Homebush Boy

by Thomas Keneally

  Through these seasonal shifts, some change was occurring in me. I had once imagined myself in English classes at Sydney University, and perhaps later in Medicine or Law classes. Sydney University, however, as envisioned, now had less and less substance to it. It was an anaemic imagining.

  Mangan sighed with a sense of deliverance as we fell to our books. The last time was past when he would be made to swim at Concord baths or field at deep fine leg or wear a coloured athletic singlet and run second last in some lowly race.

  ‘The end of ignorant sporting,’ he said, ‘and the beginning of the true vie spirituelle.’

  St Pat’s did not teach French beyond the intermediate class, but Mangan continued to speak it with a stylishness which went unchallenged on the Western Line.

  Sport had for now ended for me, but I had not retired as a spectator. I could still show that to me sport, art and religion were all part of the one rich continuum. On the first weekend of October, a few days shy of my seventeenth birthday, I took the train and bus to the Sydney Cricket Ground, carrying with me a volume of nineteenth-century poetry – because once Jimmy showed me the splendours of GMH I had grown a bit weak on the Romantics and now had to make up for it – and a small book on the Treaty of Locarno. I went on my own, since Matt had decided to spend the afternoon being tested in History – Ancient and Modern – by his father the Digger.

  This was to be the supreme New South Wales day for Peter McInnes, the contest between all the boys schools’ champions of New South Wales. Beyond this lay all the even more glittering days of Australian championships, Commonwealth Games, Olympics.

  When I arrived at the Sydney Cricket Ground, there were not too many Strathfield uniforms on the concourse in front of the Sheridan Stand. In this bigger arena of contests, our sense of dominance had been reduced to scale. The competition would be hot. Peter won the 220 yards stylishly in a time which I forget. I remember only that it was an All Schools record. But everyone knew the great event would be the 100 yards.

  Simon won the under-sixteen years 880 yards and mile – poor Pog well and truly eclipsed by now. There was no one on the Sheridan concourse to do Black, black, rickety-rack with though. The concrete space by the fence was full of boys from the best schools – Grammar and Saint Ignatius, and King’s named in honour of the Monarch and identified by the para-miliary slouch-hat and uniform its boys wore. These were boys who were told in the classroom that they were Australia’s inheritors, and probably were.

  Yet Peter had put them all in second place. Men and women and boys went past, and what they all said was, ‘Mustn’t miss that 100 yards.’

  I was tempted to enter into conversation with other boys there and offer them insights into Peter’s training methods, to let them know off-handedly that I had trained with Peter and run for Canterbury-Bankstown with him. Fortunately, I resisted. The star sprinters came out at last in their sloppy joes, most of them barefoot on the concrete, holding their spikes. Peter wore his white ankle socks, a fashion I had imitated, hoping the cotton would give me an extra tenth of a second. You could see the journalists and commentators up in the sports booths in the M. A. Noble Stand – a battery of fixed binoculars all trained on McInnes. All the other finalists could run 10 or 10.1 seconds on their best day. Peter had yards on them. Only if he started appallingly could he be beaten. But I had seen Dinny running him through his starts every afternoon on the oval. A nasal On your mark, Get set, and Go! Go! was actually a clap of Dinny’s hands, and Peter was well gone down his lane before the sound of Dinny’s hands reached me.

  ‘Good, good, good,’ the Christian Brother would cry after Peter. ‘Ah … come back, come back.’

  There was not a poor start in McInnes.

  I took up a position on the fence ten yards from the finish line. Crowded in by other, faintly sweaty uniforms which had no tribal connection with Peter.

  A lovely start. Faster than at the clapping of hands by Brother Dinny McGahan. By fifty yards, the crowd was beginning to laugh indulgently at the gap which had opened between Peter and the rest. He was not abnormally tall but his stride astounded the onlookers. Ten yards of daylight, as he crossed the finish, sat between him and some other normal sprinter running second. Yet I saw that at the line, something snapped at once in him. A fragile chord that connected his upper and lower body broke right then. This fracture drove him sideways, and when he straightened he could barely put his foot to ground and he began to stagger about with a broken, broken gait.

  People in the stand, influential parents who had never heard of Homebush, stood up. Twenty thousand with their heads cocked at that angle of inquiry.

