Homebush Boy

by Thomas Keneally

  Towery city and branchy between towers;

  Cuckoo-echoing, bell-swarmèd, lark-charmèd,

  rook-racked, river-rounded;

  The dapple-eared lily below thee; that country and

  town did

  Once encounter in, here coped and poisèd powers …

  My essay was perhaps twenty pages long, and all in the good handwriting I then had. I had inherited it from my parents who were both copyplate writers, given to tall looped Ls and Ps and thoroughgoing Ts and Fs. When I had the essay done, I walked at nine o’clock at night to Matt’s place and read it to him. He took the reading with his accustomed tolerance. I hoped of course that indirectly rumours of my brilliance would get through to Curran. Next I showed it to Dinny McGahan and he was delighted. How many things delighted Dinny! A good slips catch, a good Rugby League sidestep, enthusiasm for a poem.

  Waiting for the news of who had won the Newman Society medal, Matt and I spent our Thursday afternoons watching home games of the First XIII. Peter McInnes the great sprinter was on the wing or else in the centres. When he took the ball he sometimes showed instant acceleration. Sometimes, though, he dawdled, teasing the defence into him, perhaps even running infield a little, and then stepping off his infield foot to be gone down the sideline. He had what people like to call blistering pace.

  I’d spent part of the previous summer running for the Canterbury-Bankstown Amateur Athletic Club with Peter. There had been a desperate ambition in me that Peter’s athletic power would somehow enter me through the negligent handshakes we gave each other at the end of races. There was something about the solitariness of sprints and middle distance that appealed to certain souls, the absoluteness of the events. If you failed, you could not hide behind the deficiencies of the group. You knew precisely where you stood in the universe’s order. I and everyone else who had been sprinting with Peter since childhood, knew he stood higher than any other boy his age in the Southern Hemisphere if not the universe. The Daily Mirror spoke of him as potentially the fastest starter since Jesse Owens, the great black sprinter who had aggrieved Hitler at the Berlin games. Like all great athletes, though, he took talent easily and without assuming airs.

  At Belmore Oval, adult athletes predicted greatness for Peter. He ran not against other youths but in the Open Men’s, and beat everyone. Our racing uniform for Canterbury was violet with a manure-brown badge. But the colours were only prelude to the colours we cherished – the black, gold, blue of St Pat’s.

  Going to athletic meetings with Peter each summer Saturday, I found him something of a mystery. He ran for the pure joy. No mug lair. Neither a Celestial nor an oaf. There seemed to be no girl he ran for. If I could have broken ten seconds for the hundred yards as he sometimes did, something other boy-athletes in Australia could not do, I would have laid the bright, blue shell of those broken seconds at Curran’s feet.

  Sitting with Matt now during the First XIII home games, I watched Peter but was also forced for Matt’s sake to pursue another of my avocations – that of sporting commentator. ‘It’s a St Pat’s scrum,’ I would tell Matt, ‘and Heyes has the ball and gets it out straightaway to O’Connell, who has sliced into the line from fullback and who now draws the Lewisham defence as he gives it to Rowan, and now a lightning pass and McInnes has it, and McInnes has drawn his opposing winger and stepped beautifully inside past him and now has only the tall fullback to beat!’

  McInnes nearly always beat the tall fullback and scored.

  ‘Great game, Pete,’ Matt would tell McInnes as I steered him over to the champion at the end of the game.

  Peter McInnes would thank him in his ego-less manner. ‘Good on you for putting your money on us, Matt.’

  Sometimes Mr McInnes, Peter’s father, would be there and would say to Brother McGahan, ‘I just don’t want him to pull any muscles before the athletic season.’

  That was it: glory awaited Peter and indirectly us as long as a muscle wasn’t pulled. Brother Buster Clare had told McInnes that if rounded up in a tackle he was to fall quietly without struggling. No sense a champion trying to hurt himself breaking a tackle when a lot of the time he could evade all the defence anyhow.

  A slight chance that he might damage himself stepping from foot to foot was acceptable risk for the prodigy who had come our way and who lived with his parents quietly in Belmore.

