The Dickens Boy

by Tom Keneally

  The following spring, when Mama moved out of Tavistock House, Aunt Georgie remained with us, getting me up every morning and dressing me in my clothes, and I thought that proper. But I came to know – I don’t know how – that not all people thought it proper that Aunt Georgie stayed with us when Mama went. I caught it from the air perhaps, and from muttering people around us. There was a cleft in our world. People were cast to left from right and vice versa, and we needed to know who our new friends were. Then there was a letter published in Household Words and The Times and it had already been in the New York Times and it was in some way another divider of the world, and all at once I learned that people I had thought were friendly were vicious against the guvnor. Granny Hogarth was against him. Thackeray had said something ‘unforgivable’ at the Garrick Club. So, he and his two lively girls couldn’t be invited any more on Twelfth Night, when we always had our plays. A few friends came to persuade him that Mr Thackeray had not been insulting, but the guvnor seemed certain and couldn’t be shaken. Mark Lemon, the guvnor’s old theatrical friend, was to be spurned too, and anyone who wrote for Lemon’s magazine Punch.

  Father also argued we must all stay with him, because Aunt Georgie, Mama’s very sister, had indeed stuck with us rather than going with Mama, and how ungrateful it would be for us in any degree to spurn that sacrifice, explained only by Aunt Georgie’s love for us. She had done the raising of us, after all, because Mama was somehow deficient in the skills of mothering, he said, as we all knew. And now Mama was estranged – that was the word he used. At five or six I had not done a comparative study of parents, so I accepted the truth revealed by the guvnor. I knew Aunt Georgie wasn’t estranged from us. Now, when we visited Mama, he told us, if Grandmother Hogarth or Aunt Helen appeared, we were to leave. These two women were not like Aunt Georgie. They would twist things.

  When the guvnor was on the road, and in Ireland, doing readings, Aunt Georgie took us to see Mama and the two of them did not seem estranged. Mama said to me, with a watery smile, ‘You are still my affectionate boy, Plorn.’

  ‘Yes,’ I told her. ‘I am not estranged.’

  ‘No, you’re not at all,’ she assured me, and nodded and nodded and then cried. I liked her familiar smell. The lavender. And a powder she used that was the very smell of motherhood. One day she took me to see Miss Coutts, a rich friend of hers and the guvnor’s, but though that wasn’t popular with him, he couldn’t stop Miss Coutts.

  So, life had changed. Yet it was tolerable. And the Gad’s Hill house the guvnor bought just before Mother moved away was wonderful, and people came on weekends and Father was his old joking self. And Aunt Georgie was the constant. She was there, all the time.

  Such was the state of my memory of my parents’ separation that I brought to Australia. It was only now beginning to raise a few more questions that I couldn’t answer.

  16

  The winter in that half-desert was sharp. You might wake and find the entire ground, the dust itself, and every plant, covered in frost. A freezing wind blew from the north-west, encouraging sheep to grow more insulating wool and us to apply extra layers of our clothing. It was normal to go abroad in the morning and hear drovers say, ‘I wore everything I own to stay warm last night.’

  One day a large letter in a heavy nap envelope, addressed to Fred Bonney and carrying the name and address of a London law firm, arrived amongst the other fortnightly mail from Cobar. And with it an even more spectacular envelope marked Letters Patent and embossed with a crown.

  I heard Fred and Edward Bonney discuss them that night at dinner, with Fred saying, ‘I’ve received an enquiry from both lawyers and the House of Lords accusing me of knowing the whereabouts of one Alexander Darnell and pleading with me to find him. The Letters Patent tell me Dandy is the fourth Baron Yellowmead, and that if I know him, as is suspected, to tell him that he is summoned to the House of Lords.’

  ‘Dandy?’ asked Edward incredulously. ‘But he can barely get a sentence out.’

  ‘Stammerer or not,’ said Fred. ‘I am commanded, nothing less, I am commanded to tell him to present himself at the House of Lords, Westminster.’

  ‘Well, I’ll be deuced!’ Edward declared, laughing. ‘I really will be deuced!’

