Homebush Boy (19 page)

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.

Through these seasonal shifts, some change was occurring in me. I had once imagined myself in English classes at Sydney University, and perhaps later in Medicine or Law classes. Sydney University, however, as envisioned, now had less and less substance to it. It was an anaemic imagining.

Mangan sighed with a sense of deliverance as we fell to our books. The last time was past when he would be made to swim at Concord baths or field at deep fine leg or wear a coloured athletic singlet and run second last in some lowly race.

‘The end of ignorant sporting,' he said, ‘and the beginning of the true
vie spirituelle
.'

St Pat's did not teach French beyond the intermediate class, but Mangan continued to speak it with a stylishness which went unchallenged on the Western Line.

Sport had for now ended for me, but I had not retired as a spectator. I could still show that to me sport, art and religion were all part of the one rich continuum. On the first weekend of October, a few days shy of my seventeenth birthday, I took the train and bus to the Sydney Cricket Ground, carrying with me a volume of nineteenth-century poetry – because once Jimmy showed me the splendours of GMH I had grown a bit weak on the Romantics and now had to make up for it – and a small book on the Treaty of Locarno. I went on my own, since Matt had decided to spend the afternoon being tested in History – Ancient and Modern – by his father the Digger.

This was to be the supreme New South Wales day for Peter McInnes, the contest between all the boys schools' champions of New South Wales. Beyond this lay all the even more glittering days of Australian championships, Commonwealth Games, Olympics.

When I arrived at the Sydney Cricket Ground, there were not too many Strathfield uniforms on the concourse in front of the Sheridan Stand. In this bigger arena of contests, our sense of dominance had been reduced to scale. The competition would be hot. Peter won the 220 yards stylishly in a time which I forget. I remember only that it was an All Schools record. But everyone knew the great event would be the 100 yards.

Simon won the under-sixteen years 880 yards and mile – poor Pog well and truly eclipsed by now. There was no one on the Sheridan concourse to do
Black, black, rickety-rack
with though. The concrete space by the fence was full of boys from the best schools – Grammar and Saint Ignatius, and King's named in honour of the Monarch and identified by the para-miliary slouch-hat and uniform its boys wore. These were boys who were told in the classroom that they were Australia's inheritors, and probably were.

Yet Peter had put them all in second place. Men and women and boys went past, and what they all said was, ‘Mustn't miss that 100 yards.'

I was tempted to enter into conversation with other boys there and offer them insights into Peter's training methods, to let them know off-handedly that I had trained with Peter and run for Canterbury-Bankstown with him. Fortunately, I resisted. The star sprinters came out at last in their sloppy joes, most of them barefoot on the concrete, holding their spikes. Peter wore his white ankle socks, a fashion I had imitated, hoping the cotton would give me an extra tenth of a second. You could see the journalists and commentators up in the sports booths in the M. A. Noble Stand – a battery of fixed binoculars all trained on McInnes. All the other finalists could run 10 or 10.1 seconds on their best day. Peter had yards on them. Only if he started appallingly could he be beaten. But I had seen Dinny running him through his starts every afternoon on the oval. A nasal
On your mark, Get set
, and
Go! Go!
was actually a clap of Dinny's hands, and Peter was well gone down his lane before the sound of Dinny's hands reached me.

‘Good, good, good,' the Christian Brother would cry after Peter. ‘Ah … come back, come back.'

There was not a poor start in McInnes.

I took up a position on the fence ten yards from the finish line. Crowded in by other, faintly sweaty uniforms which had no tribal connection with Peter.

A lovely start. Faster than at the clapping of hands by Brother Dinny McGahan. By fifty yards, the crowd was beginning to laugh indulgently at the gap which had opened between Peter and the rest. He was not abnormally tall but his stride astounded the onlookers. Ten yards of daylight, as he crossed the finish, sat between him and some other normal sprinter running second. Yet I saw that at the line, something snapped at once in him. A fragile chord that connected his upper and lower body broke right then. This fracture drove him sideways, and when he straightened he could barely put his foot to ground and he began to stagger about with a broken, broken gait.

People in the stand, influential parents who had never heard of Homebush, stood up. Twenty thousand with their heads cocked at that angle of inquiry.

His medial ligament had snapped beyond any hope of being repaired. Today he could have been restored, could have taken only a season off. If the technology had existed, he would have been ready in time for the 1954 Commonwealth Games, the 1956 Olympics which Melbourne would ultimately acquire.

He was as much an inevitable Olympian as Mangan was a monk, and before our eyes, he had perished by the cruellest, un-chosen mischance. He was away from school only a few days and came back the same fellow but with a faint limp. After all, he had to get his study done for the Leaving Certificate. Of course, the fact that it was a life sentence was not fully known to him then, but that it was a substantial verdict did not alter him.

‘A bit sore, Mick,' he would say to me, when I asked, which I probably did too frequently.

But I had been
there
, had seen it. The last great hope of Australian sprinting, better than Hec Hogan. He had run the 100 yards that Saturday afternoon in 9.6 seconds, and all the sporting commentators were weeping. He could have challenged Hogan, and would within a year certainly have beaten him. Ferrety little Hec would run third in the Olympic 100 metres of 1956. Pete would have beaten him and still have been good enough to take a medal at the Mexico Olympics in 1968, and in an utterly changed world, share the platform with the two Black Power signalling athletes from America.

Soon Australians would become too worldly and understand the size of the earth and know that they could not train on cow-paddocks and beat all comers. Peter was the best, lost hope of the era of innocence, and he came unstrung on a Saturday afternoon on a rough track at the Sydney Cricket Ground.

We could not get over our astonishment – particularly Matt and I who discussed it. This was the first instance of someone in our generation who stood so close to immortality that all of us could see or sense the aura. And yet it had all died in an instant.

‘Too bloody fast for his own good maybe,' my father said, since Peter McInnes came under the category of sport and was one of the topics that was safe for us to converse on. Speed overwhelming the human framework! ‘You've got to bring a sprinter along gradually,' he said. And no one could argue with that. It was the sort of bush wisdom prevalent in his barefoot sprinting childhood.

In any case, we knew at last and very clearly that glory could be denied. If Peter needn't win the Australian sprint championship, then Matt need not be admitted to Sydney University, and I need not become a poet who held hands with Curran.

VIII

I recovered from that as I did from most things: I called in at the Frawleys' kindly hearth. One thing seemed definite barring death: Rose was going to become a Dominican nun and wear their brown and white habit. The name Margaret already earmarked for her. She had that glory chest too, just like a girl going to be married, and into it she was stacking bed linen with her initials, pillowcases likewise, and the linen shifts and bloomers which nuns wore. She would hold some of them up to the light and say, ‘Would I remind someone of Ava Gardner in these?'