The True Story of Spit MacPhee (21 page)

‘If the court pleases,’ Edward Quayle said. ‘This is not a court for offenders, nor even a court for non-offenders. So my honourable friend seems unnecessarily worried about who goes first.’

‘If you put me in first,’ Strapp persisted, ‘it will give Mr Quayle all the information he wants about our intentions – our case, so to speak. And it will also give him the last word.’

‘I hadn’t thought of that,’ Mr Quayle said. ‘So what does my friend suggest?’

‘I don’t know. Why not toss a coin …’

Judge Laker rapped his pencil on the table. ‘There will be no decision by coin-tossing in my court,’ he said. ‘Mr Quayle’s reasons seem sound enough to me, Mr Strapp, even though he cannot be given high marks for preparation. So perhaps you have the advantage anyway, Mr Strapp, and you may as well go ahead with it. In any case, I shall make sure that neither of you has the last word. I shall have it.’

But Grace, aware now of every turn and twist in what was happening, knew why Edward Quayle had been late and apparently disorganised. He obviously wanted Strapp to begin, and she was sure that he had done it deliberately.

‘Well …’ Mr Strapp began carefully. ‘It is a strange case, your honour, and it has a strange history. Everybody in St Helen knows the boy concerned. He is a familiar figure in our streets, always barefoot, poorly dressed, always pulling a cart or carrying a little bag on his shoulder, always selling fish or crayfish. And he is well known too for his wild haunts along the river. In other words, from an early age, say six or seven, he has been something of a little vagabond around the town.’

Edward Quayle tapped the table with a squat finger and said, ‘I really must protest, your honour, at this definition of the boy. To begin with …’

‘To begin with,’ Judge Laker said sharply, ‘you are out of order. As Mr Strapp said, he is not the prosecutor and you are not the defender. If anyone has to defend the boy, I shall. And though certain court rules apply here, I am not going to allow interruptions or formal objections. You’ll have your say later, Mr Quayle. Be content with that.’

‘As you say, your honour. I accept your ruling.’

‘You have no choice, Mr Quayle, so go ahead Mr Strapp.’

‘The point I am making, your honour, is not derogatory of the boy. We are not blaming him for his abandoned condition. We are blaming the circumstances of his life which made a little beggar of him. And it is our contention, from the outset, that the only person in this town who, from the beginning, took an outside interest in the boy’s welfare, and tried to do something about him, was Mrs Betty Arbuckle.’

‘How old is the boy now?’ Judge Laker said, and to answer his own question he looked at the application. ‘Eleven. And when did Mrs Arbuckle begin to take an interest in him, Mr Strapp?’

‘He must have been about six or seven, your honour. In any case it was almost from the first day he arrived in town with his grandfather and then lived with him in an old boiler down by the river.’

‘A boiler?’

‘Yes, your honour. That’s where the two of them lived. The old man himself was already something of a gypsy around the town, a half-mad watchmaker who lived from hand to mouth by getting work from time to time. But he was well known to everyone in the town for his crazy shouting, his insulting behaviour, his midnight wanderings which sometimes frightened people in the town, and of course for the strong influence he had from the outset on his six-year-old grandson who learned early to copy his ways. Not only the old man’s peculiarities – his shouting and his habit of wandering around the town – but all the rest of his primitive way of life in his fantastically painted boiler house, which looked more like something out of Dante’s
Inferno
than a decent home for the child to be brought up in.’

‘Is the boiler still there?’ Judge Laker asked.

‘No, your honour. I shall come to that later. It was burned down, probably when you were attending one of the other courts of the circuit. But almost from the first day that this five- or six-year-old joined his grandfather, Mrs Betty Arbuckle was down there trying to find out exactly what conditions the boy was living in, and trying publicly and vigorously to bring the boy’s condition to the notice of the town, even to the police.’

‘Did she succeed?’ Judge Laker asked.

