The Dickens Boy

by Tom Keneally

  ‘Of c-course I could, S-S-Soldier. I’ll be pleased of th-the quiet, I shall.’

  ‘Oh bugger me!’ sighed Staples. ‘Who would’ve thought a man would become so bloody useless.’

  There were reassurances to the contrary, before we helped Staples into the same seat in the sulky as the Desailly Trophy. After putting a blanket over him we were off again on the Momba track, which now seemed an habitual route to me, as familiar as the road from Higham to Gad’s Hill. In the dusk Fred shot some wild ducks and white and black cockatoos, which Yandi dressed deftly and cooked into a superb meal. As we set down to eat, I said to Dandy, ‘Are you really content to lose the company of Staples?’

  He considered the question awhile before replying, ‘I do not w-want to meet up with or t-tame another creature to share my hut. I am therefore b-b-better on my own.’

  After the stew, we rode into darkness and did not reach Momba until after midnight, still pleased with the success of our cricketing expedition.

  15

  Coming in from mustering the home paddocks one day, I found the bullock wagon had arrived from Cobar with a letter from Alfred.

  Corona Station via Menindee

  New South Wales

  3 April 1869

  My Dear Plorn,

  I have received a letter from my friend Blanche Desailly, who I met at the Mount Murchison races. She sings your praises as both a man and a cricketer. Through her, I found out you vanquished Netallie Station, a hard task given their team is made up of cricketers from the colonial grammar schools of Adelaide and Melbourne, along with an occasional Eton or Rugby gent. Mr Desailly obviously ignored a source of talent Fred Bonney doesn’t – the darks, who can play cricket in a fierce way, lacking in nuance perhaps but very useful in social cricket. I have a chap here named Milparinka Sam whom I’ve taught over-arm to, and he is a magnificent quick bowler. I had a chap from a bank who was clean bowled by Sam warn me it was very bad form for me to allow a native to assert such dominance of white chaps!

  In any case I sent Blanche’s glowing praise on to the guvnor, just to show him. I hope if you are ever in the rare situation of receiving praise of me, that you’ll do the same.

  Recently we had a South Australian survey expedition over here. Do you think they intend to conquer the eastern colonies? All jokes aside, they were exceedingly astonished to find the son of the Illustrious running Corona. It was to them like stumbling on a previously unclassified Wombat. The usual questions we both know so well arose: What was my favourite book of the guvnor? Had I ever written? Would I ever write? When I claimed my scholarly failures to prove why I was not a writer they said, ‘But even your mother is a writer,’ referring to the dear old cookery book she once put together. But a merciful God decrees that none of the children of Grand Narrators inherit the same gift – otherwise, we could have breeding factories for story tellers, and let me tell you, that would be lunacy. As men of science and enlightenment, the South Australian expeditioners accepted this.

  I expect we will hear from the guvnor, Aunt Georgie, and the Mater soon. The sisters keep a correspondence too. The mail comes here fortnightly. Do write to me.

  If you are happy there, dear Plorn, then I rejoice for you. May we both be happy and meet our colonial destinies. And surprise the guvnor.

  I address you in terms I don’t always use. We are embedded here now and possibly for a lifetime.

  Your loving brother,

  Alfred Tennyson d’Orsay Dickens

  And what a wonder it would be, I thought, if my father could tell people, ‘Plorn has applied himself.’

  As the winter came on, life was quieter. I travelled with Piggot the bullock wagoneer to take supplies to the hut-keeping boundary riders. The Bonney brothers also had us weigh as many ewes as we could reasonably manage when visiting distant paddocks, as they were approaching or in the state named ‘oestrus’, that all-wise and all-profitable process that was the broad base of the grand pyramid of the region’s wealth.

  I met many other hutkeepers besides Dandy. Unlike shepherds in England, they were not all cut from the same cloth. I found that where two men occupied the same hut, they would not normally be men of similar background. To find a parson’s son and a man from a family of Liverpool barge workers sharing a hut was not uncommon – indeed, such a pair supervised the huge adjoining paddocks of Perry and Bathing Spring. I could not imagine myself choosing to be quite so solitary. I noticed that the young ones often mentioned their families in an attempt to explain their remote location.

