The Dickens Boy

by Tom Keneally

  ‘My wife, Mr Dickens,’ said the man.

  I accepted the woman’s lace-gloved hand when she offered it to me, as a man would.

  ‘My wife is French, sir, and I like to call her Madame Fremmel,’ he said, his long amphibian lips curved into a huge smile.

  ‘It is an honour, madame,’ I told her. ‘My father loves your country. He knew your President Lamartine very well.’

  ‘And France loves your papa,’ she said. ‘Even the Emperor. And for those who do not love the Emperor, as I do not, your papa was also a friend to Victor Hugo in his exile!’

  I was impressed by Mrs Fremmel’s mention of Hugo, whom my guvnor had once said he liked more than any other Frenchman, though Hugo’s wife looked as if she was ready to poison the poor man’s breakfast. Looking again at Fremmel he just didn’t appear a man who had a wife familiar with Hugo, and who liked to hold opinions on the French emperor in a place like Wilcannia.

  Her bit said, however, she drew back again, allowing her husband control over the moment.

  ‘I know you must be tired from your journey,’ said Mr Fremmel, ‘and I would be honoured to be your host while you recover. I promise you I can gather a fine company of gentlemen from Wilcannia and beyond who would be pleased to entertain and acclaim you for choosing our settlement as your destination. I believe your birthday is about to take place . . .’

  Oh dear. I imagined trying to speak and appear wise to the civic fathers of Wilcannia.

  ‘Sir,’ I said hurriedly, surprising myself with my desperate firmness, ‘that is very kind of you, and there may be later occasions where we can all be joined in jovial company. But I must get to my station as soon as I can and apply myself to the business of sheep.’

  Fremmel’s smile immediately went crooked and looked unreliable.

  ‘Oh,’ he emphasised, ‘I would be particularly grateful to be your host for a few days at least. After all, I could tell you much about the business.’

  His wife laughed pleasantly. ‘Fremmel is not like other men,’ she said as a genial warning. ‘He is not uselessly tender, as his wife might be sometimes. He has a clear head.’

  The urgency to apply myself was acrid in my throat. ‘No, I have to be on my way to Momba as soon as it can be done. Mr Rusden expects me to. He mentioned a wagon . . .’

  ‘That is so, but the wagon does not have to go till you’re ready,’ said Mr Fremmel before calling towards the interior of the storeroom. ‘Maurice! Where in God’s name is the boy? Maur-ice!’

  A young man came hurrying into the office; I thought he must be the Fremmels’ son, since there was more than a hint of Mr Fremmel’s lips on this man’s face, though not enough to mar his features.

  ‘This is my nephew,’ Fremmel told me.

  The young man gave an unalloyed smile and held out his hand, saying, ‘Maurice McArden.’ He must have been about twenty and the only similarity to his uncle besides his lips was that he too had conscientiously pomaded hair.

  ‘I am driving the supply wagon to Momba, Mr Dickens,’ he told me, ‘whenever you’re ready to go.’

  I appealed to this kindlier presence. ‘Your uncle has generously offered me his hospitality. But Mr Rusden, our patron, has insisted I go there at once and apply myself. There is also a new blacksmith going there with me. A man named Larkin.’

  ‘Well,’ said Mr Fremmel, ‘this Larkin may be ready to go, but it will be rather a rush for Maurice.’

  ‘Oh no,’ said Maurice almost wilfully, as if he would be delighted to upset his uncle’s plans. ‘The wagon is as good as ready. My bags and swag are packed too. I need only change into bush kit.’

  Fremmel was frankly irritated by now, which brought out irritation in me.

  ‘The only way, Mr Fremmel, to prove I am fit for this life is to begin living it as soon as I can,’ I said as reasonably as I could, ‘That is certainly my father’s wish.’

  ‘Very well then,’ said Fremmel, grimacing as he relinquished any ambition he’d harboured to be my mentor in town.

  ‘Well,’ said Maurice, stepping forward and not disappointed at all. ‘Where should I meet you and this Larkin, Mr Dickens?’

  ‘Larkin and I will be at the Commercial,’ I replied.

