Homebush Boy (3 page)

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.

For the first four years of his high school, he had had for his guide a loud, eccentric, hectically generous boy called Martin Dahdah, who came from a Lebanese family. It seemed that nearly everyone in Australia up to the end of the Second World War had names which came from the British Isles, but there was a Lebanese draper or haberdasher in every town, and one family of Greeks, and one of Italians.

The year before, turbulent Dahdah had astonished everyone by going off to the minor seminary in Springwood in the Blue Mountains to do his Leaving Certificate and then begin studying for the priesthood, and so Matt didn't have a study companion any more. I wanted to be associated with Matt, who shone like alabaster and who appealed to some streak of what may have been both kindliness and passion for spacious gestures in me.

How to be fair to the sixteen-year-old Celestial and GMH lover who took over from Dahdah the Arab? Amongst my other motives, noble and base, was athletic ambition too, which always ran high in me. I had seen Dahdah running with Matt on St Pat's oval, Matt with his head on his side as he followed the rattling of Braille type-pieces which Dahdah carried in a Nugget Boot Polish tin in his right hand. I was faster than Dahdah, and I thought of using two boot polish cans full of Braille pieces – twice the noise for Matt to follow. I could tell that Matt was a fast man too, a natural sportsman. We would do well together. If we practised enough, Matt would be able to run the bends of the oval at full pace. The fact that this athletic endeavour would be seen by Bernadette Curran gave it greater, not lesser worth.

Anyhow, in the January of 1952, with the glow of his vocation on his forehead, Dahdah had come to my place and asked me to be Matt's companion. We may have used the callow term ‘take over Matt'.

I accepted the task up front and then tried to reconcile my parents to it. Other boys were more wary about taking Matt on as a study companion. This
was
, after all, the Leaving Certificate year, and university scholarships lay at the end, and it was hard enough to drag yourself through the process without also – this was the way many saw it – dragging someone else through as well.

The decision to become Matt's companion worried my parents too. Again, the sacrifices they made so that my brother and I could go to the Brothers, whose record with university scholarships stood so high, seemed imperilled. My father went without drink. My mother, who was by everyone's account a beautiful woman, had to line her holed shoes with newspaper. They gave up fashion and exuberance and social events, entertaining and being entertained, in the hope my brother and I would become doctors or lawyers. And I was close to being their first success. A minor academic star.

They were concerned about all the extraneous work I would have to do with the admired Matt. For example, he did Ancient History and I didn't. Yet I would need to read the Ancient History texts to him by the hour.

They were also probably more aware than I was that Matt was no neutral quantity, but a robust soul in his own right. That disease which turned Matt milk-white in his mother's womb and left him without any of the mechanisms of sight, would all his life threaten to make him appear less of a person, and like most blind people he would fight that belittling impulse in others, and only in the end come to a sort of truce with it.

Matt, who could have been anything if not for that untoward case of measles! In coming to St Pat's and studying amongst the sighted, he may have been a pioneer, but the sentimentality and ignorance of the age cast him as a curiosity and a freak. The
Daily Mirror
came and took a picture of Matt amongst the sighted boys, sitting at his desk, punching away at the Braille typewriter, a machine in which he rolled heavy pages of brown-grey paper. He punched keys with Braille characters on them, and indentations matching the keys appeared on the pages, so he could read what Brothers Adams or Harding or Markwell had said.

Few observers mentioned the armies of blind children for whom Matt stood. Few asked what was being done for them. They were safe in their institutions. They were securely enclosed at St Lucy's, named after a blind saint who'd found the light.

I was of course too young, too crass, too innocent not to be part of the general view that Matt was in part a hero and in part a freak. But if you were his friend, he proved to you daily that he was no more or no less than another boy. I slowly came to perceive too his parents' courage in letting him go forth amongst us ordinary Western Suburbs boys.