‘I’ll come to that too, in time. The point is that she was always met there with abuse and insults, and sometimes with physical violence from both the old man and the boy, who was usually egged on by the old man. There was a brief interregnum when, apparently from nowhere, the boy’s mother joined them in the boiler house, a tragic figure who had been badly burned in a fire near Bendigo, in which her husband was killed – the father of the boy. Here too Mrs Arbuckle tried to help. She visited the boiler several times when the mother was there, offering her help, but the old man wouldn’t let Mrs Arbuckle even talk to his daughter-in-law. Then, when the mother died, the boy’s situation obviously worsened, because he became entirely dependent on the care of the old man whose approach to life had become a bitter hostility to everything around him. Every time Mrs Arbuckle went down there on her regular attempts to help the boy, the old man became more and more violent, and the boy too.’

‘What about the boiler?’ Judge Laker said as if Strapp’s picture of it had caught his imagination.

‘We come to that now. In one of his fits of madness the old man set fire to the extension he lived in, so that the whole place burned to the ground.’

‘You mean the boiler too?’ Judge Laker said.

‘No, your honour. The metal shell of it was left, but the contents were burned out. Which, of course, left the boy homeless. And this time the old man was beyond saving. He died in hospital, completely insane. That is when Mrs Betty Arbuckle took the boy home, gave him a place to live, and tried also to give him some instruction in the Christian faith which the boy knew nothing about, because the old man had simply left the boy to his own devices. As a result, sir, our little vagabond has had no moral instruction from any church or Sunday school at all. He has been living the life of an African heathen. He has become a child desperately in need of saving, your honour, which Mr and Mrs Arbuckle took on as a personal responsibility.’

Grace had been watching Spit to see how he was taking this version of his life with his grandfather, but Spit was quite impassive, as if he was now expert in removing himself from anything that seemed likely to punish him or hurt him or disarray him.

‘So the boy is now living with Mr and Mrs Arbuckle, is that right?’ Judge Laker said.

‘No, at the moment he is staying with Mrs Tree. When the old man died in hospital, the boy subsequently ran away. That is, he swam across the river and tried to live wild on Pental Island. But after causing considerable trouble and concern to Sergeant Collins and other volunteers who set off to find him, the boy was brought back to St Helen by Sergeant Collins. It was then that he was taken over by Mrs Tree who kept him in her house and refused to give him up to anybody. Since then he has been kept there, and despite Mrs Arbuckle’s attempts to take the boy to her own home, Mrs Tree has refused to let the boy go, which brings us to the crucial issue of this application, your honour, the issue of matching …’

‘Ahh, I was wondering about that,’ the Judge said.

‘It’s always a touchy subject, as you know, your honour, but there is a problem here which only the court can decide. Under the 1928 Adoption of Children Act, the issue of matching faith to faith is paramount, but what we have at the moment with Mrs Tree is a mix-matching, if that is the right word.’

‘Mrs Tree is a Roman Catholic and Mrs Arbuckle is a Protestant, and so is the boy, that’s what you are saying, Mr Strapp.’

‘Yes.’

‘Then say it. It will have to be a wide open issue sooner or later, so better to face it honestly rather than try to smother it in caution and hesitation.’

‘Of course, your honour.’

‘So?’

‘The religion is, we consider, vital to the boy’s present care. Mr and Mrs Tree are practising Catholics. If the court allows them to adopt the boy, they become the absolute parents and guardians of the boy, and as such will have a legal right to do what they wish with him. As adoptive parents, they will have the same rights as natural parents, and if they so wish it they can make a Roman Catholic of him. As adoptive parents, they would be perfectly within the law to do so. But this, of course, would become a denial of the boy’s own rights, because constitutionally, and in law, Spit MacPhee has the right, even the requirement, to be brought up in the faith to which he was born.’

‘Mr and Mrs Arbuckle …’ the judge said, consulting the application again, ‘are not Presbyterians. Their church is one of the evangelical sects, is it not?’

‘Yes. But obviously their church falls clearly and firmly on the Protestant side of the fence, which is all that counts.’

‘Do they intend to bring the boy up in their evangelical faith if they become the adoptive parents?’

‘Only if the boy wishes. Otherwise they will insist that he take his religious instruction at the Presbyterian church. In any case a Protestant church, not a Catholic one.’

‘I see. Is that your case, Mr Strapp?’

‘Yes, your honour, except to say again that the boy is in need of care and protection, not simply for the clothes on his back and the food in his belly. He needs the care of someone who will rescue him from the gypsy life he was unfortunate enough to learn from his grandfather. He needs adoptive parents who are respectable and well liked, and well known in this town for their honesty and stability. And he needs the care of a family who have always been interested in the boy and his welfare. Above all, he needs the understanding and the help and protection of someone who will give him a Christian upbringing in the Protestant faith of his father and his forefathers, a profound and unshakable historical reality, sir, which this court dare not ignore.’

