An Angel In Australia

by Tom Keneally

  The troubles of the war-working girls were nothing to those of soldiers’ wives. Sydney suburbs were populated by American soldiers who had arrived well-fed and confident straight from the United States without passing through the filters of war. They had not been humbled by the defeats and hardships of the Philippines. They wore sharp-creased uniforms unstained by battle, yet, as far as fabric could, promising gallantry. They had access to hosiery and chocolate, both of which seemed to mean so much to women, and would kindly bring into the lounge rooms and kitchens of every parish the glossy magazines of American Mammon. What might be most dangerous was that compared to Australian men, the Americans were said to be courtly. Occasionally, after Sunday Mass, one or two of them would present themselves at the sacristy door with a pleasing frankness, courtesy and respect. One GI had given Darragh a stipend of a pound note and asked him to say Mass for ‘me and the boys of my section’. Darragh told the soldier the normal Mass offering in Australia was five to ten shillings. But the boy—he could have been little more than twenty—said, ‘No, no, Father. I want you to say a real good Mass.’ This mixture of innocence and worldliness was of a different order than that of Australians, and that gave the Americans fascination.

  Some women’s husbands had been absent for the better part of two years—the chief divisions of the Australian army were in North Africa or in Singapore. It was utterly according to nature, as Darragh could see, that with the sudden triumph of the Japanese in the last two months a woman on her own, with small children, should be tempted to interpose some American soldier between herself and the chance of invasion, violation and disembowelment during the coming winter.

  Even after the Japanese drove the British and Australians down the Malayan peninsula, the confessional remained Darragh’s obscure duty in war. He had learned to embrace it. It assuaged more easily than he expected his occasional self-consciousness about not being a soldier.

  As with the life of a soldier, much of Darragh’s duty was drudgery—dealing, for instance, with the surprisingly numerous platoons of self-abusers. In the spirit of the aged exorcist’s advice to him, Darragh despised this crime while understanding the sinner. He’d been a rare sinner himself, twice, although in one case, during a fever, his full intent had been lacking. He exercised a self-discipline based on not thinking about the thing, and upon resigning control over his animal nature to God. Before he was ordained a priest, he had thought the sin far less common among young males than the confessional now indicated to him it was. For a moment sometimes, he wondered where he stood in relation to these young men who could sin fourteen or more times a week. Was their malice greater than his had been at that age? If so, why did they come to confession? Or were they, or he, deficient in some medical way, they for being so regularly tempted, himself for being tempted so little? He had divine grace to fortify him, and he had his sense of outrage. In Noldin’s famous six-volume work, Summa Theologiae Moralis, the Latin name of the sin had been based on its capacity to unhinge and to damn. Manustrupatio. Hand-rape. An assault upon one’s own temple. Hence it had—by title—a profound irrationality and danger, and yet occurred as commonly as the pride, the appeasing lies and the small meannesses and envies to which respectable older women most commonly confessed.

  Some wisdom greater than himself had him telling these boys that they were better than their sin—that they were not hateful in God’s eye, that they should not fear but should resign themselves to divine help and the intercession of the Virgin Mary, forces which made all things possible. Made it possible, among other miracles, he told the sinners, for priests to keep their vows!

  Because he saw no sense in thundering at them, the adolescents of the parish, boys from the Christian Brothers’ school a mile away who might in a short time be fighting the Japanese, milled to his confessional.

  Back in the presbytery on Saturday evenings, between confessional sessions, over Mrs Flannery’s chops, peas, potatoes and carrots, Monsignor Carolan always sooner or later advised him, ‘Don’t wear yourself out, Frank. I’ve seen fellows like you—great confessors, but it wears them out. Men who take the world’s sins on them.’ Unless the rite was performed in a brisk, functional way, the monsignor saw the confessional as a possible danger to all concerned, particularly to the vain or the excessively pious. His talents were directed to building the physical kingdom of God—brick by brick. In the month before the war began, he had completed the little school next door to St Margaret’s. Classrooms, playgrounds, toilet blocks were Monsignor Carolan’s chief visible sacrament. Frank Darragh suspected he lacked the fundraising gifts of a Carolan, and thus had little chance of becoming one of those wise, competent managers of parishes so admired in the archdiocese.

  At seven o’clock each Saturday night, he was back behind the door of his confessional box, seated in his chair, facing the dim beaded glass of the door which had closed with a smooth ball-bearing click as discreet as God’s mercy. Either side of him lay the sliding shutters which gave onto the space occupied by the penitent on the left, and the one on the right.

  On the other side of the church, in his confessional, Monsignor Carolan tried to serve the needs of his penitents in good time to hear the ‘Sid Stone Variety Show’, on the Macquarie Broadcasting System at eight o’clock. The monsignor’s favourite variety turns were yodelling and bird calls—he enjoyed a full-throated kookaburra, the most difficult bird call in the world to achieve with utter authenticity. He had an aged uncle who had done kookaburras and currawongs on the ‘Amateur Hour’ years before, and been praised by the compere. The joy of Christ shone appealingly in Monsignor Carolan’s eye when Stan Jones teased husand-and-wife yodelling teams.

