Homebush Boy

by Thomas Keneally

  Besides, I was anxious about telling my parents about the interview with the Cardinal. I knew it would not be entirely welcome news. I had passed off my earlier visit to the seminary as curiosity. It was impossible to try the same excuse to cover an interview with a Cardinal.

  I went first to my mother, the intermediary between my father and myself. She interpreted the one to the other. I told her in the little dining-kitchenette which had been our hearth in the fraught, close years of my father’s absence. As soon as I had the words out I saw genuine terror cross her face.

  I said lightly, ‘It doesn’t mean anything. I’ll probably go to uni, but if I wanted to be a priest I think I’d rather go to one of the Orders.’

  She knew that the Orders meant that she wouldn’t see me for years, the child she had nursed and urged back to breathe and coaxed to some scholarly eminence, and she broke into tears. I was of course of an age where everything is easily sacrificed – family, love, even life.

  ‘You must promise me you won’t go into the Orders,’ she said.

  Even I was moved by the authority of her fear. Perhaps too I had an over-inflated view of my capacity to talk her around later, if it came to that.

  ‘Your father will be very disappointed, poor fellow,’ she told me. ‘What should I tell him?’

  I thought that perhaps and for once I should approach him, though with our mutual embarrassment towards each other, I wondered how successful that telling would be. From the back screen door I was happy to watch her breaking the news to him. As he stood in his little garden at the back of the yard we shared with the Bankses. Mrs Banks would watch from behind her own screen door and later report a mixed-up version of what she had witnessed to her husband and her daughter.

  It was not the best of years for my father. He was not entirely happy with work – he had fights with my aunt and uncle-in-law in whose store in the Western Suburbs he worked. He did not know where to go. But his sons would go somewhere, he was certain. The seminary was amongst the last choices he would want. I would find out later how tribal a man he was, how he would cherish and be exalted and validated by grandchildren.

  In the end, I didn’t do the telling of my father myself. But I did give my mother some advice. Above all, I wanted her to stress that this interview did not mean I would go to the seminary. That was certainly the case. If I had been honest enough I could have come clean and said, ‘I’m going only to keep Father Byrne happy.’ But I was ashamed to admit it.

  Watching from the back door as my mother broke the news, I saw my father pause, lean on his pitchfork and look away to the vivid winter sunset over Granville. But I knew my mother was bringing him around, taking my intentions more seriously than ever they deserved to be taken.

  Back on the train that late August, on the ochre beast which ran beyond my parents’ front windows. We Nine-Stoners got aboard at Flemington, Homebush, Strathfield, Burwood. We carried our football boots and socks and padded shorts in the same bags in which we at other times carried our schoolbooks. Globite bags which had their own smell of banana skins and Mathematics and History.

  At Central we carried them aboard the special buses laid on for the carnival to take hordes of suburban and bush footballers to the Sportsground-Cricket Ground area of Moore Park. Aboard the buses a piquant excitement grew, and moves and sprigs and the desirability of shoulder pads were discussed as we neared the holy grounds of Rugby League. We changed in the freezing dressing sheds at the Sportsground or Sydney Cricket Ground II, and found ourselves being pointed out for our black and gold and blue jerseys, which I am still proud to say meant a threat to all the players from other places and schools.

  Brother Markwell handed out resin for rubbing on our hands. In case we forgot the fundamental rules of passing and catching it would help the ball to stick. Although we knew no amount of resin could save a player who tried to take the ball with his finger tips.

  It took two and a half days to win the State Championship, and Brother Markwell played me in four games and two half-games (that is, bringing me on at half-time, or taking me off then). On Sydney Cricket Ground II, we bowled over the first couple of schools we faced. Our mode was casual efficiency. We were proving what the Brothers had told us, that the state schools didn’t have a chance, their coaches were not a celibate élite. Their coaches in fact had children to go home to, and so their attention was divided. We got the ball out to Ballesty, whose brother would play Rugby for Australia, and to Gale, who would represent Australia in the sprints at the Commonwealth Games. And they would go roaring down the flank, since we would already efficiently have drawn all the defence to us.

