Homebush Boy

by Keneally, Thomas

  The following Sunday the Currans had us all up to their little brick house at Strathfield for an afternoon tea. It was a kind of celebration and farewell. I did not take my GMH, what was the point? As we drank the tea and ate the Women’s Weekly’s best sponge cake – it was still an era where women felt ashamed to serve cake from a cake shop – Curran did not make much of her decision, although Rose Frawley kept talking about it excitedly. She still remarked continuously on the fact she and Bernadette Curran would be Dominican novices together. I began to see that this blustery, open-faced girl-woman had been genuinely and pathetically scared of the tests in front of her, amongst novices she had never seen before. Now she would be able to look across the choir stalls to a known face.

  Either Matt or Larkin the agnostic said, ‘Which one of you will be Mother Superior first?’ and we saw Mr Curran hide his face and turn his shoulder, which began to shudder. A shamed silence fell over everyone, and Mrs Curran went and laid a hand on his arm.

  In that second I knew that I was going too. The sense of seeing the rituals from the inside, the way GMH had, overtook me again, but now it did not fill me with terror. It was in part a matter of crazily knowing that grief could not be avoided, and this grief displayed by the Curran parents was purposeful and noble. In the Currans’ house at tea the richly-coloured skeins of motivation – a yearning for GMH’s God, a desire to serve, a desire to instruct, a taste for drama, a preference for fleshless love, an exaltation in the Latin rites. I would never be bored by them, I knew. I would never listen surreptitiously in the confessional, between penitents, to the Saturday races.

  So I walked home with Matt and Mangan knowing I would go. How the decision chastened, calmed and yet exhilarated me. I said nothing though, no longer a braggard. For a time I would imitate the style of the Currans and keep my decision secret. It struck me delightfully that I would have no bad news to announce to the Cardinal or Father Byrne, but I wondered how my father would take it.

  At last on an ordinary Tuesday morning at school, I told Matt. He turned to me with his face on its normal questing angle. A morning in October, the month I would turn seventeen. The wattle was out in vivid bloom and air was beginning to take on what the Romantic poets would have called a Lethean weight in preparation for the usual hot and humid Australian Christmas. We were reading Pass History on the verandah outside Fifth Year Blue, in pleasant shade.

  ‘Secular or monastic?’ asked Matt. What sort of priest would I be. Parish or in the cloister like Mangan.

  ‘I’m going into Springwood,’ I told him.

  ‘Good,’ he said. ‘So we’ll see you every Christmas.’

  Whereas Mangan would disappear for life. I would serve in a parish and go to Rugby League games. I wouldn’t be on a par with Mangan. I would never be a Trappist who kept custody of the tongue and spoke only on Christmas Day or in the extremest emergency. I would keep the more normal monastic silences of the diocesan seminaries at Springwood and Manly. But again, who said that a diocesan priest couldn’t write like GMH if he chose?

  I said, ‘I’m sorry, Matt. It means I won’t be beside you at university.’

  There was a little expulsion of breath and a faint reddening of his skin. ‘You couldn’t be anyhow, doing Law or Medicine.’

  ‘I would possibly have done Arts first.’ Would publish poetry, become renowned, and not have had to go any further.

  He said quietly, ‘They won’t let me go anyhow. They’ve got ordinances that forbid it.’ He knew the world was fortified with edicts aimed to keep him on the edge of life. ‘But I’ll be fine anyhow if they do let me go.’

  Neither of us feared that study companions for Matt would be lacking amongst those young men and women who were not frightened of his blindness.

  ‘It’s a good thing, Mick,’ he told me. ‘If it doesn’t work, you can always come out and go to university anyhow.’

  But my absolutist temperament didn’t like people saying that. Having decided to become a seminarian, I would not be the sort of seminarian who left.

  That afternoon, in the little flat by the railway line, I broke it to my mother. ‘I’m sorry,’ I told her. ‘But I’m not just playing around with the idea any more.’