  Sometimes we would be so inspired by the First XIII’s performance that Matt and I would change into running gear after the game and do a few laps with the Nugget tins. Stripped to his shorts and running, Mattie showed he had filled out a lot since last year. Even more than earlier in the year, I could tell by the way he ran that he had the athletic goods. He ran with a brave, high stride. It was just that he needed to run with his head cocked to one side and of course still lost time and direction on the bends. Sometimes I needed to grab him by the elbow, but our aim was to complete the course without having to touch at all, with nothing but sound.

  I said to Dinny after one such training session, ‘Brother, I think Matt’s ready to run against boys of his own age, not just fourteen-year-olds.’

  Dinny replied, ‘I’d think twice about that, you know. The danger of collision …’

  In a collision in a race, the orthodox thinking went, a sighted boy could brace himself, but Matt would go into it full force.

  I said, ‘It would be an important step for Matt.’

  ‘I can understand that,’ Dinny conceded. ‘We’ll see then.’

  VI

  In the same school, in the shallower levels of that ocean, my brother Johnny, seven years younger than me, went his way and did pretty well from it. He was a natural scholar, accomplished at Maths and a prodigious reader. He had been class captain since third grade, a blond little boy of whom Mrs Banks said that he reminded her of the settlers’ flaxen-haired son in Shane. He always caught the 414 bus to Homebush station, a sensible kid, no long mooning walks for him. Nor did he ever aspire to carry textbooks of any kind jammed in his breast pocket. In him my father had found an echo of his own nattiness, a consolation for the messy child I had been and still thought it fashionable to be. Sometimes Johnny would miss the bus and I would walk him home, stretching his patience by calling in at the Tierneys’ and the Frawleys’ for the good sport of posturing and orating. He couldn’t see the sense of that, would want to be home attending to his evening in an orderly way, listening to the few radio serials he cherished, doing his impeccable homework. Everybody predicted that he would be a doctor, and they were right. He had fine qualities: stubbornness and a soft heart. He got them both from people like our grandfather the engine driver, and like our grandfather he was temperamentally geared to take a special pride in some profession, in exactitude, in knowing technical matters backwards.

  I boasted of him to Mangan and Matt Tierney, and I think he might have taken a certain bemused pride in my eccentric fervours. But our nearly eight-year difference made frontal exchanges between us more awkward than they had earlier been.

  It is a truism which people, even memoirists, can’t forbear repeating: that to survive childhood is to have memories of non-recurrent chances for filial and fraternal solidarity, for crucial words which went unuttered, for concessions that went unoffered, for gestures which went unsignalled.

  Those chances occurred with my father, who was like me in savouring solitariness, working in his vegetable garden in the back yard in Loftus Crescent, but who unlike me had little social life despite his capacity for social charm. It struck me he was mourning for something he couldn’t communicate, and something that as a Celestial and an heir to GMH I wasn’t interested enough in knowing about. By a happy chance we would both live long enough to become much better friends.

  In any case, I was proving to be more of an Australian male than I knew. For I believed as well as he did that male companionship was not for the confession of weaknesses but for the exchange of jokes and bragging. We the sons of the Anzacs and the grandsons of the settlers! Our job to con
fess to no worries. That fact too stood in the way of a full communion between my father and me. Occasionally we talked of politics and running and Rugby League, and we told jokes, and all that was required to stand for the deeper code of our affection.

  Even as McInnes side-stepped and Father Byrne’s miraculous girl maligned those who had tended her, two tragedies descended on Strathfield and galvanized our attention.

  First: there was a boy who had done the Leaving Certificate the year before and entered the Christian Brothers’ scholasticate, St Enda’s, on a plateau behind St Pat’s, to study to become a Brother. One night in his dormitory, he developed peritonitis and died within two days. His name was Barnes.

  His death as reported to us in class was full of compelling arguments. He had sacrificed a place in the world, had answered his vocation, and met the death he would have met whether he had or not. Just imagine, one of the Brothers said, if he had delayed, if he had not listened to the Call.

