The Good Boy (7 page)

There was a primary school known as St Anthony's attached to the Good Shepherd convent, and when it came time for me to start school I was disappointed to find that that was not to be my destination. I loved the mysteriousness and vastness and silence of that great, grey place and the contrasting marble and stainedglass splendours of its huge chapel/church. I imagined that the primary school would share these wonders and did not know that in fact it was located in modest, even nondescript premises on the edge of the property. We lived right in the middle of town, and a new convent and primary school had been established just one block down the road in the year I was born. This convent had also been founded by a French order of nuns, an off-shoot of the Marists.
¹⁵
Their convent near us was next door to the parish church and whenever there was no priest available to say early morning Mass in the convent chapel the twenty or so nuns in the community would take up the two front rows on the right-hand side of the parish church to attend the public Mass. I used to be intrigued at the way in which they avoided distractions and the temptation to look around, and at how they could still move surefootedly up to the altar rail to receive Communion, by unfolding their black veils forward to cover their faces almost as completely as do the burkhas of Muslim women.

Although the new primary school was next door to the convent and so only a few hundred metres or so down the road from our house, there was a bus stop across the road from our house and a bus service from there to the bayside suburb of Mentone, where the buses stopped outside the Brigidine
¹⁶
convent and Kilbreda College. My mother had an aunt who was a nun in the Brigidine convent, so my sister and then I were sent the six miles by bus to start school ‘with family' rather than to either of the two local convent schools. I now suspect that there were other issues involved in this decision; the possibility of contact with adolescents from the reformatory may have weighed against our attendance at St Anthony's, and the just-built parish school across the road was a surprisingly modern and stark structure surrounded by a quite small, tree-less concreted playground in which crowds of seemingly unruly, poorly-dressed and perhaps poorly-fed children could be seen milling noisily around. Was it suitable for the local doctor's children to join in? I wonder.

We not only had a great-aunt who was a nun in the convent in Mentone but we also had one of my mother's cousins, Miss Ellie Sullivan, who came to the convent one day a week as a visiting teacher. Ellie made her living as an elocution teacher (nowadays I suppose this specialisation is referred to as Speech and Drama). She had private students who called at her house in North Melbourne for lessons and she visited a number of schools where she both took classes and gave private lessons to individuals. When I was in Grades one and two at the Brigidine Convent in Mentone, Miss Sullivan must have taken only the secondary school level for classes, as I don't remember her in front of my class. She did, however, have responsibility for the drama part of the end-of-year productions or Annual School Concert put on by the whole school, and I remember taking part in two of them. In a dramatised version of what I suppose was Little Red Riding Hood, I was the wolf. No dialogue was involved – I just had to come on stage, on all fours, dressed in an extraordinarily realistic-looking and rather frightening black wolf ‘s outfit, with big white teeth and bright red tongue lolling out of the jaws. My task was to creep towards centre stage, be shot by the hero, and then to roll on my back with all four paws pointing heavenwards in death. I was not very keen on the part, particularly not on being shot, and it took some coaxing for me to continue. I can still hear the producer, Miss Sullivan, losing her temper at a rehearsal and shouting, ‘Where's that bloody wolf?' Perhaps the good nuns overlooked this outburst because Ellie was the niece of a nun in the convent and she was there again for the following year's production … and I was too! I don't remember the name or story of this production but for my second stage appearance I was dressed in the black soutane, with purple buttons and purple sash, of a bishop. I had a nice gold pectoral cross on a gold chain and a purple biretta ( both items of episcopal regalia kindly loaned for the occasion by the then Bishop of Ballarat, a friend of a friend of my mother). I quite liked this outfit, and then and there decided that I would be a real bishop when I grew up. Again, as I recall, I had nothing to say and had just to walk slowly and look solemn … and not to move my head too much lest the biretta, far too big for me and accordingly partly stuffed with paper, slipped down over my face and blinded me. Perhaps that is what did happen as I
do
remember falling flat on my face on stage, developing an egg-sized lump on my forehead and being cosseted by an anxious nun. I can still see Miss Sullivan standing in the middle of the hall in producer mode, bosom heaving, arms waving, long blonde hair slightly awry, her voice carrying like a trumpet-blast as she drilled her little performers and her accident-prone young relative.

