Homebush Boy (11 page)

Catholicism's huge fear of sexuality, its morbid panic, its detestation of most sins of the flesh (including masturbation, of which I was uninformed at that time), was at play in him. He was both the victim and promoter of that awful phobia.

Freddie went out weeping, a rare phenomenon amongst sixteen-year-olds. He was suspended from school pending his possible expulsion. The rest of us were set to write a confession of what we had done and what we observed others to have done during the dance. Dinny bade us write the truth under pain of conscience.

The unknowing might think that he meant to take these accounts off and get some perverse pleasure from them. Brother McGahan was in this matter though not perverse but tormented. He was concerned to find how far the rot had gone. He was concerned to lay God's preventive axe to the root of the tree.

Only Matt was not required to set to work on this. His Braille typewriter would have punched out confessions that no one other than he could read. As we wrote, a red pall of shame hung in the room. I'm sure there were some brave, democratic, even Godless souls who were not intimidated by it. I confess I wasn't one of them.

The truth is, all of us, the ethos of the place and time, were what would be called Jansenist, though we were ignorant of the term.

As I would learn later, Jansen was a Bishop of Ypres, the town in Flanders for which Mr Tierney and Digger Crichton had fought. Jansen had argued the utter incapacity of decent people to choose to obey moral law, particularly to overcome their own concupiscence. He must have been faced by phenomena such as Freddie's lust for the Santa Sabina high jumper. Only Divine Grace could save you from the flesh, according to Bishop Jansen.

Jansen's propositions were ultimately condemned by the Vatican since they seemed to undermine the doctrine of free will. He died in 1640, but his doctrine about grace, and his high stress on the essential and continual austerity which must be applied in matters of sexual morality lived on at the Convent of Port Royal in Paris. Here it attracted a number of famous adherents including Blaise Pascal, the prodigy, mathematician and author of the
Pensées
.

Not knowing at that stage about Pascal's Jansenist and therefore heretical connections, I was already dipping into the
Pensées
, and was particularly attracted of course, as others were, by the aphorism, ‘The heart has its reasons which reason cannot understand.' This
pensée
seemed to fit in very well with my feelings at the Santa Sabina dance. Reason could not have gone close to expressing the impulses which led me to grope for the divine Curran's hand.

The French and the Vatican found it very hard to suppress Jansenism, and in fact many Irish priests, exiled from their country by the British Penal Laws, ingested Jansenism while studying in France. Every heresy, it stands to reason, adds its stain to the chief, central orthodoxy. The panic that grace would run out and that flesh would conquer, that will and spirit were not enough – that was the Jansenist panic which infected Fifth Year Blue and its popular teacher on the corner of Edgar Street in the antipodes in 1952.

Perhaps by explaining this theological background, I am trying to explain to the reader how I wrote what I did. ‘I did hear one boy say that it was wonderful to get up against a girl's breasts.' (Freddie had in fact said this to Matt and me in passing.) ‘When I was walking home myself, I made a number of stupid attempts to hold a girl's hand. Although this was a minor matter, I understand how it could have led to something worse …'

Something worse? Small chance. With me a Celestial, and Curran a sensible and determined refuser of my hand.

As I wrote, Matt's Braille typewriter keys
did
begin to crunch away at the heavy, brown cartridge paper onto which he habitually put everything he knew – the dynasties of Egypt, the Athenian Republic, the Punic Wars, and whatever he felt when he touched the few peculiar, feminine fabrics which encased the Frawleys and Curran, and smelled their scents. What he was writing though was his business.

I heard from the Frawley girls that there was a similar outrage shown by the Dominican nuns, who had heard reports from some of the girls' parents about the way their daughters had been clasped, hugged, caressed. Mother Concordia, the oldest surviving Irishwoman from the first group of Dominicans who came to Strathfield, a sort of Matriarch Emeritus of Santa Sabina, took all the fourth and fifth year girls to the chapel, where they said one decade of the Rosary to confirm them in the virtues of Catholic womanhood.

Hearing the Frawley girls utter the name, I felt a certain awe that Concordia had been put into commission. I had known this nun when I was very young, during the war – when we came down from the bush and I was sent to the little Dominican school of Saint Martha's. Here we had occasional, august visits from Concordia, and these deepened the dread I already had of the school.

