Homebush Boy

by Keneally, Thomas

  We waited to receive exemplary punishments for our behaviour at the dance, but the only penalty that was imposed was the most obvious – there would be no dance the following year. A saner system might have imposed a different penalty altogether – a compulsory monthly dance, something to de-mystify women and prepare us to be fit lovers and husbands. But I believed at the time that we sixteen-year-old victims of Jansen were getting what we deserved. I deserved it for trying to take Bernadette Curran’s hand so importunately. Everyone else deserved it for his own shameful reason. Shame, in fact, was inescapable. Every man was a liar and a luster. If then I had been given the choice for life between producing children through passion and explicit sexual feeling, or producing them merely by reading GMH to one’s beloved – I have to confess that under those particular prevailing winds I would have chosen the latter.

  V

  Mystical, penitential, angular Father Byrne was moved out of Strathfield parish to Lewisham, six stops closer to Sydney down the Western Line. Many said they were going to follow him there for Sunday Mass, since he said Mass like a saint, and Monsignor Loane said it like an accountant. I was not aware though that anyone really took the trouble of catching the train to Lewisham for that purpose. Uttering the idea itself stood as an adequate statement of discontent at Father Byrne’s being moved by the Cardinal to another parish.

  Father Byrne himself would have frowned on the cult of personality. Amongst his new jobs, he told all of us boys on the next vocation-hunting safari to St Pat’s, was chaplaincy of the nearby Little Company of Mary Hospital. I knew the hospital well. I had my tonsils out there, in a room of other etherized children. Fighting against the ether swab, waking weakened, succumbing to pneumonia, and being nursed by a tall Irish nun in white and blue. It was easy to imagine Father Byrne keeping a vigil for sick children, sick women, or bringing around at their last gasp decayed, agnostic old men.

  Father Byrne was on the front line in another sense too. Lewisham Hospital was a prime target for Campbell’s Raiders. Every night now, Mr Frawley told me on one of my visits to the house, two men kept watch in the convent garden armed with lengths of pipe or cricket bats. The nuns had the number of the meat wholesaler in Homebush who could gather a flying squad of six or eight groupers to come to the convent’s rescue within a quarter of an hour.

  On a further visit to Saint Pat’s, Father Byrne – talking to Fifth Year as a whole – asked us to pray for a particular patient at Lewisham Hospital. She was a girl from the bush. She’d had an ulcer grow on her leg and it had entered the bone. Her future did not look good. Only eighteen years old, but very bitter! She said the usual things – nuns were cruel; the Pope claimed to be infallible, but if so why couldn’t he pick the winner of the Melbourne Cup. And she didn’t believe in life after death. She was pleasant enough apart from that, and let him pray with her sometimes. She showed no awareness, he said, of the mortal peril of her soul.

  I suppose that some of us, told of this dark, tragic girl from the bush, whose shinbone had grown cancerous, imagined how we might with our Fix-a-Flexed hairdos and our crooked smiles bring her around. Even morbidly imagined – since such scenes were part of the mythology of our upbringing – her dying grateful, going beautiful to God with our names on her lips.

  People became aware that Father Byrne was travelling broadly throughout the Western suburbs of Sydney, garnering prayers for this poor doomed girl. My mother heard about it in a sermon Father Byrne gave at Benediction. Every supporter of Father Byrne between Stanmore and Granville was praying for the girl from the bush with the cancerous leg.

  At the beginning of the Sydney winter, when I was working on the Newman essay and making up my mind whether to try for the Firsts and Seconds Rugby League team or keep a divine distance, it was announced that Father Byrne was coming back to Strathfield parish to say a special Mass of thanks. For his patient had not only returned to the faith, but had been astoundingly cured! St Martha’s Church was packed for the event. It was nearly as big as a basilica anyhow, and distinguished by a huge mural of the Assumption of the Virgin Mary in the half-dome behind the high altar. People came to be uplifted and challenged by the news, to hear Father Byrne’s sonorous Latin. My father liked priests who got into the Mass, sliced through the litany like a buzz saw and let him out after forty minutes. But I, like Father Byrne, was a lover of sonorous Latin. I attended this Mass with my mother, making the long walk up Homebush Road.

