The Good Boy (13 page)

My mother was, I think, much less convinced than my father had been about the importance of religion. She had never joined the Sacred Heart Sodality, the female equivalent of the Holy Name Society, and while she never missed Sunday Mass while we were children and teenagers living at home, I think she saw religion as useful rather than as indispensable. How else explain her behaviour? She had enjoyed her schooling at Loreto Abbey in Ballarat and always spoke well of the nuns there, though she seemed to see them as ordinary people with faults and foibles like the rest of us rather than as the almost ethereal and superhuman people the Church suggested nuns were. While training and then working as a nurse, she had had close contact with the nuns running St Vincent's Hospital in Melbourne, the Sisters of Charity,
²⁹
and she seemed to have less time for them than for other nuns. She remained quite close to some of her fellow trainees who subsequently joined the Charity nuns, but did not often have complimentary things to say about the nuns who had trained and then employed her. ‘Charity by name!' she would sometimes rather enigmatically say about them. My impression was that my mother, perhaps unconsciously, questioned the philosophical basis either of that particular order or even of Catholicism in general, and did not think that the Charity nuns or even the Church in general offered the level of fulfilment that a teaching order such as the Loreto nuns offered. I have the feeling that she could not see the point in the Charity nuns joining the order … their work was nursing, not praying, and she more than once told stories about ‘stuff-ups' at St Vincent's in her time there which occurred because the nun in charge of the ward or unit was over in the convent and had the keys, or was not available to give her consent to some critical action, or even withheld her consent to some nursing action on religious rather than on professional grounds.

My mother always seemed to get on very well with the brothers and nuns who were our school principals, and with our various parish priests, but then she usually got on well with everybody, and did not seem to place the clergy or religious any higher than other people or professionals she came in contact with.

In her old age, when it became difficult to get to Sunday Mass, she simply and very sensibly stopped going, and suffered no attacks of scruples as far as I could see. Sometimes she would watch Mass on the television, drawing comfort, I should think, from the old familiar rituals and music. She spent her last month in a nursing home drifting in and out of consciousness, knowing she was dying, and showing no signs of panic. In the morning of the last day my sister arranged for a priest to come and administer the Last Rites. In the evening, while I was taking my turn by her bedside the nurse in attendance made a sign to me across the bed that Mum was slipping away.

I said, ‘Mum darling, I'm going to say the Hail Mary for you, because I think that is what you would want,' and after having been silent and seemingly unconscious all day she suddenly said ‘Yes!' I said the prayer carefully near her ear, and by the time I had finished she had stopped breathing. I said goodbye, and told her that she was off on her way to be with Dad in Paradise and that ‘we will all come soon'. What did I mean? What did she mean? What did my sister mean by arranging for the priest to come? I think our purpose was to help Mum to die peacefully, to say the things she probably wanted to hear, whether or not we believed them to be true. I think that my sister brought in the priest for the same reason … in case my mother wanted that to be done. And my mother, in making that ‘Yes' her last word? An Act of Faith? Perhaps. An insurance premium, just in case there
is
an afterlife? I don't know. Perhaps Mum was just as usual being herself, calm and confident and covering all options …

So we children had been brought up in a household where religion, in the form of unobtrusive Catholicism, was a part of daily life. We were taught to say our morning and night prayers but were not subsequently questioned as to whether we had done so. We said Grace Before Meals in the classroom at school but not at home. We did not say the family rosary together although every now and then we would do so for a week or two … perhaps prompted by attending a Mission periodically conducted in the parish, or by stories brought home from school by us children about the May altar or other religious events emphasised there. I think my parents both took with a very big pinch of salt the thunderings of some preachers about sin and guilt and hellfire and brimstone, avoiding contradicting such tales in front of us but in daily life making it clear to us that religion and God were to be understood as being about love rather than about fear.

