Last Words

by Dickins, Barry

  Carol Hodson, the Christian daughter of George the dead prison officer, prays more earnestly than you could ever credit – than you could ever believe possible. Night and day she is at it, praying like it’s going out of fashion for the sparing of a man who she understands was incapable of shooting her much-mourned father. Down upon her knees she goes, again and again, to deliver better constant Christian prayers.

  She also leads a delegation, a march through Melbourne that protests loudly and long. She is the daughter of the slain guard and yet she speaks out against the hanging and, when Ronald hears of the stand she has taken, he is smitten by what good there is in people, even the last ones that you might expect.

  He kneels as a supplicant himself with the ratty old bible in his claw and prays right through each sodden and mildewed page. He knows each one by heart and understands that each reading is not that far off his last, but still gets comfort from every word. Just the physical grip of its covers can be enough to cheer him up and he hopes his eyes don’t keep on with their unwanted and incessant annoying watering, so that they waterlog his sweet Lord. Two days now, it is, before he sees any sort of common or miraculous light and meets very personally the exact replica of love and Jesus he has been praying for.

  But the long hours he so fervently and willingly devotes to his praying are performed amidst screams of protest coming from hills and grass on the slopes of vantage points around Coburg Gaol where people cannot possibly bear what he must bear in his stride. Not that there shall be many of them, it is six full strides to the trapdoor from where they shall lead him at exactly eight in the morning in a few days’ time.

  How punished is he by now and how corrected, if this be the proper house of correction and physical reform, if not metaphysical resurrection? All he really knows is what he sees and that which he sees, he trusts on sight. The friendly hum of the Holy Family is all he sees now that the jig is up and the only way forward is to die like a man. A real man in his own hard-fought-for opinion wouldn’t shirk – and so neither shall he.

  Chapter 12

  BACK IN 1992, when I received a commission from the Playbox Theatre Company to write a play about the life of Ronald Ryan, I was given the opportunity to interview the then-governor of Pentridge, as well as lots of officers, about the 1965 breakout. It all went rather swimmingly, I thought at first, as I listened most carefully to various officers and made copious notes and taped conversations with the approval of the governor.

  Then, at about five in the afternoon or thereabouts, I had the great privilege of being shown how the scaffold worked. Everything was still in operation at the time, and I was shown through each phase of its wonders. I saw firsthand just how the heavy trapdoor fell away, and how the body on top would fall through to a priest standing there below to administer the last rites. I heard how the corpse would eventually be declared dead – no longer animated by any last vestige of life – and then be taken to the prison mortuary. And I guess that I was grateful for all of the help being given to me for the good of the new stage play.

  The odd aspect of it was that, just after I inspected the scaffold and was shown the mechanisms of rope and gallows, the group of mostly silver-haired guards took me to one side, well away from the governor and other sorts of authority figures. The same guards who had seemed so convivial, and so happy to discuss the great escape, and who asked what theatre company was to premiere my play and a hundred other things besides, suddenly closed in on me and started to shove me into a darkened corner, baring their teeth so they resembled mad dog fangs.

  Then they beat me up. As I struggled to my feet, they kicked me back into the dusty corner once more and they endeavoured to tear up my notes. They cuffed my face and pulled my beard; then some of them punched my face hard. I was kneed and spat upon until I feared for my life, though I eventually escaped through the reception area pretty much in one piece.

  I ran to a vandalised phone box in old Champ Street and, in tears, made a local call.

  Jill Smith, the general manager of the Playbox Theatre Company in South Melbourne, swiftly answered. ‘You sound different. What’s happened to you?’ I put some more coins in the phone and told her the prison officers had beat me up for asking too many questions; what other reason might there be?

  She said, ‘No matter what you do, you include all the mean things they said to you as they bashed you, and put them in your play to make it credible.’

  I assured her I would and later I did and I’m sure some scenes vastly improved because of it.

