Homebush Boy (2 page)

Those two and Matt had this over me: their relationship to the Western Line was in my eyes the right, southern one, whereas I found myself improperly located on the north. The line's flinty, iron stench marred the dreams of incense. The old and by now clichéd story which I must try to tell as well as possible was this: the line separated me from the better suburb of Strathfield, from the older, more settled, hilly, leafy and genteel streets. As always in these situations, most of what I believed I loved and wanted was on the other side. Teachers and other boys said, ‘You live down the other side of the line in Homebush, don't you?' So it was either in the school records or legible in my features. I was one street beyond the municipal pale.

I made up for it by dressing rakishly, as the Romantic poets had. If I could get away with it, and prefects generally could, I wore my blue-and-gold tie loose as a cravat. My grey felt hat was crushed. For Byron never did his hair. The seventeen-year-old prodigy Chatterton's shirt had been unbuttoned when he committed suicide. Percy Bysshe Shelley didn't wear neck ties. Within the limits of the grey serge uniform of St Patrick's Strathfield, I did my best to show people I was an aesthete and a wide-open spirit.

My father, who was a much more dapper person than I, saw through all the dishevelment I strained for. I heard him tell my mother that I was ‘flash as bloody paint'. He groaned to see what I did to the school suit he went without beer to pay for. I
worked
on jamming the Oxford University Press Edition of the poet-hero-Jesuit Gerard Manley Hopkins (GMH to me) into my inside breast pocket, where both it and the fabric were forced weirdly out of shape. My mother was half-amused and thought it was other-worldliness, and that gave me hope that other women would too, particularly the Frawley girls, and above all of course Bernadette Curran of Strathfield, for whose sake all the perverse Chattertonian treatment I gave my clothes was designed. I believed Curran in particular needed to be captured by the sight of a suit pocket strained out of shape by the transcendent load it carried, the rectangular force of Hopkins' fierce, eccentric English.

I caught this morning morning's minion, kingdom of daylight's dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding

Of the rolling level underneath him steady air …

In case the emanations of GMH didn't work on Curran, who was such a level kid, I spent a huge time making my auburn hair seem negligently done, fixing it then into Beethoven-esque licks with a gluey white preparation called Fix-a-Flex. My cowlick thus cemented could stand up against wind and rain, and remained in glued insouciance throughout an afternoon of English, History, Maths, Science, Rugby League practice and a long dawdle home with Matt Tierney, and Mangan the potential Trappist.

I went through all this brutalism of suit and hair not for the sake of a certain meeting, but on the off-chance of encountering the Frawleys and/or Curran in Meredith Street or elsewhere on the way back home. Mangan and I dawdling like a literary school beneath the box trees Strathfield Council lined its streets with; and handsome Matt listening sagely to us, and Larkin the sub-agnostic taking gentle shots at us. My most significant curl glued to the corner of the forehead, complementing Mangan's severely disordered tresses. Rose Frawley, the earthier of the two sisters, was always quick to say she thought Mangan and I were ratbags. But both of us thought that was just the girls' defence and that they all really
knew
that they were meeting serious presences. So when Rose Frawley asked, ‘Haven't you finished reading that bloody book yet, Mick?' I thought it was just her way of dealing with the intensity of the Chattertonian and Hopkins-like splendour of Mangan and me.

Earth, sweet earth, sweet landscape, with leaves throng …

Gerard Manley Hopkins, Society of Jesus. On his death bed he'd asked that all his poems be destroyed, and I imagined myself in that situation in a large, beeswaxed, cold room you could willingly slip away from into another state, and saying to crowds of Mangan-like peers, ‘Burn all my poems, they were vanities.' Then when I had expired as lightly, fragrantly, crisply as biting into an Adora Cream Wafer, my literary executors would say, ‘Not on your life. The stuff Mick wrote when he was sixteen, in particular
that
must live!'

Walking with or without Mangan on my way to collect Matt Tierney, I passed some big nineteenth-century houses located on the Strathfield side of the line. St Lucy's School for the Blind, Matt's earlier
alma mater
, was such a mansion, the home in the bush in Homebush-Strathfield for a family of nineteenth-century grandees called Meredith. One of the Meredith women had written a book on Victorian life in the Australian settlements. Of course it wasn't the sort of book I would ever write. We Celestials were too transcendent merely to report back colonial small talk.

From St Lucy's School for the Blind, when he was eight years old, Matt had engineered a remarkable escape with a friend. The two of them found out by intelligence – maybe one of the children who had not always been blind had told them – that you could be seen moving beyond the fence through the gaps in the palings, particularly if you had Matt's snow-white albino hair. So he and his accomplice had crawled a hundred yards on their hands and knees up Meredith Street to avoid being spotted from the school. Tussocks of grass, which always grew at the base of paling fences, screened them. Eyeless, they got as far as the Tierney house in Shortland Avenue, where Mrs Tierney had found them extracting coins with a knife out of Matt's money box.

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 the 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.