Homebush Boy (7 page)

Instead of describing the unutterable – ‘Thou mastering me, God!' – he described the Bankses. It would often be at night, while, say, wakeful in bed, I read
Silas Marner
as my parents listened to some despicable big band, far beneath the attention of a Mahler-fancier, on the radio in the living room. I would overhear my mother mention the Bankses, the struggle she had with Mrs Banks over the use of the one laundry and the clothesline, and then get my father's response. It was easy to overhear conversations in our small flat and had been since I was a child. The two small bedrooms, narrow kitchenette, kitchen-dining room, living room and bathroom were jammed close together.

Mr Banks was a hefty man, a railway guard, whom my father called a ‘flobble-gutted, wombat-headed garper', an onomatopoeic combination whose inventiveness, if not its unkindness, GMH might well have approved of.

I heard my father describe little red-haired Mrs Banks – with the robust political incorrectness of his day – as ‘silly as a gin at a christening'. Lanky Verna Banks, their daughter, was, ‘straight up and down like a yard of pump water'.

My mother said he got his imagery, his bush word-smithery, from his Irish mother, who had had a range of earthy things to say about the people who'd surrounded her in the valley of the Macleay earlier in the century. The coming of in-house plumbing therefore hadn't yet cancelled her image about pump water in her son's mouth, and it ran forth and hit Verna Banks behind the ear in Homebush in 1952.

Poor Verna. I carried in childhood like a writ against her the memory that late in the war, when the Bankses put on their daughter's twenty-first birthday party and somehow got a keg of beer into Flemington Town Hall for the party, they'd had to invite boys from the nearby air force depot to make up the crowd. Verna danced with a tall, leering Leading Aircraftsman while the band played
Coming in on a Wing and a Prayer
. I did not have the imagination to see Verna as a victim, stuck with Mrs Banks. What must it have been like for a daughter with dreams to listen to her mother's horrifying misnomers and malapropisms? I had myself heard Mrs Banks call camouflage
flamagage
, the actress Maureen O'Hara
Moran Harara
, M&B tablets
ham and beef tablets
, pneumonia
pew-mania
.

The Bankses had turned out to be readers of
The Rock
. Mrs Banks in particular quoted everything that was in it. ‘I've never had anything against you Romanian Catholics,' she had been telling my mother every week since we moved down from the bush ten years past.

One night, I overheard my mother say with some venom, ‘Mrs Banks came to me today and asked whether I was worried about Michael and John. I asked her why, and she said that there were so many stories in
The Rock
of brothers interfering with boys, that some of them had to be true.'

‘This comes from Evatt,' my father said. ‘Beating the sectarian drum. Evatt is the choir master, and old Banksie is the monkey's arse.'

But my mother's concerns were more local. ‘Even if there was occasionally something like that, I think the boys would tell me.'

‘Chrysler Six!' said my father. ‘You're not taking Mrs Banks as a guide to the real bloody world, are you?'

Yes, I would have liked to say. Dinny is interfering with me. He has given me Graham Greene to read, and W. H. Auden, and he's played some Mahler and pointed out GMH's
Thou mastering me God!
And I will never be the same.

For I was not only reading
Silas Marner
, I was reading
Brighton Rock
, in which the young English razor gangster felt a Manichean disgust for the flesh of his girlfriend. This wasn't just a story about gangster fighting gangster. This was about salvation and flesh and spirit. It was like finding out that James Cagney was really a walking battleground between angels of spirit and flesh. Who gave a damn about Mrs Banks and
The Rock
?

The crass accusers of
The Rock
knew nothing either about the humane face of Brother Digger Crichton, simple and generous soul, veteran of World War I, who had seen the world's deadly pomps and now taught nothing but woodwork. He was a natty little man whose cassock showed the marks neither of glue nor nails nor sawdust.