  His medial ligament had snapped beyond any hope of being repaired. Today he could have been restored, could have taken only a season off. If the technology had existed, he would have been ready in time for the 1954 Commonwealth Games, the 1956 Olympics which Melbourne would ultimately acquire.

  He was as much an inevitable Olympian as Mangan was a monk, and before our eyes, he had perished by the cruellest, un-chosen mischance. He was away from school only a few days and came back the same fellow but with a faint limp. After all, he had to get his study done for the Leaving Certificate. Of course, the fact that it was a life sentence was not fully known to him then, but that it was a substantial verdict did not alter him.

  ‘A bit sore, Mick,’ he would say to me, when I asked, which I probably did too frequently.

  But I had been there, had seen it. The last great hope of Australian sprinting, better than Hec Hogan. He had run the 100 yards that Saturday afternoon in 9.6 seconds, and all the sporting commentators were weeping. He could have challenged Hogan, and would within a year certainly have beaten him. Ferrety little Hec would run third in the Olympic 100 metres of 1956. Pete would have beaten him and still have been good enough to take a medal at the Mexico Olympics in 1968, and in an utterly changed world, share the platform with the two Black Power signalling athletes from America.

  Soon Australians would become too worldly and understand the size of the earth and know that they could not train on cow-paddocks and beat all comers. Peter was the best, lost hope of the era of innocence, and he came unstrung on a Saturday afternoon on a rough track at the Sydney Cricket Ground.

  We could not get over our astonishment – particularly Matt and I who discussed it. This was the first instance of someone in our generation who stood so close to immortality that all of us could see or sense the aura. And yet it had all died in an instant.

  ‘Too bloody fast for his own good maybe,’ my father said, since Peter McInnes came under the category of sport and was one of the topics that was safe for us to converse on. Speed overwhelming the human framework! ‘You’ve got to bring a sprinter along gradually,’ he said. And no one could argue with that. It was the sort of bush wisdom prevalent in his barefoot sprinting childhood.

  In any case, we knew at last and very clearly that glory could be denied. If Peter needn’t win the Australian sprint championship, then Matt need not be admitted to Sydney University, and I need not become a poet who held hands with Curran.

  VIII

  I recovered from that as I did from most things: I called in at the Frawleys’ kindly hearth. One thing seemed definite barring death: Rose was going to become a Dominican nun and wear their brown and white habit. The name Margaret already earmarked for her. She had that glory chest too, just like a girl going to be married, and into it she was stacking bed linen with her initials, pillowcases likewise, and the linen shifts and bloomers which nuns wore. She would hold some of them up to the light and say, ‘Would I remind someone of Ava Gardner in these?’

  Gentle Mrs Frawley said to me on one of those afternoons, ‘Did the girls tell you Mother Concordia is dying?’

  I must have frowned, because Mrs Frawley remarked that the old nun had had a good life. Concordia was the woman who had intimidated with a white chalk line all us six-year-old piddlers at St Martha’s Convent. Death seemed in one sense a likely proposition –
Concordia had seemed old ten years ago, when she urged us not to cause the Virgin Mary to blush.

  ‘We’re in the nuns’ chapel hours on end praying for her,’ said Rose, as if she did not see herself as a nun yet, the nuns being still them.

  I thought of Curran, lean and olive, reciting the Sorrowful Mysteries in the wood-panelled chapel at Santa Sabina.

  The mention of so austere a figure as Concordia of course by indirect paths reminded me that I was close to the time limit of pretending to be a potential priest. All the funkholes out of that destiny seemed to be guarded by arguments and ideas sharp as razors already unsheathed, and put in place by everyone from Father Byrne to the Cardinal.

  For example: ‘I’ve decided to go to university first.’

  ‘Yes, but many a vocation is lost that way.’

  ‘I’ve decided I don’t have a vocation.’

  ‘Yes, but how can you tell until you’ve tested it?’

  Could I manage to say, ‘But I like girls too much. One in particular’?

  Or equally impossible, ‘I had a revelation during Sunday Mass. God revealed that he had other plans for me.’

  I was painted into the piety corner as certainly as Mother Concordia was herself cornered by nature and piety on the tall bier of her bed in the Dominican Convent. But I wasn’t going. I couldn’t go. It would have to be said.