  The semi-final was played against Lewisham on the Sydney Cricket Ground itself, the holiest turf. Bradman and Tiger O’Reilly had worked here against the England XI, and the Rugby League Messiah Clive Churchill had his great kicking duels with the immortal French fullback Puig-Aubert. I was only a reserve for the Cricket Ground game – I ran on for seven minutes at the end. Brother Markwell told me he was saving me for the final against Marist Brothers Eastwood. And what did it matter anyhow, as long as we won the final and the rumour of it all got back to Santa Sabina and to Curran?

  The Frawley boys, Rose’s and Denise’s little brothers, were at the Sydney Cricket Ground watching from the sideline. So the lines of intelligence were in place, since they were sure to take the news back to their sisters, who would then become crucial broadcasters of it.

  The final was played in late light on Sydney Cricket Ground II, before a sizeable crowd of boys in the uniforms of various schools. The opposition’s coach had given them a scheme by which they could choke off the ball in the hands of our inside backs or mobile forwards. They were all over us. Their desperation showed they understood that the ball couldn’t be allowed to get to Gale or to Ballesty. It became a grudging, hard-tackling game. Bobby Maloney, whose first two names were Robert Emmet in honour of the great Irish nationalist of 1803, crashed over for a try. But then Eastwood struck back. Five-all. Ballesty kicked a goal, and then they kicked a goal, seven-all. Naturally, this was the sort of triumph which on reaching the cloisters of Santa Sabina would fail to cause much of a sense of excitement.

  I remember taking the ball up the middle of the field, determined to break the net of tacklers, never able to do it. For grace had gone out of all of us. We had become the day labourers of the game. We squabbled with Eastwood for the ball in a muddy corner of the field. We were like Matt Tierney’s father’s army before Ypres. Bogged down. It was seven-all at full-time, but the game belonged to us on countback – we had scored the first try. We were state champions by a technicality.

  The concept had a faint glow, which I became accustomed to while travelling home on the train from Central Railway with the Frawley boys. Again, obvious glory had side-stepped me, or me it, for I had played my lungs out. Will was not enough and grace was everything. Peter McInnes had grace. The nine-stone team, at the supreme hour, had not been given it.

  It was dark already when I got home to my parents and little brother, doing my best to sound excited at having become a State Champion by a technicality. But I knew that now, overnight, it was a matter of preparing for the other contest, the grievous sport: to be declared fit for a priesthood I had no intention of entering. I was aware that such nets of vanity held me, yet I had thought I was free. What was I doing, wasting a Cardinal’s time? I could not really envisage myself a seminarian. I thought of the priesthood the way I thought of death in battle – an admirable but unimaginable destiny.

  And so, anxious and pallid, I was back by nine o’clock onto Sydney’s rust-red electric trains. The river of our lives, carrying such freight – my grandparents arriving from Kempsey, my father returning from wars, myself returning from second place essay prizes or technically-won State Championships.

  This morning I brought a not unpleasant post-match soreness to the terrifying cosmic business of being declared, by a Cardinal, an Eminence, a man who’d spoken to the Pope, fit f
or the corps. I was so worried by the coming meeting that I levered my copy of GMH out of my pocket and after trying to smooth down my suit, left it behind.

  Off at Town Hall station and walk up Park Street, through Hyde Park, a parade ground in the days when Australia was a British colony. Now marked in the middle by the nationalistic fountain of Archibald, the founder of the nineteenth-century journal the Bulletin. Tired mothers sat on the edge of the fountain as children ran and fell and dipped their hands in water. They were like foreign populations seen from a train window. For these few hours I would belong to a different world from theirs. I am ashamed to say that I despised the plainness of them, the plainness of Menzies’ Australians.

  Ahead the great Gothic mass of St Mary’s. It lacked spires, for they had been planned to go atop the western end of the nave, but the archbishops of Sydney had always lacked the means to do them. If delivered from this ordeal, I could imagine myself as a good Catholic layman, wealthy from some unspecified cause, perhaps from writing G. K. Chesterton-like books or GMH-like poetry, endowing the cathedral so that a spire could be raised. An umbilicus connecting Sydney to the sky and to the Gothic tradition Mangan and I so loved.