  Fred smiled. ‘As for the letter from the lawyers, they are inviting him to occupy Manston House and begin administering the Darnell lands in Cornwall, Devon and Gloucestershire. All a little more complex than the mere paddock and sheep – however large in size and number – with which he has until now been burdened.’

  ‘And so,’ said Edward, ‘we are under obligation to let the poor beggar know?’

  ‘Yes, poor chap.’

  ‘Poor chap? Poor chap?’ asked Edward with a further laugh.

  ‘He has chosen his life. It might be the most merciful thing to write back and tell them that though I once had contact with a Mr Darnell, his present location is unknown to me.’

  ‘But you can’t do that in response to Letters Patent,’ his brother argued. ‘You are bound to declare him. Any individual who becomes aware of Letters Patent is bound by law to comply.’

  Fred Bonney guffawed. ‘I can’t quite see them setting up the chopping block in Momba to punish me and Dandy.’

  ‘You are bound, Fred, whether you want to or not, or he wants you to or not,’ Edward insisted, back to frowning now. ‘So don’t shyack around and strike republican poses. He can probably renounce the title to some infant second cousin if he wants. But he can’t get away without first presenting himself to the Lords. God Almighty, how many men would willingly take his place? If asked into the Lords, I would be there faster than a rat up a drainpipe.’

  He laughed creakily again, then said, ‘Take young Dickens with you, that’ll cheer Dandy up, a thoughtful chap like him.’

  ‘If I took the cart, I could take the Soldier out there as well. That would really give Dandy pause. But if he won’t leave his hut and come back here with me, I won’t make him.’

  ‘You can make him, Fred. You’re his boss, after all.’

  ‘Poor Dandy,’ sighed Fred. ‘He is out there happy in what he thinks is his country, and we are going to disabuse him of it. It is reversed transportation, and distasteful. What have the Lords ever done for England except throttle progressive laws?’

  Edward turned to me, our earlier awkwardness forgotten. ‘You didn’t think you had a radical for a boss, did you, Plorn?’

  ‘My father is a radical, Mr Bonney,’ I replied, remembering my father’s frequent cry that the House of Lords was ‘an institution that gives those who have risen by grand theft the authority to decide upon what pittances the rest of us are to subsist on.’

  ‘Ah, but your father is a sentimental radical, not as deep a one as my brother! He and his little birds twitter sedition to each other.’

  Though this assessment was meant by Edward to appear affectionate I wondered if the two of them were still secretly arguing, as I’d heard them that breakfast. I had the feeling that if they hadn’t been brothers they might not have been friends.

  Fred decided that a party made up of him, myself, the Soldier and Yandi would ride out to Ullollie paddock where the heir to the Yellowmead baronetcy rode the fences and watched the Bonneys’ mobs of sheep. A bed was set up in the back of the cart for the Soldier to recline on to protect his old wound. Yandi rode his stock horse. I still had my tough little mare, Coutts, but needed a second horse, for I’d learned that one should not travel alone and with just the one horse in this country. Never, I was sure, had such an expedition been put together in the Australian bush for such a purpose.

  We set out at four o’clock in the morning, riding across bush pastures under frost, with all the earth looking silver and inky blue beneath the dense clutter of stars. I had by now acquired a jacket of sheepskin and was grateful to wear it. That hour was full of the signalling cries of dingoes, lugubrious and full of the desire for the blood of sheep. The Soldier chose to ride in the cart seat, with a determin
ation that signalled he thought recourse to the invalid cot in the body of the vehicle would be a sort of failure on his part. The sun came up behind our shoulders and granted significant colouration to the red earth and all the subtle silvers and greens of the saltbush and mulga trees and the lines of river gums that marked out the streams and lagoons of water. The light seemed to gust Fred’s three or four little yellow finches up into his company, where they chirped at him from the boards of the cart. We stopped only for a brisk breakfast of damper, golden syrup and tea.