  The next morning I practised breaking the news to Matt.

  ‘I’ve just about decided against going into the priesthood,’ I told him.

  He put his head on the side in his intelligent, tolerant manner, in a way which sometimes made me believe that he saw through all the posturing.

  ‘There’s always time afterwards,’ he said with the hopeful, upward intonations which were his nature. This was a time of year when Dinny McGahan was letting the two of us sit outdoors on the verandah to go through our Pass subjects. We studied long hours, so that there was always time for a little desultory conversation. Even as Matt and I walked home we were still quizzing each other on Modern History or Shakespeare’s soliloquies.

  Coming back to Mattie’s little bungalow on one of those first afternoons of knowing about Mother Concordia and her impending death, I saw Curran and her well-dressed mother walking together down Shortland Avenue. Past the little suburban gardens they walked like two equals, intently discussing something. Bernadette Curran even wore her maroon Dominican Convent gloves, and Mrs Curran’s gloves were white. They were two women dressed not so much to represent motherhood or daughterhood, but an impenetrable sisterhood. What they talked of was unguessable but, you couldn’t doubt, marvellous. It occurred to me that whatever was going on there, my mother had been deprived of it in her two-boy, all-male family.

  I told Matt, ‘There goes Mrs Curran and Bernadette. They’re dolled-up exquisitely!’

  Matt gave a half chuckle. ‘That must be pretty exciting for you, Tom,’ he murmured.

  I gave him a small nudge on the upper arm. But what they spoke of, the Curran women, transcended our chirping and banter. It had crux, it had weight.

  Calling in at the Frawleys yet again, a household in which because of Mrs Frawley’s kindness, Mr Frawley’s serious purposes and the Frawley girls’ genial mockery I felt appreciated, I found out what the Curran women had been discussing.

  It was to do with Concordia, the matriarch of the Order. Like Mother Margaret, she had not borne earthly children. Yet this fact made all of them – the Frawleys, the Currans and all the rest – her children. In batteries, her daughters, class by class, girls small and large, in their impeccable maroon, had entered the Dominican chapel to pray for her deliverance or happy death. The Leaving Certificate girls were asked to come and go to the chapel only at their leisure, but come and go they did. A hush hung over their futures. Some may have even felt a pulse of an ambition to achieve in the end a death as notable, as reverberating as that of Concordia. Such a departure from the normal suburban or bush deaths of grandfathers and grandmothers!

  The prefects of Santa Sabina were, I heard, admitted in a bunch into the large convent parlour, where Concordia’s deathbed had been moved to allow for room for visitors. They saw the brave, rugged, sculpted face of Concordia, still cowled in the Order’s regulation clothing for the sickbed at this supremest moment. They saw her lowered lids, and the effort of the discourse she pursued with God on earth’s furthest up-jut, on land’s end.

  This was a death from an ancient and baroque tradition. Had there been what the Frawleys called ‘some mad girl’, some girl, that is, who was a temperamental echo of the mad boy I was, she might have been overly influenced, morbidly fascinated, inflamed by divine ambitions. But Curran was sensible, had no time – as I knew – for exorbitant responses. She should have come out safe from the visit to Concordia.

  The full and potent magic of the death of the great Irish matriarch had not yet, however, been unleashed.

  Imagine a room where the Honours English and History girls are at their desks, preparing for the coming public examination, when a messenger enters, a younger nun, and whispers to Curran. Mother Concordia wants to see Curran on her own. Walking out of the study, does Curran – who looks so settled in all life’s circumstances – feel unsettled to be chosen to share some of Concordia’s last seconds? She must not be totally at ease with such an excessive act of graciousness.

  Here at last drama has found a way to penetrate Curran’s matter-of-fact, no-nonsense, Aussie advance towards the greatness everyone agrees will mark her later life.

  She approaches the sickroom where only the last watchers remain, the most senior nuns who have shared table and cloister with Concordia for years and who are now easing her on her way. Monsignor Loane is long gone from the bedside, with the canisters of holy oil with which he has anointed Concordia in the sacrament called Extreme Unction. Two nuns rise from their knees and take Curran by the elbow, bringing her forward to the deathbed. One of them touches Mother Concordia’s shoulder. The old nun half opens her eyes. She tears her gaze away from Yahweh’s long enough to say, ‘Bernadette, I call upon you to become a Dominican nun and take my name, Concordia. I will pray for you and support you in the Presence of God.’

