Homebush Boy

by Thomas Keneally

  His unfortunate teeth clacked with his honest enthusiasm.

  The Cardinal came in with the big question. ‘Have you made a definite decision yet, my dear young man?’

  The skewering question which all but the most certain dreaded. If I told him yes, could Curran be depended upon to weep at once? Or would she laugh like a drain, like the Frawley girls?

  ‘I feel the ultimate decision is very, very close, Your Eminence.’

  Monsignor Cary’s omniscient eye made me feel that it had better be, that I’d better stop wasting his time.

  The Cardinal said, ‘You must pray to Our Blessed Mother, the mother of us all, for the guidance you need. You are a communicant four or five days a week according to your file. That is a sign of your seriousness, and in the seminary, you will have the leisure to be a daily communicant. It may be in fact what you are intended to be. And imagine what it would be to achieve the ultimate stature of being a priest of God, transforming through your words the substance of bread and wine into the body and blood of Our Lord Jesus Christ. To think that you, a young man from Homebush, should be given that divine and eternal privilege!’

  There was nothing to be said in reply. I smelled the incense, I recited in my head the sonorous Latin. I intoned the Gloria in excelsis Deo. This ritual the one item of grandeur in crass old Sydney. I felt surge in me the power of sacramental rites: the rite of the confessional, the rite of Extreme Unction – Last Anointing. GMH had written of giving it to Felix Randal the farrier.

  Sickness broke him. Impatient he cursed at first,

  but mended

  Being anointed and all; though a heavenlier heart

  began some

  Months earlier, since I had our sweet reprieve and

  ransom

  Tendered to him …

  I felt for a second the divine intoxication of GMH’s words, the transcendent value of these mercies. Then the enchantment broke and was succeeded by a freezing terror. They almost had me! All I could do was say that I expected a decision soon. I looked once more and flinchingly at Monsignor Cary’s large, rather droopy eyes. He knew I was a chancer. A dilettante.

  ‘It was very pleasant meeting you, young Mr Keneally,’ said the Cardinal. Prince of the Church. Again I remembered that according to the Mirror, Cardinal Gilroy might become the new Supreme Pontiff, infallible when speaking ex cathedra on matters of faith and morals. I was trying to play ducks and drakes with him. I was using him as lever to the acquisition – whatever that acquisition entailed – of beautiful Curran.

  ‘It might prove,’ I found myself ridiculously telling the two monsignors and the Cardinal before I left, ‘that this meeting has been the crucial one.’

  When I left it was with that same sense of escape as I had seen on the faces of the others. Into beautiful Macquarie Street. Amongst Menzies’ beautiful, secular, un-knowing people. Past the old convict barracks, the Registrar-General’s department where honest Protestants worked without claims to infallible authority. The Archibald Fountain spraying its secular, humanist water.

  I felt seamless joy. But I feared a return of the divine exaltation I had experienced in the Cardinal’s presence.

  VII

  Soon a letter came from the Cardinal’s secretary asking me to let the authorities know by the end of November what my decision was, so that a place could be set aside in Springwood seminary. Naturally I showed it to my mother, more from the point of view of being found suitable than as someone definitely going to the place. My mother took the normal mother’s pride in the idea that a Prince of the Catholic Church found her son adequate. She went and showed it to my refugee of a father, estranged by the aloofness of his smart-alec son.

  At least he still had my brother, who talked without restraint with him. And as a carpenter manqué, he still made things for Johnny. He knew that these gifts would in Johnny’s case not be dismissed as inferior to the works of GMH. He made Johnny pencil boxes and small cases for things. He ran them up on the balcony as the trains went by, and then lovingly lacquered them. Amongst Australian males, the coat of lacquer was one of the permitted expressions of affection.

  He had once made me too a lacquered schoolbag of wood, metal clips in every corner, and an accurately fitted lock. It had done me three years until one day in 1950 I carelessly left it in the shallow gutter. While I was discussing Brother Markwell’s Latin class with Mangan, the 414 bus backed over it and reduced it to splinters and tyre-marked textbooks. That – though not intended by me – was like the close of childhood.

