eBook - ePub
Homebush Boy
Thomas Keneally
This is a test
Share book
- 180 pages
- English
- ePUB (mobile friendly)
- Available on iOS & Android
eBook - ePub
Homebush Boy
Thomas Keneally
Book details
Book preview
Table of contents
Citations
About This Book
In this playful and poignant memoir, Thomas Keneally returns to his adolescence in the suburbs of Sydney in 1952. At sixteen, the red-haired teenager idolized the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins and had aspirations of becoming a star on the track or rugby field. He also dreamed of wooing the beautiful and alluring Bernadette Curran until the day she announces her desire to become a nun. For the first time, Keneally started to consider priesthood himself. An insightful portrait of the transition from childhood to adulthood, Homebush Boy affectionately captures the awkwardness, grace, and all the contradictions of being a teenager.
Frequently asked questions
How do I cancel my subscription?
Can/how do I download books?
At the moment all of our mobile-responsive ePub books are available to download via the app. Most of our PDFs are also available to download and we're working on making the final remaining ones downloadable now. Learn more here.
What is the difference between the pricing plans?
Both plans give you full access to the library and all of Perlegoâs features. The only differences are the price and subscription period: With the annual plan youâll save around 30% compared to 12 months on the monthly plan.
What is Perlego?
We are an online textbook subscription service, where you can get access to an entire online library for less than the price of a single book per month. With over 1 million books across 1000+ topics, weâve got you covered! Learn more here.
Do you support text-to-speech?
Look out for the read-aloud symbol on your next book to see if you can listen to it. The read-aloud tool reads text aloud for you, highlighting the text as it is being read. You can pause it, speed it up and slow it down. Learn more here.
Is Homebush Boy an online PDF/ePUB?
Yes, you can access Homebush Boy by Thomas Keneally in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Literature & Literary Biographies. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.
Information
VI
In the same school, in the shallower levels of that ocean, my brother Johnny, seven years younger than me, went his way and did pretty well from it. He was a natural scholar, accomplished at Maths and a prodigious reader. He had been class captain since third grade, a blond little boy of whom Mrs Banks said that he reminded her of the settlersâ flaxen-haired son in Shane. He always caught the 414 bus to Homebush station, a sensible kid, no long mooning walks for him. Nor did he ever aspire to carry textbooks of any kind jammed in his breast pocket. In him my father had found an echo of his own nattiness, a consolation for the messy child I had been and still thought it fashionable to be. Sometimes Johnny would miss the bus and I would walk him home, stretching his patience by calling in at the Tierneysâ and the Frawleysâ for the good sport of posturing and orating. He couldnât see the sense of that, would want to be home attending to his evening in an orderly way, listening to the few radio serials he cherished, doing his impeccable homework. Everybody predicted that he would be a doctor, and they were right. He had fine qualities: stubbornness and a soft heart. He got them both from people like our grandfather the engine driver, and like our grandfather he was temperamentally geared to take a special pride in some profession, in exactitude, in knowing technical matters backwards.
I boasted of him to Mangan and Matt Tierney, and I think he might have taken a certain bemused pride in my eccentric fervours. But our nearly eight-year difference made frontal exchanges between us more awkward than they had earlier been.
It is a truism which people, even memoirists, canât forbear repeating: that to survive childhood is to have memories of non-recurrent chances for filial and fraternal solidarity, for crucial words which went unuttered, for concessions that went unoffered, for gestures which went unsignalled.
Those chances occurred with my father, who was like me in savouring solitariness, working in his vegetable garden in the back yard in Loftus Crescent, but who unlike me had little social life despite his capacity for social charm. It struck me he was mourning for something he couldnât communicate, and something that as a Celestial and an heir to GMH I wasnât interested enough in knowing about. By a happy chance we would both live long enough to become much better friends.
