Homebush Boy

by Thomas Keneally

‘After the Lewis gunners got him, the Baron swerved back eastward towards Jerry’s lines. But now you could tell he was out of control, and he crashed on the furthest edge of the ridge the artillery stood on. This ridge was open to enemy fire, but soldiers rushed from everywhere to see if he could be saved. I galloped over there myself. The Germans, for a time believing Brown’s version which was published in all the papers, said he was alive when he crashed and one of us shot him. But no Australian has that on his soul, boys. We would have lifted him out and shaken him by the hand. Look in the official war history – the Red Baron is already dead, and is buried with full honours by Australian men in slouch hats.’

  And Crich is right. There is such a remarkable picture. Lanky Aussies firing into the air over the Baron, whom everyone admired. Boys from the bush in a fusillade over a prince from Prussia.

  ‘Join me now, boys, in praying for the soul of Baron Von Richthofen and all the faithful departed.’

  It didn’t strike us as odd to say an Our Father and three Hail Marys for a thirty-five-year-dead Baron. Some of us had prayed for other historical figures. Mangan had once attended Mass for the repose of the soul of Byron. I sometimes – while reciting the rosary – remembered Talleyrand, who’d been a bishop before he had been a statesman and had a lot to expiate. Through the Communion of Saints, we were connected from Strathfield and Homebush to history’s giant shifts and huger sinners.

  Brother Crichton’s story had potency for me even after I became a Celestial. For all of us. It was a classic version of the great brought down by the humble. The humble then being denied the credit, since that was the way of the world. Even now that I had read Sweeney Agonistes, Trooper Crichton’s fable still fascinated me.

  Dinny was remarkable because he would appear at the elbow of this boy or that and present them with some special task they had not thought of themselves, a task which related them to the larger universe. In that spirit he came to me one autumn morning and said, ‘Young Keneally, ah … ah … I want you to enter the Newmans Society Essay Prize and win something for the school. I suggest that since you’re so crazy about Gerard Manley Hopkins, you should write about him.’ He had a slim grey book in his hands. ‘Here is a Kenyon Critics essay on Gerard Manley Hopkins, and otherwise with your record last year and this, I think you would be a good … ah … bet.’

  Essay prizes were the first blaze writers made on their trail to greatness. Didn’t they say on the back cover of Evelyn Waugh novels, ‘Evelyn Waugh won the Hughenden Essay Prize at Oxford.’ The upshot was, of course, in every case an endless flow of grand fiction. I could see already before my eyes the red back covers of my Penguins. ‘Keneally won the Newman Essay Prize …’

  Yet my reputation for English was perhaps an inflated one in Dinny’s eyes. It was based on the fact that the year before I’d come first in the state for Christian Brothers Schools. This sounded promising. But it was slightly suspect in reality.

  That year big Brother Moose Davitt had taught us English. His method was to sit at the chemistry bench at the front of the room with his leather case opened before him. Inside it were limp-covered pulp Westerns which were his preferred reading. And a supply of tobacco and cigarette papers out of which, as he expatiated on Shakespeare, he rolled masses of skinny cigarettes for consumption out of class hours. He was frumpy, Moose. His soutane was carelessly kept and sprinkled with ash, he had large bullish features, and he was dearly loved by all of us. As his hands worked in the opened leather case, he advised us that he was slow to anger, but to be wary when it came, and that the only thing he couldn’t really stand was a boy horse-laughing.

  ‘If you’re wise boys, you won’t horse laugh. It drives me mad, and I can’t help it.’

  Moose’s method of preparing us for exams was rather like Buster Clare’s method of teaching History. Faced with a large poem like Keats’ Hyperion, he would say, ‘I don’t know about this one. It was on the paper four years ago. I might go and test out Dinny about it over the weekend.’

  For Dinny McGahan was stellar enough to have been given the job of setting the examination for all the Christian Brothers Schools. Moose had a special talent for enraging Dinny, for teasing probabilities out of him. For gauging exam paper omens in what was said over the flummery at the monastic table in the Brothers’ house on the corner of Edgar Street.