  I still wonder if as Bernadette left the deathbed (and indeed the old nun would die overnight, eased of the question of the inheritance of her name) any nun said to her, ‘Think closely about this. A command from Concordia is not necessarily a command from God!’

  It had been after Concordia had made her severe bequest to Curran that I saw the Curran women speaking so earnestly on their way home and mentioned it to Matt.

  It is wrong to surmise the decision was made for her by Concordia’s deathbed edict. Sensible and democratic Curran was not so readily deprived of will as all that. But it must have had an effect in some scales of decision, and it seems she made the decision pretty quickly afterwards. She did not trumpet it though – I heard about it not from her lips. I had gone home with Matt to his house in Shortland Avenue, and his mother offered us tea and told us.

  ‘Wow,’ said Matt. ‘What’ll you do now, Mick?’ Did he mean, how to top that? Or how to deal with it? I sat in a vacuum, my hands prickling. As soon as I could I left. It was as if this were a war, but all the maidens, not all the young men, were about to vanish. I walked bemused to the Frawley house in Broughton Road, and everyone was home except Mr Frawley the wiry grouper. Rose Frawley had answered the door with a half-smile.

  ‘Have you heard the news?’ all three women were asking. ‘What will you do?’ asked Rose. ‘Join the Foreign Legion?’

  She of course was delighted that she would have a sister, a Strathfield girl, a Santa Sabina girl, her own head prefect and ‘brain’, with her in the novitiate.

  We discussed it. I felt a constraint over my heart, sharp edges against my ribs. The Oxford University Press Edition of GMH. I knew I did not need that discomfort any more. I took it out of my breast pocket and absent-mindedly slid it into my schoolbag.

  The younger, gentler Fr
awley girl, Denise, cried, ‘Did you see what Mick just did?’

  Rose said, ‘Sick of strung rhythm, are we?’

  ‘Sprung rhythm,’ I told her without any passion.

  I got home and my mother did not notice merely the phantom shape of GMH in the grey serge coat she looked after so arduously. She had met Mrs Frawley outside Cutcliffe’s Pharmacy in Rochester Street and had been told.

  ‘This shouldn’t have any influence on what you decide,’ she told me.

  When my father came home from his store in Granville, he said the same thing. ‘Just because everyone else is volunteering it doesn’t bloody mean you have to.’

  He knew whereof he spoke. He had been a volunteer in his day, and had not been fully happy in the service.

  What was worst for me was that I could tell that whatever Curran was renouncing in the name of the Deity and Concordia it was not me. No messages or hints had been sent. There was no chance of a last hand-hold.

  Nonetheless, amongst the quicksilver shifts of sentiment occurring to me, there now grew a desire to be associated with such a brave drama. Curran’s sincere choice put the question to me in a lasting way the Cardinal had not been able to. On the one hand the sublime path. On the other hand, the chance of a normal university degree and a little double-fronted brick cottage in a suburban street. GMH had been a priest in his cell and had sung like an angel in his chains.

  There were references of pure and sublime love as well: Eloise and Abelard, St Francis and St Clare. And then there was the other, Australian example – Father Tenison-Woods and Mother Mary MacKillop. MacKillop the seraphically handsome woman, and Julian Tenison-Woods a priest like GMH, but a famed geologist rather than a poet. Mother Mary MacKillop had founded the Sisters of St Joseph, who lived in poverty and taught poor children in the Australian colonies. She spread her Order right through the world, so that she constituted an early Australian success story. I had seen Tenison-Woods’ works in the library of the Brothers’ house – History of the Discovery and Exploration of Australia, Volumes I and II, Fish and Fisheries of New South Wales and Geological Observations in South Australia. He quarrelled with Mother MacKillop, yet enthused her to found an Order and at the same time had an heroic sense of Australia’s ancient geology. They – Tenison-Woods, elegant Brit, former Times journalist, and MacKillop, colonial girl – had once been photographed side by side, and made a remarkable pair. Mother MacKillop’s piercing, enormous eyes. No fainting mystic. A good, practical woman. Like Curran in that. Could there be some possible similar and future alliance between Curran and myself?