My reaction to all this seems to have differed from that of my brother and sister, in that I rather enjoyed religion. Even in primary school the daily class of Christian Doctrine /Religious Knowledge as it was variously termed from time to time, and which was normally held in the 30 or 40 minutes before the lunch break, was my favourite class of all. The basic textbook used was a small
Catechism
, containing about a hundred or so little lessons presented in question and answer format, which we were required to learn by rote once they had been explained to us. The Catechism began something like this:

Q.1 Who made the world?

A. God made the world.

Q.2 Who made you?

A. God made me, giving me a body and a soul.

Q.3 Why did God make you?

A. God made me to know Him, love Him and serve Him here on earth and to be happy with Him forever in heaven.

These few lines, clear and confident as they are, were the foundation of the philosophy of life which I was taught throughout my school life, and while I often sought clarification of various points from my teachers, especially in my teen years, it was not until middle age that I started to question their very bases. In primary and junior secondary school everything seemed to be as it should be: simple and straightforward, God was in His Heaven, and I had few if any doubts.

In Grade Two I was enamoured of a poster-size picture on the wall of our classroom showing a Guardian Angel. The angel was a very handsome young man with long curling hair (well, I assumed he was a man though now I don't know why) wearing a long white dress and sporting tall white wings, and he was shown shepherding two small children away from the dangerous edge of a high cliff. Underneath was printed a little prayer in verse which we were encouraged by the nuns to learn by heart and to say each day:

Angel of God, my Guardian dear,

To whom God's love commits me here,

Ever this day be at my side,

To light and guard, to rule and guide, Amen.

In the same year our daily class routine was one day interrupted when the Reverend Mother appeared at the classroom door accompanied by two nuns who were helping a third nun through the door. She was young and beautiful, just like the angel, and she carried a tray of ice-creams which she distributed to the delighted class. I learned that her name was Sister Elizabeth, that she was dying of some then incurable disease (tuberculosis?) and that she had apparently asked to be allowed a last visit to a classroom of very young children. I think my dreams may then have changed from being like the angel to being like Sister Elizabeth … beautiful and popular and going to Heaven.

Once a month, I think it was on each first Friday, the whole school would walk from the convent school to the parish church about a kilometre away. We ‘Bubs' in Grades One and Two formed up in pairs, instructed to hold our partner's hand, and set off in a troop, two nuns fore and aft. Once installed in the church we would attend Benediction,
³⁰
the flower-decked altar ablaze with candles and lights, the organ swelling as we sang
O Salutaris Hostia
³¹
and other mysterious chants. The priest, enveloped in gorgeous vestments and attended by a flock of colourfully dressed altar boys, would place the golden monstrance
³²
on the altar, the altar boys would gather around him while he spooned incense into the thurible, and then with a clinking of the golden chains he would swing the thurible towards the monstrance and clouds of heady smoke would swirl upwards and outwards, and we would drift off to a dream world where God and His Blessed Mother, Mary Most Holy, and Jesus Christ, True God and True Man, and His Angels and His Saints and the Guardian Angel from the classroom picture and Sister Elizabeth were all smiling at me …

I really enjoyed Benediction. It was a pleasant change from the classroom, it involved a nice walk through the town to the church, the music was wonderful, the vestments were beautiful and then there was the ‘fix' of the incense! While Sunday Mass shared some of these attractions, it suffered from having a long and usually boring sermon inserted near the middle. On special feast days such as at Christmas, Palm Sunday, Easter and Corpus Christi, Mass in the parish church was made more interesting, more theatrical, more emotional, by being held at midnight in the specially lit church or by being preceded by colourful processions through the church grounds.