  The next Monday Moose would be back with his briefcase of Verity’s Shakespeare, Romantic poetry, cowboy novelettes and tobacco.

  ‘I think we’d better do Hyperion, boys. I said to Dinny at dinner on the weekend, I don’t think I’ll bother teaching the boys that. And he said, Ah … ah … I tell you, your boys better be prepared with Hyperion if they want to do well.’

  Thus the odds on Hyperion had shortened, and Moose explained to us what the poem was all about, and then set us to learn it and its notes and its study guide all by heart. Everything had equal value with Moose – the merest footnote by some junior English academic, and the highest imagery of John Keats. In fact, footnotes were probably more useful for exam purposes, for they explained the Classical allusions.

  … she would have ta’en

  Achilles by the hair and bent his neck;

  Or with a finger stay’d Ixion’s wheel.

  Her face was large as that of Memphian sphinx …

  This material represented in many ways the world Mangan and I would have preferred to Homebush. Other boys said, ‘What’s it got to do with getting a job, Brother?’ Mangan and I really kindled to Wordsworth’s On Westminster Bridge and Keats’ On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer. We thought these men were reporting a real world, and didn’t understand that they were lost souls, too, in the moils of a squalid Industrial Revolution and trying to ignore it.

  We had both already written poetry like theirs. Some of it still exists, composed all over the flyleaves of textbooks. With its mixture of Romanticism and theology, it is as embarrassing as teenage love letters. It is in fact a series of love letters, since I saw it as near publishable and likely to impress Curran with its promise when published amongst my Early Poems. None of it will be brought into play in these pages.

  But back to the 1951 exam. On top of baiting Dinny, by the end of the year, through methods which included exploiting his spies in the senior year who showed him the sort of questions Dinny was setting in term exams there, Moose had a sophisticated betting sheet, and we followed it. In English exam terms, we were the equivalent of the first steroid takers in the decathlon. As an unnatural advantage, we knew as no other Christian Brothers’ boys did which areas to concentrate on. The result was that I was first in the state, my name published in the Catholic Weekly to the gratification of my parents. And my repute with Dinny McGahan was set somewhat higher than I knew I quite deserved.

  Dinny probably had a more accurate sense of my attributes as an athlete than as an English scholar. During a meeting of the athletics team, all ages, he said, ‘Ah … stand up young Keneally. Now you see, boys, you don’t have to be a champion like Peter McInnes to make a contribution. There’s a boy who’ll never be a champion but who has a fine time running and training and can get placed in inter-school events for us and even occasionally win one.’

  The smaller boys looked at me. An average hero. I didn’t feel offended at all. There was something that suited the Australian self-image in such a definition. I was a battler. If all the conditions were right, my chance of a 220 or 440 yards victory had been pronounced on by Dinny.

  ‘Black, black, rickety rack,’ the younger members of the athletics team would chant in the event of a chance win,

  SPC is on the track,

  Blue black, blue black gold …

  Dinny did understand now that I was so good on GMH because I was neglecting the broader sweep of writers. Curran was doing Honours English too, and when I talked to her on the train to and from concerts, it was obvious to me that she was covering the field. ‘Have you done much on the Gothic novel yet?’ she asked me. It was clear she had, under t
he tutelage of some analytical Dominican nun. She was also covering the main eras of English poetry, and reading a few representatives in each case. The same with the novel. Whereas I tended to get fixated. I wasn’t covering the whole pelagic expanse of literature. I was diving deeply enough to get the bends in a few places.

  To console myself, I wrote on the flyleaf of my copy of GMH, Michael K., Professor of Hopkinsian Idiosyncrasy.

  I made sure I knew all I could find out about Hopkins’ ‘sprung rhythm’, and when I found myself reciting it according to what the Kenyon critics said it should sound like, I discovered that the only way to read Hopkins’ poetry was in a sort of incantatory voice, in an intonation a little sub- or supra-human.

  Earnest, earthless, equal, attuneable, vaulty,

  voluminous,… stupendous

  Evening strains to be time’s vast, womb-of-all,

  home-of-all, hearse-of-all night.