I was not happy there to start with – not very bright, easily distracted, easily contracting a wheeze. Running around in the playground made my nose stream, but I lost my handkerchief readily, and the wrists of my navy blue blazer became marred by the snail-like silvery traces of mucus.

The young, impeccable Bernadette Curran had been a member of the same class. She never spilled ink, and her nose never ran. One day on the way down Homebush Road towards the bus, she asked me, ‘Why do you always have drippings on your work?'

I burned, and said, ‘I don't see any dripping around here.'

But she had noticed my terrible weakness. In the subjectivity of childhood misery, every day was a month and every week a year, and both the ink and my nose flowed without spate. To make up for the runniness of my nasal passage, I tried to be a lad with the other lads. When someone started pissing contests up the creosoted walls of Saint Martha's boys' toilet I joined in enthusiastically, straining my lower belly to get my stream of urine an inch higher than that of the bloke beside me.

This was the year in which Singapore had fallen to the Japanese and the occasional Japanese reconnaissance plane went over Sydney, the year in which the entire Australian world scheme – development as a working man's utopia under the umbrella of Imperial power – had been disrupted by the humiliation of British and Australian arms. Yet it was our urinary crimes which seemed to cry to the heavens, and evoked a visit from Santa Sabina to Saint Martha's by Mother Concordia. She got all the boys from the Infants and First Grade and took us into the boys' toilet, aligning us in threes between the urinal stalls.

She was a big-boned woman, though I didn't think of her in those terms then. I thought of her as being constructed of one piece through and through, legless as a mountain. Divine thunder was compacted into her eyes and the strip of brow we could see below her celluloid brow-piece. She had a long, immaculate stick of chalk in her hand. She reached into the urinal stalls and drew a line about two feet three inches off the ground.

She moved from stall to stall, continuing the line. The stick of chalk did not break in her hand, despite the unevenness of the tarred and creosoted walls. She worked down the left side of the stalls and then passed across the rear of our silent column and worked on the facing right wall. It was awesome to see her mark and measure this infant, male place. When she had finished her work, she was panting slightly, pursing her lips, and she stood in front of us. The chalk was evenly worn down – she had taken lessons long ago in stopping it cracking and wearing to a point.

She said, ‘I know what you've been doing to your shame. Think of what your dear mothers would say. You have disgraced them. More importantly, you have wounded our Saviour and appalled His Blessed Mother. I tell you this: see that mark on the wall. Any boy who piddles above that mark will attract the anger of dear God and cause His Blessed Mother to shed tears of shame.'

She then took an eighteen inch ruler from a deep, deep pocket in her habit, called forth two of the ringleaders – someone must have talked – and gave them three on each hand. I don't think it hurt hugely, but its intimation of the Deity's lightning bolts caused both boys to weep.

A few weeks later, the Americans and the Australians stopped a large Japanese convoy in the Coral Sea, and then a few months after that – thirty miles from Port Moresby – the Diggers stopped the Japanese advance across New Guinea. All so that we should grow up in freedom, except the freedom to pee above the line.

Ten years later we had again failed to keep our unregenerative selves in order in the boys' lavatory at St Martha's, and Concordia had been forced to come out of ever deeper retirement to lead the girls of Santa Sabina in prayers for our redemption.

We waited to receive exemplary punishments for our behaviour at the dance, but the only penalty that was imposed was the most obvious – there would be no dance the following year. A saner system might have imposed a different penalty altogether – a compulsory monthly dance, something to de-mystify women and prepare us to be fit lovers and husbands. But I believed at the time that we sixteen-year-old victims of Jansen were getting what we deserved. I deserved it for trying to take Bernadette Curran's hand so importunately. Everyone else deserved it for his own shameful reason. Shame, in fact, was inescapable. Every man was a liar and a luster. If
then
I had been given the choice for life between producing children through passion and explicit sexual feeling, or producing them merely by reading GMH to one's beloved – I have to confess that under those particular prevailing winds I would have chosen the latter.