  ON SUNDAYS THE merciful confessor Frank Darragh normally said the early Masses, the six-thirty and the eight o’clock. The monsignor, with the debt on the school to repay, said the more populous and strategic nine and ten o’clock Masses. For these he attracted the bulk of the parish with the briskness of his recitation and of his sermon, which never failed to refer to the reality that the parish was burdened with the primary school debt and the maintenance of St Margaret’s.

  St Margaret’s was indeed a splendid, almost basilica-like church built in the most modern style during the prosperous 1920s by an Irish parish priest named McHugh, and improved and paid for in his memory by the younger Australian cleric, Monsignor Carolan. It put the modest Methodist chapel and even the Anglican church of St Anne’s in the shade, which had been the intention of the late Father McHugh and the inheritance of Monsignor Carolan. Behind its main altar, which stood high above marble steps, a fresco of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin into Heaven had been painted by a team of Italian artisans who had travelled the length and breadth of the Australian continent filling churches with iconography in the style of Raphael. These artisans, and the families they had acquired in Australia, had recently been interned, but the Papal Nuncio in Sydney had been working to have them released so that they could continue their benign craft even in wartime.

  There were in St Margaret’s as well two handsome side altars, one to Our Lady of Perpetual Succour, the other to St Anthony of Padua, everyone’s favourite miracle worker and finder of lost objects. None of this had come cheaply, nor had the slate roof and the rafterless cement-and-steel-reinforced upper reaches of St Margaret’s. St Margaret’s had a grandeur then which outshone many Sydney parish churches, including the one at Frank Darragh’s first posting, in Stanmore. The next-door parish to Strathfield, Flemington, within reach of the dust from the livestock saleyards, possessed an extremely humble and dowdy church by comparison, barely more than a cement-rendered hall, undistinguished architecturally, with murky varnished cedar buttresses and rafters, and bare gestures towards ornamentation and statuary. It was not that Darragh would be unwilling to serve in such a place, but that he was pleased exceedingly to find himself the unwitting beneficiary of the energy of Father McHugh, native of Tipperary, and Monsignor Carolan, native of Tamarama.

  Darrag
h took a little longer than the monsignor over his Mass, since he considered it a work of serious articulation. In the seminary he had acted Mark Antony in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, and had been an admirer of the iambic pentameter. Since he needed to give the Latin of the Mass at least the same weight and rhythmic enunciation as he had Shakespeare’s metres, he found it hard to finish the eight o’clock Mass and fit in a sermon in fifty-one or two minutes. But the monsignor had made it clear that that was what he required—Frank was to be back in the sacristy and out of his heavy Mass vestments by about seven minutes to ten. The monsignor wanted peace in which to recite privately the pre-Mass prayers while parched summertime altar boys took turns drinking water from the washbasin which sat in the sacristy’s corner.

  Within the limits the monsignor placed on him, Frank Darragh was a happy young man, dazed and delighted with his sacramental duties. Dried out from the weight of his vestments that summer, he ate little more than toast at the end of his Masses, despite the insistence of Mrs Flannery that he needed more. He drank plenty of tea, and left the substantial breaking of his Saturday-night, Sunday-morning fast until he reached his boyhood home in Rose Bay, to which he returned on most Sundays.

  This Sunday was in humid February. He had no car, but travelling by public transport gave him a sense of fraternity which he knew he would lose when and if he acquired the skills appropriate to a car, and a vehicle to go with it. Hard-bitten fathers of families raised their hats to him on Strathfield Station, implying, ‘We are one with you in the Faith.’ He made in return a half-embarrassed gesture of raising his black felt hat to them. They were the ones who had fought the fight, had raised their children in a harsh decade. But a fraternity of respect was established, even as people shuffled together towards the doors of the red electric trains.

  In the crowded Sunday-morning carriage, young leading aircraftmen tilted their forage caps, and he nodded. The Communion of Saints on the Western Line thundered towards Central Station amidst showers of sparks from the electric lines above. Of course, from much of the population of the trains, those not party to the mysteries of faith, there were surreptitious stares and blankness. Mystification. A mute hostility to which he was utterly accustomed.

  A beautiful young woman in a floral dress drew her six-or seven-year-old son off the seat opposite her to allow Frank Darragh to sit. She held the child between her knees and told the boy in a lowered voice, ‘Say hello to Father.’ The boy had a small scatter of freckles on the same fine-grained skin his mother had.

  Darragh said, ‘Thank you for the seat.’ The mother had that air of grace, and a particular light in the eye. She was not frightened of him. It was good not to be feared.

  ‘My daddy’s in the Middle North,’ said the boy.

  ‘The Middle East,’ his mother corrected him, and kissed the rim of his ear. Darragh tried to remember if such easy exchanges had operated between himself and his mother. He decided briefly and with some unease that his mother might not have been so casual in the presence of a priest. ‘Your father is a brave man,’ Darragh told the boy.

  Darragh saw that the woman nearly shrugged, as if Darragh’s compliment did not serve her and her son much.