In any case, I was proving to be more of an Australian male than I knew. For I believed as well as he did that male companionship was not for the confession of weaknesses but for the exchange of jokes and bragging. We the sons of the Anzacs and the grandsons of the settlers! Our job to confess to no worries. That fact too stood in the way of a full communion between my father and me. Occasionally we talked of politics and running and Rugby League, and we told jokes, and all that was required to stand for the deeper code of our affection.
Even as McInnes side-stepped and Father Byrneâs miraculous girl maligned those who had tended her, two tragedies descended on Strathfield and galvanized our attention.
First: there was a boy who had done the Leaving Certificate the year before and entered the Christian Brothersâ scholasticate, St Endaâs, on a plateau behind St Patâs, to study to become a Brother. One night in his dormitory, he developed peritonitis and died within two days. His name was Barnes.
His death as reported to us in class was full of compelling arguments. He had sacrificed a place in the world, had answered his vocation, and met the death he would have met whether he had or not. Just imagine, one of the Brothers said, if he had delayed, if he had not listened to the Call.
All of us were taken out of class and lined Barker Road as Barnesâs coffin went by on his way to Rookwood cemetery. He had the holiness of the war dead. He would not get old. He would never lose his freshness, cuff children across the ear in Mathematics class, throw chalk. He had answered the call but not been soured and reduced to ordinariness by it. All that had been required of him were the simple things â to be born, attend St Patâs, answer the call. And his reward would be simple, sublime and eternal. He was to the Brotherhood what Chatterton was to poetry. Eternal because taken too early! I wondered if there had been a Curran in his life, who visited the grave at odd hours. Both Jansenism and Celtic melancholy approved of such an imagining.
Whatever hormonally was happening within me, it was driving me as surely as any biker or hotrodder to the belief that death â to be glorious â should best be consummated in youth. What I would have despised in James Dean, and in the driver of hotted-up Holdens you saw on Parramatta Road, I subscribed to just as actively in my own world view. Barnesâs death had its appeal as a way out of the quandary. Better to be a young, slim, untested saint than any plump parish priest or disappointed husband.
That was the first tragedy. Glory interrupted my morbidity over it. A letter came to the school (so that eleven hundred brats could mildly rejoice in the news), announcing I had won second prize in the Newman Society Essay competition. My work was thereby considered good enough to be published in the Catholic Weekly.
âOnly second prize,â I would say with a hunch of the shoulders to all those who congratulated me. But my mother was delighted in an unqualified way, especially when Dinny told her he had called one of the judges and had been told it was a very close decision. As only an intelligent woman whoâd been deprived of it could be, my mother was obsessed above all with her own supposed lack of education. At twelve years she had been allowed to do the Primary Finals in Kempsey, and that was as far as family resources and the times would allow her to go. She had gone to work for ninepence a week, a shop girl at Barsbyâs Emporium. She served the eccentric bushies who came to town after cloth or buttons, hosiery or corsets.
From this experience she had taken vows that if she had children they were going to go places, and in some ways it was easier to meet her at least halfway than to disappoint her. She had taken intense joy from my first place in the state in English, and had no time at all for my argument that Moose Davittâs manoeuvring with Brother McGahan had contributed to that. It partially confirmed both of us in what could be called our conspiracy of ambition â hers maternal, mine personal. My mother needed little more than this second prize in the Newman essay to confirm that I was a child of destiny. All she innocently asked of life was that her children attain a passable excellence.
The award was to be made in the Newman Societyâs rooms in Grosvenor Street, Sydney. I knew my motherâs enthusiasm and pride might embarrass me and did the sort of thing many an ageing child is later ashamed of â I told her that the event was only for the recipients and the officials of the Newman Society. An obscure amalgam of vanity and lust for independence produced this meanness.
Splendidly solitary in a suit my mother had energetically ironed, I took off for Homebush railway station, three or four hundred yards from home and the scene of all our departures, renewals, and returns from glory and defeat.
