Homebush Boy

by Keneally, Thomas

  Buster Clare, responsible for half our success in the Leaving Certificate, was a very different man from Brother McGahan. He was large and muscular with a grizzled head, and in another life might have been a very forceful cop. His soutane was older and had less black in it than Dinny’s and didn’t fit him as well. Maybe he’d inherited it from a Brother who had died. The sash, which the more demonstrative brothers sometimes raised and held in their left hand as they spoke, looked very small in proportion to Buster’s rugged body.

  His pedagogic methods were simple: you had to recite the text off by heart for Buster. No extra marks for reading a biography of Napoleon or Metternich in your free time if you didn’t get Robert’s right down to the last preposition. And if you didn’t, he would come down and ironically call you mavourneen (which I believe means darling in Gaelic) and declare you a fool and cuff your ear.

  He would say too, ‘I don’t think we’ll do the Second Empire this year. It was on the last two Leaving exams in a row.’

  He loved this gambling on what would be on. He would say, ‘I tipped twelve questions from the last Leaving Cert, mavourneen. So you just learn it the way I tell you, and then perhaps you won’t end up shovelling sand for Strathfield Council as you deserve.’

  Of course, you could play Pass History that way. But you needed the urbanity of Dinny McGahan to get through Honours History.

  When we told the Frawley girls and Bernadette Curran about the way Brother Buster Clare ran his Pass History classes, they thought it was all pretty strange. The Dominican nuns who taught them weren’t punters and wouldn’t skip the Second Empire no matter how often it had been on the paper recently.

  ‘It’s all part of an education,’ La Belle Curran told us once when she was at the Frawleys. She said it matter-of-factly, not with airs. She seemed to me to have no airs at all, and to be calm in all circumstances. My job was to evince some huge response from her. How to get it was connected to the pyrotechnics of GMH which I carried around over my heart.

  Once we were all at our desks in Fifth Year Blue, we started the day with Dinny McGahan’s Pass English. The New South Wales curriculum, Silas Marner, the fairly wimpy Richard II, a monarch so studiedly hapless that even Mangan and I, as much as we wanted to, found it hard to identify with him. And then Romantic poets.

  St Agnes’ Eve – Ah, bitter chill it was!

  The owl, for all his feathers, was a-cold;

  The hare limp’d trembling through the frozen grass,

  And silent was the flock in woolly fold.

  Hardly an indication in Pass English that there were twentieth-century novels, or that letters had in any way taken root in Australia. That news lay like a secret between the Honours English boys, Larkin, Mangan and Keneally, and Brother Dinny McGahan. Matt Tierney of course was in on the secret too, from listening to Mangan and me rave on about T.S. Eliot and Murder in the Cathedral and Graham Greene’s Brighton Rock and GMH. I’m sure Dinny McGahan said extra prayers for us each morning, having exposed us to the theological doubt of Graham Greene’s novels, and to the secularism of Eliot and Auden.

  At twenty to ten, Dinny and Buster would switch rooms with each other. Buster would come in to our room, Fifth Year Blue, the room devoted more to the Humanities than Fifth Year Gold, whose strong suit was Maths and the Sciences. Under Buster, we Physics Pass and Maths Pass boys were the primitives now. Since we believed more in other things, including the thirteenth century, the greatest of all, the century of the troubadours, Mangan and I had cut ourselves off from half the glory and drama of our own century by eschewing Maths I and Maths II and doing the Sciences cursorily. We didn’t see the Honours Physics Buster taught next door to his select body of students as in any way connected with the giant facts of the world anyhow, with the awful atomic wonders Joe Stalin meant to bring down on our heads.

  I was aware that Matt certainly had the gifts for Honours this and Honours that. Honours was good to do because it gave you automatic stature as a brain. Matt had the capacity to be a brain whether in the Arts or the Sciences. But the Braille library didn’t have the books for him yet. They didn’t even have Silas Marner in Braille. He was the first blind boy ever to need Silas Marner and Richard II, and so he was creating the demand, and the supply always lagged behind him.

  Mangan never knew the passages Brother Buster Clare wanted memorized. ‘History was never meant to be à-la-Clare,’ Mangan had said to me grandly at the start of the year.