  Despite his resolve, the Soldier started to get shaky, so we helped him into the back of the cart and then Fred invited me to tether my mare to the cart and ride beside him. I did so, while Yandi roamed about on his horse, sometimes ahead, sometimes to the left, sometimes to the right of the cart, sometimes singing as if to himself. And under it all was the fixed sea of red soil, the medium of our travel and indeed of our hopes.

  ‘What do you think of Yandi?’ Fred asked me.

  ‘I don’t think he trusts me yet,’ I replied.

  ‘Oh, he trusts you well enough. That casual air of his . . . is characteristic of them. I have seen wives seem casual to a husband they have not seen for weeks.’

  ‘To be frank, I believe he fears I might somehow take his place as your riding companion and aide.’

  ‘That doesn’t worry him in the least. He believes, you see, that I am his maternal uncle reborn. And I am happy to fulfil that role for him.’

  I was confused but said nothing.

  ‘His mother’s brother, you see, was a small man, rather like me. And when I came here and started making friends with the yellow birds – well, it was exactly what his uncle, the clever man, had got a repute for doing. The uncle was shot dead by South Australian troopers at Rufus River. Yandi and his mother believed me to be his uncle returned in another form. That is why I have Yandi as my aide.’

  He let this concept settle in my mind, knowing that it took an average Englishman a time to adjust to it, then added, ‘Who is to deny their perception, or would want to say in which of God’s infinite minds this idea of Yandi’s is invalid?’

  ‘That is all very strange,’ I said.

  ‘Yes, wonderfully strange,’ Fred agreed.

  ‘So, to the natives, you are a shot man returned?’

  ‘Yes, but if you find that outlandish, try to explain to Yandi that mere paper marks made by the powerful fifteen thousand miles away have made us take to the road hunting poor Dandy.’

  The Soldier revived in the afternoon and politely asked for his seat back. I gave it up willingly as I liked the freedom of my own mount. From my saddle I watched Yandi scout the country we advanced into. He shot and plucked some birds, but there was no time to cook them that night and we just had cold mutton and damper again. As we kept riding on in the aching cold of the desert night, I found myself daydreaming about being gallant for Connie Desailly. I imagined having my own run and inviting her to it and introducing my overseer who was – by the weight of daydream – Tom Larkin.

  In the darkness we approached Ullollie. We heard Dandy’s dogs engaging in a spate of barking to warn dingoes away from their sheep or else warn of our approach. As the moon came up, we caught sight of the whim of the well, its upper structure with a windlass, fine-etched against the night, and the flocks around the well. I’d discovered by now that moving sheep to water, then moving them on again before they grazed out and made a desert of the place around the waterhole, was a fine-edged proposition. They seemed to move on in any case, of course, as if by nature, in the pilgrimage for nourishment, but the shepherd or boundary rider was there to help them in their decisions.

  As we got closer to the hut, the door opened and a figure emerged, delineated by the lantern illumination inside. Yandi began to hoot and emit a chirruping series of yells when he saw Dandy and went galloping towards him, reining in his horse and appearing to tell Dandy who was in our party. After he’d greeted us all, we helped the Soldier inside, not that he welcomed our care. Fred told Dandy that he and Yandi and I were fine to sleep in our swags till morning.

  ‘But what b-brings you here?’ Dandy wanted to know, suspecting the composition of the party indicated a special visit.

  ‘Leave it till morning, my boy,’ said Fred. ‘Leave everything till morning.’

  ‘Do you know, Soldier?’ asked Dandy of his old mate.

  Not wanting to answer the question, Staples clutched his side as if it were under new pressure to open.

  ‘What is it, S-Soldier?’ Dandy asked, and Staples pleaded, ‘For God’s sake, just let me rest, Dandy.’

  That seemed to work, so we put the horses in the yard and there was no more talk between man and man, or man and God, for that night. We were soon all abed, inside the hut and out, and the risk to Soldier’s side and to Dandy’s composure was for now averted.

  An Australian bird that starts the dawn with a gargling sound woke me from profound sleep with confused dreams of classrooms and impenetrable algebraic and geometric formulae mixed in with Latin declensions. When we got up we had some more damper with sliced mutton and tea for breakfast, with Dandy’s curiosity held at bay by his need to make sure the Soldier’s plate was amply provisioned.