He had unwittingly developed one quasi-sporting and religious rite of his own. The Rugby League goalposts were kept in his huge woodwork room throughout summer, and towards the end of the first term every year, about Easter time, they would be carried to the oval by crews of junior woodworkers, one pole at a time, along with the cross bar, striped in the middle – where all the most perfect goals sailed over – with the school's black and blue and gold. A seasonal rite for which he chose only the finest boy carpenters! Two years before I had somehow cack-handedly assembled a glass-fronted bookcase which my mother keeps to this day crammed with the textbooks of our childhood. I was not sufficiently accomplished at tenon joints ever to take part in that sacrament of the posts.

Though we Leaving Certificate boys no longer took woodwork, occasionally Digger Crichton came to us to give Religion class when Dinny or Buster was ill. What he told us about on such occasions was always the Red Baron, and the controversy over who had shot him down, the Canadians as the history books incorrectly said, or the Australians.

At sixteen, I could still see in Brother Crichton's tale a collision of the old world and the new, something about which as it turned out I would later try to write a number of novels. But of fascination to me too was the fact that somehow the Western Front had not made Digger Crichton worldly. It was as if it had been so horrible that he understood that should he become knowing and ironic, he would lose himself in a morass of cynicism. And so he remained an innocent. Always with a childlike open face. He never gave anyone the strap either. The strap was simply not part of his repertoire.

He had come to Strathfield in 1928 with the first Brothers, and had been here ever since and was happy at how it had gone. More than a thousand boys! More than a battalion. In fact, some battalions, he told us, got down to about a hundred and fifty men towards the end of the war. So we were his super battalion upon which no artillery would fire.

Listening then to Digger Crichton telling us about the death of Von Richthofen, the Red Baron! Would that young German aristocrat ever have believed that his name would come up so often in Religion classes in the antipodes?

Brother Crich or Digger Crichton was a dispatch rider in the Third Australian Division, and his mount was a former Queensland racehorse. On a spring day in 1918, he was riding his horse eastwards up the road to Vaux-sur-Somme carrying a message to the headquarters of the 52nd Australian Battalion. The Australians had managed to stop the great German spring offensive here, astride the Somme, that great river of blood.

We can all envisage – from repeated descriptions – the road down which Brother Crichton delivers his message. It is a little sunken, and on the rise to his left a number of Australian batteries are in place, and Lewis gunners with their guns set on a swivel and equipped with antiaircraft sights. Dispatch rider Crichton and his horse are alarmed when a big Sopwith Camel aircraft appears, filling the sky, low enough to clip his horse's ears. The horse thinks so too and skews sideways. The huge red nose of the Sopwith fills Trooper Crichton's vision, but then is gone and succeeded instantly, a few inches higher still, by the enormous all red machine of the Baron. The Baron has the British Sopwith in his sights and is hammering away at it.

‘The Sopwith, boys, was flown by one Lieutenant May of the Royal Flying Corps.'

That's why we liked Brother Crichton. In his Religion classes Lieutenant May had equal weight with Saint Therese of Lisieux and Saint Anthony of Padua.

The Lewis gunners along the road and on the ridge beside Trooper Crichton began firing as soon as the British Sopwith was past.

‘Now, boys, a mile to the south over the church steeple of Corbie I could see another Sopwith, and this was flown as it turned out by a Canadian pilot, Lieutenant Brown. Brown would later be given all the credit for shooting down Baron Von Richthofen. The books say that earlier, before he peeled away, Brown had fired some shots at the Baron, but that was just before I turned up. I must tell you that I think Lieutenant Brown is sincere in believing he caused fatal damage to the Red Baron, he later wrote a book about it. Well … I think most men could tell a brief lie, but not then write an entire book on it.

‘At the time I saw the Red Baron he was hugging the terrain, flying very well and right on Lieutenant May's hammer. He was in full control and expecting another victory. The glory and vanity of the world were however about to desert him. Because it was when he crossed the ridge, following Lieutenant May, that I saw one of the Australian Lewis gunners open up and get him. The doctors agree with what I saw. They later found that he'd been shot from below and through the heart. Lieutenant Brown claimed to have shot him from above. There's an inconsistency, you see.