  ‘Why don’t you learn it anyway?’ I asked him. ‘It only takes a few minutes.’

  Mangan pursed his broad and yet delicate lips. ‘I won’t enter into a conspiracy with Buster to belittle Napoleon with memorized lines and such.’

  Mangan would therefore spend nearly the entire year standing on the rostrum within reach of Buster for easy cuffing over the ears.

  ‘Mavourneen, you are the most wilful, stubborn and immensely stupid student I have had in twenty years. Are you too good for Robert’s Modern History? You say you are, mavourneen? What did you say? Did you say you are?’

  I used to see a composure, a serenity, and contentment of a kind on Mangan’s face as Buster Clare boxed his ears, still calling him mavourneen, that ironic Celtic endearment.

  Mangan had always been like this. I had seen him take beatings and humiliations because of some inscrutable point of honour. For refusing to take interest in a cricket match say, and languidly turning his back on the game. Or for just being late, of course. You could see in Mangan’s rigid standards even when it came to being unpunctual the future monk who would sleep in his own coffin as a memento mori, and rise at three-thirty to sing Matins, before going out into frosty fields to milk or feed the beasts. Mangan was deliberately saving up all his punctuality for his grand monastic career, for a routine worth being routine about.

  In the meantime his lateness was legendary in Edgar Street. The year before, when our class had been in the Physics room, sitting at the long experiment benches under the tutelage of Brother Basher Bryant, there had occurred what I thought of as the crowning instance of Mangan’s unworldly lateness for plain events.

  Brother Bryant was choirmaster and fourth-year Physics teacher, and was not really so much more ferocious than anyone else despite his nickname. But he had put Mangan on a warning not to be late again. At nine-thirty one morning, the warned Mangan, heroically late, crept in the back door. Basher had his back to us and was writing some Physics formula on the blackboard. Mangan stood blushing, ready to surrender. But when Basher kept talking over his shoulder and did not turn, Mangan dropped to his knees, knee-walked in under the Physics bench with his school bag, and sheltered there. Those who saw this whispered, ‘Typical bloody Mangan.’ Dahdah, who was then still at St Pat’s and Matt’s familiar, filled Matt in on what had happened, and I saw Matt begin to laugh, turning a vivid, preternatural, tell-tale pink, as he always did when trying to suppress hilarity. Dahdah had, of course, whispering rights which were far more broad than those of my fellow pupils, but if he used them recklessly, Matt – who dwelt where pink was merely a notion – would unwittingly give him away like this.

  It has to be said that all those Australian adolescents, though they thought Mangan a dingbat, kept the convict code. Mangan could have sat there all day, his textbook out on his knees, unreported, invisibly following the lesson and noting down Basher’s homework requirements; if Basher had not come perambulating around the back of the room orating as he went. Thus he found Mangan, as fully employed as any student could be, but as so often wrongly and even grotesquely located. Mangan was ordered out. When Basher asked Mangan what he had been doing there, and whether he thought it was comic, Mangan said, ‘I was hiding out of embarrassment.’ This seemed to make Basher angrier, but I know Mangan was speaking the truth. He took six from the strap, the quintessential Christian Brother weapon, a number of strips of leather sewn together but with – according to an unreliable legend amongst school boys – a hacksaw blade included between the middle layers.


  Mythologizing about the strap occupied a great part of the time of younger Christian Brother boys. Some Brothers were rumoured to practise giving it in the secrecy of their cells. Some – we believed – stiffened the thing, others made it more flexible. (We were not, of course, aware of any Freudian imagery in our legend-making.) The Brothers had frequently enough told us that we boys and their own community were the totality of their world. We imagined, therefore, that they spent all their free time thinking of us, whether it be in terms of charity or of punishment.

  Yet it was through Basher Bryant that I had got a glimpse the year before of the fact that these men were indeed like others, and that like others they sought an existence of their own, that devotion to us was not their complete definition, and that the communal and institutional were not enough.

  Our group would sometimes take to the streets on Sunday. We did not want to break things or to ambush anyone. But ennui made us restive. We were looking for something Homebush and Strathfield were hiding from us, daring the sky to deliver the unexpected. Dahdah, who was already talking restively of being a seminarian, Mangan, Larkin and myself argued over the existence of God, for which there were some very nifty proofs in Sheahan’s Apologetics, a text we’d studied the year before. We would collect Matt Tierney on our way.

