Homebush Boy Read online

  I knew from this story, and from the way a smile took the corners of his mouth when Mangan and I were at our most rarefied, that Matt had plenty of go. He was stuck with us because he was in a sense our hostage. We were the ones who studied with him and read to him those books which were not yet in the Braille Library. He was, after all, a forerunner – the first blind child to attempt the Leaving Certificate – and the New South Wales Braille Library had not yet caught up with his needs.

  He had the physique, the quickness of gesture, which would have made him a sportsman if he had been suddenly freed, and he would have hung around at least part of his time with the surreptitious smokers and beer drinkers and appreciators of ‘women’ (as they hopefully called the sixteen-year-olds from the Dominican Convent). But at least he was able to share with them and with me an athletic enthusiasm. And he had also the aforesaid advantage of living in Strathfield.

  Amongst the occasional mansions were ordinary brick bungalows of the kind in which the unruly, un-punctual Mangans lived, in which the orderly Tierneys could be found, in which Bernadette Curran’s parents raised their splendid daughters. The fragrant little gardens of these smaller houses were full of shrubs and flowers whose names I did not know but which did the service of bearing away the coaly, electric smell of the railway. At the height of summer, the Strathfield gardens looked desiccated and heat-frazzled, but they were as close as I could get to seasons of mists and mellow fruitfulness.

  I was the sort of kid men took aside for serious talks. One was Mr Frawley, the Frawley girls’ father. The other was Mr Aldo Crespi, who lived at Mrs Talbot’s boarding house in the Crescent and who – everyone said – was her lover. He was an amnestied Italian prisoner of war who had escaped from a camp in the bush. He had found a place with Mrs Talbot who had fallen for his Italian palaver. Turning himself in at the end of the war, he returned to Italy and then re-emigrated to Australia to be with Mrs Talbot.

  My father disapproved of Crespi and called him ‘the Red Wog’, since Mrs Talbot was a Leftist in the Strathfield Branch of the Labor Party and Aldo was her ideological sidekick. He had lived well with handsome though tubercular Mrs Talbot while – to quote my father – ‘silly, bloody Australians’ were off in foreign parts fighting the war he had abandoned.

  I would sometimes meet Aldo as I walked up the hill in the Crescent, on the far side of the railway line. The Crescent was as straight as a die, and I’d see Aldo coming down the hill with his sample bag. He sold lotions and soaps and detergents door to door – my mother was one of his clients and said he ‘really laid it on’. He seemed to make a good living since he was always so buoyant, a dapper little man. If he met me, he would put his sample bag down, because he had plenty to tell me.

  ‘So you’re going off to those bigots again?’ he’d ask me. ‘Those Franco-lovers who tell you to pray for poor Godless China? I tell you, China is better off under the Reds than it was under the warlords. Less than ten years ago, fifteen million Chinese were dying of famine. More than the population of this little country of ours. But that was okay with the bigots because the missionaries were still there.’

  But sometimes he would be a residual Fascist. ‘Those bigots will run down Mussolini while they praise Franco. I tell you, if Mussolini hadn’t been silly enough to put his money on Hitler, he’d still be in business, and Italy a much better place. Crikey, I’ll give you the decent oil. Mussolini even treated political prisoners nicely. The world is bloody complicated, son, and they’ll try to tell you, those bigots, that it’s bloody simple.’

  I could not ask him the questions I was really interested in. Had Mrs Talbot known he was the escaped enemy? And then the matter Mangan knew about somehow – that TB made people twice as sexual, destroyed their control. But it was hard to put that together with Mrs Talbot’s severe good looks, and her pallor, and with how one day, as I was passing the boarding house at the top of the Crescent, which was not a crescent, I’d seen her put a handkerchief to her mouth and bring it away drenched with blood. There were mysteries to do with Crespi which superseded the mystery of how the Chinese were fed.

  ‘Don’t let them cross your wires,’ he advised me. ‘They have nothing better to do. My wires were crossed when I was a boy. First, the Church, then the Fascists. You think at first the one is the cure for the other. But they dance together. Look at the industrial groupers as they call themselves. The landscape of Fascism.’