  The real words the real guards used on me were hard fought for because my bruises only made me more determined to get the story on to stage and page and to display the meanness of spirit that was still alive and kicking out at Coburg Gaol. Some historians believe it is worth remembering; and they’re right, if the truth is told.

  Dorothy sits down at her home and writes again to Ronald. Her second husband is fighting for his life due to some mystery illness and may in fact predecease Ronald.

  But he won’t leave this world with the same kind of publicity. Ronald by now is a kind of superstar figure of notoriety, particularly on slow news days when journalists use his name and situation to brighten up their pages.

  Once, when I was a columnist there, I was looking at some old yellowing newspaper cuttings in the library of the Herald Building. I came across a certain gossip page in reasonably good condition pasted into a book or a folder to do with what Melbourne was up to in the summer holidays of the year 1966. In amongst cuttings displaying the latest concerts by the Seekers and ads for saucy sports cars and hair oils, there was one feature story neatly snipped and glued that I shan’t ever forget. It included a poor-quality black-and-white shot of Ronald and the copy underneath went on about what leisure ideas the condemned man had to look forward to before he got hanged a few weeks hence. The story was a space-filler, pure and simple, because the editors had obviously run out of ideas to brighten up the pages. The condemned man was depicted as a laughing-stock for the temporary amusement of Christian readers.

  Having said that, this sort of thing still happens today: newspapers and current affairs shows still try to boost their sagging ratings with footage of murderers and rapists on their way to murder or rape – or outside courtrooms, bustling their iron-willed way past news cameras and crowds. The news stories of today dwell mostly on terrorists and mass killers and the voyeurism of where they got their guns from – on their playboy lifestyle, where they holiday and water ski. People innocently waiting at their general practitioner for a flu shot are made to wade through trash magazine stories about high school massacres right next to the comic strips and half-complete crossword puzzles.

  Bored folks find satisfaction as they flick through such trash, and are perfectly turned on when they see that terrific double-page spread in that women’s magazine showing the much overdue public hanging of Saddam Hussein. So they are slightly annoyed when they are called in to see their doctor, now their eagerness for capital punishment has been aroused. ‘Yes, yes, I’ll be there in a second!’

  Ronald, however, is off to the condemned cell, a place that I visited while researching my play. I saw his filthy old water-stained striped mattress on the bed frame, covered with rat shit and seagull feathers. His old blanket was still there, sort of folded and resigned; and his old phone book–hard flattened pillow still lay beside it. Ronald’s physiognomy was imprinted on it, like a mortal ghost.

  When he is collected to be hanged, he puts on his favourite black runners, doing up his long laces in neat double bows, and placing the beat-up Catholic Holy Bible back down on the bed frame. Doing precisely what he is being told, he then puts on his reasonably clean and fairly new white cotton T-shirt and walks, handcuffed and fettered with the officers and without a rehearsal, to do whatever it is they want him to do.

  Chapter 13

  IN A TINY room in her sepulchral home, Ronald’s old mum gets down upon her worn-out stumps of knobby knees, clasps her sun-freckl
ed wrists, her dilapidated palms, and closes her old, blackened-by-grief eyes. She asks yet again for her dear Lord Jesus to personally intervene and act to spare her beautiful son. Since it was she who donated creation to him in the very first instance, who better than her to plea for some sort of justice, or at least some forgiveness from heaven?

  But all she hears is Sydney Road traffic and cats and dogs and the barking of officers and the barking of Christians on the high hill overlooking Coburg Gaol. It would be rather pleasant if it rained, but the only moisture is from her eyes.

  She discovers a strange and unusual peace amidst those ever so-tightly-clasped country palms of hers when she deigns to do it as hard as she does this morning, with only the two days left of young Ronald.

  After a very lengthy serving of prayer, she eventually gets up and takes a peek at the note on her kitchen table that requires her enlarging spectacles. As she stares into the hurried handwriting, it becomes evident that Father John is coming here to the new home, the temporary flat near the gaol, and that he is going to walk with her all the way up Bourke Street in Melbourne. Miraculously, they have received an appointment to see Premier Henry Bolte – a last-ditch opportunity to have her boy spared. Just how that appointment came to life she has no idea at all but of course she will be ready when Father comes knocking.