  We walked expatiating amongst the suburban bungalows. Mangan knew the Hound of Heaven by heart, and as we passed the low brick fences, would recite it as if it too were a proof.

  ‘I fled him down the labyrinthine ways of my own heart.’

  Even, and perhaps particularly in the rain were we likely to go walking. Mrs Tierney released Matt to our care as long as he wore his thin grey raincoat. But I had escaped the house without coat or hat. This was on the one-in-a-hundred chance that girls were encountered. The one-in-a-thousand that Curran somehow was out and about that afternoon. Curran would say, ‘He’s so distracted by sublime thought he doesn’t know it’s raining.’ Yet even I knew Curran was so stable she had that sense most of the young don’t – the sense to come in out of the rain.

  We would reach the school and sit for a while by the oval, looking at its vacant sabbath green. And then we would find ourselves moving amongst the buildings. Hoping for a glimpse of a Brother, of their lives without us. As we went we might recite Hamlet off by heart – it was our Shakespeare play for that year, and Brother Moose Davitt, who came from the same educational school as Buster, considered it safest if we learned every word by heart and Verity’s notes on the text as well.

  We had come to the Physics room that afternoon, and the door was mysteriously open. Our own room, open on a Sunday! In a society without theft we did not expect the worst, but there was no way we wouldn’t look in.

  Basher Bryant was there, at the top demonstration bench. He stood reflectively, a glass of whisky before him and a bottle by the sink. He saw us, put the glass at once in the sink, and came rushing towards us. He was brittly welcoming. ‘Hello, boys, how are you today?’ And we were anxiously smiling to explain ourselves away. ‘We’re just passing and saw the open door.’

  ‘Do you often come up here on Sundays?’ he asked, as if he wasn’t entirely pleased that we did.

  ‘Hard to keep away from the place, Bra.’

  That was the common form of address. ‘Bra’ for ‘Brother’. Another instance of the Australian passion for shortening words.

  But it was astounding what we had seen. Basher taking a private drink. Why did he need it? He had the company of the other Brothers. They occupied their hill in utter amity, a happy band. The comradeship was astounding, we were told by the Brother who came around to convince us to join. Why did Br Bryant need to drink solitary, severe liquor?

  Now I know what warnings I should have taken from the sight, and how he must have genially cursed us. Would we mention it to someone? he must have wondered. The principal, Brother Callan? Our parents? Of course, he did not recognize how odd we were, and how long we’d keep his banal, innocent little secret.

  The Brother who came around the classes now to urge us to consider succeeding Basher, Moose, Buster or Dinny in the Order’s ranks, had that task as a full-time job.

  ‘Ask yourself if God may not be sending you a signal. Look at the men who teach and guide you. Are you man enough to bear with them the vows of poverty, chastity and obedience. Remember this, the denial of a vocation will lead to the loss of your immortal soul. How many laymen out there plagued by drink and unhappiness, would have found salvation within the Brotherhood?’

  I tried to imagine whether my father, moving like someone laden with questions amongst the tomato stakes at the bottom of the yard at 7 Loftus Crescent, might have somehow been meant to be Brother Keneally?

  ‘I’ve known plenty of boys who have entered the Juniorate without knowing for certain whether they have a vocation, but in the spirit that it was better to find out than to lose one’s immortal soul. Those who find they are not then called are able to leave with honour and without reproach and with a clear sense of what God’s will is for them, and so to enter the holy state of matrimony without self-doubt.’

  Whenever Brothers mentioned the holy state of matrimony, I thought for some reason of a dark-complexioned girl in a blue dress. Not Bernadette Curran, strangely. I didn’t think of children nor did I think directly of sex. One perverse part of the daydream, sadly or not, was of how that essential girl would look when you told her, ‘I have a vocation.’ What drama in dull Strathfield. ‘I have to renounce you, for the sake of both our salvations.’

