Paakantji riders coming in to join our party from the east. At that huge distance, and with no other evidence but the mood the day had put me in, I looked at them like brother knights. I could not wait to get back to Momba so I could write to Mr Rusden and ask him to share my news with Father: the Bonneys were gentlemen and Plorn Dickens had achieved application.

  8

  That night, more rum was drunk by a vast fire the Paakantji stockmen shared with the white drovers. Tom Larkin, who’d been happy to transform from a blacksmith into a drover for the purpose of this muster, approached me where I sat near Dandy on a log.

  ‘Mr Plorn Dickens, is it rude of me to ask how you have liked the work here to this point?’ he asked with what my first mug of rum and water made me think of as natural bush delicacy – so much more to be admired than the tortured manners of London.

  ‘I could happily do this work forever,’ I said, surprising us both by beginning to weep, though they were the warmest, most delightful tears. If I had met the crassest of colonials in McGaw of Eli Elwah, I felt I had met the very cream of men here on massive Momba. Tom Larkin put his hand on my shoulder, causing a fresh rush of grateful tears from me.

  After gathering myself, I introduced Tom to Dandy. I could not quite yet engage in full bush democracy, calling him Mr Darnell, for I thought of Dandy as a gentleman.

  But Dandy, knowing the rules and considering himself disqualified from my nicety by failed exams, held out his hand and said, ‘D-Dandy, Tom. You’re new to M-Momba, no?’

  ‘I am. I used to work for Brodribb on the Murrumbidgee. My whole family have worked for Brodribb from the time they came to this country. I married and am the first to break the pattern.’

  ‘I have w-worked for the B-Bonneys since Mr Edward, the older b-brother, came out on the s-s-same ship as me j-just six years back. Got treated with c-c-contempt as a new ch-chum.’

  ‘We don’t mean anything by that,’ said the kindly Larkin. ‘It’s just chaffing.’

  ‘All the same, thought it safest to be a b-boundary rider. In d-deuced vast paddocks!’

  ‘Did this Brodribb fellow treat your people well?’ I asked Tom, wondering if Brodribb was more of the nature of McGaw or Frederic Bonney.

  ‘Oh,’ said Larkin, ‘my father and mother, who were – I might as well tell you – convicts, were assigned to him when he was in the Alps away to the south of Sydney. There he could not call on magistrates to discipline his convicts, nor could the convicts depend on magistrates to protect them from severity. As a result everyone had to respect each other, and do the same things and live the same life. Mr Brodribb had the gift for managing that. His own father was a convict of the gentleman variety in Van Diemen’s Land. Transported for some rebellious thing – a pamphlet or some such. He understood men, our Mr Brodribb. My father considered him an honest man.’

  Whether I thought a convict was in a position to declare another man honest, Larkin had no doubt about it.

  ‘A lot easier riding out here,’ Larkin continued. ‘There, up in the Alps, ground’s steep and full of shifting rocks and wombat holes. We used take the sheep and cattle up to the High Country, the Perisher Valley, in summer. My father and Mr Brodribb and others many times drove sheep and cattle all the way through the Port Phillip Pass to Melbourne. The sheep sometimes became buried in snow and had to be dug out to continue the journey.’

  ‘Long b-bloody time,’ said Dandy, ‘before that’ll happen here.’

  ‘After my father and mother got their freedom, they moved away but went back to work for him when he moved down onto the Murrumbidgee.’

  ‘Flat c-country that,’ Dandy asserted.

  ‘Yes,’ said Larkin, ‘but did you know, Dandy, while we were in the Alps we discovered that if it snows the merino don’t know how to forage for grass. They’ve never seen snow before. Mr Brodribb had to have Suffolks, lesser though their fleece might be, to show the merinos by example.’

  ‘You are a t-true colonial,’ said Dandy, ‘and an edu—, an education to listen to.’

  That night everyone left the hut to Dandy and Staples and we made a wide camp in the open.

  The muster began at dawn the next day. I was again awoken by the shouts and stirring of men and the half-melodious complaints of horses in various stages of preparation. I retrieved a few bites of damper from a staunched fire and drank black tea from a pannikin. Yandi had saddled Coutts for me and Fred Bonney’s little yellow birds were drinking briskly from water he was holding in the palm of his hand.

  Yandi came to me with a page of his sketchbook and said, ‘This is my country.’

  He had rendered the Momba country in great swirls with the ranges in fluid chunks. It was impressive and novel, and I said, ‘Are you sure you want me to have this, Yandi?’

  ‘Yes. It’s not your country. But you can see it.’

  I wondered, did Yandi see it this way, as a great ribbon of earth?

  ‘I’ll put it in my room,’ I said.

  ‘Right-oh,’ he told me indifferently. ‘Big ride today, Mr Dickens.’

