Homebush Boy

by Thomas Keneally

  The priest was probably wondering why I didn’t confess the normal things, the lusts and masturbations. But Celestials didn’t go in for that sort of thing.

  It was wonderful always to come out of the confessional, having told the truth, irrespective of whether the embarrassing announcement were the reading of Graham Greene or the inchoate desiring of a girl. James Joyce had written definitively on the exaltation of a good confession, the internal horror of a bad one. How joyful the long, treading-on-air walk down Homebush Road, the readiness with which Hopkinsesque imagery sprang to mind in the immaculate soul.

  Sometimes Matt came to St Martha’s wanting to confess. I would take him to the door of the confessional, guide him down on to the little kneeler by the grille, and close the door behind him. The doors of the confessionals of Strathfield were designed to click shut on ball-bearing locks, and so they were a mixture of the latest fittings and the most ancient Sacrament.

  Returning to a pew to wait until Matt was finished, I would notice the edification on the faces of the elderly women saying their pre-confessional prayers and waiting their turn. I wondered what Matt had to confess, in his colourless world. What sensuality, in what form, broke into his darkness? How did he speak of his desires? Was it touch Matt confessed? A touch of silk dress and of waist succulently remembered from the St Pat’s–Santa Sabina dance? Mysteries none of us discussed. Even Mangan and I, in our florid egotisms, in our striving for the dazzling word. I did sometimes wonder even then whether Matt ever confessed that I got on his nerves, as I must have sometimes in my freneticism and vanities.

  On top of that we had of course been frequently instructed that confession was not for criminals. Virtue was maintained by frequent confession. Perhaps as well as confessing the standard sins, Matt was storing up credits. I’m sure the sentimental clients of the confessional, who understood blindness even less than I, must have thought so.

  The hearing of confessions always seemed an august task for a priest to undertake on Saturday afternoons and nights. I’d been told of priests who were punters and who took the new portable radios into the confessional with them so that they could hear race results between penitents. But I could not imagine anyone so far under-awed as that by the power to bind and to loose. The old bigot rumour was that priests got indecent thrills listening to people’s sexual admissions. But I couldn’t imagine anything garish being confessed by the staid parishioners of St Martha’s.

  And in the spirit of these reflections on the power of priests to bind and loose, Father Byrne was back, seeing if I had yet decided whether I had been called to the priesthood. I had a sense of him as a man for whom at the Virgin’s behest a miracle had been worked. Therefore I did not dare to lie to him lest I be fixed by his scarifying gaze.

  ‘I find that I still lack certainty,’ I told him. Indeed, I still had my eye on Sydney University, I preferred that option. As I spoke, I noticed his cheeks. They seemed hollowed by the drag within him. The drag of weariness, and the gravity of all the half-truths people told him. But he had his stratagems too.

  ‘There is a vocations’ day at the major seminary at Manly,’ he said. ‘A number of boys from St Pat’s are going over there on Sunday week. One of the deacons will show you around the place and answer your questions. Do you think you would like to go?’

  I felt that I had to agree. The only way I could think of to avoid it was to get a divine flash which told me at that instant I shouldn’t think about becoming a priest. I felt uneasy about being an impostor though, since in the end I would have to announce to him that I was staying in the world with Curran, going to university and glory. Vanity which had got me into this pretence would in the end have to be paid for with the shame of being seen through by Father Byrne’s mystic eye. He would then know yet again that his supposed disciples played on his innocence.

  The weariness I noticed in him that early winter day might have been a foreshadowing of events that were about to occur in Lewisham Hospital – involving Campbell of The Rock.

