Homebush Boy (14 page)

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 themselves 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.

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 confess 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
.