I had three years of schooling with the nuns in Mentone and then, as co-education did not extend beyond Prep, Grades One and Two at that time, moved on to St Bede's College, run by the De La Salle Brothers,
¹⁷
a few more bus stops down the road from the convent and just across the street from the beach. At St Bede's I was taught in Grades Three and Four by an elderly but very lively Brother Malachy, who placed great emphasis on spelling and multiplication tables and sitting up straight in class in silence, arms folded, and on lining up neatly and in silence outside the classroom … an old-fashioned disciplinarian, I suppose. As I found that I was able to do whatever was expected of me in the classroom, I enjoyed school and rarely had to join the queue of boys lining up to hold out their left hand for a punitive whack from Brother's strap or ruler.

There was, however, one poor soul in the class who never seemed to do things correctly, either schoolwork or behaviour, and was forever in the queue. This chap, Norman, was twice the size of any of the other boys, several years older, a boarder and was repeating the year. (Much later on I realised that poor Norman must have suffered from a then-undiagnosed handicap and was not simply the ‘slow learner' he seemed to us to be.) One day Norman was particularly slow and just could not add up the column of figures Brother had put on the blackboard. Or
would
not, according to Brother, who for once seemed to lose his temper and all sense of proportion, finally ordering Norman to drop his trousers, bend over the front desk, and be belted on his bare backside. The rest of the class of nine-year-old boys watched in stunned silence while Norman tearfully did as he was told. Then Brother presumably came to his senses and suddenly said, ‘All right, that will do, go back to your place …' which Norman did, adjusting his clothes as he shuffled back to his desk, soon resuming his usual sunny smile and getting on with his day. I can still recall my own fascination at the scene, a vague feeling of guilt that I was enjoying something that was wrong, and my disappointment that Norman never actually did bare his backside for the beating. I now wonder whether this had been for me the first awakening of sexual arousal and even of an interest in mild S and M?

In Grade Five I was taught by a much younger Brother Matthew, whom I quickly grew to admire as an interesting teacher … and a handsome young man. Brother Matthew placed great emphasis on reading, and while others in the class may have still been struggling to acquire the skill, I was already at the stage of reading easily and for enjoyment. Brother often read to us, as well as requiring individual pupils to read aloud to the class, and I can still remember his calm, deep voice and the delight of hearing its changing shades in his expressive storytelling. Brother Matthew introduced us to poetry, too, and again showed us how the sounds of the words and the rhythm of the lines could be as interesting as the meaning of the poem. He read Longfellow's ‘Hiawatha' to us and we (or at least I and some of the class) delighted in learning off by heart great slabs of it and of other similarly musical poems, A. B. Patterson's ‘The Man from Snowy River' among them.

At home we children had already been introduced to the excitement of books, and parents and visitors were regularly beseeched to read bedtime stories to us in return for our going to bed early (around 7.30 p.m.) when we knew the adults were just starting to relax over a long, leisurely dinner or game of cards or round of drinks with friends. I remember C. J. Dennis being a very popular writer with my sister and me, and how we would badger someone like our Aunt Nell to ‘read it again' when she had got to the end of the story/poem in the expectation/hope that we would have fallen asleep. Other bedtime favourites were Enid Blyton's
The Green Goblin Book
, Phyllis Morris's
Willy and Nilly
and, strangely perhaps, Heinrich Hoffman's
Struwwelpeter
with the original illustrations. Hoffman's unforgettable cautionary tales would nowadays probably be considered too gruesome for young children (who would nonetheless be exposed to television clips and video games showing all manner of far more gruesome suffering, death and destruction, fact and fiction, around the world). But I think that in Grade Five, Brother Matthew consolidated my interest in words and reading, and showed me how reading was the key to learning, to enjoying living and even to being happy.

