Homebush Boy

by Thomas Keneally

  After the priest had gone again, non-Celestials of the kind who hung on the Paragon milk bar in the Boulevarde in Strathfield, who sang the latest pop songs and had never heard of Mahler or GMH – fellows that is like genial Freddie Ford – would come up to Matt and pretend the priesthood was an option for him and say, ‘Gunna break all the sheilas’ hearts, Mattie?’

  And Matt would frame the answer with his handsome white lips. ‘Aw, don’t think they’d want me, Freddie. I think I’d bring down the tone in the seminary.’

  Freddie Ford was the sort of boy who went to the Stockade, the big combined toilets and changing rooms, at lunchtime with his mates. They would stand in turns in front of the one mirror and work frankly on their hair, slicking it lovingly back, as if it wasn’t theirs but someone else’s, as if they were barbers enjoying their work. Freddie was a boy of a different kind of honour and daydream, a boy kindly, mocking, sensual, deliberately neither a prefect nor a scholar, and happy with his age and surroundings. Mangan called Freddie and the others narcissists. But you couldn’t call any of this public lunchtime hairdressing narcissistic, because they did it in front of their mates, communally, trying to look like Farley Granger or Montgomery Clift. Slyly and secretly at home, I tried to make mine look like Chatterton’s, Viney managed to make his look like Beethoven’s, and on top of that we felt morally superior. For we worked in guilty and exhaustive secrecy and wouldn’t have confessed under torture to caring about these things.

  At the start of the year, when Father Byrne came around to canvass us, the idea of the priesthood for me seemed preposterous. University would be the good thing. I would join the Newman Society and talk about scholastic philosophy, and perhaps Curran or the recurrent girl in blue would be there. Despite the splendour of the vestments and sacraments, I couldn’t see much sense in being a plumply irascible, suburban priest like Monsignor Loane of St Martha’s of Strathfield – Pop Loane the school kids called him – who played golf on Mondays and worried a lot about the Silver Circle, the numbers-like betting game on which St Martha’s depended for a lot of its income. You wouldn’t have ever heard Father Hopkins S.J. mention any Silver Circle! Father Byrne himself was quite a suitable model, but a threatening one, in that there seemed no flamboyance in his nature, no room for Hopkinsian poetry or broad gesture.

  But although I didn’t want to be a priest as far as I knew, and did not wish to occupy some Curran-less pulpit from which the Silver Circle results fell, I still queued up in the corridor with other people who wondered if they might be called. It was according to Father Byrne’s advice, and all the advice I had heard since childhood, better to err on the side that you might be called, as the phrase went, and it got you out of Buster Clare’s General Maths anyhow. And I was also within the guidelines: ‘Do you go to Mass more than once a week? Do you find yourself engaged in spiritual debates when some of your mates are more concerned about the things of the world? Do you spend most of your life in a state of Sanctifying Grace through regular Acts of Contrition and regular attendances at the confessional? Etc, etc.’ All that applied to me.

  ‘I don’t think my sense of vocation has crystallized yet,’ I told Father Byrne when my turn to talk to him came.

  That was a good verb, I knew. Brother Dinny McGahan would have liked that word.

  ‘Then be calm and pray to our Blessed Mother,’ said Father Byrne. ‘The Mother of all of us. I don’t know what would have happened to me without Her.’

  We would all later find out that he was telling the truth about this. While he spoke, he looked to the ledge in the corner of the room on which the Madonna stood in blue and white robes. The Virgin Mother Saint Bernadette had seen at Lourdes. Even though I now know, in the smart-alec way all we former Brothers’ boys now know, that Mary would not have been blue and white, would not have had Saxon or Celtic features, but would have been a small, brown and glittering-eyed, Bedouin-like woman, I did not doubt the force of what Father Byrne was saying then and I do not doubt it now. He was talking about an utterly literal kinship. He was talking about his Dreaming, if you like. The balance of his world depended on it. You looked into his pale face and did feel the appeal and temptation to be a young priest, rosary in hand, in a cold church after all the people had left, keeping the Virgin’s real company at the altar rails.