  Once Dinny McGahan played us a record of Dylan Thomas reading his Poem in October, and Dylan Thomas seemed to know all that, even though he was an alcoholic about to die. Welsh intonation, which I’d never heard before in my life. That – I told myself – was the intonation for reading Hopkins. A bardic intonation.

  I already knew that novelty gave you a chance in literary contests. I would put up this incantation theory in my essay, padded out with a lot of plagiarized critical jargon. And beyond it all, I would strain to utter the grandeur of what Hopkins was trying to do.

  With: Our evening is over us; our night whelms,

  whelms, and will end us.

  Only the beak-leaved boughs dragonish damask

  the tool-smooth bleak light …

  Curran though seemed to think Hopkins was just another interesting poet in the Honours English course. I dreamed I would read something of him to her one day, and she would be transformed.

  IV

  In line with being a Celestial, I did not seem to myself to have changed much physically since the week or so in the first year of high school when I first began to understand Latin declensions, and simultaneously, in a flash, like falling in love, understand Pythagoras’s Theorem after a long stand-off with it. That first year of high school was the year when from being an infant sleepwalker I first became a serious academic contender and got to like the feeling of moderate scholarly success. Now, in my sixteenth year I was a far more turbulent spirit, and felt that something massive was about to descend upon me, but I saw the turmoil not as sexual but as utterly spiritual and aesthetic. I was not aware of any increase in erections, which I was still and for whatever reason too innocent to take for what they were. I was not aware of the surge of testosterone. I may have been a late developer, and uttering that idea is not offensive to me. But really I don’t think so. I think I was what people talk about when they mention the monastic temperament and sex: a case of sublimation. A case of culture defeating nature.

  In the Easter Week retreat senior boys went through – three James Joycean days of silence and sessions from a retreat master, generally a Passionist or Redemptorist priest – the retreat master had told us with a false matter-of-factness that there might be some mornings when we woke up to find a stickiness on our upper legs.

  This was said in the sermon on purity, and the sure road to damnation which impurity provided. The reference to stickiness caused Freddie and others to nudge each other, but I have to confess with some embarrassment I didn’t know what he was talking about. Nor was I interested. It was like Honours Science – something I wasn’t involved in.

  Impure thoughts swam into the young mind, said the retreat master, as surely as brightly-coloured, poisonous fish frequented a reef. I knew at least that that was true. I remembered that a little earlier that year, I was for once walking on my own up Edgar Street, reading occasionally as I walked. It was Eliot’s little book on what poetry was. Imagery, said Eliot. That was what it was. Everywhere, new and wonderful beasts of language falling from the sky! Imagery raining cats and dogs. That was the essence of poetry. Mind you, I also had a weakness for half-rhymes myself, and GMH wasn’t against them and Wilfred Owen, the World War I soldier, had favoured them before the machine guns got him. But the image – that was everything. I could accept that proposition. No worries!

  And in the midst of being enlightened by T. S. Eliot, a substantial image of a woman entered my head, a woman with bountiful breasts. And I knew that somewhere in her body was a place designed with her urgent consent to contain me. But where was it? I found that I didn’t know and I wanted to. Not for any immediate purpose, though for an imminent purpose.

  Who was that woman whose presence I sensed? Who was the girl in the blue dress? And how did they both relate to living women like the Frawley and Curran girls?

  I cannot remember having suffered any guilt over this quandary. I don’t think that I felt any need ever to confess it. But since I still remember it, it must have been a question of some force, since I paused on Strathfield’s orderly pavement, a boy with a lurking pimple scar on his jawline and a manufactured hairstyle. A faux casual, that boy, who was one of the few in Strathfield to know that poetry was image, yet did not know how the race, the poets, the novelists, the Communion of Saints were generated.

  Whatever all this meant, I didn’t have the time to be a lascivious schoolboy. Instead, my demented energy was astounding to my parents and even myself. These days I would generally study till at least eleven o’clock at night, with 2BL the classical station on the radio in the lounge room, and me sprawled with a dozen books before it. Hence with the off-hand lack of thought of the adolescent, I now deprived my parents of the chance of chatting by the radio as it played more casual programmes.