  I did not read the pallor and the normal lines of stress and neurosis in the faces of brothers and priests, though I was aware they were there and wondered why. I saw only myself with my Fix-a-Flexed hair in a week of no pimples renouncing the girl in the virgin blue dress, and we were both incandescent and as lovely and unearthly as a tapestry.

  I always knew I wouldn’t be a Brother though. I didn’t want to do the walk-away from the girl in the blue dress just to spend the rest of my life correcting kids’ homework and acting outraged because they hadn’t finished some essay. I looked to the bigger fights involving the priesthood – St Francis and nature, St Vincent and poverty, Pius XII and Communism. Sometimes in fantasy I was a monk of total silence, like Mangan would be. Sometimes I was a vocal pastor. Just once the girl in the blue dress saw me from a distance and was awed by something broader than our mutual splendour.

  But all that was a fantasy. I didn’t want to be a priest. I wanted to be a composer, a writer, an orator and possibly all three. But again, an occasional clerical fantasy. I was a priest, and women turned their eyes to me, sad for what I was and could not be for them.

  What I was certain about was that I did not want to be a Christian Brother. You didn’t get canonized, you didn’t become a bishop, and as far as I knew, you didn’t get your thoughts or your poetry widely published.

  A priest named Father Byrne did the bigtime recruiting, the recruiting for the seminary of the archdiocese of Sydney, from which ordained priests, not humble Brothers, emerged. The minor seminary was located at Springwood in the Blue Mountains, and was the institution into which Dahdah had recently vanished.

  Father Byrne the persuader was thin and ageless, though certainly not more than forty years. He was very pale but not with the paleness of disappointment. More the paleness of having prayed at night. He was not one of the surfing, tennis-playing, golfing curates Australians seemed to like for their human touch. There was something too challenging about him for that. He had come down from the mountain top where there weren’t any tennis courts, where scalding divine light hid every detail of the landscape.

  Even now I think he was wonder-struck with the doctrine of Transubstantiation, with what others mocked, the transformation of the substance of the bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ by the word of the priest.

  ‘This religion that makes cannibals of its members,’ The Rock would thunder. ‘They actually believe they eat the flesh and drink the bloo
d!’

  But we all had niftier minds than that. We ate the appearances of bread, the appearances of wine. How could outsiders fail to understand that? Malice was, of course, the answer.

  ‘By your word,’ Father Byrne would say to us. ‘By the word of an ordinary man. But are you an ordinary man? You’ve been transformed by ordination. You have given up the joy of the earthly generation of Christians so that Christ may make use of your words and thereby enter Christians under the guise of homely elements like bread and wine.’

  It was generally early in the year, when the humidity was strong and the blowflies were active, and before our plans for university were too settled, that the priests came to raise this other possibility. Some of them, a little more worldly than Father Byrne, appealed to ambition.

  ‘Imagine the pride of this school, its Brothers and students on the day you are ordained to the priesthood in St Mary’s Cathedral or even – in special cases – in St Peter’s Basilica in Rome. Imagine then the joy of this school and of your parents if you should be consecrated a Bishop. Imagine then further what it would be for St Pat’s if one of its sons was elevated to the College of Cardinals. For His Eminence Cardinal Gilroy attended an ordinary Brothers school and was an ordinary boy like you.’

  We had seen Cardinal Gilroy distantly, proceeding in his scarlet cap and facings and accompanied by auxiliary bishops and monsignors in purple, and by clergy of lesser plumage, at the opening of new churches and new schools. It was the truth! He was native born. He had a slightly beaky but identifiably Irish face which you might have found on a parent, but he had gravity as well, and he would vent his resident Australian voice in a pulpit orator’s delivery, which elevated its tones far above the utterance of ordinary people. Since his nomination as a Cardinal a year or two past, the newspapers ran occasional pieces about the likelihood of his being the next Pope.

  Again, a daydream! ABC Radio returning to ask aged Brothers and grownup former students what they remembered of the new Pope. What sort of boy was he? Asking the girl in the blue dress, who in her grief had scarcely aged, but was fixed in her blue adolescent loss. Asking Bernadette Curran and the Frawley girls. ‘There was something about him,’ Bernadette Curran would say. I saw her in this fantasy as barely aged too and wearing still her maroon Santa Sabina uniform.