  I think of the nights of those boyhood winters as dark, even though they were by the standards of other hemispheres relatively mild. No night life graced the Western Line. The hotels closed at six so that even the drunks went home early. Mangan and I might be found walking the streets, discussing the suppression of the Kulaks by Stalin, or the confessions of St Augustine, or T. S. Eliot. A scatter of people attended the cinema in Parramatta Road, though there was a sense that going to the pictures on a week night was a bit like drinking in the morning. Everyone else was at home listening to the radio, except Father Byrne in the parish church at Lewisham keeping vigil, watching the Blessed Virgin, who according to rumour stepped through a gap in time, a rent in the suburban stupor. Appearing to her son the priest and simultaneously cancelling someone’s bone disease over in the nearby hospital of the Little Company of Mary.

  Now, without Father Byrne’s knowledge Campbell’s agent, a kitchen hand, had begun to speak to the girl of the miracle, the girl whom we had seen at St Martha’s in the cardigan with the light dressing on her leg. I still wonder what happened. Was it that she was a country girl scared by the claims being made for her? Did too many people expect her to become a nun? Did she simply want to get away? Did she feel a captive of her own miracle? Or did she just want to see the Big Smoke, Sydney? Campbell’s raiders, the kitchen hand told her, could get her out.

  According to Mr Frawley’s later report, the sort of men Campbell used to infiltrate the kitchens of religious houses were not good solid wowsers like the old-fashioned Rock-ites. They were decadents like Campbell himself. Hence they knew how to talk to simple girls from the bush. She whose osteomyelitis had been remitted was such a simple girl as St Bernadette of Lourdes herself had been. Simplicity can easily be re-directed.

  On a Wednesday night in the early winter of 1952, two industrial groupers guarding the convent garden, foot soldiers of the army of light, heard a noise from the hospital’s lower floor which was virtually a basement. Campbell’s raiders were in. The meat merchant of Homebush who was Mr Frawley’s lieutenant was telephoned at once, collected his band of groupers from around Homebush and Strathfield in a matter of minutes and went raging down Parramatta Road towards Lewisham in a series of cars. They ran into a full-blown fist and implement fight with Campbell’s rearguard, which consisted of fairly hefty young men stationed by Petersham Cricket Oval to cover the packing of the girl’s bag into Campbell’s vehicle and her general escape. Stumps and bike chains were used by both sides in that great battle, which saw Campbell’s car pull out amidst the mêlée, and then the retreat of the other Campbell forces in the direction of the railway bridge.

  Many said that the country girl had shown supreme ingratitude, and avoided her destiny. There would be for her no odour of sanctity, no building of a shrine in her name to which the lame, the blind, the halt would come in darkness and on crutches, and depart upright in light.

  This event was yet another example to me of the fact that if you correctly positioned yourself in plain suburban streets, you could be a witness or an actor as absolute good and absolute evil engaged in the earth’s most graphic contests. The biggest game in this or any other town. In fact, it was this sort of galactic struggle which in all our minds redeemed Sydney from its distance from everywhere and its then drabness.

  Mr Frawley had wielded a cricket stump in that battle and was, therefore, a kind of hero. My father was saved by his World War II-derived cynicism from serving in such a contest, but generally approved of the hard times the groupers had given the raiders. Now witness my father’s common man’s wisdom in standing aside from the supposed titanic wars of Lewisham and Homebush!

  At first the nuns and Father Byrne thought the girl had been abducted and called the police, who within a few days broke the news that the girl had gone off by her own will. Within three weeks, Campbell had her speaking on the platform of the Sydney Town Hall, talking about her imprisonment in the convent. She did not malign Father Byrn
e, though she told garish stories of the pregnancy of nuns and of unspeakable sins, a term I understood only vaguely but by which I now suppose she meant lesbianism. There were a hall full of bigots and then many more spilling down the steps in George Street. A few groupers in the audience heckled.

  Amongst the uninformed, whose thousands packed Campbell’s meeting, the sins, of nuns and priests were believed to be of such Boccacian frenzy, of such gothic colour. The accusations about child molestation would later sadly be found to have some substance. Certainly nothing was quite as pure as everybody pretended. But the picture was on balance more prosaic. The most common phenomenon would be the chaste and frequently tormented neurotic. And the occasional person who had in full measure that which the system was supposed to deliver more regularly – sanity, joy, hard-won tranquillity. No matter what the sins of priest and religious, they rarely attained the garish form the miraculous girl attributed to them in a packed Town Hall.