  She is old, she is damaged, and she understands Ronald – or at least, she is pretty sure that she does. But if he really did kill Hodson, then she doesn’t know him at all: he is a perfect stranger to her; someone different; someone callous and cold.

  No. No. No! He is a good boy really, as she says to Dan Webb at Channel 7.

  She can’t quite recall, by the way, who it was that gave her the temporary flat near the gaol or who it is who keeps on stacking food in the freezer and leaving perfectly good milk on the tiny table top and other items such as butter and bread and even marmalade. But it has to be said that there are good people in the world. Probably, kindness is the one thing you will be ever remembered for, no matter what else you do with your days.

  She slowly dresses nice and proper for the priest, who she knows is never late. She swears a bit under her breath in the realisation that her old hair is so white and always crooked and it sticks up like a white cockatoo, or some sort of bush bird in shock.

  She pushes her stiffened hairbrush through it anyway, as best as she can, and splashes water over her eyes. Great big bush eyes, those eyes of hers. She’s a country lady with a country face, a face of humour and honesty and integrity. A face just like her three daughters who are all in hysteria over their brother’s fate. One of them, Gloria, is writing to the premier a kind of letter that should appeal to his heart – provided that he has one to appeal to. Here’s hoping, thinks Gloria.

  Father turns up at the flat right on time and they catch the city tram to Bourke Street together. Generous and a gentleman to boot, he shouts Mrs Ryan her single tram fare and when they come back she is slightly surprised that he repeats his kindness towards her and treats her to a ticket again on him. It’s not that he’s got much money; all he’s got is incredible front.

  He has always had confidence in himself, and you would need confidence in a parish like Pentridge Prison, I should think, with axe murderers at every nook and cranny and poisoners ready to pounce. Father is more than a match for any species of criminal and he knows the vilest on a first-name basis when he does his rounds of trying to put a bit of God in them.

  He takes his time when Ma runs right out of puff, and sometimes they sit on a bench on the concrete path to let her catch up a trifle with her shallow breathing, but in the end they make it to the wide curly stone steps of ancient parliament on the corner of Spring and Bourke streets: the corridors of political power where the powerless had best know their place. Father speaks soft and hushed to the tense concierge who speaks similarly soft and hushed to someone half an inch higher up the chain of command and they are both told to sit.

  They both obey instantly. There is no sort of greeting, let alone a nice drink of water for an old lady. The two simply sit there and say not a single word.

  Inside they can overhear things like lackeys whispering and the sounds of lifts going up, only to smartly come back down again. And more hushed voices and carpeted footsteps. The gentle emphysemic coughing of highly placed public servants. The occasional click of heels on cold parquetry.

  It is boring there but Father keeps examining his crisp, sharp white rectangular official appointment card with his important name on it and wonders why on earth they can’t be greeted in the first instance and then given a nice coffee to relax with before talking to Bolte – but nothing happens. They both trust that he will give them an hour at least and not the perfunctory few minutes you might otherwise expect from someone of such incalculable power and astonishing importance.

  More time passes, but still nothing happens. Only more hushed voices as the concierge whispers away into his terribly crucial host of telephones, and ministers arrive with their smooth, silky smiles: all beautiful suits and bright teeth. Only the burr of long-unanswered telephones and the hum of the lift and the carrying of hot teacups to people elsewhere.

  Ma asks Father if, somehow or other, someone’s forgotten them but, with his famous wink, he assures her that that’s out of the question, as Henry Bolte is a man of his word. He just wouldn’t – and indeed couldn’t – break such an appointment as this. Slowly and methodically explaining to Ma the exact nature of such a promise, Father flicks the important-looking ivory appointment card her way and she puts on her cracked reading glasses and feels reassured. Soon the premier will be chatting to her about her son, who is in such a pickle you wouldn’t read about it. But he’s a good boy, really.