  She wept but said that she was in favour of anything which made me happy. This had always been the pattern – firmness, ambition for her children, but finally she was an encourager and indulger of unexpected directions they might take. This last and climactic time she went down to visit my father labouring with his tomatoes and onions at the bottom of the garden, and I watched her talking to him, and he shaking his head.

  How I appreciate that fellow at the bottom of the back yard now. I have learnt from experience at many a bar and over many a dinner since that he was a robust drinking man, but he could not afford to drink at all during those years, even though he came from a tribe whose lives did not seem to have been at all shortened by drink. He possessed that taste for fashion which his negligent child lacked. He preferred good clothes and highly polished shoes and tailor-made cigarettes. But he had to heel-and-sole his shoes himself, and he had to smoke the world’s thinnest roll-your-owns to enable us to go to St Pat’s and get the glimmering of what people call ideas above our station.

  Through the squat Irish mother who had raised him as the last of nine children, the last beloved son, he retained a passionate though ambiguous relationship with the Church. He knew that if your son was called, you had to cop it sweet – there was nothing else to be done.

  At tea that night he made some remarks about ‘throwing away your education’. And it was then, to keep him happy, that I fell back on Matt’s line.

  ‘Don’t worry. If it doesn’t turn out to be right, I’ll come straight out and go to university.’

  My mother spoke to him over days, and gradually he began to take some whimsical pride in having a son a potential priest. One day I asked him if he wanted to walk up to the school at Strathfield and play some tennis with me. We ran around the court chasing tennis balls until he was red-faced. A vigorous fellow though, I could see. Standing up with a retrieved ball in his hand, he said, ‘Do you think I’ll get a discount in bloody purgatory? For having a son a sky pilot?’

  That’s what they called ministers of religion in the bush town he grew up in, and in the RAAF in Egypt during the war. Sky pilots. He could not understand the honour which, as sky pilot, I intended to bring on the family name. The literary as well as the ecclesiastical honour.

  One night though, cutting away at his well-done meat, he returned to an earlier theme. ‘I hope this isn’t some bloody reaction to that Bernadette Curran deciding to take the veil.’

  I was innocently sure it wasn’t.

  Slowly the news got up and down our block in Loftus Crescent, Homebush, and was uttered as trains thundered through on the Western Line. Jimmy Smart, a great St Pat’s batsman who lived at the corner, had a sister who married a Protestant, a genial man who worked for some department in the New South Wales Government. He was particularly amazed by the news. One afternoon when I met him on the street he gently asked me how I felt about never marrying. I forget what I told him.

  Fellow Catholics by contrast began to look at me with new wonder and enquiry. Sometimes, outside Martha’s on a Sunday, where Curran was a regular but not a relentlessly early visitor, the group of us – Mangan, the Frawley girls, Matt, Curran – would stand talking, and people who had heard of our various intentions would look on us with a new surmise. We had acquired an esprit. Dahdah was already in the seminary, Mangan of course was committed to be a monk according to the Spartan rules of St Bernard of Clairvaux, and one Frawley girl and Curran and I were bound for a great transformation from children to austere figures.

  My parents were in the strange position of receiving greetings which were halfway between condolences and congratulations.

  One afternoon immediately after my decision became known, while I sat with Matt on a brick fence by the Stockade, flush from making choices, I wat
ched lean Larkin come up and bend towards me in a scholarly way he might have learned from his weekend drinking companions in the pubs around Sydney University.

  ‘So you’re really going to do it?’ he asked.

  I said of course I was.

  ‘Why don’t you join the police force, that might be easier?’

  ‘Why do you say that?’

  ‘Organized religion is a form of social control, and so is the police force. But you don’t have to live in a monastery to be in the police force.’

  ‘I don’t understand what that means. Social control?’ Had GMH been a sort of copper? Impossible!

  ‘Religion is in place,’ said Larkin, ‘to distract the working class from what they haven’t got.’