  Now my mother showed the Cardinal’s letter to my father. As usual I did not show it to him myself. Afterwards though, I presented it in person to the Frawley girls and the Tierneys. None of them were more than moderate spreaders of news. But the word got around that way.

  I received some discouragement. Crespi the salesman stopped me one morning in Homebush Road.

  ‘Do you know,’ he asked me, ‘that in the Spanish Civil War the Republican forces shot priests? These were decent armed young fellows, and they shot priests. Why do you think so? Not because they hated the Church in itself. No. Because the priests were enemies and exploiters of the people. Ordinary people knew. If you became a priest, you became an oppressor of minds and bodies.’

  It was nothing I did not expect to hear, and I was not disturbed.

  When we rested during training for the athletics carnival, Matt would ask, his head held sideways, ‘Have you made up your mind yet, Mick?’ Even then I think he gauged all of us accurately and forgave us our vanities.

  ‘I don’t believe it’s for me,’ I told him, though the immaculate and arctic atmosphere of the Cathedral house still remained with me and I fell asleep savouring it.

  In the meantime I was all studied indecision. To endure in divine uncertainty, stuck between the cloister and the hearth made me – I was sure – a figure of great dramatic interest. I believed I would get away with it too. That awesome sense of the priesthood as seen from the inside by GMH and the Cardinal had not recurred to me.

  Only the wise saw me more as a rabbit caught between headlights.

  Indeed the further I got from the interview with His Eminence the more middling cosy and ordinary the life of the diocesan seminary seemed to be. For one thing, you came home every year. Those who went to the Franciscans or the Passionist monastery (called the Passionate Fathers by the ignorant and the mocking) did not come home to be fed up by their mothers during Christmas vacations. They did not become priests who played golf. They lived as if golf had not been invented.

  I knew now in an academic sense that my mother and father would give their reluctant consent to my going into the seminary, if I decided on that. Because no one could stand in the way of the divine intent. My mother had already touchingly begun to observe, with those research capacities which mothers have, the relationship between young curates around Sydney and their mothers. She had spoken to a Mrs Aherne at Flemington whose son was a priest. Mrs Aherne was very pleased with her lot. She told my mother that in the world, boys marry and often did not have time for their mothers. But for a priest, the mother remained the chief relationship. The son, the priest, could devote a lot of his time to his mother and be a true filial companion.

  This had consoled my mother somewhat. But having come like my father from a tribal family, she was no more than consoled. She would have liked the prospect of grandchildren, a prospect which seemed to me remoter than becoming the conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic.

  My father would come in and say sometimes, gloomily but without aggression, ‘Why don’t you get a degree first in case it doesn’t work out?’

  But Father Byrne had prepared me to deal with such proposals.

  Meanwhile, Brother Digger Crichton, who had seen the Red Baron fall, would sometimes say at large assemblies on the last Friday of September, ‘Every boy has his last Sports Day.’

  It was a plain enough statement with its intimations of mortality and change and decision. It bore down str
enuously on me. Soon I would have to come clean on the seminary. Soon I would have to step back into ordinariness and decide on university.

  Matt and I were prepared for the Sports. Matt ran in bare, strong, snow-white feet. His upper legs were even better developed from all our training, the hairs on his body utterly white. His mother’s German measles, which had made him a snow baby in the womb, had penetrated even to the follicles.

  He and I were members of the team called the Reds – in anti-Communist Australia, the colour still had an innocence when applied to running teams. Terry Heys, a future academic, was captain of the Reds, and I was vice-captain. Brother Basher Bryant, the Brother in charge of the Reds, obviously mercifully felt he could not deny the intensity of my desire to be identified as an athlete.

  I approached him after our team meeting to discuss what race against other sixteen-year-olds Matt would run in. He showed me he had slated Matt for the fifth heat of the Under 14s.

  ‘But we’ve been training,’ I protested, barely able to hide my anger. ‘Just so that Matt can run against people his own age.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Basher Bryant definitively. ‘But he isn’t very certain in the way he runs and I don’t want any collisions.’