  Businessmen and ministers in fantastically costly clothes make their way to and fro reception. Lobbyists lobby and cleaners clean and servants put teacups on trolleys. Visitors sign in and then sign out again and Father and Ma are completely and utterly ignored as though they are both quite invisible.

  ‘It’s well after eleven!’ says Father, looking at the big gold watch on his left wrist, and then at the overhead clock. It is in fact 11.25.

  He has the right day but asks a minor-looking official to confirm it, and the instantaneous reply is the last day of January of the year 1967. Father again stares unhappily at his watch and listens to its tick and says, ‘I hope that we don’t have to wait too much longer.’

  Busy delivery boys deliver important notes. Telegrams to be read in a trice then screwed up in less than a trice are belting through, along with things that need to be signed instantly. Even taxi drivers, the lowest of the low in our society apart from criminals, are being seen to but nothing happens and it is a quarter to twelve and very nearly midday and no one recognises Father or Ma and the whole thing is ridiculous.

  Father politely crosses to the front desk and inquires as to the delay and the bored guy there looks at his card. He makes a slow telephone call to the Department of the Premier and mumbles and mutters for a couple of seconds. Then he replaces the big black important-looking phone on its cradle and says that the appointment’s been cancelled.

  Father lets him know just how he feels about that but the guy couldn’t care less and suggests they try to make another appointment. As she blows her sore old red bush nose several times in her big bush handkerchief, her eyes play up with unexpected watering and so they have to leave.

  They go the way they came, down busy Bourke Street, both feeling not so great. They have to walk to Swanston Street together and hop on the tram together and go home together and Father swears under his breath and Ma just stares at nothing and prays that another appointment shall be given as soon as is practicable.

  She kisses Father lightly on his unshaven right cheek: he forgot to have a ‘Dad and Dave’ this morning in his eagerness to talk things over with the premier. And he pecks Ma on her right cheek too and they part with nary another word.

  Father briskly walks across to the manse w
here Governor Grindlay is talking to his son, Ian Grindlay Junior, who, just like Ronald, is a pretty good cyclist. Ian asks his father if he could have a few minutes with Ronald, and, to the son’s surprise, the governor arranges it.

  Before long, Ian Junior is in quiet conversation with Ronald, although with a guard also present in the cell. After a bit of shyness, a silence that’s natural enough between two chaps of such completely different backgrounds, they chat about long-distance cycle events and Ronald is most encouraging of the younger man and there is even chuckling at a few points when Ronald discusses the road genius of ‘Fatty Lamb,’ the greatest cyclist he’s ever seen ride.

  This laughter so novel in the never-ever-chuckling cell, it catches the warders by surprise. They glare at the two men who are speaking in the most friendly way about riding bikes all over Victoria and swapping anecdotes thick and quick. The great feeling only ever alters when the visiting time is deemed over and Ian Junior asks, extremely sweetly, how Ronald is feeling. How is he coping in such a difficult position as this? This is a hard thing to say but Ian is of high conscience and believes he must say what he is feeling to the condemned prisoner.

  ‘Well’, says Ronald as he shakes Ian Junior’s hand extremely firmly (and the handshake of Ian Junior is just as firm, by the way), ‘I am someone who comes from a fairly difficult background and I have always managed to improvise my way out of any awkward position’.

  They smile and, as Ian Junior quits the cell, Ronald winks at him. He has always given strangers a wink, not that he’s ever known why.

  Chapter 14

  MA IS SITTING watching the news at six on her black-and-white telly, wondering whether they will let him off, or do something unexpected like that. A pardon seems almost possible due to all of the screaming upset protestors, and university students rampaging around the gigantic gaol. Somewhere obscured within it is her son, Ronald, who she knows is perfectly innocent. ‘I love me broth,’ she says to nobody there, as she sips her tinned vegetable soup.