  Fred Bonney sometimes took me to sit in the Paakantji camp to observe the people he talked to. Whenever we arrived, Fred, in his sola topee, duck trousers and collar and cravat, would walk through the camp crying greetings, more as a friend than as a visiting grandee. People would be sitting in the doorways of their grass and branch humpies whose clever architecture and sturdiness Mr Bonney had convinced me of despite my initial prejudice against such questionable habitations. The women, young and old, would remove their pipes and greet him aloud and with sudden excitement and a kind of merriment. Some would stand up, but women weaving bags made of dyed grass, using their legs as a sort of weaving frame, grinned at the little man from a sitting position and shrilled at him.

  The men were always pleased to see him, though on occasions we would find Edward there also, sitting amongst elders. When this happened Edward got up and left as his brother arrived and I had the sense that his going generated little regret among the elders.

  By contrast, I never saw any man, in any circumstances, anywhere in the country, get a more thorough and unpretentious greeting from the natives than Fred. And I never saw anyone more interested in them, more reverent, more assured that they had in their possession secrets he believed he should become fit to know.

  ‘People treat them somewhere between annoying fauna and ghosts, potentially lethal figures from the fringe of life,’ he complained to me once in terms I shall never forget. ‘But we, Plorn, are the ghosts. They think we whites are mere temporary phantasms.’

  He taught me the meaning of what at first sight seemed nothing, explaining once when we saw an old man wearing a hat of bark from a certain tree with leaves of a certain other tree, affixed with a cord around his head, that he was treating himself for headache, from which he regularly suffered. And near the women, within reach, were the broad stones of quartz basalt on which they ground grasses and extracted grain. The young men standing about in their station clothes and ready for work chewed sweet gum from the wattle tree, which I noticed afterwards as habitually as one would an alder tree along the Medway.

  Fred told me the meaning of the Paakantji’s true, subtle names. Yandi’s elder brother Momba George’s real name was Warnarka Willepungeree, which meant not only lizard – lizard was a favoured totem and a favoured food – but lizard wintering in his den on a cold night. A woman dubbed Purnanga Nora had a true name that meant ducks searching for food in a creek bed. The Paakantji only took their artificial names, made up, say, of the place they were born and a British forename, for station convenience.

  I learned that Fred Bonney’s Paakantji name meant ‘yellow birds about his shoulders’. If by unlikely chance we ever became equal friends, I would nickname him ‘Yellow Birds’.

  On each visit two men of middling years, who seemed to have ignored Fred while the others greeted him, came up after a time and sat with him on the ground. These were his chief informants of Paakantji life. Policeman Danny (for he had once worked with the police) and Poondary Dick.

  I got a note from Willy Suttor on one of the winter days of lighter work saying, ‘Dear Plorn, some mail’s come up to you from Cobar. And I have some news about Our Mutual Friend, if you will forgive that reference.’

  When I arrived, the veranda of the store was heaped up with new deliveries of tobacco, fencing wire, soap and bleach. One of the young Paakantji was stacking it all away as Willy entered the number of items of each into his stock book.

  Seeing
me, he called ‘A moment’ before wiping his hands thoroughly against the leather apron he was wearing and going into the store. He emerged holding a letter delicately by the corners, asking with undisguised awe, ‘Do I really hold in my hands a written artefact of the Illustrious One?’ I had never seen him struck with such reverence.

  ‘Let me see,’ I said, moving in closer to look over his shoulder since it seemed unkind to shorten his enjoyment. ‘Oh, I’m sorry, the C. Dickens on the envelope is in the handwriting of my brother Charley. It’s not my father’s.’

  ‘But close enough,’ said Willy, gently waving it in the air a last time before handing it to me.

  ‘And our friend? Maurice?’ I asked. ‘Do you need the money I pledged you?’

  Willy grimaced. ‘He says he won’t go. He claims his aunt needs him for protection, though the opposite is true. But I can’t reach him at all. Perhaps we should write to the Wilcannia parson. Though . . . let me ponder on the issue, Plorn.’

  Maurice’s proposition, quoted from William Blake, on the images of gratified desire, possessed me again for a while. It was still a new idea for me – that even in daily life, in plain matters, men were looking for that in women, and more remarkably, women were looking for that in men.

