The Dickens Boy

by Tom Keneally

  ‘Don’t harm him,’ cried Uncle Eustace in his distress. ‘He is the bruisèd reed and the smoking flax. Do not break the child!’

  ‘But he’s a filthy little sod, sir,’ Guilfoyle complained, ‘and merits beating.’

  ‘For Christ’s own sake,’ screamed Uncle Eustace, ‘let go of him, and get out!’

  After Guilfoyle obeyed, Uncle Eustace approached Aunt Livinia and said, in a voice choking with disappointment that made my face blaze, ‘Compose yourself, wife. Arrange your dress properly. And rise.’

  Aunt Livinia gathered the obituaries scattered about the sofa and floor and reordered not only her dress but her hair. While she was applying herself to all this, my uncle turned sideways.

  ‘To your room, sir! I will order Guilfoyle to lock you in while I decide how to dispose of you.’

  I wondered from his new harsher tone how he had so quickly disposed of ‘bruisèd reeds and smoking flax’.

  Within a day, very hungry and accompanied by Guilfoyle, whose bearing implied that at any second he would forget my uncle’s Christian prohibition and beat the tripe out of me, I was sent to a cheap school in Lewes, where I was boarded for two years, including during holidays. I spent most of each Christmas Day alone until evening, when the headmaster, Mr Pounder, invited me to Christmas dinner with his wife, one resentful son and four generous but uninterested daughters. I felt I had been and was being punished for a relatively innocent infatuation. I had done nothing but succumb to an enchantment that, when heroes in novels suffered from it, was treated by famous authors as meritorious. I could not reconcile my guilt towards my uncle and aunt with the warm effusions of great men for women characters in works of art, and so I began to question those effusions.

  Let me begin with Thackeray and his Henry Esmond, the latter an unfortunate Jacobite, a Catholic and supporter of the Stuarts, but no more immune than any other man to the delusions and mad enthusiasms of love. Thackeray writes of Esmond’s feelings for Beatrix: ‘And so it is – a pair of bright eyes with a dozen glances suffice to subdue a man; to enslave him, and inflame him; to make him even forget; they dazzle him so that the past becomes straightaway dim to him; and he so prizes them he would give all his life to possess ’em.’

  He goes further than others, does Mr Thackeray. He dares mention ‘hunger’. He dares mention ‘desire’. He dares mention ‘inflame’. These are more appropriate than the descriptions of any other of the novelists of our day. But having let these three vivid verbs out of their cage, he quickly retrieves them and locks them away.

  Charles Dickens’ account of David Copperfield’s reaction on encountering Dora, the childlike – or is it childish? – daughter of Mr Spenlow: ‘She was more than human to me. She was a Fairy, a Sylph, I don’t know what she was . . . I was swallowed up in an abyss of love in an instant. There was no pausing on the brink; no looking down, or looking back; I was gone, headlong, before I had sense to say a word to her . . . What a form she had, what a face she had, what a graceful, variable, enchanting manner!’

  More prosaic, more predictable, is Bulwer-Lytton in the unforgettable (yet not for the evocation of love) The Last Days of Pompeii, in which Clodius describes Ione, the dancer, as having ‘the soul of Vestal with the girdle of Venus . . .’ At one point Glaucus’s reaction to seeing her is rendered thus: ‘that bright, that nymph-like beauty, which for months had shone down upon the waters of his memory’.

  I could multiply examples. I knew from my experience with Aunt Livinia that the presence of a lovely woman is an ineffable experience for a man, but that it must then be somehow approximately described in tired language and half-truths – goddess, nymph-like beauty, fairy, sylph, angel – words which fail to penetrate the mystery of human woman, and which actually evade it.

  What a fine writer Maurice was, I thought, in my first ever literary conclusion. I did not have the right to make that judgement, but for reasons I could not say the story enchanted me.

  One great writer had told the utter truth, and cut through the mesh of tired affirmations and affectations. William Blake asked the crucial questions and answered them without prose or cliché:

  ‘What is it men in women do require?/The lineaments of Gratified Desire./ What is it women do in men require?/The lineaments of Gratified Desire.’

