A Season on Earth

Every afternoon in the last weeks of 1953, Adrian Sherd caught a different train home. At each station between Swindon and Accrington he changed from one carriage to another. He looked in every compartment for the girl in the Mount Carmel uniform but he could not find her.

Adrian realised he had to endure the seven weeks of the summer holidays with only the memory of their one meeting in Our Lady of Good Counsel’s Church to sustain him. But he swore to look for her each Sunday at mass and to go on searching the trains in 1954.

He spent the first day of the holidays tearing all the unused pages out of his school exercise books. He planned to use them for working out statistics of Sheffield Shield cricket matches and drawing maps of foreign countries or sketches of model-railway layouts or pedigrees of the white mice that his young brother was breeding in the old meat safe in the shed. It would all help to bring February closer.

Adrian’s soul was in the state of grace and he meant to keep it that way. He was ready for his passions if they tried to regain their old power over him. He was sitting alone in the shed with a pencil and paper in front of him when he found himself drawing the torso of a naked woman. As soon as he saw his danger he whispered the words ‘Earth Angel’. Then he calmly turned the breasts of his sketch into eyes and the whole torso into a funny face, and crumpled the paper.

In bed that night he joined his hands on his chest and thought of himself kneeling in church beside the girl he loved, and fell asleep with his hands still clasped together.

On the second day of the holidays, Adrian’s mother announced that none of the family would be going to her brother-in-law’s farm at Orford in January because her sister had just brought home a new baby and the Sherd kids would only be in the way.

Adrian’s brothers rolled around on the kitchen lino, howling and complaining, but Adrian took the news calmly. All year he had been looking forward to the bare paddocks and enormous sky of the Western District. But now he was secretly pleased to be spending January in the suburb where his Earth Angel lived.

That night Adrian thought of himself sitting beside the girl and listening to a sermon on purity. He felt so strong and pure himself that he let his hands rest far down in the bed, knowing they would not get into trouble.

He looked for his Earth Angel every Sunday at mass and rode his bike for hours around unfamiliar streets hoping to meet her. After Christmas when he still hadn’t seen her, he decided she had gone away for the holidays. He wondered where a respectable Catholic family would take their daughter for the summer.

The wealthier boys at St Carthage’s went to the Mornington Peninsula. Adrian had never been there, but every day in summer the Argus had pictures of holiday-makers at Rye or Rosebud or Sorrento. Mothers cooked dinner outside their tents and young women splashed water at the photographer and showed off their low necklines. Adrian began to worry about the dangers his Earth Angel would meet on the Peninsula. He hoped she didn’t care for swimming and spent her days reading in the cool of her tent. But if she did go swimming he hoped the changing sheds were solid brick and not weatherboard. He lay awake for hours one night thinking of all the rotted nail holes in wooden changing sheds where lustful teenage boys could peer through at her while she undressed.

All round her in the shed the non-Catholic girls were putting on their twopiece costumes. But what did she wear? Adrian couldn’t go to sleep until he had reassured himself that she chose her beachwear from the range of styles approved by the National Catholic Girls’ Movement. (Sometimes the Advocate, the Catholic paper, showed pictures of NCGM girls modelling evening wear suitable for Catholic girls. The necklines showed only an inch or so of bare skin below the throat. There were never any pictures of bathers suitable for Catholics but girls were advised to inspect the approved range at NCGM headquarters.)

One morning the front-page headline in the Argus was HEAT WAVE. In the middle of the page was a picture of a young woman on a boat at Safety Beach. Her breasts were so close to the camera that Adrian could have counted the beads of water clinging to the places she had rubbed with suntan oil. All that afternoon he lay on the lino in the bathroom trying to keep cool and hoping his Earth Angel kept out of the way of men with cameras. He thought of some prowling photographer catching her as she stepped from the water with a strap of her bathers slipping down over her shoulder.

At night he had so many worries that he never thought of his old sin. On New Year’s Eve he remembered the boys of Eastern Hill Grammar School. That was the night when they all went to parties in their fathers’ cars and looked for girls to take home afterwards. One of the Eastern Hill fellows might have seen Adrian’s Earth Angel on the beach and tried to persuade her to go with him to a wild party. Adrian tried to remember some incident from the lives of saints when God had blinded a lustful fellow to the beauty of an innocent young woman to protect her virtue.

One day in January Adrian went to a barber’s shop in Accrington. One of the magazines lying around for customers to read was a copy of Man. Adrian studied the pictures quite calmly. The naked women were trying to look attractive, but their faces were strained and hard and their breasts were flabby from being handled by all the photographers who worked for Man—and probably all the cartoonists and short-short story writers and the editor as well. One glimpse of his Earth Angel’s hands and wrists stripped of the beige Mount Carmel gloves had more power over him than the sight of all the nude women in magazines.

Late in January Adrian felt strong enough to take out his model railway. He sent passenger trains round and round the main line and the loop, but he was careful to snatch up the engine each time it slowed down. He still remembered clearly all the landscapes around the track where the train used to stop in the old days. So long as the train ran express through the scenes of his impure adventures he felt no urge to enjoy America again.