  For the truth was Brother Basher Bryant consoling himself with a Scotch in the physics laboratory. The truth was the cranky authority of Mother Benignus leading the girls of Santa Sabina in prayer to shield them from the combined concupiscence of St Pat’s boys!

  When the news about the young woman got out, I think some of us, myself included, imagined encountering this ordinary girl from the country. Talking her around, persuading her back into the care of Father Byrne, back into the shadow of the Little Company of Mary. Something more predictable than that happened: it would eventually become known, and would make the pages of that scandal sheet Truth, that Campbell had seduced her, as he did others of his rescued women. She was pregnant with his child. Ultimately, members of that extreme temperance group would lock the doors of The Rock to him. But not yet and not that year. That year he would ride high in his hour, a hero on the platform, one who exposed the Papist cant of the convent and the monastery. And when he did fall, it was not his lies which would ultimately be resented by his own people so much as his lecheries. So at least that was universal throughout Christianity – sex was what counted; the main game.

  By the very fuss made of it, I knew it was out there, a splendid, glittering, flesh-rending beast, moving in sprung rhythm, wrapped in a mystery which by midyear, Australia’s shortest days in June, I had formed no intention at all of giving up.

  And yet to give Father Byrne temporary solace for his other disappointments, I caught the train to Wynyard and walked down to Circular Quay and then boarded the ferry to Manly for a look at life in the major seminary.

  An early priest of Sydney, Father Therry, had got the whole of North Head above Manly as a land grant from one of the governors. Manly had been considered remote then, seven miles across the harbour by ferry. By the end of the nineteenth century it had become one of Sydney’s chief pleasure and beauty spots. Its long and beautiful surf beach had been a cockpit for the controversy over mixed bathing, and particularly on its sands and on Bondi Beach’s further south, the question of what degree of nakedness you could go surfing in was fought out, with an increasing victory going to freedom and flesh. By 1952 beach culture was well entrenched in Sydney, and Manly was one of its loci. But above it all hung on the headland the neo-Gothic magnificence of the seminary, St Patrick’s, the architecture a dead ringer for the great seminary of Maynooth in County Kildare, but translated to a sandstone headland in Australia.

  The seminary stood behind high sandstone walls and was approached by a long driveway fringed with Norfolk pines. The huge building itself and its appendix of a stone chapel faced northwards, the preferred Sydney direction to catch winter sun. In style, this was one of the few concessions the place made to its Australian location.

  As I arrived, a number of boys from several schools were sheepishly collecting in the driveway and being taken in charge by young men in cassocks. These were deacons. Soon they would be ordained. At the end of the year they would go forth as priests and be assigned to parishes. Fresh and dewy, eager and compassionate, they would be adored by parishioners in a way that older, crustier parish priests might not be. Even to someone as young as me, there was something very appealing about their freshness, their new-minted quality. And everyone of them a potential cardinal, a possible first antipodean Pope.

  Our group’s young deacon introduced himself to us. There were a few St Pat’s boys (that is, from the school which bore the same predictable name as the seminary) in our group, but most of the other boys wore the all-blue uniforms which were characteristic of Brothers’ schools. The routine was that our deacon, whose name I forget and who would possibly be mixed up and tormented by the great changes ahead in the 60s and 70s, took us first to the chapel. By the chapel entrance was a little glassed-over alcove in which the Cardinal’s hat and stole of Australia’s first Prince of the Church, Cardinal Moran, were displayed. Moran was something of a hero. He’d supported the strikers in the 1890s, and therefore had a social as well as an ecclesiastical glamour.

  Inside, the chapel was wonderful, just like a picture of the medieval monastery. The pews or stalls were very high and faced each other, set up for the singing of the Office. We filed into these unaccustomed stalls and prayed for a short time for guidance on the question of becoming a priest or not. Then the deacon took us through a door by the high altar and we found ourselves in a semi-circular arcade in which a whole series of smaller altars were set in alcoves. The young deacon said, ‘After I am ordained in St Mary’s, I’ll have the honour of saying Mass here at one or other of these each morning.’