  That is, to observe gratified desire in each other’s faces, and indeed, in each other’s bodies. On reading that, I knew at once it was the sacred, innocent truth. That was what Guilfoyle had chosen to punish in me. He could see in my face the traces of Aunt Livinia’s desire for closeness. And the answer came that in all Guilfoyle’s exchanges with women he had not experienced that, that he had been a brute and was possibly incapable of seeing the said lineaments. So, as a means of reclaiming the limbs and form and body of Aunt Livinia for the cold blood and cold grasp of Uncle Eustace, he wished to punish me for having displayed even an echo of the aforesaid lineaments in my childish face.

  After two years in Manchester, I received a letter from Uncle Eustace’s younger and more secular brother Amos Fremmel. He and his wife, my education now being considered finished, were willing to welcome me to a remote part of New South Wales and give me employment in his business there.

  I was willing to sign on to this eviction amongst unimaginable people in an unimaginable place, though I knew that as surely as Britannia ever sent a convict to Australia, my Uncle Eustace was consigning me to the Antipodean depths for the sake of his cold grip on Aunt Livinia.

  And to the grand masters of the world of prose, I would say as Blake’s spiritual child that we cannot venerate what we do not perceive. We can venerate only that which is declared in its fullness and without deception, the full woman revealed in spirit and flesh, removed from vagueness and the vulgar, from childish speculation over which infantile diminutives are pasted to represent the full mystery and holiness, and from the soothing but finally worthless imagery of even the best of writers.

  Over the following days I carried Maurice McArden’s half-perceived but high truths in my head, combined with a residue of resentment of him for questioning the limits of my guvnor’s genius.

  Finally the day arrived for the great trial cricket match in the vast home pasture of Momba. When I emerged from the homestead, I saw a crowd of Paakantji people standing on either side of a pitched tent on the homestead boundary, where men could pad up before batting, and ginger beer was kept cool in stone jars. Approaching the tent, I saw several sturdy-looking, bearded Paakantji men standing in lines behind chairs placed there for players. One held a hardwood club, and two others short spears with broad blades. No one present seemed to feel these weapons were held with any warlike intention – it was merely a case of tradesmen hunters absent-mindedly bringing their tools with them on the chance of meeting some small, sweet-meated marsupial. The women sat in front of them, in full gowns. One old lady wore a widow’s cap of gypsum. Babies in shirts but bare-bottomed were scattered amongst the women.

  Within a quite vast perimeter of home pasture marked out with flags, the day’s eighteen-men-a-side game was to be played. I knew Fred had considerable command of what was to happen, and of who should be in which team. He’d told me that one team would bat for three hours or until all of them were out, and then the other team would take up the chase of runs.

  Before play began, Fred said to the participants, ‘You had better give us your best, since the team will be chosen entirely on the day’s performance.’

  Not far from Fred sat Edward Bonney, who was to be scorer and match referee. Seeing him, I was pleased to admit to myself, in my mood of expectation, that he had been an exemplary fellow since his strange assault on me. The two white women of the settlement were there to watch the match – Mrs Gavan, a drover’s wife and Mrs Larkin, Tom’s recently arrived Welsh wife. Looking at her at closer range, I saw she had a round, comfortable face with striking dark eyes, a pert, neat nose, strong features and lustrous black hair.

  My team fielded first and I soon found
out what a distance it was to chase a ball hit for four on that ground. It was in that sense like cricket in heaven, in which you hit a celestial four and then ran and ran till the ball was found, though here, you were credited only with four. There were a few surprises. Dandy was a poor cricketer, but his hut-mate Staples was a hypnotically deceptive slow and deadly mystery bowler. That is, he bowled a ball which would break in an unexpected direction on Momba’s hard earth. Who would have guessed he had the talent, except that cricket was a game of who would have guessed?