‘After the Lewis gunners got him, the Baron swerved back eastward towards Jerry's lines. But now you could tell he was out of control, and he crashed on the furthest edge of the ridge the artillery stood on. This ridge was open to enemy fire, but soldiers rushed from everywhere to see if he could be saved. I galloped over there myself. The Germans, for a time believing Brown's version which was published in all the papers, said he was alive when he crashed and one of us shot him. But no Australian has that on his soul, boys. We would have lifted him out and shaken him by the hand. Look in the official war history – the Red Baron is already dead, and is buried with full honours by Australian men in slouch hats.'

And Crich is right. There is such a remarkable picture. Lanky Aussies firing into the air over the Baron, whom everyone admired. Boys from the bush in a fusillade over a prince from Prussia.

‘Join me now, boys, in praying for the soul of Baron Von Richthofen and all the faithful departed.'

It didn't strike us as odd to say an Our Father and three Hail Marys for a thirty-five-year-dead Baron. Some of us had prayed for other historical figures. Mangan had once attended Mass for the repose of the soul of Byron. I sometimes – while reciting the rosary – remembered Talleyrand, who'd been a bishop before he had been a statesman and had a lot to expiate. Through the Communion of Saints, we were connected from Strathfield and Homebush to history's giant shifts and huger sinners.

Brother Crichton's story had potency for me even after I became a Celestial. For all of us. It was a classic version of the great brought down by the humble. The humble then being denied the credit, since that was the way of the world. Even now that I had read
Sweeney Agonistes
, Trooper Crichton's fable still fascinated me.

Dinny was remarkable because he would appear at the elbow of this boy or that and present them with some special task they had not thought of themselves, a task which related them to the larger universe. In that spirit he came to me one autumn morning and said, ‘Young Keneally, ah … ah … I want you to enter the Newmans Society Essay Prize and win something for the school. I suggest that since you're so crazy about Gerard Manley Hopkins, you should write about him.' He had a slim grey book in his hands. ‘Here is a
Kenyon Critics
essay on Gerard Manley Hopkins, and otherwise with your record last year and this, I think you would be a good … ah … bet.'

Essay prizes were the first blaze writers made on their trail to greatness. Didn't they say on the back cover of Evelyn Waugh novels, ‘Evelyn Waugh won the Hughenden Essay Prize at Oxford.' The upshot was, of course, in every case an endless flow of grand fiction. I could see already before my eyes the red back covers of
my
Penguins. ‘Keneally won the Newman Essay Prize …'

Yet my reputation for English was perhaps an inflated one in Dinny's eyes. It was based on the fact that the year before I'd come first in the state for Christian Brothers Schools. This sounded promising. But it was slightly suspect in reality.

That year big Brother Moose Davitt had taught us English. His method was to sit at the chemistry bench at the front of the room with his leather case opened before him. Inside it were limp-covered pulp Westerns which were his preferred reading. And a supply of tobacco and cigarette papers out of which, as he expatiated on Shakespeare, he rolled masses of skinny cigarettes for consumption out of class hours. He was frumpy, Moose. His soutane was carelessly kept and sprinkled with ash, he had large bullish features, and he was dearly loved by all of us. As his hands worked in the opened leather case, he advised us that he was slow to anger, but to be wary when it came, and that the only thing he couldn't really stand was a boy horse-laughing.

‘If you're wise boys, you won't horse laugh. It drives me mad, and I can't help it.'

Moose's method of preparing us for exams was rather like Buster Clare's method of teaching History. Faced with a large poem like Keats'
Hyperion
, he would say, ‘I don't know about this one. It was on the paper four years ago. I might go and test out Dinny about it over the weekend.'

For Dinny McGahan was stellar enough to have been given the job of setting the examination for all the Christian Brothers Schools. Moose had a special talent for enraging Dinny, for teasing probabilities out of him. For gauging exam paper omens in what was said over the flummery at the monastic table in the Brothers' house on the corner of Edgar Street.

The next Monday Moose would be back with his briefcase of Verity's Shakespeare, Romantic poetry, cowboy novelettes and tobacco.

‘I think we'd better do
Hyperion
, boys. I said to Dinny at dinner on the weekend, I don't think I'll bother teaching the boys that. And he said, Ah … ah … I tell you, your boys better be prepared with
Hyperion
if they want to do well.'