  Many of these altars were bare of cloths at the moment, and you were able to step up and look at the stone itself, the small slab of engraved marble let into the plainer stone surface, and beneath it a relic of some sort, a fragment of cloth or tissue which had belonged to a prominent saint. For some reason that arcade of altars, that string of divine possibilities, had an impact on me. It is still what I most remember from that first visit.

  After the chapel we walked awed into the main building, into the huge stillness of the main corridor, paved like a great chessboard with squares of black slate and white marble. In this broad indoor avenue long as a football field we passed first the rooms set aside to accommodate the professors, then we visited the library, and last the long refectory where the professors and the seminarians ate. During breakfast and the evening meal, someone read from a book chosen by a professor. Sometimes a devotional book, sometimes what the deacon called ‘a secular book’. Even books like Paul Brickhill’s The Great Escape.

  We saw a typical room on the upper floors, bed, study desk, cupboard, a few devotional items. The textbooks all in Latin. Glamour to that too. Mangan and I had a taste for the Latin Mass and understood it. The idea of actually studying from books of Philosophy and Moral Theology in Latin was something designed to appeal to a Celestial. It seemed a palpable means of defeating ordinariness and lifting us into a region where we were one with all the other Latin-writing, Latin-speaking clerics and monks of history.

  We saw the large Rugby League fields downhill – mens sana in corpore etc. The old tag, sane body, sane mind, applied a fortiori in a community of celibates.

  Also, on the first floor, a museum, and amongst the items a purple set of vestments worn by Blessed Oliver Plunkett, executed under the British Penal Laws. Confessor and martyr.

  And another tribute to Ireland – the handball courts on the end of the headland nearest the sea.

  At the end, we drank some tea and ate some biscuits in the refectory, on a high table where the rector and the professors ate. Magic again to this. But Sydney University would have its magic and its rituals, too.

  We were all awed just the same. A St Pat’s boy, Hickey, and myself, in loose formation with other boys in the uniforms of schools we played football against – Marist Brothers Kogarah, Christian Brothers Lewisham, De La Salle Brothers Darlinghurst – walked down Darley Street towards the Manly ferry, chastened. Some of them were promising each other milk shakes at Manly Wharf, as if to console themselv
es for their brush with a quasi-monastic morning. They felt threatened by the claims of the life they had just looked at, and now they wanted to reassure themselves that 1952 was still in place.

  One boy said, however, ‘I wanted to join the Redemptorist Fathers, but my mother made me promise not to do it. You don’t get seminary holidays at the Redemptorists.’

  I had an uncomfortable feeling that the visit to the seminary had put the question to me: how could I be immoral enough to keep stringing Father Byrne along? The prospect was becoming far too real. I dreamed of Blessed Oliver Plunkett’s vestments on the first floor at Manly. Freud had not then visited Homebush, and dreams were therefore still prophetic in a way they had been in the Middle Ages. The dream disturbed me because it was unwanted. What I wanted was something which combined the glamour of the priesthood with the company of either Curran or some other as yet unimagined helpmeet and hand-holder.

  In my mental confusion, I had now found time to write the essay for the Newman Society competition (winner and runner-up to be published in the Catholic Weekly, to the acclaim of all relatives). My essay was concerned, as Dinny had suggested and to no one’s surprise, with the great poems of that lonely Jesuit, GMH: The Wreck of the Deutschland, The Windhover, Felix Randal.

  Felix Randal the farrier, O is he dead then? my

  duty all ended,

  Who have watched this mould of man, big-boned

  and hardy-handsome

  Pining, pining, till time when reason rambled in it

  and some

  Fatal four disorders, fleshed there, all contended?

  This Jesuit who was the swashbuckler of images, the Errol Flynn of language.