  Yandi watched the sport like a dissenting schoolboy, but when invited to bowl he had a ferocious round-arm action. Larkin was, as I’d hoped, a wide-shouldered striker of the ball, his newly betrothed witnessing his success

  I heard the bearded boundary rider, Sydney Keogh, with whom Staples was to share a hut that night, tell him, ‘No bloody talking to God tonight, Soldier. Let poor bloody God have a rest. D’you reckon you could do that?’

  This strange and profanely reverent idea, that God might need a recess from his children, tickled my imagination. I was delighted that Staples’ friends could address his tendency to talk to the Deity openly, the way other Israelites might have mentioned Him to Moses.

  In any case, when not fielding, Staples continued to show his wonderful tricks of bowling the ball out of the back of his hand and making it head in unexpected directions on the leg side. He bowled four men out and caused four more to nudge the ball to the wicketkeeper and the catchers in the slips close in. His experience of the divine had not harmed his clever and cunning bowling at all. And each time he took a wicket, the man who spoke to God looked pensive and tenderly touched the site of his old wound.

  The Paakantji bowled round-arm, and ferociously, standing still at the stumps and aiming their thunderbolts at the batsmen-targets, who dealt with these deliveries with various levels of skill and evasion, sometimes simply avoiding their wickets and being called out. The natives loved nothing like a ball flattening a wicket, particularly if it was one of their own whose wicket was so flattened. If a Paakantji clean-bowled a fellow Paakantji, the hilarity was prodigious. But they liked Staples’ magic too, as did I.

  At lunch Fred suggested that Larkin and I take the more fierce and accurate bowlers and give them training in the new and modern orthodoxy of overarm bowling, which we did.

  After we returned to the field it was my team’s turn to bat. Initially, the opposition bowlers sent down mad, wild, wide balls and the drovers and Paakantji batsmen on our side made wild swings, launching the ball into the sky if they connected with it but incapable of guarding their wicket with a straight bat. The essential skills of blocking and nudging were just not in their repertoire, nor was the late cut or the full-bladed drive into the covers. Luckily for the batsmen on both sides, the fielding was agricultural. By the time it was my turn to bat, the bowlers had improved their line and length. I was anxious to show at least the form I’d had with the Higham XI in Kent, and did my best to demonstrate a range of artful shots, making a respectable thirty-seven runs before I was caught at mid-on by Tom Larkin.

  11

  After the game, Fred and I discussed who should make up the team to play Netallie, Cultay observing us so closely I almost thought of him as an extra selector. By dusk we’d made our selections, with our team to consist of Frederic Bonney (captain), Tom Larkin, Momba Alfie, Willy Suttor, Soldier Staples, Edward Dickens, Momba George (whose real name, I had found, was Warnarka Willepungeree), Yandi (Wertie Coornbilla, Bonney confided to me), a drover named George Harbridge, hard-bitten boundary rider Sydney Keogh, another boundary rider called Joe Smailes, and the wagoneer’s assistant and wheelwright, Brian Cleary. As had been the case in the past, Edward Bonney was to be honorary twelfth man and umpire.

  Though exhausted by the cricket and the entertainments that followed, back in my room I picked up Maurice’s story again. It resumed sharply, in an unappeased way.

  I left the prevarications of Europe behind, perhaps for ever, hoping I would find a more honest world in Australia. It was an inevitable hope brought on by the length of the journey, events such as an equator crossing, and the talk of fellow passengers about ‘the new world’.

  Three months’ journey brought me to Melbourne – the golden glory of the Empire. From there I made a complex journey to Wilcannia, at the head of navigation of the Darling River. In any new place on earth, people expand to take on the accustomed roles appropriate to any European principality. A sergeant of police is a man-at-arms; a lawyer like Malleson, in an office on a dusty street within the shade of river gums, an immortal jurist in the matter of such acreages. The princes were out there beyond the river, shaky in their sovereignty over their acres. But who had the true power in Wilcannia? Who was the person that no wise man and no prince chose to insult or slight and who thus, if he could not rise above all whispers, need never hear himself named without some honorific – ‘esteemed’, ‘industrious’, ‘well placed’ – but Fremmel? The name of a stock and station agent and thus a wilderness god in Australia!