V

Mystical, penitential, angular Father Byrne was moved out of Strathfield parish to Lewisham, six stops closer to Sydney down the Western Line. Many said they were going to follow him there for Sunday Mass, since he said Mass like a saint, and Monsignor Loane said it like an accountant. I was not aware though that anyone really took the trouble of catching the train to Lewisham for that purpose. Uttering the idea itself stood as an adequate statement of discontent at Father Byrne's being moved by the Cardinal to another parish.

Father Byrne himself would have frowned on the cult of personality. Amongst his new jobs, he told all of us boys on the next vocation-hunting safari to St Pat's, was chaplaincy of the nearby Little Company of Mary Hospital. I knew the hospital well. I had my tonsils out there, in a room of other etherized children. Fighting against the ether swab, waking weakened, succumbing to pneumonia, and being nursed by a tall Irish nun in white and blue. It was easy to imagine Father Byrne keeping a vigil for sick children, sick women, or bringing around at their last gasp decayed, agnostic old men.

Father Byrne was on the front line in another sense too. Lewisham Hospital was a prime target for Campbell's Raiders. Every night now, Mr Frawley told me on one of my visits to the house, two men kept watch in the convent garden armed with lengths of pipe or cricket bats. The nuns had the number of the meat wholesaler in Homebush who could gather a flying squad of six or eight groupers to come to the convent's rescue within a quarter of an hour.

On a further visit to Saint Pat's, Father Byrne – talking to Fifth Year as a whole – asked us to pray for a particular patient at Lewisham Hospital. She was a girl from the bush. She'd had an ulcer grow on her leg and it had entered the bone. Her future did not look good. Only eighteen years old, but very bitter! She said the usual things – nuns were cruel; the Pope claimed to be infallible, but if so why couldn't he pick the winner of the Melbourne Cup. And she didn't believe in life after death. She was pleasant enough apart from that, and let him pray with her sometimes. She showed no awareness, he said, of the mortal peril of her soul.

I suppose that some of us, told of this dark, tragic girl from the bush, whose shinbone had grown cancerous, imagined how we might with our Fix-a-Flexed hairdos and our crooked smiles bring her around. Even morbidly imagined – since such scenes were part of the mythology of our upbringing – her dying grateful, going beautiful to God with our names on her lips.

People became aware that Father Byrne was travelling broadly throughout the Western suburbs of Sydney, garnering prayers for this poor doomed girl. My mother heard about it in a sermon Father Byrne gave at Benediction. Every supporter of Father Byrne between Stanmore and Granville was praying for the girl from the bush with the cancerous leg.

At the beginning of the Sydney winter, when I was working on the Newman essay and making up my mind whether to try for the Firsts and Seconds Rugby League team or keep a divine distance, it was announced that Father Byrne was coming back to Strathfield parish to say a special Mass of thanks. For his patient had not only returned to the faith, but had been astoundingly cured! St Martha's Church was packed for the event. It was nearly as big as a basilica anyhow, and distinguished by a huge mural of the Assumption of the Virgin Mary in the half-dome behind the high altar. People came to be uplifted and challenged by the news, to hear Father Byrne's sonorous Latin. My father liked priests who got into the Mass, sliced through the litany like a buzz saw and let him out after forty minutes. But I, like Father Byrne, was a lover of sonorous Latin. I attended this Mass with my mother, making the long walk up Homebush Road.

We noticed that in the front row sat a young woman, pleasant-faced, dressed in a blue blouse, white skirt and white cardigan. Her leg was bandaged and she smiled a lot. She was obviously the redeemed girl. As Father Byrne said in his sermon, not referring to her by name or gesture as she tilted her face ecstatically towards the pulpit, her bone cancer had disappeared, and the wound left by the ulcer was clean and was healing even as we spoke.

Outside afterwards, talking to Mangan and the Frawleys, we saw her emerge, helped along by the middle-aged woman who had sat beside her. People did not talk to her, and some looked bleakly at her, almost in the way the ignorant looked at Matt. Her miraculous cure made her an outsider as well as a wonder. Homebush Road nonetheless brimmed with miraculous hope. With a faint limp, and in the company of her middle-aged attendant, she moved off in the direction of Strathfield Station to catch the train back to Lewisham. There, everyone seemed to know, she was living in the hospital but praying with the novices. It was now near certain that her life was mapped out.