The Dickens Boy

by Tom Keneally

  ‘Well put, well put,’ said the storekeeper, nodding his head, and looking suddenly very much like what he was – an Englishman far removed from his home, and somewhat lost.

  I could hear Mrs Chard speaking to my brother in the background. ‘Pu-er Mr Chard, he wuzz thut suck lest naight, Mester Deckins. Et wuz too badd alttugutha of yue!’

  ‘I am chastened, dear lady,’ Alfred told her with apparent earnestness. ‘I will myself tell Mr Chard to reject my future offers of hospitality, and for your sake I shall not press . . .’

  ‘Yezzir, dun’t you priss ’im anymower, Mester Deckens.’

  Chard lowered his voice now. ‘My darling there,’ he said, nodding at his wife. ‘She is a pearl. And the wonderful thing in the colonies, you can marry anyone who takes your heart. Juries of aunts and uncles don’t have to sit on the girl and test her suitability. And so I have my love, no matter what anyone thinks. Oh . . .’

  Almost in a whisper he added, ‘She has this voice modulation which is a little strange, but that is for my sake. She feels I’ve married badly and would love to pass as a stage Englishwoman . . .’

  ‘Oh,’ I said, enlightened, ‘that’s what it is.’

  ‘Yes, that is what she is attempting. It is altogether poignant, isn’t it? But it will pass.’ He paused and coughed. ‘I wished to tell you actually, Dickens, your brother has done great things here. We have peace. It is hard to believe that only two years past, Gow, the manager before him, had to fight off the Cooper’s Creek darks. Even the local Paakantji fear them. Gow and four of his men shut themselves up in my store, hammered up great bulwarks of hardwood and turned it into a fortress. A dawn attack took place, like it would in an American novel. But with some help from the Messr Bonney, Alfred changed all that because he refused to live as if he were under siege. There are some Cooper’s Creek men back here now, and I believe Alfred means to visit them tomorrow.’

  ‘Are you praising my supposed statesmanship?’ called Alfred.

  ‘Indeed I am, Alfred,’ Chard replied.

  ‘That’s an old song,’ said Alfred, before going back to talking to Mrs Chard.

  Chard whispered to me, ‘Remember your brother’s wisdom when you get a place of your own, Mr Plorn. Let the darks take a few sheep. If they have permission, they’ll take fewer. Punishing every infringement will merely make them bitter and they will secretly kill many more. In Gow’s day, the Cooper’s Creek darks retreated over paddocks in which they left hundreds if not thousands of dead sheep.’

  Alfred was clapping his hands now to alert us to the onset of the Christmas feast, announcing, ‘Lady and gentlemen, Mrs Geraghty would like a word with us.’

  Mrs Geraghty appeared behind him in a white dress and large boots, with a handsome slick of sweat on her cheeks, and said, ‘For your Christmas meal, Mrs Chard and gentlemen, I have prepared everything from recipes supplied by Mr Alfred and Mr Edward Dickens’ mother in her famous cookbook, doing my best with Australian conditions.’

  ‘Splendid conditions they are!’ cried Alfred.

  ‘So,’ continued Mrs Geraghty, ‘I will start you off with Mrs Dickens’ menu for six to seven people, it being more promising for our purposes. We begin with Murray cod freshly extracted from the Darling River itself.’

  ‘Or a mud hole thereof,’ my brother interjected irreverently.

  ‘This will be accompanied by my dry-land version of oyster sauce.’

  ‘Very dry perhaps,’ said Alfred, enjoying himself.

  Mrs Geraghty did not pay attention to him, saying, ‘This will be followed by roast loin of mutton and boiled fowls with bacon, accompanied by colcannon, minced collops, spinach and mashed and brown potatoes.’

  ‘Boiled fowls, Mrs Geraghty,’ Hayward interjected. ‘Are these fowl, or brush turkey impersonating fowl? I simply asked for the elucidation of the entire party.’

  ‘When I serve brush turkey I never pass it off as fowl,’ said Mrs Geraghty. ‘I have never done it in your experience, have I, Mr Hayward?’

  ‘I do not believe you have, admirable Mrs Geraghty.’