  ‘I suppose if I’m not sure at the end of the year,’ I told him blithely, covering my bets, ‘I could go to the seminary maybe after a year at uni.’

  I wanted those poets and novelists, and the chance to argue with secular philosophers and to wrongfoot humanist professors with my Thomism.

  ‘I must counsel you very seriously,’ said Father Byrne, leaning forward, ‘that is not the best way. There is a spirit of secularism and disbelief at the university. I know many a young man who followed that line: first my degree and then the priesthood. By the time they’d finished their degree, under the influence of atheistic philosophers from Marx to Nietzsche to Bertrand Russell, they’d lost their faith. The seminary is in any case a complete education – English, European Languages, History. But as well as that, of course, Philosophy, and Moral and Dogmatic Theology and Canon Law.’

  ‘Would I be allowed to try to write poetry or novels?’ I wanted to know.

  The novelist priest. A sort of G. K. Chesterton with a collar. Monsignor Ronald Knox wrote murder mysteries.

  ‘Subject to proper authority,’ said Father Byrne. ‘I had a seminary friend who wrote poetry on a regular basis and had it published in the Messenger of the Sacred Heart.’

  There was some confusion for me in this news of his friend’s literary glories. I’d read the Messenger of the Sacred Heart, and a lot of its verse was obvious, rhyme-y stuff, full of clichés (ugh!) and none of the verbal and theological thunder of GMH.

  ‘I’ll be back in May,’ said Father Byrne, ‘and we may be able to speak then.’

  Mangan didn’t go to see Father Byrne. Mangan was beyond all that reassurance and urging stuff. He was shooting straight for the stars. He didn’t want anyone trying to persuade him to go to the Sydney Diocesan Seminary. Rather than chat with Father Byrne, he would remain in class, doing penance within cuffing reach of Brother English.

  Father Byrne was in any case not the only messenger from the spiritual world. There was still the free orchestral concert every Sunday afternoon in Sydney’s massive, nineteenth-century Town Hall.

  Sometimes the conductor was Sir Eugene Goossens, a bald, smooth-looking man. Quite famous, in a few years time he would be found with what Australian Customs said were pornographic items in his luggage and would be primly exiled for it. The awful thing was that some Australians would be oddly comforted that he was so found out. It just showed you! Artistic types.

  An Oxbridge aesthete could not have folded himself more interestingly into his seat than Mangan did, or laid a finger more ponderingly over his lips, or become more lost. I wanted to be able to do that, but my bones weren’t long enough. During the entire recital, Mangan would not once open his eyes. He was away on the plateau where Tchaikovsky, Bach and Debussy held discourse. The Frawley girls and Curran, with their nose for pretension, would nudge each other and point to him.

  Afterwards we would descend to the train, and walk each other miles home from wherever we disembarked. One night we all walked Curran to her home on the hill behind St Pat’s. The Currans lived in a standard brick cottage which was nonetheless rendered special by the cleverness and good looks of the Curran girls, Bernadette and her two younger sisters. Mr Curran, who worked for the State government, was as good-looking as a father in a film – a little like Fred MacMurray as a matter of fact. And there were plenty of older actresses that weren’t as impressive as Mrs Curran. The same could have been said for my mother, on whose looks everyone commented, though for some reason that caused me to squirm.

  As Mrs Curran gave us tea, I said to her, ‘I don’t know about becoming a priest. Mrs Curran, I wonder if all your beautiful daughters would wait till I find out.’r />
  Everyone laughed, Rose Frawley indulgently. ‘What a drongo,’ she said softly to her tea.

  Mrs Curran said, ‘I think you’d better stay at home with us, Mick.’

  I felt secure, and knew I was staying home at least until recognized by the world. But just in case, what I’d said would make a good story for her to tell the ABC should I win the Nobel Prize at twenty-three or become Pope.

  III

  The upstairs flat in Loftus Crescent, which we had rented since the Second World Cataclysm, sat above a downstairs which had been rented for a similar length of time to a family called the Bankses. I did not realize it, since I took him for granted, that my father had startling ways of describing people. He was, in fact, a wordsmith comparable in his way to Gerard Manley Hopkins, a sort of bush poet who got not enough honour for it from his son.