The judge threw up his hands in a mild gesture of protest as he said to Mr Strapp, ‘When advocates tell the court that we dare not ignore something, Mr Strapp, I always have the feeling that, sitting in judgement, I am being blackmailed. Are you trying to blackmail me, sir?’

‘There was no such intent, your honour.’

‘Then in future do not tell the court what it dare or dare not do. The judgement of this court will be qualified only by the law, and by what is best for the boy. So Mr Quayle, we can now hear your proposition, and I hope that you will not stick pins into me in order to warn me that I am supposed to have blood in my veins as well as vinegar.’

‘Nothing would be further from my mind, your honour,’ Edward Quayle said, and he waited a full minute, as if he wanted all previous influences to disperse before he began. And Grace Tree, having listened closely and almost breathlessly to everything that Mr Strapp had said, wondered how Edward Quayle would be able to contest what seemed to her to be a perfect case. In a way everything Mr Strapp had said was true, even though she thought it was wrong.

‘Spit MacPhee,’ Mr Quayle began, looking up from his papers at Spit, sitting on the bench. ‘Stand up will you, Spit MacPhee, so that Judge Laker can take a good look at you close up.’

Spit stood up promptly, boldly, defiantly, ready this time to shout at a moment’s notice, ‘You’re not going to get me.’

‘There he is, your honour, the boy we are arguing about, and if we want a model for the Australian boy, in perfecto, I can’t imagine a better example than Spit MacPhee. A true native of the wide open spaces. A boy born and brought up to look after himself when necessity forgot him. A very bright lad who, in the deepest and best traditions of this new and pioneering country, has shown many adults in this town how best to utilise the country he was born in, how to enjoy it and make friends with it and, at the same time, merge into it like an autumn leaf. A vagabond? A gypsy? A wild thing? Absolute stuff and nonsense, your honour. Take a good look at him and make up your own mind.’ As Judge Laker raised his stub of pencil ready to interrupt, Edward Quayle said sharply, ‘Sit down, Spit MacPhee.’

But Spit hesitated a moment before he sat down and, sensing Spit’s continuing resistance to all this turmoil over his head and around his ears, Edward Quayle said, ‘It’s all right, Spit. Nobody is going to harm you here, so sit down, boy. Just sit down.’

Spit obeyed, but he kept his eye on the judge who had been studying him with a rather puzzled expression. ‘Mr Quayle,’ he was saying. ‘Why is he called Spit?’

‘That’s his nickname, your honour.’

‘Does he spit?’

‘The story is that in a contest at school, some years ago, he beat every other boy at the sport of spitting at passing bumblebees and flies and such. But though he doesn’t spit any more, he is known affectionately, and I might even say respectfully, to everyone in this town as Spit MacPhee. But even if it is not a very salubrious nickname I am sure in the Australian tradition that your honour had one just as picturesque in his own youth.’

Judge Laker was startled for a moment. As a boy he had been called ‘Lick’ Laker because he always licked his pencil before using it, something he still did. ‘I don’t believe a word of your story, Mr Quayle,’ he said. ‘It’s a little too good to be true. But never mind.’

‘Well, your honour, as Mark Twain said: “If it isn’t the gospel truth it’s at least a possibility.”’

‘In the circumstances I should call it flim-flam, Mr Quayle. But I take your point about the boy if you really have to make the point.’

‘Oh, I do, your honour, because this is not just “a boy”. His grandfather was not, as my learned friend kept calling him, “the old man”. He was Fyfe MacPhee, and this boy is Spit MacPhee and that is how we shall refer to them, because they must not be labelled and insulted here as nameless vagabonds and gypsies. They were not.’

‘All right, Mr Quayle. You have established your characters, so get on with your plot.’

‘Well, sir, the plot is really a simple appeal to the humanity and common sense of this court.’

Judge Laker groaned. ‘Not again,’ he complained. ‘We have already been blackmailed with does and dares, and now you are messing me about with humanity and common sense. This is not Olympus, Mr Quayle, so get on with your story.’