  ‘He’ll be very disappointed,’ I told Basher.

  ‘Are you arguing with me?’ he asked.

  ‘It’s not fair to him. He could beat people like Mangan.’

  ‘I expect a more cooperative and obedient attitude,’ said Basher.

  ‘Yes, well, if you’d told us earlier we could have saved ourselves a lot of training.’

  ‘That’s enough of that,’ said Basher.

  I saw that the thing to do was to appeal to Dinny. But before I could do that, I had to go down the room and fetch Matt. My rage was such that I couldn’t keep the news in. As I spoke to him, Matt remained preternaturally still.

  ‘I’m going to get Dinny to fix it up for us,’ I told him.

  ‘Don’t, Mick,’ he said.

  ‘No, Dinny won’t stand for it.’

  But his face reddened in that astounding way and his enunciation was taut with fury. ‘Don’t!’ he told me. He was so authoritative at such moments.

  ‘But we’ve trained so hard,’ I told him.

  Matt, however, was determined to get even with Basher by accepting the limits others put on him. I said we should both refuse to compete, but at St Pat’s that was like refusing to breathe.

  Matt looked away into darkness, and as much as I pleaded would not let me take our case to Dinny.

  It was in fact so compulsory to participate in Sports Day that Mangan the future Trappist was there shamelessly bare-footed, for running shoes were beneath his dignity.

  ‘Oh, my heaven,’ he told me. ‘I feel so vulgar in primary colours.’

  Lanky Larkin, the apprentice agnostic who these days spent only a little time amongst the Celestials, was in a blue singlet for the last time in his life, suffering this last indignity of his boyhood. He had begun to meet up with Sydney University Philosophy students at pubs in Forest Lodge, and the secular heresies sang to him as he stood slightly goose-fleshed and self-parodied in the vest of the Blues.

  A photographer from the Mirror had come to take a picture of Matt and me crouching in our lanes, and we did not bother informing him of Basher’s cruel edict. Early arriving parents sportingly applauded Matt as he took up his crouch. Then a group picture – Terry Heys, Matt, myself, Peter O’Gallagher the 880-yards runner.

  ‘What about you, Curly?’ the photographer called to Mangan in an attempt to make a crowded photograph.

  ‘I’m a sporting leper,’ Mangan cried to him, but joined in, Byronic martyr to Australian sporting philistinism.

  Whenever the Reds won a race, Heys and I and other gun athletes were meant to run in front of the team on the benches by the dressing rooms called the Stockade and lead the rest of the Reds in their war cry.

  Eero, eero, eero rum,

  Rum stick a bopple

  On a zip man golliwoggle,

  Down with Green, Gold, Blue …

  For me this was a half-sweet day, since I knew I would not excel adequately in any one event to make it into the supreme team, the team which ran against the other colleges on the Sydney Cricket Ground. And then the closed subject of the race Matt had to run in.

  I was third in the shot-putt in the morning, against a background of little boys running their hearts out.

  ‘Eero, eero, eero rum …’

  My little brother, a blond-haired member of the Greens, had never been a runner. I stood in my representative’s singlet of black and gold and blue, yelling him on in his age group. He had never been well-coordinated except in the academic sphere, where he was dazzling. But unlike Mangan he did not despise athletics or athletes, though he had a sensible unwillingness to flay himself. Equal quantities of vanity and desire had won me my black singlet. My little brother was content with his green. And though he didn’t particularly like me coaching him in races, I thought it a fraternal duty to do so.

  As for the serious stuff, I won the Second Division 100 yards and was overtaken by one other boy in the 220. Peter McInnes, the wonder of the meeting, whose picture had been taken solo by the Mirror photographer earlier, steamed down the grass to win his age race (he was some months younger than the rest of us) in 9.9 seconds. A standing ovation, which he took with a very small ration of smile.