  Instead of describing the unutterable – ‘Thou mastering me, God!’ – he described the Bankses. It would often be at night, while, say, wakeful in bed, I read Silas Marner as my parents listened to some despicable big band, far beneath the attention of a Mahler-fancier, on the radio in the living room. I would overhear my mother mention the Bankses, the struggle she had with Mrs Banks over the use of the one laundry and the clothesline, and then get my father’s response. It was easy to overhear conversations in our small flat and had been since I was a child. The two small bedrooms, narrow kitchenette, kitchen-dining room, living room and bathroom were jammed close together.

  Mr Banks was a hefty man, a railway guard, whom my father called a ‘flobble-gutted, wombat-headed garper’, an onomatopoeic combination whose inventiveness, if not its unkindness, GMH might well have approved of.

  I heard my father describe little red-haired Mrs Banks – with the robust political incorrectness of his day – as ‘silly as a gin at a christening’. Lanky Verna Banks, their daughter, was, ‘straight up and down like a yard of pump water’.

  My mother said he got his imagery, his bush word-smithery, from his Irish mother, who had had a range of earthy things to say about the people who’d surrounded her in the valley of the Macleay earlier in the century. The coming of in-house plumbing therefore hadn’t yet cancelled her image about pump water in her son’s mouth, and it ran forth and hit Verna Banks behind the ear in Homebush in 1952.

  Poor Verna. I carried in childhood like a writ against her the memory that late in the war, when the Bankses put on their daughter’s twenty-first birthday party and somehow got a keg of beer into Flemington Town Hall for the party, they’d had to invite boys from the nearby air force depot to make up the crowd. Verna danced with a tall, leering Leading Aircraftsman while the band played Coming in on a Wing and a Prayer. I did not have the imagination to see Verna as a victim, stuck with Mrs Banks. What must it have been like for a daughter with dreams to listen to her mother’s horrifying misnomers and malapropisms? I had myself heard Mrs Banks call camouflage flamagage, the actress Maureen O’Hara Moran Harara, M&B tablets ham and beef tablets, pneumonia pew-mania.

  The Bankses had turned out to be readers of The Rock. Mrs Banks in particular quoted everything that was in it. ‘I’ve never had anything against you Romanian Catholics,’ she had been telling my mother every week since we moved down from the bush ten years past.

  One night, I overheard my mother say with some venom, ‘Mrs Banks came to me today and asked whether I was worried about Michael and John. I asked her why, and she said that there were so many stories in The Rock of brothers interfering with boys, that some of them had to be true.’

  ‘This comes from Evatt,’ my father said. ‘Beating the sectarian drum. Evatt is the choir master, and old Banksie is the monkey’s arse.’

  But my mother’s concerns were more local. ‘Even if there was occasionally something like that, I think the boys would tell me.’

  ‘Chrysler Six!’ said my father. ‘You’re not taking Mrs Banks as a guide to the real bloody world, are you?’

  Yes, I would have liked to say. Dinny is interfering with me. He has given me Graham Greene to read, and W. H. Auden, and he’s played some Mahler and pointed out GMH’s Thou mastering me God! And I will never be the same.

  For I was not only reading Silas Marner, I was reading Brighton Rock, in which the young English razor gangster felt a Manichean disgust for the flesh of his girlfriend. This wasn’t just a story about gangster fighting gangster. This was about salvation and flesh and spirit. It was like finding out that James Cagney was really a walking battleground between angels of spirit and flesh. Who gave a damn about Mrs Banks and The Rock?

  The crass accusers of The Rock knew nothing either about the humane face of Brother Digger Crichton, simple and generous soul, veteran of World War I, who had seen the world’s deadly pomps and now taught nothing but woodwork. He was a natty little man whose cassock showed the marks neither of glue nor nails nor sawdust.