  Imagine this, then: a robust and honest man from England runs sheep on a huge leasehold at Mount Murchison. As well as producing fine wool, he creates for himself and his family a tennis court packed with hard clay, and marked up for civilised play and contained by a high wire fence. It is his intention that when other men and their families visit him from Momba or Toorale or Murtee or Yancannia, there will be friendly tennis tournaments. And imagine that on a picnic weekend the homestead offers hospitality not only to the leaders of other stations, but even to a stock and station agent, Mr Fremmel.

  Mr Fremmel doesn’t have a history of tennis-playing, but he is confident that his civic esteem will somehow bolster him. During his sporting humiliation at the hands of the honest homesteader – who dares to laugh when Fremmel collides with the wire of the net – the stock and station agent decides that he has been subjected to an insult. On the Monday morning, returned safely to a town whose population is not aware that he plays laughable tennis, he writes to Elder Smith, the huge land agency to which the tennis-playing homesteader has some, until now manageable debt, and to the English, Scottish and Australian Bank, ditto, suggesting that a recent visit to the man’s huge pastoral holding has persuaded him that the place is not soundly run. And to the grief of the homesteader, the financial rug is pulled out from beneath him when both institutions decide on reliable intelligence that they want their debts paid instanter.

  In my time with my uncle, I would see this happen not only to opposition tennis players but to others who offered my uncle a slight, perhaps even when they were not, in that rough country, aware of doing so. He had a capacity to offer them sympathy and to reduce his agency’s fees when he auctioned their premises, their leasehold, their sheep. That is something I noticed of him. That there would be a particular set of tyranny on his mouth, and the undermining letters were then written, his performance of finding the demands of the bank and the agency outrageous was so credible that men rode away to the larger towns saying, ‘At least Fremmel stuck by me.’

  Such is the man who, in return for my passage to Australia, made me undertake five years’ service for bed and board and without further payment. But it was not only the matter of a tennis court in the remote bush that bespoke his tyranny. It was above all his rule over my French aunt, Mariepier, a tradesman’s daughter whom he had first met during his trips as a commercial traveller to the English shops in Boulogne.

  In the house in Reid Street, Wilcannia, and at his table, I found my uncle saw married love as an exercise of power. And if he had ever been enchanted and unstrung by the mere sight of Aunt Mariepier, he showed it as little as his older brother did in the case of Aunt Livinia.

  What is it men in women most desire? I asked. And the answer seemed to be: the reflection of gratified power, and the shadow of their management.

  As William Blake warned: ‘And priests in black gowns were walking their rounds/And binding with briars, my joys and desires.’<
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  I was fascinated by these passages. Because Maurice McArdern had found in his aunts the fascination many of us found with girls more or less our age. There was something especially lush about aunts though, especially aunts misused. I felt guiltily about Aunt Georgie, neither to be pitied nor rescued and certainly not to be desired. Yet I was engrossed by the tale of Maurice and his aunts, even apart from the raciness of the text. I was close to suspecting that I was learning something to my advantage.

  I was involved in further autumn musters from the southern paddocks with names like Kilkoosha and Tallandra, but also The Wells and Mount McPherson West. Tallandra was part of our strangely beautiful frontage on the Darling – I had slowly begun to refer to the Bonney leaseholds as if I had some ownership of them too. The splendid evenings along the creeks in the paddocks created intriguing effects of light amongst the huge columns of trees and over the deep alluvial river banks. Fred said to me, ‘Have you been raised, Plorn, to tot up the years in the Old Testament and the years of Christian history, and thus come up with the age of the earth? Perhaps six thousand years, as the pious say.’

  ‘I had heard the biblical theory. But my father has told many people that all the formations of the earth have to be, in the case of some rocks, older.’

  ‘Ah,’ said Bonney, beginning to feed his accompanying yellow finches. ‘Always the advanced man, your father. This . . .’ He pointed to the deep-set river banks and the mirror surface of the river, ‘And all this looks older than six thousand years, wouldn’t you say?’