When staying in Bendigo with my grandparents, I discovered the delights of Solemn Pontifical High Mass, as up there the nearest church was the cathedral, and we went to the 11 a.m. Mass which was always a High Mass said by three priests (Celebrant, Deacon and Sub-Deacon). Sometimes the Celebrant would be Dr Stewart, the coadjutor bishop, and that would boost the level of pomp and circumstance, and sometimes Dr Stewart's Mass would be attended by the old bishop himself, Dr McCarthy, who would enter the cathedral
in cappa magna
with his own little procession and be installed on his throne in the sanctuary from which he would preside, his procession (which usually took the short cut through the sanctuary from the vestry door to the bishop's throne) being followed by the main procession which would enter the cathedral through the main door and move slowly up the central aisle, the processional cross floating ahead and the coadjutor bishop and priests, in full vestments, bringing up the rear. The cathedral in Bendigo, one of the most beautiful in the country, has a particularly fine organ and the music for these ceremonies, always quite wonderful, combined with the columns of incense drifting up to the carved angels peering down on the congregation from the lofty timbered ceiling, never failed to transport me to an emotional high. The effect could be marred, but never totally spoiled, by a long sermon from Dr Stewart, a lawyer before he joined the priesthood, who was given to convoluted sentence structures, rhetorical questions, pregnant pauses and many ‘ums' and ‘ahs'.

While visits to convents and monasteries were far from popular with my sister and brother, I quite enjoyed them … and I think this contributed to my growing reputation of being quite religious. Nobody (other than, perhaps, my mother), and certainly not I myself, realised as I do now that my interest was really in the often fine buildings, the ceremonies, the music, the vestments, the flowing robes and habits of the monks and nuns, rather than in their work or in the spiritual basis of their work. The religious life, the lives of these men and women, seemed to me to be as romantic and exciting as the lives of many of the heroes I enjoyed reading about, and at some stage of my teen years I changed my life plan once more, resolving to become a priest, preferably in some order where the monks wore flowing mediaeval habits and lived in a wonderful Romanesque or Gothic abbey. Rapid promotion to the position of abbot was definitely part of the plan. When I was fifteen years old and in Form IV, I realised that my family (or at least my father and my aunt the nun) really did think that I would take up the religious life and so, in an effort to show that they were jumping the gun, I gave up Latin (a compulsory subject for entering the priesthood) at the beginning of Form V. I liked enjoying my daydreams, but was by no means certain that I wanted them to come true.

In January of that year I had travelled with a school friend to Newcastle in New South Wales and had stayed for a few days with my friend in the Redemptorist
³³
Monastery there, where his uncle was a priest. One of the Redemptorist priests had some years earlier been appointed a bishop, and a rather well-furnished room was kept in readiness for him to use on his return visits to the monastery. I was allotted the bishop's room, while my schoolmate scored the more spartan one of his lordship's secretary. We took our meals at the mahogany table in the bishop's parlour rather than with the priests in the monastic refectory and indeed lived a rather lordly few days, with interesting excursions organised by the good Redemptorists to the BHP steel works, the new Catholic hospital and so on. I think that I was again attracted to the religious life by the experience, or rather to this somewhat unrealistic sampling of it.

Since my introduction in Grade Five to the pleasures of poetry and literature in general I had become very attracted to books and reading, although whether this interest could be turned into a career of some sort I did not know. We had always been read to as very young children and I knew the alphabet and was able to read before I went to school. I used to devour the school
Reader
, which was supposed to last for a whole year, and would have finished it within a week or so of getting it. Ditto for the monthly
School Paper
. The family always gave us books as presents at Christmas and for birthdays and we were encouraged to join and use the local library, beginning with the children's section. I fairly quickly progressed from the
Boys' Own
type of story to the
William
books of Richmal Crompton, to outback and wild west stories (Ion Idriess and his
Lasseter's Last Ride
and
The Drums of Mer
come to mind), ship stories (E. Laurie Long was one of my favourite authors), mystery stories (the
Dr Fu Manchu
series of Sax Rhomer intrigued me), detective stories … and romantic or adventure stories such as W.E. Johns's
Biggles
series and P.C. Wren's
Beau Geste
and
Beau Sabreur
. For years I dreamed of joining the French Foreign Legion and of discovering my heroic qualities out in the Sahara and the scorching deserts of the French colonial empire.