  I was pleased that Charley, so busily married, and thus preoccupied, I presumed, in the way Maurice suggested, had taken the time to write to me.

  I opened the letter with the eagerness appropriate to an exile.

  ‘My Plorn,’ it read.

  I hope you are contented in that far, fabled colony. Have you held off an attack by the natives yet? I trust you are in the bloom. I wanted to tell you in case you had not heard that I have now been given the full title of sub-editor of the magazine but am also attending the guvnor on his outings and doing the effects some nights for his readings. I am very nearly transformed into a literary man and am being trained to substitute for poor Wills the sub-editor who had that bad spill on his horse. I am grateful for this: I have five young mouths to feed, and Bessie is carrying a sixth. I recommend marriage, Plorn. I would be rudderless without it.

  Pater is much improved, I think, but he has evinced a desire to perform the murder of Nancy by Bill Sykes in Oliver Twist. When I took the children to visit him recently, he was raging around the garden, doing Bill Sykes, for it’s never enough for him just to read with expressive hand gestures – he is still such a thespian. We came on him and he was murmuring in falsetto, ‘Bill, why do you look like that at me?’ And then in basso, ‘You know, you she-devil!’ I asked him about it, and he was of course determined to go ahead with the idea, even though a lot of us think it’s far too tiring for him, the way he insists on performing it. In his more senior years, he has not got over the naming of children – he has pet names for all our four, but he doesn’t like them calling him grandfather instead having them call him the Venerables (yes, plural) instead. I don’t know where he gets plural from, unless he thinks he’s the Holy Trinity.

  Later in the day anyhow he performed the whole thing for me, the flight of Bill Sykes the killer as well, and he was so thoroughly in that ruffian and in each victim that it was the most wonderful thing I’ve ever heard or seen, and I said ‘Bravo! There’s no way you should be doing it in the theatre.’

  He laughed and said, ‘Everyone says that. Especially Dr Steele.’ Steele actually wrote to me about it, warning me to attend every performance this coming autumn. So you see I’ve become the devoted son! Speaking of devoted, Aunt Georgie is still in place and it’s pleasing to see how well she gets on with our fiery sister Katie now. And of course, she and Mamie have always been close.

  As for the mater . . .

  After Charley had gone to Eton, where he’d been quite good at Latin and Greek, he’d insisted on addressing the guvnor as Pater and Mama as Mater.

  As for the mater, I visit her frequently and she continues to bear the separation from the Dickens household and the daily separation from her children bravely. Indeed, if there was a medal for that sort of thing she would win it. Katie visits her a lot and goes so far as to tell her she should be angrier. The mater resists it, as she resists all Grandma Hogarth’s fury about the schism between our parents. I think it was a good thing that I stuck with Ma, though, at the time, telling Pater I loved him but that Ma needed some company. It might be the best thing I ever did in my life, apart from marrying Bessie – even though the pater does not like Bessie’s people, as you know. But in any case, I saw that Mater understood all too well that all she had left was her dignity, and she would lose that if she began to malign the guvnor. She actually gets on with Bessie’s people and dines with Mrs Evans quite regularly still.

  Pater is a man of reason, but he does tend to divide the world into His Side and Mater’s Side. The only people who are permitted to be on both are me, Bessie and our little ones, because he realises that to be so is a condition of our very existence. Mater sees Mrs Ingram too . . . you remember, the widow of that chap who started the London Illustrated News. Pater’s feeling for that journal is dubious. He says to me, ‘Ingram, when he was a humble shopkeeper, invented Old Parr’s Longevity Pills. If he hadn’t taken so many of them, he might have seen his fiftieth birthday.’ Big Mark Lemon and all that crowd are still on the outer with him, and on the inner with Mother.

  The upshot is, anyway, that the dear thing Mater is well and remembers you and Alfred so warmly and wishes you every success in that place of which, as Pater says, ‘No one can imagine it unless they’ve been.’ He still intends ultimately to visit you there, and he met up with the obnoxious Trollope the other day who boasts about the fact he’s sent his son there, and says he intends to visit, give lectures there and write a book about the place.