  After we’d eaten, Fred Bonney took Yandi and me aside and asked us to start the mob of sheep onto the next waterhole at Myer’s Creek, saying, ‘I will simply acquaint Dandy with the news and then come on after you. That way, Dandy will have had time to digest his situation once we return this evening.’ Fred then spoke in Paakantji to Yandi.

  We said our goodbyes to Dandy and Staples and – with dogs yelping happily about us, frantically enthusiastic to be of help – we started mustering the horde of sheep, doing work that Dandy would probably never do again now that he was Lord Yellowmead. Yandi, with neither self-consciousness nor malice, took over the command of the colonial sheepdogs, releasing them with one whistle round either flank of the large mob, and whistling in a different intonation to bring them back to the rear of the flock. The joy the dogs took in their ferocious energy was a wonder to behold. Larkin had been training me in the whistled orders for, blacksmith though he was, he had grown up on a sheep station and knew how to control sheepdogs, though I doubted I would ever become as skilled as Yandi.

  We made good, steady progress, and barely an hour and a half had passed before Fred Bonney caught up with us and spoke to Yandi a little while. I took over the marvellous business of commanding the dogs, who, remarkably, responded exactly to my set of learned and practised whistles.

  Fred rode up to me after a few minutes and said, ‘Dandy will take the day to think about his news.’ And he intoned, ‘Ill fares the land, to hastening ills a prey, Where wealth accumulates, and men decay . . . Oliver Goldsmith. True eighty years back, true now. But a fellow could be just, I think. Dandy could be just.’

  From the west and into our path, a group of watching natives materialised. It seemed to be a large family group. There were a number of young men carrying two or three spears each, with many other implements tucked into their grass belts. In their midst was an older man with full hair and a beard. There was also a boy of perhaps ten, near-naked and holding a club, and several smaller children, including infants in pouches of kangaroo skin on their mothers’ backs. They were all standing, except for an older woman, wrapped in a blanket, who had taken the chance to drop to her haunches.

  As Fred and I drew to a halt, Yandi rode up to the line of people and dismounted. He said nothing. At last the older of the two men raised his hand and began speaking.

  ‘These are the Wanyawalku. They speak the same language as our people,’ said Fred, watching the encounter closely. ‘They’re a shy people. The name of the old man talking to Yandi is Barrakoon. He is a purist and won’t live on any station. His wife is from further west still. I think he might have got her from her people on a wife raid.’ At the same time as Fred informed me, two little yellow birds fluttering near him seemed to be informing him.

 
The old man now reached out for Yandi’s hand and led him away from the others as they talked. Yandi talked back, his head bowed to the old man, only sometimes raising his eyes to him. Then the old man took hold of Yandi by both shoulders with the appearance of true affection and bent his head until it touched Yandi’s breast.

  ‘Hold my horse, and command the dogs to keep the sheep contained,’ Fred told me, handing me his reins then dismounting and walking in the direction of the old man. The yellow birds scattered about him, and the women began to shrill with the pleasure of this, very like people who’d heard of this trick before and were now having it confirmed before their own eyes.

  As the old man greeted Fred there was something liquid about the way he spoke his language. After he’d finished, Fred laid his head down on the breast of the old man with the greatest solemnity. A necessary cycle had clearly been completed. More conversation followed in what looked like some sort of treaty-making, after which Fred walked over to the group and greeted everyone, taking out some grain to feed each yellow bird for the amusement of the party. Meanwhile, at what seemed the behest of Fred, Yandi walked over and slit the throat of one of the young ewe lambs, letting the blood drain and then carrying the carcass to the family. Everyone resumed their separate ways, with Yandi taking over the sheep again and Fred coming back to me.

  ‘I offered them the hospitality of Momba, Plorn, but they have had a bad experience with South Australian troopers and want to make away northwards to be quit of them. They’ll negotiate their way and camp amongst a people named the Karengapa up Wanaaring way.’