  We noticed that in the front row sat a young woman, pleasant-faced, dressed in a blue blouse, white skirt and white cardigan. Her leg was bandaged and she smiled a lot. She was obviously the redeemed girl. As Father Byrne said in his sermon, not referring to her by name or gesture as she tilted her face ecstatically towards the pulpit, her bone cancer had disappeared, and the wound left by the ulcer was clean and was healing even as we spoke.

  Outside afterwards, talking to Mangan and the Frawleys, we saw her emerge, helped along by the middle-aged woman who had sat beside her. People did not talk to her, and some looked bleakly at her, almost in the way the ignorant looked at Matt. Her miraculous cure made her an outsider as well as a wonder. Homebush Road nonetheless brimmed with miraculous hope. With a faint limp, and in the company of her middle-aged attendant, she moved off in the direction of Strathfield Station to catch the train back to Lewisham. There, everyone seemed to know, she was living in the hospital but praying with the novices. It was now near certain that her life was mapped out.

  I must say again, lest this sound too much like the account of some sect even more frantic than we were, that there was a lot of pity for people who were as God-marked as Father Byrne and this girl. No one except lunatics like myself wanted to have these experiences. They were out of kilter with the sunny suburb, at odds with the genius loci of Homebush/Strathfield on the edge of the age of Rock and Roll.

  Mr Frawley, who knew people close to Father Byrne in Lewisham Parish, who had also been close to him in Strathfield, later told us a gloss on the tale. Late one night, just before the recovery of the girl from the bush became known, while Father Byrne prayed in Saint Thomas’s Lewisham, in a church long vacated by his more worldly colleagues, he had actually suffered a vision of the Virgin Mary. Once more, a mixed blessing in itself. The officials of the Church did not approve of visions and treated them with extreme scepticism. They put a burden of proof on the person claiming to have witnessed them, subjected them to all manner of tests and examinations, suspected them of demonic possession. And all this before such psychiatric terms as hysteria or schizophrenia had come into common usage in the church; that is, long before Freud’s breath was felt on conventional Catholic orthodoxy.

  Mr Frawley himself pitied Father Byrne the way people pity a lone polar explorer who perishes of his vision. In that, again Mr Frawley was not at all like a member of a charismatic sect, who having seen others talk in tongues wants to talk in tongues himself.

  Father Byrne was now under as much suspicion as eccentric Monsignor Leonard, who came to Strathfield sometimes to say Mass and who gave away his shoes or his coat to vagrants or dipsos. Christ’s counsels in this regard were in most people’s minds not designed for literal interpretation in Homebush Road. A baroque extreme of vision in a non-Italianate locale – that was the inherent problem of what Father Byrne had seen.

  At the very time of his vision, the sleeping girl from the bush woke up in the nearby hospital with a new feeling of well-being, and called the night sister, a nun who looked at the dressings and became a witness to the sudden, unexplained remission the girl was now in. The wound amazingly gone!

  This remarkable, imagination-hijacking event nonetheless needed to share the early Sydney winter with other questions. The question for example of Rugby League. At St Pat’s – as already intimated – we played rugby-à-treize, thirteen-a-side Rugby League, which in Eastern Australia was the chief game and which was largely our map of heroism and the universe. Running with and passing bladders filled with air to teammates was to
sport what GMH was to poetry, what Bernadette Curran was to ethereal beauty. The Brothers taught us to play splendidly; lightning backline movements, determined forwards. St Pat’s teams were always bringing back State Championships from the August knock-out competitions at the Sydney Cricket Ground. I had participated in one such victory the year before, in a team coached by Brother Markwell, a lean Queenslander who tended to admire the industrial groupers.

  In the eight-stone team – that is, the one hundred and twelve pound weight limit – we had been sublimely schooled and disciplined. The ball rattled out along the back line into the hands of a boy centre who would later play for the Australian national Rugby team, the Wallabies. Then, after drawing his man, that is, sucking in the defender and committing him to a tackle, the future Wallaby would give it to our winger, who was a future Commonwealth Games sprinter.