On arrival in Grosvenor Street, I was greeted in a panelled room by two youngish men in suits. Very nearly simultaneously with me arrived the first prize winner, an extremely handsome, small, darkish girl of sixteen named Leonie. She had, according to the men in suits, written a killer essay about Christopher Brennan, a tormented Sydney bard, Irish-Catholic, Thomist, alcoholic. It had been a toss-up, one of these officials said, between tormented Brennan and tormented GMH.
Leonie had her parents with her, well-dressed and very proud. She was unabashed by them. Though there was no question of the primacy of Curran, I was excited to find Leonie was both clever and enchanting. Since she was a dazzling child, small as a fourteen-year-old but with a face of mature intelligence, and since I was also clear-eyed and between pimples, it is likely that we looked to Leonieâs parents and to the two officials of the Newman Society like the fresh-faced promise of the future.
The Society presented us with a book each. Mine was one I still have â Elizabethan Recusant Prose, the writings of the Elizabethans who refused to take their oath to the Queen and remained loyal to Rome. A characteristic Newman Society kind of book, and extremely thick, for the Recusants were enthusiastic pamphleteers ablaze with their rightness, writing in white heat while imprisoned and awaiting the most savage punishments â quartering, the drawing out of their organs while they still lived. Their heroism, too, spread a patina on the night.
I walked back to Wynyard with Leonie and her parents, each of us carrying our massive books and the Societyâs stamp of approval. There we parted. They were catching a train to the North Shore â somewhere like Pymble. Between us we encompassed Sydney, but hers was the better part. I was never to see Leonie after that night. I wonder what became of her. I canât believe that she trod ordinary paths â I speak not simply out of vanity. Even I could sense her superior latent talent, and find it hard to believe for a second that the result was as close as the officials said.
I kept on telling myself I should visit poor, delivered Barnesâs grave at Rookwood and turn there to Hopkinsian verse about it. But things were too busy for me. I had streets to haunt, study time, athletics training, and reading to Matt. And in any case, I was forestalled by the fact that Barnesâs incomparable death was superseded in our imaginations by a far more mysterious and utterly tragic one.
It was as if Barnesâs perfect, ethereal death had called up an answering one of Satanic and awful nature. A boy from Fifth Year Gold, Buster Clareâs class which was so good at Maths and Science, a boy who was repeating the Leaving Certificate in fact in the hopes of a perfect pass and of being awarded the ultimate university prize, an Exhibition, hanged himself in his bedroom in Flemington just a stoneâs throw from St Patâs.
Flemington, next on the Western Line past Homebush, was of course not a suburb designed for such terrible acts, nor a suburb where people were all at once choked by excessive hope or despair.
It was taken for granted by everyone that this was not a deliberate act, any more than Barnesâs peritonitis had been chosen. Talking to us about it, Dinny McGahan spoke of the âbalance of the boyâs mindâ. He had taken his life, but it was certain he was not in theological terms a suicide. His mind could not be guessed at. His torment must have been pitiable.
Since people who were good at Maths and Physics were unlikely to be Celestials, I had not known him except as a fairly restrained presence. He had no particular notoriety and was not a footballer or an athlete of any kind. I had never seen him yelled at or chastized by any Brother. People now said heâd been dissatisfied with his pass the year before in the Leaving Certificate â Second Class Honours in Physics and Mathematics I. The story which was told to explain the unexplainable was that he was a perfectionist whoâd gone to pieces in the Physics exam last year and had to be allowed out of the hall at Homebush High â where we sat for the Leaving Certificate â to be sick.
Matt and I and other boys talked about the disaster out on the verandah outside Fifth Year Gold â weâd been advised not to speculate on the event but naturally enough couldnât help ourselves. I heard a boy say, âHe was too bloody scrupulous.â And here we did all begin to edge around the big question.