  This particular radio, which brought Handel and Mendelssohn to the young Homebush aesthete, was the very one my aunts Molly and Annie had bought to listen to the broadcast of the opening of the Harbour Bridge in 1932. Over it had come Test Matches, war news, the bells of peace brought on by atomic explosions in Japan, and speeches by Australian Prime Ministers. Through its mesh of valves came the death of Prime Minister Curtin, the accession of Ben Chifley, the election of Bob Menzies.

  I would go to sleep after my parents, and wake about six o’clock ravenous for life and Eliot’s promised images. Some mornings I went to Mass as Strathfield. I could have just as easily gone up to Flemington to Father Johnson’s little church, but he was the sort of priest that rattled through the Latin, and I liked the greater solemnity of Father Byrne who now frequently said the early morning Mass at St Martha’s. Maybe in outrageous vanity I hoped he would see me there and be moved to wonder. Had I made up my mind yet? Not for him to know how essential the olive-skinned beauty of Curran in her Santa Sabina uniform was to the systems of my world.

  Then carrying the Globite bag every Australian boy carried to school in those years, I would walk joyfully towards Matt Tierney’s, accomplishing my part-solitary, part-communal approach to school. On the way I might outline the scheme of my essay and draw down phrases from the high lake of imagery which seemed to be situated above my head. I would be at Matt’s front door before eight, sans or avec Mangan, sans or avec having sighted Curran at the 414 bus stop or run into the Frawleys, and Mrs Tierney would take me through to the enclosed back verandah where Matt and I would sit together doing his Pass English – the sort of English they devised for kids who hadn’t read Eliot’s book and might spend the rest of their lives believing that poetry necessarily rhymed.

  At that stage, of course, though it was a fairly well kept secret, there were superb Australian poets who knew what T. S. Eliot knew but who pursued what people call ‘their own voices’. Judith Wright, a young woman who came from a grazing family from Armidale in Northern New South Wales, the area which was called New England. Kenneth Slessor, who was a journalist and editorial writer for Frank Packer at the Daily Telegraph. A. D. Hope, who taught English in Canberra; David Campbell, a farmer and former fighter pilot from the Canberra area. And then Douglas Stewart. The verse play w
as popular in the 1950s and Douglas Stewart had written two fine ones – Fire on the Snow, a play about Scott of Antarctica, and another on Ned Kelly the Australian hero-saint or brigand. These would soon, but too late for us, creep their way into the school curriculum and raise the supposition that perhaps poetry was possible in Australia. But on the mornings we did Pass English on Matt Tierney’s back verandah, the idea which the examiners seemed to propose, and which I knew to be untrue, was that poetry had ended with Alfred Lord Tennyson.

  Already I had been frenetically conscious for three hours as Matt and his mother conducted their normal contest over who had put his glasses where, which of his suit buttons should be done up and which left undone, and where his foldable white stick was.

  After the full day’s school work, Dinny – lean as a runner himself, nimble in movement and intent – already had our athletics team (the term track team was an Americanism which entered much later into Australian usage) training twice a week. Sometimes Matt would stay back with me, and we would practise running the bends with the Nugget Boot Polish tins, the Braille type rattling inside. Matt was game, thundering into a curve in the track, missing his direction, re-cueing his ear to the rattling type, and picking up speed again. In some such moments, I was simply liberated through fraternal love for the thwarted athlete in Matt, the child un-sighted in the womb by a chance infection.

  Mangan would sometimes wait for us, his legs folded, his chin pensively held, a hermit in the grey serge suit of St Pat’s. My similar coat, GMH still crushed into its vest pocket, and Matt’s similar coat hung in the Stockade waiting for us to finish with our vulgar preoccupation with running the curve in the 220 yards.

  Back with Matt to Shortland Avenue, then dawdle home with Mangan, calling at the Frawleys’ on the way. Like a more accustomed adolescent in that: delaying going home if you could. On top of that, delicious hours of study lay ahead. In a life rich in experiences, I would later live as richly but never more so.