  ‘So I would be grateful if you asked only the questions that needed asking,’ she said, to which Hayward imitated a man impaled. There were cries around the table, even from Mrs Chard, along the lines that Mrs Geraghty had got him between the eyes and it served him right.

  ‘For your dessert,’ Mrs Geraghty continued, ‘there is the normal pudding of the season with a brandy sauce, and cabinet pudding made from our lemon trees, accompanied by cream from our few dairy cows. I will leave you now with wishes for a happy Christmas and a reminder that I have tried to give the Messrs Dickens a memory of their childhoods, and to introduce the rest of you to that memory. May God bless us all.’

  ‘Thank you, Mrs Geraghty. Don’t forget to take that Christmas bottle of rum to Clohessy’s with you. You mightn’t miss it, but I can tell you Clohessy can’t say the Rosary without it.’

  At table we drank the white wine with the fowl and fish, and the red with the beef. The cod was wonderful, and as we broached the fowl and beef we paid further compliments both to Mrs Geraghty and to her prophet, Mrs Catherine Dickens. This induced a sadness in me as I was reminded that today my mother would miss the lively Christmases Father could still produce at Gad’s Hill, with presents, games, charades and plays.

  Shaking off my sudden melancholy and grateful for the company, I said, ‘We have here at table five people of whom only one is colonial-born. I think we would all love to hear any details of your story that you are willing to share with us, Mrs Chard.’

  ‘Oh yue doen wanta hear abite me, Mester Deckens.’

  There were cries from all of us that we wanted to. And so she began the story in her strained accent, telling us she was only colonial-born because her mother was delivered of her on the shores of Holdfast Bay three days after landing in South Australia. Her parents had been crofters on the Isle of Skye, but the kelp trade had given out so they took advantage of the colony’s offer to pay the passages of sturdy Highlanders and islanders. After their arrival in Adelaide on a wagon, her people had travelled north-east along the Murray River, and then to Menindee in New South Wales where she’d grown up and where Chard had first seen and recruited her as a maid or housekeeper.

  ‘And I was struck by her totally and at once,’ said Chard.

  I did envy him at such a time as this, wondering when I would be struck totally and at once, and rendered incapable of worrying whether she was Imperial Sterling or Colonial Currency; nor how her opinions lay. When would I find all someone’s frailties enchanting, as Chard had found his wife’s? He had been very determined to identify as lovable quirks what others might regard as outrageous eccentricities. But that was his good luck, and the triumph of his generous heart over the more limited views.

  ‘What was Lola Montez doing at the Royal Theatre in Menindee when you were ten, Mrs Chard?’ Alfred said, as a tease.

  ‘Oh, Mester Deckens, yue know there weren’t enny opera in Minindee.’

  ‘I thought Lola Montez was in love with the pub owner there,’ said Alfred, winking at the rest of us.

  ‘Oh Mester Deckuns, yue are thet wucked!’ cried Mrs Chard. ‘My fether drove boolock teams, a humble Scot but greatly acquinted with the Scruptures, bitter then menny a Prisbytarian pastor!’

  ‘But isn’t it true he was a notable Caledonian highwayman?’ asked Hayward.

  ‘Mester Hayward,’ she cried. ‘Mye yor fibs choke your goud and trulley! Nun uv the Scots were cremenels. None! It is hour boust! The Englush and Irush are the creminels.’

  And so she went on, galloping through thickets of diphthongs, searching – I was sure – for the sound that would not disgrace her husband, and failing at every turn.

  By half-past two we were all in a merry condition and Mrs Chard was beginning to slip into her true colonial accent. ‘Orright, Chard. No more trouble from you, Sonny Jim!’

  Mrs Geraghty came back to serve the pudding, receiving quite a respectable vo
lume of amazement and acclaim from the company of just five. Rosy with wine, I looked forward to my Momba prospects and found for the first time in my conscious life that the prospect of the coming year held no terrors. I knew what to expect from the curriculum of sheep, as I never had from the school curriculum. As if to crown that awareness, Hayward was prevailed upon to sing a music hall song called ‘Our Lodger’s Such a Nice Man’ and then, egged on by a tide of applause, ‘The Lay of the Very Last Minstrel’.