Say he had fallen from grace and continued to go to Communion in that fallen state? An as yet untravelled nightmare country for me, but the young Stephen Dedalus had trodden it and told Honours English boys what is was like in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Had the boy from Fifth Year Gold been there too, and found it unliveable? But to kill yourself, to cut yourself off from mercy. It really wasnât a rational path to follow. All you had to do was to approach cranky, horse-fancying old Father Johnson in Flemington who didnât listen too closely to confessions anyhow. Or the curate at Strathfield who everyone said was so understanding. And so we came back again to the belief that the boy from Fifth Year Gold couldnât have done it deliberately.
âHe was too bloody scrupulous,â was the sentiment everyone returned to. Too much of a perfectionist. He was a lesson on not being too hard on yourself.
Though no one thought he was culpable, only a few prefects were allowed to go to the Requiem Mass, kindly said by Monsignor Loane, which preceded the boyâs burial. The school did not line the route to Rookwood as they had for Barnes. As we walked back to St Patâs, strolling informally through the streets of Strathfield as we had never been allowed to in the two-by-two ranks of childhood, one prefect said, âThey reckon he came across his parents at it.â
In my chosen Celestial anatomical innocence, I still knew what he meant. The rumour filled the air with nearly too much pain and guilt. Iâd seen the devastated mother in the front pew and a portly father, his face unguarded and cruelly pink from grief. And how would they feel, the parents, if what the prefect said was right? So fallen, so degraded, so judged by their boy? And how plausible it all was given the boyâs nature, his lust for the perfect. Like Yahweh, finding the world impure, he cursed it. Finding the light sullied, he renounced it. He was the anti-Barnes. No pilgrimages to his sad, sad grave were the subject of daydreams.
We said a rosary for him in class, and then the waters of our remembrance very nearly closed over his head.
The European tradition that women brought dowries to their marriage had gone out of usage in places like Australia, although one occasionally heard the term used in connection with Greek or Italian families. It had not gone out of use to the same extent in the case of girls who went into the convent. By now it had been established that since Rose Frawley was going into the convent she would need a modest dowry to take with her.
Daughters of doctors and lawyers brought superb dowries of thousands of pounds to the convent, and sometimes remembered the Order in their wills. But the Dominican nuns knew â despite the Frawleysâ more modest means â the quality of the family and the nature of girl they would have in Rose.
In the Frawley lounge-room, Rose had a highly varnished glory chest placed, just like a girl already engaged to be married, and into it went the specially designed under and outer wear of a novice. Whenever any of us saw it, one or other or us would say, âYouâre not really going are you, Rose?â
We stereotypically expected the quieter sister to âgoâ if anyone went. For the Dominicans were a tough order. They put their novices through a strenuous and penitential course at their novitiate amongst the gum trees at Wahroongah, one of Sydneyâs quietest northern suburbs. It was hard to imagine companionable Rose tolerating the yearâs silence the novitiate imposed, and certainly not tolerating unlimited and unquestioning obedience. Chastity, of course, for all of us, seemed the least of problems.
âFair go,â Rose would say, the idiom of Australia rolling in a mouth which would devote itself to the liturgy and hours of the Office as sung in the thirteenth century. âDo you think Iâd want to stick around just on the off-chance of marrying some joker like you or Mangan?â
Or once she said with unconscious cruelty, âIf Matt was available, I might stick around in the world.â
Mattâs snow-white face flushed and we all laughed all the harder to cover her gaffe, her condemnation of Mattie to bachelorhood. And Rose laughed too, the sort of laughter designed to slide discourse along, or to clear its table. She had spoken her most unconscious thought, she had uttered one of the reasons girls from Santa Sabina wouldnât dance with Matt. Without knowing it explicitly, and without any logical reason, they saw Matt as a eunuch for blindnessâs sake. He could neither be consoled by a beloved nor could he serve the Lord. God had already stricken him. He was exempt both from carnal desire and the need to answer any higher call. Canon Law did not permit the already blind to be ordained. It was possible for men who grew blind after being ordained priests to continue exercising a limited form of priesthood. But if you were blind from birth, neither the dancing girls of Strathfield nor the New South Wales public service nor the departments of the Commonwealth government nor the Holy, Roman and Apostolic Church had ...