  As Mr Fremmel turned his attention to a catalogue, Mrs Fremmel smiled charmingly at me and then at her nephew, saying, ‘You must both be careful with heat sickness and snakes. Kick your swag before you settle down on it.’

  ‘My aunt is half-demented by snakes,’ said Maurice fondly.

  I was myself half-infatuated with divine Mrs Fremmel, and given her Gallic accent, her advice on serpents was hard to forget or ignore. To us nearly serpentless Britons, the word ‘snake’ had great power in any case.

  ‘Death adder,’ she said, shivering. ‘Taipan. And you are both my darling boys.’

  ‘I am nineteen,’ Maurice McArden told his aunt.

  ‘Yes,’ she said with insistence. ‘Boys.’

  ‘I need but twenty minutes, Mr Dickens,’ said Maurice, glancing at his uncle, who still looked aloof.

  4

  When I arrived at the Commercial, Larkin was speaking companionably to other men, a pint of dark brown fluid only quarter-drunk before him. I signalled to him and told him we were going.

  I itched to ask him about his encounter with the priest while we were waiting for Maurice, for to know a practice is barbarous is not to renounce all curiosity in it. I managed not to. I also managed to tell him the agent had offered me his hospitality, but I had managed to renounce the town of Wilcannia in favour of Momba.

  So we drew up our cavalcade, me on Coutts, Tom Larkin on a stocky, shaggy gelding I called a Waler after the distant uplands of New South Wales where they had been bred. I would learn the Army in India sent their agents to Australia to buy up as many Walers as they could for cavalry mounts.

  I wondered if my brother Walter had ridden a Waler while serving in the 42nd Highlanders in India, where he’d been involved in the campaign that led to the defeat of the rebels at Cawnpore and the relief of Lucknow. The poor fellow had fallen down one day with sunstroke and ‘smart fever’, a sort of brain infestation, and had to be carried to a hill station to recuperate. The guvnor had been very proud that Walter had earned ‘a mutiny medal with clasp’ and gained promotion from ensign to lieutenant and some prize money before he’d even turned eighteen years!

  I had barely known Walter when I was young. To him I was the ‘cursed Plorncaster’ or ‘Plorncabanaster’. But he had come to my room at Tavistock House two night before he left and said, ‘Plorncaster, I have been dismissive of you.’ He burst into tears, and his face creased so childishly I had no idea what to do. ‘I don’t want to go. Just because I passed the East India Company exam, why must I go?’ And he shook his head. ‘Little brother, little brother, if I could stay, you and I could be chums.’

  ‘Ask Katie to talk to the guvnor!’ I’d suggested, knowing our eldest sister could make demands, and had the power to make Father stop and take notice. But if Walter had done so, Katie hadn’t been able to prevail.

  Poor, pitiable Walter, in view of what was to happen!

  Maurice McArden, in checked shirt, moleskin trousers and Prussian boots, sat at the reins of the wagon and a team of four draught horses. We set off without any uttered sentiment and in two street lengths were on black soil fringes where a few Chinese were growing pumpkins, and beyond that we moved onto red soil and into the yellowing grass of this antique and western land. The sun was strong – not so strong as to dement a man but strong in an honest way. There was no vapour in it. The chance of fog in this country was remote. Clarity was all. I guessed one would call it prairie had it been America, with glinting outcrops suggestive of gold but generally yielding only quartz. Distant mountains somehow promised infinity, however, rather than any limit.

  We drove in silence for a long way, perhaps fifteen miles, before Larkin called, ‘Reckon it’s a little after two.’

  He dismounted by the rocky rim of a st
rangely beautiful yellow earth lake with only a smear of mud at its bottom. Every stone that had delineated the lake and its various stages of fullness and decline shone blue and yellow, brown and white.

  I dismounted too, and Maurice hauled his draught horses to a stop and tethered them to a fragile-looking bush.

  ‘Will your horses bolt?’ I asked him.

  ‘You don’t know how a grevillea can tangle the reins,’ he told me, possessed of superior knowledge.

  That was when we began to talk like fellow travellers, and I learned much of Maurice and Tom Larkin on the way and, inevitably, as we lay on swags beneath huge skies which intoxicated one with their immensity, they learned something of me. For we were like travellers on a raft in immense seas. At every fork on the track so far, Maurice and Tom Larkin seemed to agree where we needed to go, this way, not that way. I might have been one of those hapless British travellers who perished (of thirst, for I would learn that in Australia they used only the verb) and I might have become a cautionary tale.