  ‘But surely you think that Stalin is a threat to Australia, Mr Crespi?’ I asked him as always.

  ‘Stalin is not as much a threat himself as what they will make of him. Besides, don’t be fooled into thinking it’s a choice between Stalin and the groupers. Between the inhuman and the inhuman, other choices can be made.’

  I liked Crespi because the idea of galactic struggles between ideologies of good and evil suited my temperament. I suspected that even a pimple came from a struggle between the white deity of spirit and the dark one of flesh.

  To my dialogues with Crespi I brought a selective sense of history. Some of the Brothers in my earlier years at St Pat’s talked a lot about the Spanish Civil War, for in it the forces Crespi talked about had come face to face. We were never told that the Republicans had been a democratically elected government of Spain. We were told, however, that they were nun-slayers and priest-killers, and that in Madrid at the Alcazar, trusting in the Virgin Mary, the garrison had held out for an astounding time and been delivered at last by faith.

  The other fellow who would take me aside and talk to me as if I had a mission in the cosmic battle was wiry little Mr Frawley, father of the Frawley kids, the two older girls Rose and Denise, and two smaller boys about my brother’s age. Frawley was one of the industrial groupers Crespi abominated. The groupers believed something like this: Dr H. V. Evatt, leader of the Labor Party, a scholar, a lawyer, first Secretary of the United Nations and a former Cabinet Minister of the governments of Curtin and of Chifley, was either too soft on Communism of perhaps even a fellow traveller. The nexus between the Labor Party – saviour of the working class and guarantor of equities – and the Communist-controlled unions was a scandal to men like Frawley. Look in Doc Evatt’s speeches and correspondence now, and you will not find much to justify their broad fears. Poor old Doc, who competed with the Conservative Prime Minister Menzies to express fealty to the dying King of England and the coming Queen! But to Mr Frawley, either a dupe or a co-conspirator.

  My father harboured the same suspicions and would often utter them over the Sydney evening paper, the Mirror. He did not become a grouper, however, an activist. The war seemed to have given him a certain cynicism about joining things. Frank Frawley had been deprived of his war and was fighting it here on the Western Line.

  Frawley was a little wiry man like Crespi. He had a cowlick and worked as a purchasing officer in the New South Wales Government Railways, the crowd who with their brute locomotives ran their steel rail right through my sleep. He was a reader, and he too liked to believe in this struggle of dogmas at the end of time, and felt that 1952 was getting pretty late in the century and in history in general.

  Mr Frawley’s war was territorial, too. ‘The Catholics founded the Labor Party,’ he pronounced, ‘and now we’re being forced out of it by Reds.’

  And he would say such things as, ‘At least one classic Marxist objective is part of the platform of the Australian Labor Party. It’s right there – The Nationalization of all means of production, exchange and communication. It lies there like a serpent at the heart of the party. And all of us told ourselves it didn’t really matter. Mr Chifley said it didn’t matter, Mr McGirr, Mr Cahill.’

  Joe Cahill, the premier of the state, a good friend of Cardinal Gilroy’s and a Papal Knight, escaped too much vilification from Mr Frawley though. No one believed he was Marxism’s running dog. Besides, he was only a power at the state level. The Federal level, and above that the world and the universal level, were what interested Mr Frawley and me.

  Some of th
e Brothers at St Pat’s told us a lot about brave work undertaken by industrial groupers. The Communists intimidated union members and always insisted on an open ballot to intimidate them better. If that didn’t work, we were told, the Reds then stole the ballot boxes for counting, and opened them in their own headquarters. The security of ballot boxes was one of the things the groupers fought for. There was a young man in Lewisham, a grouper who – Brother Markwell swore – had his arm broken with a cricket bat in a fight over a ballot box.

  Mr Frawley couldn’t take on Communism directly though. His office was not a Marxist breeding-ground, but was in fact full of members of the Knights of the Southern Cross, an Hibernian society, reliable men. There was little call for him to break his arm in his workplace defending ballot boxes. Instead, the occasional rough stuff Mr Frawley’s band of groupers got involved in was aimed not against Reds but against the commandos of a rabid newspaper called The Rock.