  I write to you, dearest Plorn, chiefly because I feel I have entered the best phase of my life, and in coming to the magazine, have as it were come home. I hope things happen with you such as to make you feel the same about where you are.

  Your affectionate brother,

  Charles Culliford Boz Dickens

  So, Charles Culliford Boz Dickens had also applied himself.

  Staples was working in the station office with Edward Bonney, who moved and spoke with a sad reserve I now understood. As Edward had promised the doctor in Wilcannia, Staples was working on the stock books, and questions of where and when and what rams were distributed throughout the great space, as well as the wages books of boundary riders. I did not know if the Bonney brothers made up this work for him, but Staples had writing and arithmetic, and skills of his own.

  In any case, I visited him in the office one day in early winter, when the air was knife-sharp and all the earth a golden, sculpted glory. ‘Mr Staples,’ I said, looking about, pretending I’d come searching for Edward.

  He gave me a broad smile and said, ‘Mr Plorn, you see a man cured of cricket.’

  ‘Despite your deceptive bowling, Mr Staples! And at such a good age, too.’

  ‘Yes, I am a good age. But there are good county cricketers older than me. Those Yorkshiremen, they play till they die, and they die happy.’

  ‘Well, who thought your bowling action would tear your old wound open? After all that mustering and boundary riding.’

  ‘Oh, it would happen out in the Ullollie paddock sometimes. But I would lie quiet until it closed again. God would seal it, you know. He is willing to seal it when it splits on proper business such as the muster. Not so willing when it’s cricket. Vanity of vanities, you see. You watch, Mr Plorn, I’ll be back with Dandy, and carrying bloodwood stumps to help the fencers before you know it.’

  ‘Do you really believe that, Mr Staples?’

  ‘With every fibre of my being, Mr Plorn! I wouldn’t leave that Dandy on his own. He’s too given to imagination.’

  ‘Forgive me, Mr Staples. But did you ever have a family?’

  The fibrous mesh of connections that Charles’s letter had demonstrated meant families were on my mind.

  ‘Ah yes. I arrived in Adelaide on a
migrant labourer ship with my wife and our littl’un, but both have gone to God. There was little time to dwell on their souls out in Ullollie paddock, not much room for ’em here. But next to bugger-all room if I was in Adelaide.’

  He turned a page and started writing the names of rams in the rams column. He was engrossed in it.

  Suddenly he said, without looking up, ‘Most kind of you, Mr Plorn. But best to leave me out of the Momba XI in the future.’

  ‘That is a great loss of a genuine gift,’ I declared.

  ‘Ain’t so. There is some child within our vicinity with the gift of spin bowling. God is profuse with his gifts.’

  ‘If he ever tells you the name of the child . . . No, I mustn’t be irreverent.’

  ‘Best bloody well not,’ Staples advised me.

  As Charley had said, I was very little when the guvnor and Mama stopped getting on. There were the normal guvnor japes – a play after Christmas, an outing, but when Mama and the guvnor were in the same room, they looked past each other in a way I found odious. Later, carpenters mysteriously put up a partition in their bedroom at Tavistock.

  I vaguely remember everyone coming home for Christmas 1857, except for Walter, who was in India, and that was the last Christmas the guvnor and Mama were together. Though I didn’t understand why, I accepted it all as a given, as is probably normal when one is five.

  When Mama moved out, she wept over us. And though I knew nothing of what was happening at the time of the separation, it seemed to activate everyone.

  The guvnor was never quite the same after Mama left, and that was just the start. Thank God for the bright Saturdays and Sundays at Gad’s Hill. That’s when the guvnor was at his best. On the weekends with the visitors and us children – Alfred, Frank, Henry, me, Katie and Mamie.

  Before Mama left home, the guvnor made her visit and drink tea with a family of women named the Ternans, who the guvnor was helping. I didn’t know why she must do it. I knew the guvnor thought the Ternans were good theatricals and that for some reason Mother had to be brought to agree to taking tea with them to make everyone happy and of one mind. I heard my sister Katie telling her not to go, but Mama insisted. Mysterious stuff. A household of actresses and my mother, alone, and not a thespian herself. What did that mean? And when she returned sombre, recriminations from Katie. Why did you? What did you expect? And so on.