  That first lunchtime was functional. Damper, mutton, black tea. In the afternoon, Larkin and I let Maurice’s dray go ahead of us along a route made, in this country of sun-brittle grass, by the stagecoach that brought the shearers to Momba Station in season. As we rode along behind, Tom Larkin gave me further education in the nature of the country, pointing out the mulga trees widely spaced on the plain and telling me you never cut one of them down because the branches were good stock feed in drought.

  He also pointed out light green-blue shrubs called saltbush, which he said the sheep loved. How providential, he solemnly told me, that this shrub that had been here since Adam’s day proved just the ticket for sheep to live off!

  He showed me pearl bluebush which was like saltbush but not as palatable. Similarly applebush and rosebush, which looked nothing like their namesakes.

  Above all he showed me the tall, orange-brown kangaroo grass, saying, ‘Prime, Mr Dickens. Prime!’ And then, as if he had committed a breach of etiquette, ‘Prime, Plorn. Caviar for sheep and cattle. It dies with drought though.’ Then yellow tussocks, of which he said, ‘Mitchell grass. Hard to kill.’

  By the end of the day he had introduced me to clumps of mulga grass with green-grey bulbs, emu grass, feathery and lime-green neverfail, which Larkin assured me was even more durable than mulga and Mitchell grass. And he had no doubt that this was all providence for the wool business, that all this fodder, until now cropped only by kangaroos, had been placed here from time primordial until Britons should need it to grow the world’s best wool.

  He put names to other items in the nearby landscape until I grew thoroughly confused. It was astounding how much he knew, as if he had sampled them all as provender himself.

  In the late afternoon we encountered the front fence of Momba Station, which stretched away, northwest and southeast.

  ‘It’s forty-five miles long,’ said Maurice, a little breathlessly. It was in its way a world wonder – built of tons of wire, and hardwood stumps by the ton, along with mountains of human sweat.

  After a dinner of mutton stew prepared by Larkin, my two friends told me of their origins while taking mine for granted.

  First, Tom Larkin: ‘My parents were convicts from Ireland, but loving and worthy of honour. My old man was transported for breaking his oppressive landlord’s door down, though if he were here he would argue fully he was no criminal. My dear mother was sent here for stealing a length of cloth in Limerick. She was a good woman, but sadly died in childbirth, and my father passed a few years later of melancholy. I cannot swear, Mr Dickens, that liquor might not have been involved, for men’s souls were marked by their long imprisonment and the passage to Australia.’

  I listened to this as if it were normal to have such parents.

  Maurice had, if anything, an even sadder tale. His parents had both been artists and their marriage a meeting of souls. They travelled widely together on painting expeditions. Maurice’s father had been elected an associate of the Royal Academy and would, in time, have been made a full member. Maurice’s parents had exhibited together at the Royal Society of Artists under, said Maurice, ‘A friend of your family, Dickens – a very generous man named Clarkson Stanfield. Your father dedicated a novel to him, I believe.’

  I remembered the name Clarkson Stanfield. Though he was an old man – I would say maybe twenty years older than my father – he had the demeanour of a young one and proved he liked children when he came to Tavistock House for fun and games when I was little. (He had lost a lot of his own children, it turned out.) He painted back cloths for the plays Papa put on, and the guvnor said of him that though he was a Papist he lived modestly and without hypocrisy. For fun he imitated someone stumbling over his names, and would make jokes, calling himself Clarkfield Stanson and Fieldstan Transom. Then he went on to tell us how in Napoleon’s day he had been pressed into the navy by a press-gang. He knew that story would enchant us and he was right.

  So this same man had been a benefactor to Maurice’s parents, and we were discussing all this beyond Wilcannia, on the rim of the known earth.

  Sadly, three years past, Maurice’s parents had died in a huge avalanche in the St Gotthard Pass. The rest was a familiar enough story: Maurice’s father had left his business affairs in the hands of a London lawyer he would have entrusted with his life. The man was unworthy not only of that trust, but even incapable of normal honesty.