  All of us were taken out of class and lined Barker Road as Barnes’s coffin went by on his way to Rookwood cemetery. He had the holiness of the war dead. He would not get old. He would never lose his freshness, cuff children across the ear in Mathematics class, throw chalk. He had answered the call but not been soured and reduced to ordinariness by it. All that had been required of him were the simple things – to be born, attend St Pat’s, answer the call. And his reward would be simple, sublime and eternal. He was to the Brotherhood what Chatterton was to poetry. Eternal because taken too early! I wondered if there had been a Curran in his life, who visited the grave at odd hours. Both Jansenism and Celtic melancholy approved of such an imagining.

  Whatever hormonally was happening within me, it was driving me as surely as any biker or hotrodder to the belief that death – to be glorious – should best be consummated in youth. What I would have despised in James Dean, and in the driver of hotted-up Holdens you saw on Parramatta Road, I subscribed to just as actively in my own world view. Barnes’s death had its appeal as a way out of the quandary. Better to be a young, slim, untested saint than any plump parish priest or disappointed husband.

  That was the first tragedy. Glory interrupted my morbidity over it. A letter came to the school (so that eleven hundred brats could mildly rejoice in the news), announcing I had won second prize in the Newman Society Essay competition. My work was thereby considered good enough to be published in the Catholic Weekly.

  ‘Only second prize,’ I would say with a hunch of the shoulders to all those who congratulated me. But my mother was delighted in an unqualified way, especially when Dinny told her he had called one of the judges and had been told it was a very close decision. As only an intelligent woman who’d been deprived of it could be, my mother was obsessed above all with her own supposed lack of education. At twelve years she had been allowed to do the Primary Finals in Kempsey, and that was as far as family resources and the times would allow her to go. She had gone to work for ninepence a week, a shop girl at Barsby’s Emporium. She served the eccentric bushies who came to town after cloth or buttons, hosiery or corsets.

  From this experience she had taken vows that if she had children they were going to go places, and in some ways it was easier to meet her at least halfway than to disappoint her. She had taken intense joy from my first place in the state in English, and had no time at all for my argument that Moose Davitt’s manoeuvring with Brother McGahan had contributed to that. It partially confirmed both of us in what could be called our conspiracy of ambition – hers maternal, mine personal. My mother needed little more than this second prize in the Newman essay to confirm that I was a child of destiny. All she innocently asked of life was that her children attain a passable excellence.

  The award was to be made in the Newman Society’s rooms in Grosvenor Street, Sydney. I knew my mother’s enthusiasm and pride might embarrass me and did the sort of thing many an ageing child is later ashamed of – I told her that the event was only for the recipients and the officials of the Newman Society. An obscure amalgam of vanity and lust for independence produced this meanness.

  Splendidly solitary in a suit my mother had energetically ironed, I took off for Homebush railway station, three or four hundred yards from home and the scene of all our departures, renewals, and returns from glory and defeat.

  On arrival in Grosvenor Street, I was greeted in a panelled room by two youngish men in suits. Very nearly simultaneously with me arrived the first prize winner, an extremely handsome, small, darkish girl of sixteen named Leonie. She had, according to the men in suits, written a killer essay about Christopher Brennan, a tormented Sydney bard, Irish-Catholic, Thomist, alcoholic. It had been a toss-up, one of these officials said, between tormented Brennan and tormented GMH.

  Leonie had her parents with her, well-dressed and very proud. She was unabashed by them. Though there was no question of the primacy of Curran, I was excited to find Leonie was both clever and enchanting. Since she was a dazzling child, small as a fourteen-year-old but with a face of mature intelligence, and since I was also clear-eyed and between pimples, it is likely that we looked to Leonie’s parents and to the two officials of the Newman Society like the fresh-faced promise of the future.

  The Society presented us with a book each. Mine was one I still have – Elizabethan Recusant Prose, the writings of the Elizabethans who refused to take their oath to the Queen and remained loyal to Rome. A characteristic Newman Society kind of book, and extremely thick, for the Recusants were enthusiastic pamphleteers ablaze with their rightness, writing in white heat while imprisoned and awaiting the most savage punishments – quartering, the drawing out of their organs while they still lived. Their heroism, too, spread a patina on the night.