  He had unwittingly developed one quasi-sporting and religious rite of his own. The Rugby League goalposts were kept in his huge woodwork room throughout summer, and towards the end of the first term every year, about Easter time, they would be carried to the oval by crews of junior woodworkers, one pole at a time, along with the cross bar, striped in the middle – where all the most perfect goals sailed over – with the school’s black and blue and gold. A seasonal rite for which he chose only the finest boy carpenters! Two years before I had somehow cack-handedly assembled a glass-fronted bookcase which my mother keeps to this day crammed with the textbooks of our childhood. I was not sufficiently accomplished at tenon joints ever to take part in that sacrament of the posts.

  Though we Leaving Certificate boys no longer took woodwork, occasionally Digger Crichton came to us to give Religion class when Dinny or Buster was ill. What he told us about on such occasions was always the Red Baron, and the controversy over who had shot him down, the Canadians as the history books incorrectly said, or the Australians.

  At sixteen, I could still see in Brother Crichton’s tale a collision of the old world and the new, something about which as it turned out I would later try to write a number of novels. But of fascination to me too was the fact that somehow the Western Front had not made Digger Crichton worldly. It was as if it had been so horrible that he understood that should he become knowing and ironic, he would lose himself in a morass of cynicism. And so he remained an innocent. Always with a childlike open face. He never gave anyone the strap either. The strap was simply not part of his repertoire.

  He had come to Strathfield in 1928 with the first Brothers, and had been here ever since and was happy at how it had gone. More than a thousand boys! More than a battalion. In fact, some battalions, he told us, got down to about a hundred and fifty men towards the end of the war. So we were his super battalion upon which no artillery would fire.

  Listening then to Digger Crichton telling us about the death of Von Richthofen, the Red Baron! Would that young German aristocrat ever have believed that his name would come up so often in Religion classes in the antipodes?

  Brother Crich or Digger Crichton was a dispatch rider in the Third Australian Division, and his mount was a former Queensland racehorse. On a spring day in 1918, he was riding his horse eastwards up the road to Vaux-sur-Somme carrying a message to the headquarters of the 52nd Australian Battalion. The Australians had managed to stop the great German spring offensive here, astride the Somme, that great river of blood.

  We can all envisage – from repeated descriptions – the road down which Brother Crichton delivers his message. It is a little sunken, and on the rise to his left a number of Australian batteries are in place, and Lewis gunners with their guns set on a swivel and equipped with antiaircraft sights. Dispatch rider Crichton and his horse are alarmed when a big Sopwith Camel aircraft appears, filling the sky, low enough to clip his horse’s ears. The horse thinks so too and skews sideways. The huge red nose of the Sopwith fills Trooper Crichton’s vision, but then is gone and succeeded instantly, a few inches higher still, by the enormous all red machine of the Baron
. The Baron has the British Sopwith in his sights and is hammering away at it.

  ‘The Sopwith, boys, was flown by one Lieutenant May of the Royal Flying Corps.’

  That’s why we liked Brother Crichton. In his Religion classes Lieutenant May had equal weight with Saint Therese of Lisieux and Saint Anthony of Padua.

  The Lewis gunners along the road and on the ridge beside Trooper Crichton began firing as soon as the British Sopwith was past.

  ‘Now, boys, a mile to the south over the church steeple of Corbie I could see another Sopwith, and this was flown as it turned out by a Canadian pilot, Lieutenant Brown. Brown would later be given all the credit for shooting down Baron Von Richthofen. The books say that earlier, before he peeled away, Brown had fired some shots at the Baron, but that was just before I turned up. I must tell you that I think Lieutenant Brown is sincere in believing he caused fatal damage to the Red Baron, he later wrote a book about it. Well … I think most men could tell a brief lie, but not then write an entire book on it.

  ‘At the time I saw the Red Baron he was hugging the terrain, flying very well and right on Lieutenant May’s hammer. He was in full control and expecting another victory. The glory and vanity of the world were however about to desert him. Because it was when he crossed the ridge, following Lieutenant May, that I saw one of the Australian Lewis gunners open up and get him. The doctors agree with what I saw. They later found that he’d been shot from below and through the heart. Lieutenant Brown claimed to have shot him from above. There’s an inconsistency, you see.