  The pudding was long eaten and the light was at last declining when the homestead clock announced it was five o’clock. The Chards were suddenly on their way out, with Hayward calling mischievously, ‘This time next year there might be three Chards.’

  Not long after, the couple came back to the homestead with Alfred to fetch his tobacco. Finding myself alone on the veranda with Mrs Chard, I felt a general goodwill, and not least to this lady. I foolishly said, ‘Mrs Chard, you don’t need to try with pronunciations. He is enchanted by you and would be happy however you spoke.’

  She astounded me by leaning across and kissing me. ‘You’re a lovely boy,’ she told me in an unstrained Australian accent. ‘But, see, I’m just keeping him interested with all the pronunciation stuff. Our secret. Orright, sonny Jim?’

  ‘Indeed,’ I told her, consumed with admiration.

  Soon after, her husband and my brother returned, and Alfred and I saw the Chards out into the still heat of the late afternoon.

  ‘Why are you smiling?’ Alfred asked me.

  ‘They are an amusing pair,’ I told him.

  ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘poor old Chard.’

  That would always be his version of events.

  23

  Later that night, on the veranda, with Alfred drinking brandy and smoking his pipe, we lazily discussed our brother Sydney at sea aboard some ship of battle, before moving on to others of our family. Talking about Frank, the young inspector in Bengal, we wondered what brigands he might be pursuing. Then we discussed the sisters, and Charley’s work with the guvnor, and how Henry would be down from Cambridge for the holiday. We also remembered our deceased brother, Walter, dead of a paroxysm in the military officers’ hospital in Calcutta while talking about going home.

  But in the turn of a second, some unhappiness started to emerge in Alfred. It began casually, with his remarking, ‘Mother had a day of glory at Corona with Mrs Geraghty’s cooking, eh?’

  ‘Yes. We must write and tell her,’ I said.

  ‘She’d be gratified, yes. She’s been transported like her sons. Have you ever thought about Father transporting people to Australia in his novels?’

  ‘Does he send many?’ I asked, hoping that in discussing numbers we would not go deeply into the question.

  ‘Look, if he wants to get rid of someone in his books, he either kills them or sends them to Australia.’

  ‘I wasn’t aware of that,’ I said, devoutly wishing yet again I’d read more of the guvnor’s works so I could put up a defence. ‘But it’s only his imagination, isn’t it?’

  ‘He sends quite a few people to Australia in David Copperfield, you know. Hopeless Mr Micawber and Little Em’ly who has lost her virtue. And all her relatives, her uncle Peggotty and so on, to keep her company. It seems fallen women un-fall themselves when they get to Australia. That’s what Pa seems to believe anyhow.’

  ‘Well, it is a fresh start, isn’t it? Look at us!’

  ‘Ah,’ he murmured. ‘Exactly. Would you like some brandy, Plorn?’

  ‘Tipsy enough on wine from lunch, thank you, Alfred.’

  Alfred poured himself more.

  ‘It’s not his sending Micawber to Australia – you really must read that damned book, Plorn! It’s another thing. There’s a place in the book where David is married to his beloved Dora, close to the silliest woman Pa could invent, and he thinks he’s happy about that, and doing well enough to employ a pageboy. So he does, and this boy-child is the sort of person who wipes his nose regularly with the tip of his handkerchief, after which he folds the handkerchief neatly for its next use. And any hint his services might be dispensed with fills him with terrible grief, which upsets David and Dora and makes them feel bound to him. And wouldn’t you know – and how ‘conwenient’, as a number of the guvnor’s characters often pronounce that word – that the boy has been thieving food and valuables and clothes all the time. And how does the guvnor get rid of him? Why, he’s arrested and transported to Australia. You see, death or Australia, that’s the equation, Plorn. And he’s already got death in childbirth awaiting Dora – has to get rid of her so that David can marry his real love, Agnes. Where would our father’s plots be, I ask, without death and Australia? The pit at the end of the world you toss useless folk in.’

  I tried to interject to ask him about Corona but he was speaking heatedly now, and at a pace that brooked no interruption.

  ‘Do you think then, Plorn, that you and I are that clumsy boy with the corner of the handkerchief? Do you think that for the guvnor Australia was the sentence short of death?’

  ‘Do you actually hate Father?’ I asked, tired of this line he was pursuing.