  I walked back to Wynyard with Leonie and her parents, each of us carrying our massive books and the Society’s stamp of approval. There we parted. They were catching a train to the North Shore – somewhere like Pymble. Between us we encompassed Sydney, but hers was the better part. I was never to see Leonie after that night. I wonder what became of her. I can’t believe that she trod ordinary paths – I speak not simply out of vanity. Even I could sense her superior latent talent, and find it hard to believe for a second that the result was as close as the officials said.

  I kept on telling myself I should visit poor, delivered Barnes’s grave at Rookwood and turn there to Hopkinsian verse about it. But things were too busy for me. I had streets to haunt, study time, athletics training, and reading to Matt. And in any case, I was forestalled by the fact that Barnes’s incomparable death was superseded in our imaginations by a far more mysterious and utterly tragic one.

  It was as if Barnes’s perfect, ethereal death had called up an answering one of Satanic and awful nature. A boy from Fifth Year Gold, Buster Clare’s class which was so good at Maths and Science, a boy who was repeating the Leaving Certificate in fact in the hopes of a perfect pass and of being awarded the ultimate university prize, an Exhibition, hanged himself in his bedroom in Flemington just a stone’s throw from St Pat’s.

  Flemington, next on the Western Line past Homebush, was of course not a suburb designed for such terrible acts, nor a suburb where people were all at once choked by excessive hope or despair.

  It was taken for granted by everyone that this was not a deliberate act, any more than Barnes’s peritonitis had been chosen. Talking to us about it, Dinny McGahan spoke of the ‘balance of the boy’s mind’. He had taken his life, but it was certain he was not in theological terms a suicide. His mind could not be guessed at. His torment must have been pitiable.

  Since people who were good at Maths and Physics were unlikely to be Celestials, I had not known him except as a fairly restrained presence. He had no particular notoriety and was not a footballer or an athlete of any kind. I had never seen him yelled at or chastized by any Brother. People now said he’d been dissatisfied with his pass the year before in the Leaving Certificate – Second Class Honours in Physics and Mathematics I. The story which was told to explain the u
nexplainable was that he was a perfectionist who’d gone to pieces in the Physics exam last year and had to be allowed out of the hall at Homebush High – where we sat for the Leaving Certificate – to be sick.

  Matt and I and other boys talked about the disaster out on the verandah outside Fifth Year Gold – we’d been advised not to speculate on the event but naturally enough couldn’t help ourselves. I heard a boy say, ‘He was too bloody scrupulous.’ And here we did all begin to edge around the big question.

  Say he had fallen from grace and continued to go to Communion in that fallen state? An as yet untravelled nightmare country for me, but the young Stephen Dedalus had trodden it and told Honours English boys what is was like in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Had the boy from Fifth Year Gold been there too, and found it unliveable? But to kill yourself, to cut yourself off from mercy. It really wasn’t a rational path to follow. All you had to do was to approach cranky, horse-fancying old Father Johnson in Flemington who didn’t listen too closely to confessions anyhow. Or the curate at Strathfield who everyone said was so understanding. And so we came back again to the belief that the boy from Fifth Year Gold couldn’t have done it deliberately.

  ‘He was too bloody scrupulous,’ was the sentiment everyone returned to. Too much of a perfectionist. He was a lesson on not being too hard on yourself.

  Though no one thought he was culpable, only a few prefects were allowed to go to the Requiem Mass, kindly said by Monsignor Loane, which preceded the boy’s burial. The school did not line the route to Rookwood as they had for Barnes. As we walked back to St Pat’s, strolling informally through the streets of Strathfield as we had never been allowed to in the two-by-two ranks of childhood, one prefect said, ‘They reckon he came across his parents at it.’

  In my chosen Celestial anatomical innocence, I still knew what he meant. The rumour filled the air with nearly too much pain and guilt. I’d seen the devastated mother in the front pew and a portly father, his face unguarded and cruelly pink from grief. And how would they feel, the parents, if what the prefect said was right? So fallen, so degraded, so judged by their boy? And how plausible it all was given the boy’s nature, his lust for the perfect. Like Yahweh, finding the world impure, he cursed it. Finding the light sullied, he renounced it. He was the anti-Barnes. No pilgrimages to his sad, sad grave were the subject of daydreams.