  We had played the game which qualified us for the final on the prodigiously sacred turf of the Sydney Cricket Ground, and then had beaten a Marist Brothers team on the Sydney Cricket Ground Number Two, winning the trophy by a single try. This was a wilder success than I’d ever imagined in my asthma-ridden pre-pubescence.

  Now – at the beginning of a new season – I was all set up to try out for halfback or five-eighth (the English called if fly-half) for the First XIII.

  My father had been a great five-eighth on the Northern Rivers of New South Wales. Late into my manhood, old gents with sun cancers on their faces would come up to me and tell me how good he had been. One of them once said, ‘He was one of the best five-eighths I ever saw, but he used to come the knuckle.’ He had a reputation for putting in punches on the blind side, safe from the referee’s gaze. He was always a fiery man, and even much later in his old age, walking with a stick, was willing to take on people who offended him. Willing to come the knuckle.

  My father had played in four premiership teams for Taree Old Bar Rugby League Club, an awesome outfit in the bush in the 1930s, one that was not beyond stacking its team with famous visiting players from Sydney, offering them an introduction to the local girls and a skinful of beer. He also played for Central Kempsey. Once, when his Irish mother was very ill, his sisters had asked him not to play, but he had anyhow and dislocated his collarbone. He hid the fact from them and carried the injury untreated. In my childhood he still carried a strange socket in his collarbone, from a peculiar way the bones settled themselves.

  The trial for the First XIII was to be played on the oval itself, before interested spectators – parents, brothers, the occasional exquisite Santa Sabina girl. Curran came down for games on the oval on a Sunday afternoon – it was only a three hundred yard walk from the bungalow where the Curran women stored their beauty and cleverness.

  My father had been so proud of me approximating his earlier competence in the game that in the past few years he often invited his cousin Pat, who was the family’s success, a graduate of Sydney University and a lawyer in the western suburb of Granville, to see me play.

  As the Christian Brothers of Ireland had made a long journey to Australia, so had this Northern English game, Rugby League. In Huddersfield, Yorkshire in 1893, a number of interested parties had separated away from the Rugby Union, which we liked to call with inverse snobbery ‘the gentlemen’s and dilettantes’ game’, and formed a new league which enabled workers from the mine and the mill to be paid for the time they lost in playing the game, and to be compensated for injury. It took more than a decade for League to move on to Sydney, where the great Test batsman, Victor Trumper, was one of its earliest promoters. In eastern Australia the teams which went over to Rugby League became the most popular, crowd-pulling teams. Rugby League remained a working-class, Christian Brothers sort of game. The grammar schools which were an imitation of Eton and Harrow, and the Jesuit Schools which imitated Stonyhurst, played the original Rugby, the fifteen-men-a-side game, itself a marvellous version of football too and one I would later come to love with almost equal passion.

  This evolution and social context of the game of Rugby League led to my running onto the oval on a given Sunday, wearing a jersey of black and white hoops, convinced of the significance of what I was doing and observed by my hopeful father and his cousin Pat.

  I found it hard to get going in that game. I had a sense that my tackling was more than adequate, but I felt leaden-footed in attack. Brother Markwell had taught me to watch the direction people’s legs were stepping – in talented footballers, a step off the right or left foot could take the hips away from where you were sure they were. Due to this training, I brought some big lads down but didn’t make much headway when I had the ball, and despite my best efforts, didn’t often get near the ball either.

  A Freudian would say that I was awed by the presence of these two old warriors, my father and Pat.

  After the game, Dinny McGahan told me that he would start me at five-eighth in the Thirds just for the moment. He was sure that I could work my way up to the Seconds if I got back some of my form of the previous year. Walking home by the normal long route – Matt’s, the Frawleys’, orating, referring to poetry, discussing Graham Greene’s new novel The Heart of the Matter with Mr Frawley – I was near to making up my mind not to bother playing this climactic year. It was partly vanity – the ignominy of starting in the Thirds. But there was wisdom to it also. I was busy enough. My companionship with Matt already kept me occupied. I could claim resurgent asthma, from which I had been thankfully free for the past four years. Each of the Brothers knew it had been the curse of my earlier adolescence, and that I had very nearly died from a bout of it in Kempsey at the age of five.