  ‘Like a child in a novel, I had nothing,’ said Maurice, ‘and my father’s friends rallied and wrote to my mother’s brother in Wilcannia. Not long after I got a wonderful, welcoming letter from my aunt, saying that she and my uncle both believed I should join them in New South Wales, and my parents’ friends raised the money for a saloon passage, though I travelled second-class so I had resources left over. And . . . here we are. Tom and I are orphans, but you, Dickens, thankfully in full possession of parents.’

  Though possession of Charles and Catherine Dickens was not easy to claim at such a distance, and could not even be simultaneously managed in England, with Mother living at her parents’ and Father prowling the earth.

  At last, without even checking my swag bed for vipers, I unfolded it and, in the cooling desert night, fell asleep on it.

  Away at dawn, we crossed claypans where, Larkin told me, the Aboriginals had in times past lit fires and turned the surface to a form of glazed brick.

  ‘You will hear nothing but good of the natives from Mr Bonney at Momba,’ said Maurice. ‘My uncle says Bonney is cracked about them. I think he’s a student of them.’

  We saw smoke from a fire some way off. ‘That’s them,’ said Maurice. Our path lay in that direction, and later in the day I saw the antediluvian people moving across their country. The men were tall and thin like the Aboriginal men on the wharf, and wore cast-off jackets, no doubt given them by the Bonneys, with clouts of cloth on their lower body. The women wore mission dresses but some were bare-breasted, including a woman suckling a baby.

  As we approached, an old woman advanced a way to look at us more closely, the sun glinting off a sort of halo adorning her head. ‘What is that?’ I asked. ‘On her head.’

  It was a helmet of gypsum, as it turned out, which widowed women encased their head in after their husbands died. The gypsum helmet gave me my first impulse of fascination with the darks. By some mad loop of un-reasoning, it made me think at once of Mama. She was not a widow nor did I ever want her to be. But it had been ten years since she’d gone home to her parents. What helmet should she wear?

  She had claimed she wanted to go and live with her parents. When she married Papa, he was a shorthand reporter and scribbler, but when she left his side he was a god. An impulse told me that had she worn a glinting helmet on her head it would have spoken and argued for her, and helped her move into the society of ordinary, ungod-like men and women, as she wanted to.

  An impulse in me wanted Mama to be able to be as shrill as this dark widow now was, making a trembling plaint at her
condition within Momba’s great fence. Contrary to what the guvnor said, Mother got away from her turbulent children and husband the demigod to live in her parents’ place, and then in her own neat little house in Gloucester Crescent. She had taken Charley, the oldest, with her, letting us all know she loved us before she moved there, weeping softly, making no loud gestures like this widow. Aunt Georgie, her own sister, stayed with father and us. Aunt Georgie, if widowed, would have raged like this dark woman. But mother was such a gentle claimant on our love. Perhaps she should have come to Gad’s Hill after we moved out there to the Kentish countryside, and wailed on the front steps as the old lady with the gypsum helmet wailed.

  The melancholy of all this did not last long, for by late afternoon we entered the last gate and came to a homestead with a deep veranda not unlike the homestead of the unspeakable McGaw. But this one was not the sum of Momba, which was like a little village! There was a large store, a grand shed for the bullock wagon, a foundry, a sawmill, several cottages for drovers and carpenters, stables and a huge shearing shed with a fringe of sheep races and pens and yards. Larkin said it would be a wool factory once shearing began.

  After opening the gate for Maurice’s dray to roll through, Larkin and I rode in behind. I was nervous now about whether the Bonney brothers and Mr Suttor would, if amiable, greet me with urgent questions regarding the guvnor. A proper demeanour quite rightly meant coolness, distance, until I showed I was aimed in the same direction as them – that I wanted to apply myself and be a lord of the fleece.

  I was heartened when we went to the stables and Tom Larkin, who had not asked me laboured questions, lifted the saddle off his horse’s steaming back, and said, ‘Mr Dickens . . . Plorn, I’d be pleased if when you get the chance you could thank Mr Suttor, since he and his father stood up for us Catholic children of convicts while some would have had us in the pit. To think I was born in convict slavery while my mother still served her term, but here we are now, free men of worth, each with the universal franchise.’