  I rounded the flank of the cathedral and followed up sandstone steps a sign that said Minor Seminary Interviews. A stone doorway austere as a vow carried a similar sign. I could hear subdued conversation inside. I stepped indoors.

  I would later find out from travels elsewhere in the world that the severe decorousness of convent and presbytery architecture is universal. Sombre wood panelling, bare walls except for a photograph of St Peter’s or the Pope or both, and on a stand in a corner the Virgin crushing the serpent with her foot. The floors in turn are bare but highly-polished, and the cold smell of the beeswax which brought them to such a high shine pervades. There is none of the hutch-like aroma that exudes from homes where real, squabbling families live. There is instead a cold clarity of air. The atmosphere had been imported from places like Dublin and Maynooth. From this clarity, arctic even in the climate of Australia, it seemed only a short and elegant shuffle to the eternal clarity.

  I think all the boys from ordinary hutch-like places, Homebush or Darlinghurst, Kogarah or Belmore, felt the magnetic pull of that air. As I entered the waiting room, I noticed how this atmosphere made their Celtic flesh paler, brought out their freckles. My fellow interviewees wore the uniforms of sundry Marist and Christian Brothers schools. I wasn’t sociologically imaginative enough then to realize that most of them came from the same sort of schools which produce the New South Wales Police Force – hardly anyone from the North Shore, or from the Jesuit colleges which played Rugby instead of Rugby League or put boat crews in the Head of the River. I saw not demographics but only the chosen-ness of this group. For the first time, I felt an impulse genuinely to belong amongst them. In military situations, I suppose, this is called esprit de corps, and all armies depend on it, even the armies of the Lord.

  I was, however, not unconscious of the fact that amongst this group St Pat’s was something of an aristocracy. We wore grey serge rather than blue, our felt hats were sported with the cockiness of great Rugby League players, and we now had all the casually acquired State Championships we needed to prove it.

  I saw that John Hickey was there, a tall boy from St Pat’s who didn’t know whether he wanted to be a lawyer or a priest. I sat beside him. His dark hair had been lustrously brilliantined.

  ‘I don’t know if I want to be in this place,’ he murmured to me. ‘I think I might like women too much.’

  ‘I feel exactly the same thing,’ I told him. I patted the empty space where GMH had lain inadequately exploited over my right breast. That pocket which was somehow associated in my mind with love.

  ‘Can you really concentrate when they’re around?’ he whispered.

  I remembered the fatal quarter-mile race I’d lost through lack of concentration. I said, ‘Just because we’re thinking of the seminary, it doesn’t mean we’re obligated to anything.’

  Yet I could feel the atmosphere of obligation working on me. I knew in my water that once I got in there with the Cardinal and the rectors, I mightn’t be able to stop myself saying something which was halfway to being a promise. Too much magic, too much authority to resist.

  Hickey picked up a book from the floor. It was Windeyer’s History of Australian Law.

  ‘What have you got that for?’ I asked him.

  ‘Cripes,’ he said, shaking his head. ‘I thought I’d take it in with me to let them know I’m not certain.’

  I all at once wished I had brought GMH for a similar reason – both to protect me and strengthen me. Yesterday Hickey had played reserve when the First XIII had won the State Championship. He hadn’t needed any protection out there. This was, however, of course, a serious battlefield.

  ‘These other blokes here feel the same way,’ Hickey confided in me, and I checked again the pale faces. I tried to see the future bishops behind the freckles and the acne.

  We went over the top one at a time. In the presence of the Pope on the wall, the jokes that were uttered as each boy went out were in a lowered voice and accompanied by what you would have to call graveyard humour. ‘Don’t forget to tell them about that girl from Saint Scholastica’s.’ No reference to masturbation. These were not those kinds of boys. No reference to homosexuality, which was an unimagined and unimaginable kingdom of night, at least as yet, to everyone in the room.