  With a low command from Fred, hoots from drovers and whistles of command from dog owners, the riders galloped north and south to encompass and move the great sheep mob. Without directions I rode a little way from Fred. He whistled and his dog circled behind me as Fred cried, ‘Cut in those stragglers on your right rear, Mr Dickens!’

  I rode off, wondering what noises to make and uttered a hoot that turned despicably soprano. Fred’s dog was doing the task anyhow, compelling a stray knot of perhaps five hundred ewes and lambs towards the grand conglomeration of protesting animals with his speed and barking.

/>   I was comforted, despite my own bleat, to have succeeded at my first task, and trailed the mob eating the ancient dust of Australia. Occasionally I was instructed to ride hard to cut off some errant stray, and did it, feeling increased mastery each blessed time.

  The successful arrival of the mob at Momba’s home pasture was at first a continuation of the pastoral idyll I lived in those early days, when the air sang with possibility. Willy Suttor came out of his store to meet us as we left the mob cropping the wide, dusty paddock and walked our horses back to the horse yards and stables.

  ‘Mr Dickens rides well for a kid bred in England,’ cried Larkin, and a number of men cheered.

  This praise felt alien and succulent. Didn’t they know that I was the academic despair of Wimbledon School and took up the same title at Cambridge Grammar in Rochester, where I was the despair of poor Dr Sawyer, and went on to be little more accomplished at the agricultural college in Cirencester? Acclaim was unfamiliar meat to me.

  ‘Not used to the stock saddle yet,’ a kindly voice added. ‘But when he is, make way for the wizard!’

  ‘Bloody right!’ cried another to more cheers.

  The sun was nearly down as Yandi took my mare and unsaddled her before turning her loose. Willy Suttor walked beside me in the evening’s violet dust, asking in a murmur, ‘Did Maurice McArden give you some writing of his, Plorn?’

  At first, I was a bit hard put to decide who Maurice McArden was. ‘Fremmel, the stock agent’s nephew,’ Willy reminded me.

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  ‘May I tell you? Don’t read it.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘It is not appropriate. If what it contains gets around . . . people could be hurt. I beg you.’

  ‘Very well,’ I agreed, though in the light of the recent esteem I had won, part of me believed that no book should be closed to me.

  I did not read anything that night. The day had been so intense that it had absorbed all other days, and needed to be followed by oblivious sleep.

  In the first clarity of a hot morning, Fred told one of his drovers to show me how to mark a male lamb’s left ear by clipping a W-shaped segment out of it. We stood by a wooden cradle, as high as the fence in one sheep yard, while other men waded through the sea of moving wool in the neighbour yard.

  ‘The ewes are all marked with a different letter,’ the drover told me in a thick rustic accent, maybe Lancashire. ‘It’s Mr Bonney’s method. You can tell their age at a glance. Last year’s one was a V in the right, you see, Mr Dickens. If they see no marks, the fellers in the yard there’ll lift them out to you, and you settle them on their backs in the cradle, and you give ’em the W on the ear. Then come down this end of the cradle when I say and hold the little bugger’s legs!’

  After the first lamb was lifted to us, I laid it on its back into the leather socket of the device, and made the clip in the ear. Then I laid the clippers down on a narrow bench offered by the table edge and went and held its hind legs.

  ‘Be firm with him, Mr Dickens. Not tender!’ the drover told me.

  He had a knife in his hands and leaned over the lamb. I saw him cut the male lamb’s penis off and put his mouth down on the wound to suck out with tobacco-stained teeth one testicle and its accompanying glutinous matter, and spit it on the ground, and then bend again to take up and spit out the second. He smiled at me with mucus-stained and blood-smeared lips. ‘You could get your father to write about that one,’ he told me and winked.

  All other marking and, in the case of male lambs, neutering continued by knife, as if his first method using his teeth was a necessary opening ploy or rite. With marking and docking and, if necessary, castration, our yard filled, and my arms grew weary, and the clipping, docking and castration went on with a rhythmic energy.

  When we stopped for black tea, the nectar of the great stretches of sheep country, I sat in the shade of a tree with Dandy, who had ridden on with us, leaving Staples alone for now. Dandy was a fellow I felt I could confide in.

  I said, ‘Despite the mutilating of the lambs, I feel I have found the only place on earth I can live.’

  ‘They are very un-unsentimental, the drovers,’ Dandy replied.

  Wasn’t it the way of things, though? I wondered. Unsentimentality seemed to be at one with the place.

  ‘I must say it’s p-pretty stunning, your g-governor being the Master N-Narrator,’ he said in a lowered voice.

  For once I found this remark did not in any way make me flinch here, at the core of a dusty, uneasy mob.

  ‘I think it shocks other people rather than us Dickens children,’ I told him flatly, without discomfort.

  ‘If you were the child of M-Matthew, M-Mark and Luke, I wouldn’t be m-m-much m-more amazed. I don’t m-mean you’re not a p-p-perfectly civilised f-fellow. B-But . . . the oddity of it!’