  ‘Don’t be fractious with me, Plorn. I’m not saying that. The guvnor’s a god, anyway. There’s no future in hating gods. But did you choose being here by yourself? Or were you driven in this direction?’

  ‘Well, I was happy at home. And am happy to be here as well. I wasn’t driven.’

  Though it had never occurred to me before, for a second I wondered if I had been because there was such certitude about it in Alfred’s eyes.

  ‘I chose to come,’ said Alfred. ‘I’d had my failures at trying other things. But my being here . . . the guvnor used that as a reason to drive you here. Unlike the rest of us, you weren’t tried at other things. You were sent straight here after school. And even your schooling was truncated.’

  ‘But I’m happy here, Alfie,’ I asserted, or perhaps pleaded.

  ‘Did you ever hear of Urania Cottage when you were younger?’ he asked.

  I had, in fact. It was a place for disreputable young women; somewhere my sisters and Aunt Georgie and Mama thought was good and brave for my father to attend to, but not good enough to be talked about in full voice in front of me.

  Alfred shivered suddenly with the effect of the brandy. ‘Do you know Urania is some sort of goddess of astrology, but it seems she is also the polite version of Aphrodite. Aphrodite in a bloody mission dress.’

  I felt that he was somehow intent on undermining the guvnor now. And that in the process his use of unaccustomed language and colonial bluntness was meant to jolt me, since he knew I would support the guvnor’s honour.

  ‘I knew it was a place for young women and that Miss Coutts was somehow in it,’ I said.

  ‘They were in it together. Miss Coutts put up the money and bought the house in Shepherd’s Bush, and Father put up his well-known imagination. Miss Coutts was such a bluestocking, such a pious, dry old tart, though Mama never minded her.’

  ‘I liked Miss Coutts,’ I said, as if to warn him. Mama had told me once that Miss Coutts was an example of the humble being exalted. I’d kept the table at Momba enthralled one night with the fairytale-like story of Miss Coutts, though I hadn’t mentioned anything to do with Urania Cottage.

  Mama had told me the story like this: a little girl, the youngest of six children, grew up in a house where her father (the radical Member of Parliament Sir Francis Burdett) was wise and loved her greatly. Soldiers shot people dead (the Peterloo Massacre) and the father told all the world that those who shot innocent people dead must be punished. And for saying that, he was put in prison! Here we were then, with the necessary components – a princess, a seer and a dungeon.

  The princess (Miss Coutts) vowed that if God would let her father free, she would always be a just woman. One day she saw him brought back, and walking to her door as a hero, cheered by ordinary people who knew he was their friend. Later, when her wealthy grandfather died, his wife received
his cave of treasures. But then, while the princess was still little more than a girl, this wife also died. The wife’s lawyer gathered the family together to tell them what the second wife had decided should happen with the cave of treasures. It emerged from the lawyer that the woman who’d recently died had noticed how loyal the princess had been to her father and had decided that she could have the cave (as long as the princess did not marry a foreigner, though that was an item that did not quite fit the story). So now there was only one woman in the kingdom richer than the princess, and that was the queen.

  And to help her, the princess called on the greatest wizard in the land (the guvnor) to ask him about some of the things he would advise her to do with her treasure. And the wizard said, give some of the treasure to the ragged schools that teach the children of the very poor, and make the schoolrooms bigger, and build a bathhouse where the ragged children can wash themselves. And next the wizard advised her to do something for unfortunate girls, having spoken to a wise woman (Mrs Chisholm) who had told him that the outer kingdoms in Australia and Canada were such blessed places that an unfortunate girl could remake herself there after she was prepared and reformed in a London house.

  That was how the princess and the wizard came up with Urania Cottage, which Alfred was now bringing up to buttress his argument.

  ‘The idea of Urania Cottage,’ said Alfred, ‘was to be a house of reform for poor women, even prostitutes. It used a points system for good behaviour and when one of the girls had scored enough points, what do you think the reward was?’

  ‘I know that they were sent away with a sum of money to start a new life.’

  ‘And where were they sent?’

  ‘To Canada. And here. Australia.’

  ‘And so why, Plorn, were they sent to Australia?’

  ‘You know why, Alfred. To remake themselves.’