I was not at all happy, however, when my father decided that as from Grade Six, I should transfer to attend the nearest school run by the Irish Christian Brothers (who had taught him in Ballarat), namely, St Kevin's College in Toorak. My younger brother had just completed Grade Two at Kilbreda, travelling down to Mentone with me on the bus. The new plan was that he would travel with me each day to school in Toorak, and as St Kevin's did not offer Grade Three, he had to ‘jump' a year and start in Grade Four. We started off together in the 1945 school year, catching the train and then the bus from the station to the college, then located at the corner of Orrong Road and St George's Road. (In later years, these buildings were demolished and a new college was built on land near the playing fields in Moonga Road.)

Two years earlier had seen my sister change school, from Kilbreda Convent in Mentone to ‘Mary's Mount' in Ballarat, which she attended as a boarder. I think that this move was made because my mother had such happy memories of her time at Mary's Mount, but my sister was not alarmed by the prospect of attending a boarding school far from home. Perhaps the deal was one, common enough in those days, that the mother could choose the daughter's school while the father could choose the school for the boys. At all events, the changes were made, the preparations for my sister's departure for Ballarat involving an incredible outlay of energy (and, I suppose, money): new ‘Loreto blue' uniforms, of course, plus a vast supply of linen, pullovers, underclothes, socks, stockings, shoes, hats, gloves, scarves and so on … all having neat little name tags waiting to be sewn on. I did not want to leave St Bede's, but my sister was quite keen on giving Mary's Mount a try. Some compensation may have been afforded by the fact that another of my mother's cousins was a nun at Mary's Mount and Mother Judith, as the cousin was known in religion, was enlisted to keep a family eye on my sister.

For the following six or so years we used to drive up to Ballarat in the middle of each term for a family visit and my sister would join us for midday dinner at the George Hotel, at the Provincial Hotel, at The Wattle Restaurant and Tea Rooms or perhaps at Craigs Hotel which looked, and was said to be, the grandest of all but which had, it was also said, a dining room that had ‘gone down'. These Sunday dinners were quite formal affairs, with a profusion of starched white linen tablecloths and napkins, gleaming silver cutlery, highly polished glassware (for the adults' wine and for the children's lemonade) and arrangements of fruit and flowers placed strategically around the rooms. Uniformed waiters and waitresses moved silently about, bringing and removing the various courses and each dining room was supervised by a
Maitre d'
(or Manageress in the less expensive establishments). My sister would be in her school uniform and so we all had to be on very best behaviour lest the reputation of Mary's Mount for gentility be in any way threatened. My sister had to be back at the convent in time for Sunday Benediction, usually at about 4.30 p.m., after which we would set off for the drive home. Mary's Mount made a deep impression on me with its fine buildings and beautiful chapel
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in their peaceful setting by the lake, and the seeming serenity of the nuns there may well have contributed to my feeling that joining a religious order (well, one that had establishments akin to Loreto Abbey in Ballarat) had to be considered seriously as a possible future lifestyle.

Once enrolled at St Kevin's, my brother and I used to catch the 8.03 train to the city each morning, changing trains at Malvern as the .03 then ran express to the city, and then we would alight at Armadale and catch the Glenhuntly-City bus along Kooyong, Irving, Albany and St George's Roads to Orrong Road where St Kevin's then stood. The trip in the morning was always a bit of a hassle, as neither Peter nor I liked getting up early and we often had to rush for the train which, after a few stops, would be crowded with adults going to work in the city and so we schoolboys would give up our seats and stand for the last few stops. There were never any seats available in the bus in the morning, but the trip home each afternoon was much less crowded and more relaxing. I always loved the bus ride along those leafy roads which in the 1940s and 1950s were still very largely lined with the nineteenth-century mansions for which Toorak was famous. From the vantage point of the bus windows, we could often see over the high perimeter walls and enjoy the fabulous gardens and architecture of the homes of Melbourne's rich, the merchant princes and the descendants of the early squatter barons. Many of the properties had an acre or more of garden, with tree-lined carriageways curving in from massive entrance gates to the houses themselves which, apart from the rooftops and chimneys, would usually be screened from the sight of passing pedestrians.