  ‘But it’s not odd to us,’ I told him, ‘because we’ve never known it otherwise.’

  ‘But to have a pater who’s home all d-day, inv-inventing tales . . . And s-such tales.’

  ‘Oh, he was away as much as most other people. He has an office at the magazine.’

  Before Charley had joined him, Father had felt he needed to be there to keep the magazine going. And he had rooms on the top floor that were well fitted out by Wills to keep us children out. ‘He’s got a Swiss chalet in the garden at Gad’s Hill,’ I told Dandy. ‘At our home there, that is.’

  ‘Swiss chalet?’ asked Dandy, fascinated beyond stammering.

  ‘Yes.’ I was getting fascinated myself. ‘Charlie Fechter, the French theatrical, gave it to him and he put it together in the paddock beyond the railway embankment.’

  ‘B-But . . . you t-talk with him. He who talks with angel’s v-voices.’

  ‘Yes,’ I conceded, ‘but we started doing it before we knew he was anything special.’

  ‘You m-must be a c-cleverer chap than you say.’

  ‘No. He sent me here because I’m not.’

  ‘B-but, how c-could you or anyone d-d-dare f-frame a sentence in f-front of such a g-god? I would be t-transfixed, Dickens. T-t-transfixed.’

  ‘Novelists are ordinary men,’ I assured him. ‘The guvnor liked everything tidy. We each had a peg for hat and coat and if we were not wearing them they had to be on that peg, or else.’

  ‘Or else,’ asked Dandy, ‘p-punishment?’

  ‘No. His displeasure. And he was fussy about the library, too. God forbid he inspect our rooms and find a missing book there.’

  ‘D-displeasure?’ asked Dandy.

  ‘The guvnor’s tongue could be sharp. He hated a messy storeroom as well, and utterly deplored a messy cricket bag in the tack-room – that’s what we call the equipment room. We always had to make sure our pads and stumps and bails weren’t hanging out. He clipped the ear of my brother Frank once after telling him his bags looked like disembowelled horses!’

  Dandy was fascinated.

  ‘They’re all ordinary men,’ I continued, enjoying entertaining him. ‘Now, Wilkie Collins. There’s an ordinary fellow. Likes a drink and a girl to tease. And my godfather, Bulwer-Lytton –’

  ‘The Last D-Days of Pompeii?’ asked Dandy breathlessly, as if he were nominating a divine text.

  ‘Yes. Now he’s a brain and a wizard. My father says of him, “Lytton is a prince of words and a prince of powers.” He says to me, “Plorn, you can be a prince of two countries as our friend Lytton is of two spheres, but I hope you’ve got better ears than him.” Lord Lytton, my godfather, he’s quite deaf, you see.’

  It took two days to mark the lambs and castrate the male lambs then muster them out from amongst the ewes.

  9

  The night after we’d finished the sheep work, I finally undid the sturdy cardboard wrapping around the manuscript Maurice McArden had given me, feeling great anticipation now that Willy Suttor had taken the trouble to warn me off the thing.

  I settled it on the desk in my room. The title ‘Suppose an Aunt’ was written in a generously loopy
hand and underlined twice. Immediately beneath it was: ‘Chapter the First: In which our hero bids farewell to his parents’.

  Oh heavens, I thought, how many openings were as plain as this? I must have read that same sentence in some dozen novels I had sampled and got only to the meat of the first paragraph before I tossed them aside and went out into the garden to bat a cricket ball around the flowerbeds.

  There was something about Maurice’s half-boyish handwriting that was suitable for my reading skills where print was not. I began and then, half to my own surprise, continued.

  I think my parents were perfectly absorbed in each other and loved me as a creation of that love. My mother and father were not rich, but fashionable enough that those who wanted to pay £10 less for a portrait than they would need to outlay on a full member of the Royal Academy were happy to use an artist almost guaranteed in time to become a bearer of those wonderful letters, RA.

  There was just a hint of rawness and newness in the passage to keep me reading.

  My mother was reconciled to the reality of the art world but frequently joked that women painters, all of whom were excluded from the Academy, were employed by people who wanted their portraits done with skill, either on their rise to eminence or on their fall, by women painters since they were more economical. Between them, however, my parents made a living and had the life they desired. And what they desired most was to go to Italy in the autumn to paint landscapes. They loved the country of the passes, the great St Gotthard, the Simplon. They would take time to sketch on the long, winding journey up from Andermatt, draw or paint the Devil’s Bridge, linger around the summit for the same purpose, and then descend into the Tremolo Valley and take lodgings at Ticino, where they intended to turn their sketches into full-blown paintings.

  I found I was embarked now as a reader of the narrative. It was the right narrative for me at the right moment, perhaps, and for unexplained reasons I was taken by this other man’s two parents, as a child from a lonely house might temporarily attach himself to the parents of a friend and find them intriguing.