  ‘We’re going to Clovelly,’ said the boy, resting easily against his mother’s thigh. As the train rolled, this young woman evoked in Darragh the usual sharp and not too frequent pain of celibacy. His spiritual adviser, an elderly, gentle soul named Dr Cahill—for every seminarian had to choose a spiritual adviser from the staff of the seminary—had once said, ‘The institution of celibacy is not a mere sacrifice of pleasure. It asks of a man that he will consent to be the end of the line. That he will not pass on his embodied nature.’

  Darragh considered this apparently perfect, archetypal young woman who faced him. Besides what he read as an air of confident innocence, she had the character of having suffered without being given a choice. History, without asking her, had claimed her husband and put him at a fabulous distance from her.

  On a rowdy stretch of the line near Macdonaldtown, she leaned forward by just a margin and told Darragh, under her breath, that she and her son lived closer to Flemington parish, but belonged to St Margaret’s and preferred to go to Mass there. So she had recognised him as the curate of St Margaret’s. Was she one of the young soldiers’ wives who had confessed loneliness or temptation to him? Had he, unconscious of her loveliness, absolved her and imposed a penance: ‘Say one decade of the Joyous Mysteries.’ Darragh nodded, and the woman settled back and resumed a secret whispered conversation with her son.

  Central Station that dangerous February was a melee of Sunday people, children in light summer hats, beach-bound with their parents. Skylarking soldiers bearing kitbags made their way towards the steam trains which would take them—who knew?—to some banal camp in the bush, or to immolation in the Pacific. These warriors among whom he could not be counted! On the broad concourse at Eddy Avenue, a larger amy of sailors, airmen and soldiers posed for the pavement photographer on the arms of their mothers, wives or girlfriends. The papers talked about Australia being stripped of troops, but there seemed enough to raise substantial regiments waiting with their womenfolk for the Bronte and Bondi trams.

  And, some distance away, among the crowd by the tramline stood the mother and son. She had the air of a woman who was used to waiting, of not resenting queues and crowds. Probably a country girl, he thought, building a history in his mind, whose husband had brought her out of the bush to the city, looking for some work in the Depression. Darragh saw her lift her son onto the running board of the Clovelly tram. A militiaman who looked perhaps sixteen stood, doffing his slouch hat, and offered her a seat. She took it with a frank smile, and with a steely howl the tram bore her and her tribe of fellow travellers away to Elizabeth Street. When his Rose Bay tram came along five minutes later, he boarded it, and a boy in a school blazer stood up to offer him his seat. Some instinct that he should now separate himself from the memory of the lovely mother, and that this was better achieved in the discomfort of standing, caused Darragh to smile and say, ‘No, I’m perfectly fine, thank you. You sit.’

  To the edification of any Catholics who might be on the tram, and the mystification of others, he pulled from the pocket of his black jacket his Breviarium Romanum. The volume he had was marked Hiemalis—Winter—since it was winter in Europe, winter in the Vatican surrounded by Italian Fascists, winter in Russia where Hitler’s men correctly suffered at the hands of Soviet troops, winter over the bomb sites of England, and of course over the neutrally undisturbed and poverty-stricken farms of Ireland, from which his own ancestors came. This word ‘Hiemalis’ in dull-gold lettering on the spine of the beautifully printed little book, when taken in conjunction with the humid summer day, told you that Australia was in a remote and inverted relation to the well-springs of the European faith, to the locales of monasticism and mysteries of faith, and of strategic importance. That was the basic question which Smith’s Weekly and the Telegraph kept asking: Could Mr Churchill be made to take an interest in the destiny of a place so distant? So far off that a priest, reading the Hiemalis volume of his daily breviary, felt no shiver of northern wind but sweated instead into his black serge, in the close air of a tram beneath a ruthless February sun?

  Each day, diocesan priests like Frank Darragh were required to recite their breviary—the office, as it was called. In the tradition of those monks who sang in plainchant the sundry so-called hours of the office—named Matins, Lauds, Prime, Terce, Sext, None, Vespers and Compline—busier souls like Frank and the monsignor were allowed merely to recite the psalms, hymns, lessons, versicles and collects making up the text which, according to one of Darragh’s seminary professors, sprang from ancient Jewish tradition and had been formally recited from the second or third century in Christian monasteries. The office thus possessed a worldwide breadth and a historic depth, but that did not prevent comparative speeds for its completion being discussed by young priests on tennis Mondays, the way at
hletic times for the half-mile might be discussed by runners. A jovial former seminary buffoon named Tim Murphy boasted that he could manage the whole thing in thirty-four minutes. If so, it showed a remarkable facility Frank Darragh couldn’t match—the Latin seemed to him to demand a slower enunciation. Verses such as ‘Undique circumvenerunt me sicut apes; adusserunt sicut ignis spinas: in nomine Domini contrivi eos’ did not rattle off the tongue. Neither did they roll off the mind, in their significance. ‘They surround me like bees; they engulf me like tongues of fire …’ He had got to say Matins and Lauds the evening before, as was customary, and Prime and Terce and Sext between his two Masses, and now on the tram he recited None from his breviary, his lips moving, as required by canon law, to pronounce the Latin hymns and psalms and versicles.