  Matt ran with apparent full force against fourteen-year-olds in the 220 yards. He did better at the bends than at the 100 yards, in which he still ran uncertainly, baulking sometimes, down the stretch of the field. Perhaps Basher had been right or perhaps Matt – though he didn’t seem to be – was dispirited. In any case, he ran third. But in the 220 yards, following the rattle of the Braille type in the shoe polish tins, he ran with enough certainty to win. I laconically shook Matt’s hand and uttered my Goodonyers. He got the only standing ovation of the day other than the one for Peter McInnes, and waited beside me with his head half cocked, his chin enquiringly lifted until the crowd had stopped clapping. As his parents did, he secretly wondered whether the applause was not outright pity.

  In that way, on that bright September Saturday, Matt and I stood in the sun imitating true athletes.

  I cannot even remember which team won that day. Eero, eero, eero rum or one of the other three. The march-past remains as a composite memory from my eight years of marching past my parents as a St Pat’s child. We all lined up in fours behind our flag and Brother Crichton played a record or The Stars and Stripes Forever by Souza, the same marching tune on the same record, which he’d been playing since I was eight years old.

  At the end of the afternoon, the mile was run. The world was full of talk of the four-minute mile that year. There were actually small boys who thought, What if I break that barrier today? That was the improbable lure. Red-headed Pog O’Gallagher and a small ferrety boy called Simon were the best milers, and Simon had run four minutes thirteen seconds. Thirteen seconds did not seem to us in our innocence much of a barrier. Matt and I even started the mile, as did my little brother in his green singlet. After our efforts of the day, I knew we would not be expected to run more than a lap, and so loping along, my hand on Mattie’s elbow, we bade our farewell to St Pat’s athletic tradition.

  My little brother Johnny, having dashed away into the mile like a ferret, was flagging after a lap and a half. I called, ‘Come on, Johnny.’ Just a pro forma cry. I was horrified to see the exhausted boy turn back onto the track and continue for another asphyxiating three hundred yards. I found myself half-ashamed at the fraternal power I had discovered myself to have.

  We waited until Monday afternoon to see the picture of ourselves and Matt on the Mirror’s back page.

  Inside the back page lay a more serious, hard-hitting article on Peter McInnes. John Treloar, the Olympic sprinter, said Peter had now beyond all remaining doubt confirmed himself as Australia’s greatest sprinting prospect. Yet Peter was in class on Monday morning with
his Maths homework done. All that splendour concentrated in him.

  He made me feel the un-holiness of being a pretend athlete, a pretend seminarian. The duty of breaking the news to priests and cardinals would soon descend.

  Now there was hardly anything between us and the season of frantic study. In six weeks we would begin going to Homebush High to do our public examinations, the very examinations whose prospect had – according to conventional wisdom – killed with a noose the boy from Flemington. In a week or two we would be issued our exam numbers, which we would put instead of names on all our answers. I was beginning to come to grips with more T. S. Eliot and Auden than I had earlier in the year and even with some Shelley and Keats as well. But I had taken a vow that it would be a good Honours English exam question that would prevent me writing about GMH. For the Honours History exam I was up on all the totalitarian systems.

  At the inter-school competition at Sydney Cricket Ground, running on turf which in the winter was used as a Rugby League pitch and which in summer was the outfield for Cricket Test Matches, Peter blistered down the 100 yards in 9.8. I was a mere reserve for the 100 metres relay, which meant that I had to sit in the stands with Matt, contented enough and leading the war cry.

  Black, black, rickety-rack,

  S P C is on the track …

  There was plenty of opportunity to intone it, since we were so dominant. Simon, the brilliant 880 yards and mile runner, was disqualified from the under-sixteen years mile for crossing out of his track too early. Pog O’Gallagher was already standing in his lane for the start of the open mile when Dinny McGahan approached him and was seen reasoning with him. We all know what the discourse was: ‘You might get third or fourth, but young Simon can win it for us and break the record. Will you stand down?’

  What an exquisite humiliation, to be asked to stand down for a younger, better athlete when you are already in the starting lanes! It was the harshest thing I ever saw Dinny do, but everything that worked was fair in sport.

  Young Simon ran and won. Black, black, rickety-rack … Pog looked sick and clammy all the way back to Central railway. He would make up for it in later life by owning a string of pharmacies and liquor stores. On that afternoon, however, he shone with anguish.