  ‘That’s old stuff,’ said Matt. And indeed I had heard the opium of the people argument put by a number of folk, including Crespi the salesman. But I felt profoundly disturbed by this idea as uttered by Larkin; the accusation that all that motivated me was a desire to do this or that to the working and middle classes. He knew about GMH.

  How easily it could have been argued if we’d been on some campus and a year older (by which time I might have agreed with him). But to have my vast choice depicted as the equivalent of becoming a junior constable turned the air sour.

  ‘That’s not what I’m going in for,’ I told him.

  ‘Oh, I know you see yourself as a clerical poet,’ said Larkin. ‘But look all around you. Do you perceive poetry?’ He waved his hand round the surrounding streets – Hyde Brae, Merley, Francis. ‘This is the stupor of real estate, and religion exists to protect it. To make the working class pleased to have nothing, and the middle class content with their sad little bungalows.’

  ‘That’s not it at all,’ I said, but when I said it I thought of sleek Monsignor Loane.

  Matt said nothing more. Did he have a grudging feeling of support for Larkin’s position?

  We went on arguing, but I was at a disadvantage from feeling betrayed by Larkin. He was speaking up for other, newer friends. He was not speaking up for the Celestials. My face burned. It was because I respected Larkin’s intelligence, and wanted to be seen by its light as engaging in something Hopkinsian and inexpressible. I hated the way he depicted me.

  Of course, I did not see that in his own way Larkin was a neophyte too. He was writing off property with the same lightness of touch with which I had written off sex.

  In the indefinite era leading to my decision, time had seemed to erode a grain at a time. Now, in this definite season, it evaporated, and I soon recovered from the intense but momentary hurt of my argument with Larkin.

  In the midst of this period of slightly self-conscious wonderment, Matt and I had all at once to do the Leaving Certificate. We had been for some time ready, at least at the Pass level. We walked together, casually, from St Pat’s to the state school, Homebush High, to do our Pass English. Homebush High had a good reputation and many future notables of Sydney and New South Wales would go there. It was of solid red brick and its catchment area was pretty much what St Pat’s was, the west and south-west of Sydney. Its corridors were barer, slightly dustier, and of a different odour than St Pat’s. This was the odour of secularism, the un-Gothic-ness of ordinary Australia. Having made the decision I had made, it didn’t appeal to me. Yet I remember exactly its ambience now, forty years later, and its smell.

  A special room had been set up for Matt, since he was making history, and an amanuensis – a young graduate of Sydney University appointed by the NSW Department of Education – had sat ready to write down Matt’s answers.

  At first it all went well. The Pass English Richard II and all the Romantic poets – no problem to such a Celestial, such an intimate of GMH, as I. Physics and Chemistry were a pleasant trot. Latin, which I would now most certainly need at Springwood and Manly, were equally accommodating – translating Catullus and Horace. Catullus’s less obvious poems to his beloved and the verse addressed to his canary. In Pass History we regurgitated what Buster Clare had taught us to regurgitate, and found his bets on what would be on the paper quite accurate. I added in a little more from other reading I’d done in secret defiance. Just to make sure I got an A.

  Late-night studying at Matt’s, late-night studying at home. In the frenzy of preparation, my mother tells me, I appeared from the second bedroom which I shared with my brother Johnny, sleepwalking like Lady Macbeth.

  But now the examinations got tougher. The General Maths paper was appalling – they were punishing us, Mangan and I told each other, for preferring to the sure firmament of algebra such useless things as imagery and the date of Mussolini’s accession to power.

  Writing for hours. St Pat’s boys mixed in with Homebush High boys at desks in the examination hall, all united in the fragrance of paper and ink from the Government printery, writing our answers on the fragrant stationery of the New South Wales Government.

  Soon the Pass process was over. Ten days. Matt, pleased with himself, was done. For me, Mangan, Larkin and others there were still the Honours examinations to be sat. Over at Strathfield High, Curran – the future Sister Concordia – would also sit down to the Honours exams.