  The Rock was a very juicy scandal sheet edited by a man called Campbell. He did this on behalf of a fundamentalist group who were worried about Papism and its pomps and its decadence. It was so hugely popular, with its tales of pregnant nuns and buggering brothers, that people had to reserve it at Rossiter’s newsagency on Parramatta Road to be sure of getting a copy when it came out on Tuesdays. It confirmed for Protestants all they had ever thought about the Whore of Babylon, but Monsignor Loane of St Martha’s Strathfield had to exhort his own flock not to buy the rag since it only encouraged Campbell.

  Early on, Campbell had excited his readers by telling them he intended to raid convents and liberate young nuns enslaved by Popish superstition and imprisoned in the cellars. To ward off Campbell, Mr Frawley served under the lieutenancy of a meat wholesaler called Kelleher, who lived in Homebush. Kelleher’s corps of groupers would defend the convents from attack.

  On the Western Line there were two places in particular which were susceptible to Campbell raids. One was St Anthony’s Home for Fallen Girls at Ashbury, and the other was Lewisham Hospital, run by a company of genial nuns whose robes were sky blue and white. Both these convents had superb gardens, as if to fulfil the well-known dictum about flower beds and the Deity’s heart. And nuns of both Orders had actually caught Campbell’s scouts snooping around amongst the rhododendrons on reconnaissance.

  In between serving as an undoubtedly brave convent sentry, Mr Frawley, whose parents like my father’s were Irish emigrants, was a student of Ireland’s grievances. He told me once, ‘You have to suspect anyone called, say, Neill. They’re probably descendants of Soupers. That’s people who drop the O’ from their name and abandoned their faith during the Famine in return for soup.’

  I wondered why that didn’t apply to Frawleys, if they’d all been O’Frawleys once. But I was almost manically polite, so I didn’t force the issue.

  In this way, during my journeys to and from the house of Matt Tierney, ground breaker, I would receive vigorous though intermittent and contradictory instruction on the nature of the world.

  In that year of high circulation for the mad rag The Rock, I guiltily believed I’d met Campbell once. That had been three years before, in 1949, before The Rock became famous, before Campbell had brought what would now be called his ‘tabloid’ talents to it.

  My mother was taking my brother and me back to Kempsey in New South Wales, where my maternal grandmother lived, on the North Coast Daylight. There had been a big good-looking man in a grey suit in our compartment. He’d worn his tie loosened and had an edge of danger. It was increased by the fact he got out and drank at each refreshment room at every station we stopped at. This wasn’t uncommon on country trains in the late 1940s – men would jump off the train before it had stopped and run, suited and hatted and in the hope the beer was on, for the refreshment room. If it was, they would order three or four beers and drink them fast before the train left and come back to their seats meritoriously flushed and a little uncertain in speech.

  Once, between Maitland and Taree, as I came back from the toilet, I saw the man from our compartment standing in the corridor with his face slackened. He was drinking from a flask he must have got filled at Maitland. He looked at me, first coldly and then with a good-natured derision. I was of course wearing my St Patrick’s grey uniform, Luceat Lux Vestra on my breast pocket.

  ‘The Brothers’ boy,’ he told me, as if it was a joke between us. He hadn’t been like this with my mother. He’d been flirting with her, and every town we passed – Gosford, Wyong, Maitland, Merewether – he knew a story about, knew what the local economy was like, knew what houses were worth and what was the rent for shops. Whether it was worth owing a milkbar in Wingham. He’d quoted cousins and friends he had everywhere. I knew my mother considered him a pain, a blowhard. But out here in the corridor, I knew he wasn’t going to tell me anything about the cost of housing, or how the timber mill at Dungog was going.

  ‘You had your first hard one yet, sonny?’ he asked.

  I wasn’t exactly a Celestial then, but I was on my way to being one, and am abashed to have to admit I had only the dimmest idea of what he meant. An erection, for certain. But something else as well? I was unworldly, and proud of it, so I said nothing.