  The next day I approached Dinny McGahan and told him the lie. He who had introduced me to the history of Fascism, to the Anschluss, to the courses of World War I and World War II.

  ‘Brother,’ I said (I’d given up the diminutive ‘Bra’ commonly used by younger boys and by the farting-and-innuendo crowd), ‘I think I’d better miss Rugby League this year. I’ve got the asthma coming back.’

  I may even have quoted Dr Buckley, our local physician, who had brought me out of earlier attacks and spoken calmly to my mother. Since Buckley treated the Brothers and the nuns for free, his name operated as an impeccable medical authority.

  I would regret not having the humility to play in the Thirds. All my life I have retained a curiosity about whether I would have been good enough for the Seconds or even the Firsts. The Seconds were pretty good players after all.

  In any case my winter was now clear. I had no excuse for not by year’s end writing poetry as sublime as GMH’s, no excuse for not training with Matt until he was ready to run against boys his own age for not or achieving some other form of transcendence.

  Sleek Monsignor Loane was enraged by the very book Mr Frawley and I had already discussed. The Heart of the Matter was doing great business and even Pelligrini’s Devotional Bookseller had it on sale. Monsignor Loane and other parish priests would quickly enough give it a bad reputation.

  ‘It has nothing,’ said Monsignor Loane from his pulpit, ‘no merits in terms of plot comparable say to the great Sir Walter Scott or Charles Dickens. The concerns of its central character, a British District Officer in an African colony, seem to be predominantly to do with fornication and the destruction of a Catholic marriage. This novel holds out an apparently theologically sound theory that even the soul bent on self-destruction can be redeemed in the last seconds of its existence. The fact remains that God extends his mercy only to those who have shown good will at some point of their lives, and not to a man like this District Officer who shows nothing but callousness at every stage. This book exploits the concept of redemption and sanctifying grace as if it were a party trick. I urge all parishioners under conscience to advise their families and friends against its seductive argument. The new edition of the life of Saint Therese of Lisieux makes better and more valid reading.’

  ‘But I’ve already read the Greene book,’ I said to Mangan and the Frawley girls outside.

 
‘Well, of course you have,’ said Rose Frawley.

  ‘You can’t be scrupulous about it,’ Mangan advised me, laying his bright brown medieval eyes upon me. Perhaps he saw that I already had the beginnings of a neurotic scrupulousness.

  I think they all knew that I had the makings of a possible zealot. In a remote city, in a former colony not yet fully recovered from colonial status, I feared I had caused some lesion in the universe by reading a book condemned by Monsignor Loane, a priest whom – unlike Father Byrne – I didn’t particularly respect. For a second in that sun-drenched year so rich with promise, I suddenly feared the loss of myself through the reading of the book, exactly the way GMH feared the loss of himself if the huge grandeur of his poetry were released on the world. He didn’t want his poems on his slate when he faced the great cosmic sifting.

  Graham Greene had succumbed to a typical and blessed writer’s temptation of writing about the mysteries of mercy as they bore on the souls of the weak, the venal, the concupiscent. According to the Monsignor, while pretending to be devoutly Catholic, Greene was tainted with secularism, with the adoration of the things of the age – science preferred to theology, modernism preferred over works of the Fathers of the Church, and repentance after fornication preferred to chastity.

  The Church made it all very hard for writers and readers, if you took its edicts literally. The Vatican had its Index of Prohibited Works which included such apparently harmless tales as Alexander Dumas’ The Three Musketeers, on the list presumably because of its bias against Cardinal Richelieu and its romanticizing of duelling. Secularism was everywhere, and those books in which it was presented had the immediate honour of being put on the Index.

  The next Saturday night I went up to St Martha’s again, entered the confessional and confessed, not to Monsignor Loane but to the curate, that I had read a Graham Greene novel. I knew it was no grave matter but couldn’t help confessing it, as if behind my exultance in life lay a thin-lipped fanatic. ‘That’s not necessarily a bad thing,’ he said. ‘It’s a Christian duty to inform yourself, as long as you balance it with devotional reading to protect yourself mentally from some of the things portrayed.’