  I found that with both Honours English and History my knowledge was too particular. I wanted the examiners to honour GMH by asking a specific question about him, something which would allow me to expatiate on sprung rhythm. It was – like other years – more general than that.

  ‘Poetry is image. Discuss.’

  Instead of being what the yobbos who did Pass English thought – merely a rhyme. ‘I’m a poet and don’t know it.’

  History too honoured the wide smear of knowledge rather than the particularities. I knew that Curran and her comprehensive knowledge would do well in all of this. At last I too had the exhilaration of handing over the last exam and walking away. No longer a schoolboy. In fact, by the time I reached the railway line between Homebush and Flemington, three blocks from Homebush High, already a putative adult.

  I had been told the Archdiocese was willing to offer me a scholarship to the seminary, but I had to raise some money to pay for other expenses, and had seen an advertisement in the Catholic Weekly from Pellegrini’s, the Devotional Object Dealers and Booksellers, George Street, Sydney. They needed extra staff before Christmas and then through January, as the orders came in from various schools. I went in and applied. The thin manager had a calm, judicious, devout air which I supposed would permeate the entire company. I had heard that future seminarians got preference at Pellegrini’s.

  So I was put to work with a number of boys taken on specially for the season. We wrapped packages with missals and priests’ breviaries and rosary beads and the latest works by Jacques Maritain or Frank Sheed, the cricket enthusiast and theologian, or his wife the theologian Maisy Ward. We boxed statuary and other objects – chalices, altarboy uniforms, surplices and stoles such as priests wore in the confessional. A label which would be attached with glue to the package had the name of the destination typed on it, some little bush convent, some parish priest in the sweltering Darling or Riverina districts.

  The packing room lay out the back of the store in a Dickensian yard and up some ramshackle steps. Its supervisor came to me early on the first day and said, ‘What sort of fucking knot is this?’

  So it appeared that gravity of demeanour wasn’t universal in Pellegrini’s. To avoid further bullying by the man I observed other packers and saw how the classiest knots were tied, and soon became expert. After the year of hectic study and yearning I enjoyed the small challenges of packing.

  The supervisor of the packing room, amongst the as-yet-unblessed and still purely commercial rosary beads, altar linen, surplices and devotional books, also exhorted us to watch out about string, we weren’t rigging a bloody ship. And measure the paper carefully too. Fucking paper didn’t grow on fucking trees. He was a nephew of a famous monsignor, and swore like a publican’s nephew.

  One afternoon he ordered me to go with him and a girl, a
label typist from the office (a regular not a casual), down into the dank and humid basement to find some crates for shipping larger objects. The crates lay there amongst other bric-à-brac, and I dragged one of them out into the yard. When I returned for more, the supervisor was kissing the girl and fondling her breasts and she was resisting. I was shocked by what you could only call the naked grin on his face. Though it was theologically certain, as the supervisor’s uncle would have told him, that mortal sin cut in when a man felt women’s breasts, it wasn’t dogma that worried me. It was the ugliness, sweatiness, goatishness.

  I felt sorry for the girl too, who was shamed in front of me. She was fearful I’d spread gossip about this.

  ‘What are you bloody looking at?’ the supervisor asked me, as if in that fairly prudish age he could do what he was doing and not be looked at. A pained and dangerous smile took over his face. He was beginning to feel a bit silly, and threatened too. The girl straightened herself and left.

  So this was sex – shame, awkwardness, reluctance, bullying and fear. Not such a big thing to miss out on. Better to be St Francis and St Clare.

  Like the packing supervisor, however, I would soon enough make a fool of myself. It was towards Christmas, marked by high temperatures and high humidity. And yet Christmas must have counted for a great deal in the celebrations of Scottish, Irish and English settlers to the country, since it has always been robustly celebrated there, the heat bringing forth a profoundly-based, primordial Australian hedonism.