  ‘I’ve got a brother-in-law. A bit straight-laced. Doesn’t smoke, drink. He has a paper. The Rock. Ever heard of The Rock?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Well, that’s bloody understandable. They ought to smarten themselves up. What they write about mostly is the evils of drink. To most Australians, the only evil with drink is we don’t have enough. But stories, too, about the evils of the Church of Rome.’

  He uttered this sentence lightly, as if he didn’t really believe it himself. ‘They ought to concentrate on that more. People like reading that. I could give you money for a good story. For example, do the Brothers sit you on their laps? Do they unbutton you? Things like that?’

  ‘Nothing like that happens,’ I said.

  In primary school, one of the Brothers would sometimes sit boys on his lap, not surreptitiously, but in front of the lot of us. Classrooms operated from the desire to be noticed and favoured by the teacher, but this was a mark of favour I never envied. I didn’t understand the reason for this behaviour though. A few knowing boys sniggered about it. Most of us were not knowing. The unease I felt when I saw it, the itchy, bilious sense – that was my business. It wasn’t the business of this joker with the loose tie. This fellow who was one kind of smart-alec with me and another with my mother.

  ‘If you had any stories like that, I could give you ten bob a pop. I’ve got a telephone number.’

  He took out a card and gave it to me. ‘Better put it away somewhere. Careful your mum doesn’t find that when she’s ironing your suit.’

  What he didn’t know was how well the Dominican nuns first and then the Brothers had prepared me for this hour. They had prepared me, in fact, for Satan in an Akubra hat to torture me, to offer me martyrdom. This fellow was a stupid man not to understand that. Ten bob wasn’t even a temptation. It was an anti-climax. It was – though I didn’t know the word then, and wouldn’t until three years later when I came under the influence of literary Brother McGahan – bathos.

  ‘See, I’m just going to Lismore to visit my wife. She’s not too keen on me.’ He winked. As if I had women trouble too. ‘Then I’ll be back at Sydney, that number. You could be my agent in the field. How would you like that?’

  He extended his hand, but I didn’t take it even though I was scared of him. We made our separate ways back to the compartment, and he returned to being the flash know-all all the way from Dungog to the small hamlet of Kundabung. Here we began to gather our luggage. My mother drenched a handkerchief from the solid glass water carafe in its silver plated bracket on the wall, NSWGR (New South Wales Government Railways) frosted on the surface of the bottle, and began the last tidying up of my brother’s face, and combing of his hair. She wanted to show her parents in Kempsey that she had sparkling boys.

  The man, whose name
was not on the card I had been given – it said only The Rock, and had a telephone number – insisted on jovially carrying our ports to the door of the train and setting them down on the station. Emanations of conspiracy still came off him, I thought, aimed at me. But they evaporated when I saw my grandfather’s face bearing down on us. The man did not try to make a friend of my grandfather or impress him with any information about dairy farming in the Macleay. He got straight back on the train and it was the last I saw of him.

  I never told anyone I’d had this brush with possible Campbell. Later, I was fascinated to read in my father’s copy of Truth – very much a secret activity with me, though I could manage to do it if I went to a different Mass from my parents – that Campbell’s wife in the bush was angry with him because he was unfaithful and had used a horse whip on her. The Rock said that she had been bribed by the Knights of the Southern Cross and by the Vatican to say these things. And he, the man on the North Coast Daylight who had carried our bags, was the general against whom Mr Frawley stood as a brave NCO of Christ.

  II

  At the age of thirteen, Matt Tierney had come to St Pat’s Strathfield with some fanfare. He possessed the aforesaid uniqueness of being the first blind boy in any state of the Commonwealth of Australia to attempt the Leaving Certificate. His markedly handsome features were utterly albino. His mother had suffered rubella when she was pregnant with him, and he’d been born with her features but with snow-white hair and skin and withered orbs of eyes. He had never seen anything, though he once told me his marred optic nerves were sensitive to gradations of light.