  The Ahernes, the Clancys, the Doughertys, the Fitzgeralds went in alphabetical order of their first names, and when Hickey was called by a young priest who waited in the corridor with a list, the gravity of the event became more intense still. I noticed though that Hickey had not found the courage to take in his law book. It stood by the leg of his chair, an abandoned love.

  A couple of Kellys from sundry suburbs stood between me and the enquiries of the Cardinal. Cardinal Gilroy’s voice, the one all schoolboys occasionally made fun of. It seemed to have been a voice devised in the Collegio di Propaganda Fidei in Rome, where the stars of the seminary were to finish their studies. It was designed more for speaking ecclesiastical Latin than English, and it penetrated the soul. It could not be imagined what it was like to face it as a solitary listener in an august room.

  The Kellys now went in one at a time to the Cardinal and came out pale, making for the street and the secular world, relieved of a burden. Determined either to go or not to go. To become a seminarian or put it off until the meeting with that sensual, secular girl who would render the choice irrelevant.

  My name was called. Walking forward in unreal space, in the hushed but heel-clacking corridor, I knocked on the indicated door and heard the extraordinary voice. ‘Come in, my young man.’

  I entered. There he was, the Cardinal in black and scarlet, sitting tall behind a long mirror-shined table.

  ‘Please sit down.’

  I felt very small crossing the polished boards to him and the other ecclesiastical presences. Scarlet cardinalatial piping connected the sections of His Eminence’s soutane, and the broad scarlet sash sat high, just under his sternum. The Cardinal and the two men who sat either side of him wore birettas, or priests’ hats.

  ‘Hello Your Eminence,’ I said, so they wouldn’t think me a bumpkin.

  And then His Eminence indicated his partners, on his left, Monsignor Cary of St Columba’s Minor Seminary at Springwood in the Blue Mountains. Monsignor Cary was built heftily, like a cop or a publican. Then on the Cardinal’s right, Monsignor Mahony, rector of the great St Patrick’s College Manly.

  ‘I have been remarking to the other boys,’ the Cardinal told me after I settled in the chair in which it was impossible to sit with ease, ‘that it is a little like surviving in a holy war. Getting from Monsignor Cary’s to Monsignor Mahony’s seminary. The inevitable losses account for perhaps three in ten young men. And yet the process is necessary and ordained by the Church’s long experience in ecclesiastical education. It is much better that a young man
lose a few years testing his vocation in the minor seminary than that he should go out into the world and lose his vocation there on the streets, or amongst so-called intellectuals.’

  They all three looked at me, the Cardinal and Mahony smiling, Cary seeming to suspect me of breaking and entering.

  ‘That is my concern, Your Eminence,’ I managed to tell Cardinal Gilroy. For, as a natural competitor, I did not want to be seen to be passive but to be a fellow capable of word-making in any situation. Just the same, I judged from the look of suspicion on Monsignor Cary’s big meaty face that he saw right through me.

  The Cardinal looked at the dossier from St Pat’s.

  ‘I see you are studying Leaving Certificate Latin and attempting Honours History and English.’

  ‘That’s right, Your Eminence.’

  ‘And placed second in the Newman Essay Prize.’

  ‘Yes, Your Eminence.’

  ‘Very promising,’ said Monsignor Mahony, who looked like Pius XII, a wiry little man whose false teeth fitted him badly and slewed around his mouth. He was by temperament jovial however, unlike his colleague.

  ‘Students who are good at English are very frequently capable of great vanity,’ said Monsignor Dunne. ‘I suppose you’re vain like the rest of them?’

  ‘I hope not, Monsignor,’ I lied. ‘My hero is Gerard Manley Hopkins, who was both a great poet and a man who fought vanity.’

  ‘Don’t know him,’ said Monsignor Cary.

  ‘He was the Jesuit priest who asked on his death bed that his poems should be destroyed.’

  ‘Probably a good idea,’ said Monsignor Cary.

  ‘And you play Rugby League, I notice,’ said His Eminence, breaking up the impasse.

  Monsignor Mahony said, ‘It’s the day of the year when the St Patrick’s Manly team play the St Columba’s Springwood team.’