But one hot afternoon he was staring through the shed door at the listless branches of the wattle scrub over the side fence when he realised the train had stopped. He stood very still. The only sounds around him were the clicking of insects and the crackling of seed pods on the vacant block next door. He was almost afraid to turn and see what part of America he had come to.

He was far out on the plains of Nebraska. The long hot summer had ripened the miles of wheat and corn. For just one moment Adrian thought of grabbing the first American woman he could find and wandering off with her into the hazy distance to find some shady cottonwood tree beside a quiet stream.

The thought that saved him was a simple one, although it had never occurred to him in all the weeks since his Earth Angel had changed his life. It was this: the temptation that came to him on the prairies of Nebraska proved he could never do without romantic adventures in picturesque landscapes. The way to keep his adventures pure and sinless was to take his Earth Angel with him.

That night Adrian proposed marriage to the beautiful young woman who had been educated at the Academy of Mount Carmel. After they had set a date for the wedding they sat down over a huge map of Australia to decide which scenic spots they would visit on their honeymoon.

On the hottest night of January, Adrian lay in bed with only his pyjama trousers on. He fell asleep thinking of the cool valleys of Tasmania where he and his wife would probably spend the first weeks of their marriage.

Later that night he was struggling through a crowd of men and women. In the middle of the crowd someone was gloating over an indecent magazine. Somewhere else in the crowd the girl from Mount Carmel was pushing her way towards the magazine. Adrian had to get to it before she did. If she saw the filthy pictures he would die of shame. People started wrestling with Adrian. Their damp bathing costumes rubbed against his belly. The girl from Mount Carmel was laughing softly, but Adrian couldn’t see why. Everyone suddenly knelt down because a priest was saying mass nearby. Adrian was the only one who couldn’t kneel. He was flapping like a fish in the aisle of a church while the girl he loved was tearing pictures out of her Argus and wafting them towards him. They were pictures of naked boys lying on their backs rubbing suntan oil all over their bellies. The girl put up her hand to tell the priest what Adrian had done on the floor of the church.

Adrian woke up and lay very still. It was daylight outside—a cloudless Sunday morning. He remembered vague bits of advice that Brother Cyprian had given the boys of Form Four, and something that Cornthwaite had once said about wet dreams. In those days he had been so busy doing the real thing that he never once had an impure dream. He mopped up the mess inside his pyjamas. He was ashamed to realise he hadn’t experienced all the facts of life in Form Four after all. But he went back to sleep pleased that nothing he had thought or done that night was sinful.

That same Sunday morning Adrian went to seven o’clock mass and walked boldly up to communion. He hoped his Earth Angel was somewhere in the church watching him. At the altar rails he knelt between two men—married men with their wives at their elbows. Adrian was proud to be with them. He belonged among them. He was a man at the peak of his sexual power whose seed burst out of him at night but whose soul was sinless because he was true to the woman he loved.

For days before he went back to school, Adrian wondered what he could say to his friends when they asked him his score in their competition. He couldn’t simply hand in a blank scorecard. The others would never believe he had gone for seven weeks without doing it. They would pester him all day to tell them his true score. Even if he made up a low score they would still be suspicious and ask him what went wrong.

Adrian’s worst fear was that Cornthwaite or O’Mullane or Seskis would guess he had met a girl and fallen in love. They would think it a great joke to blackmail him. Either he paid some preposterous penalty or they would find out the girl’s name and address and send her a list of all the film stars he had had affairs with.

In the end he decided to fill in his card as though he had taken the competition seriously and tried his best to win. He marked crosses in the blank squares for all the days he might have sinned if he had never met his Earth Angel. He was scrupulously honest. He left blank spaces around Christmas Day, when he would have been to confession. But he added extra crosses for the days of the heat wave, when he would have found it hard to get to sleep at night.

On the first morning of the new school year the cards were handed round. The scores were O’Mullane, 53; Seskis, 50; Cornthwaite, 48; Sherd, 37.

The others all wanted to know what had happened to Adrian to make him score so poorly. He made up a weak story about getting sunburnt and not being able to lie properly in bed for a fortnight. He promised himself he would find some new friends. But he could not do it too suddenly. He was still frightened of blackmail.

That night Adrian went on searching through the Coroke trains for his Earth Angel. Two nights later he walked into a second-class non-smoking compartment of the 4.22 p.m. from Swindon and saw her. The face he had worshipped for nearly two months was half-hidden under a dome-shaped beige hat—his Earth Angel was absorbed in a book. If she loved literature they had something in common already. And it fitted in perfectly with the plan he had worked out for making himself known to her.

He stood a few feet from her. (Luckily there were no empty seats in the compartment.) Then he took out of his bag an anthology called The Poet’s Highway. He had bought it only that morning. It was the set text for his English Literature course that year and it contained the most beautiful poem he had ever read—‘La Belle Dame Sans Merci’, by John Keats.

When the train swung round a bend Adrian pretended to overbalance. With one hand on the luggage rack, he leaned over until the page with the poem was no more than a foot from his Earth Angel’s face. He saw her look up as he swung towards her. He couldn’t bring himself to meet her eyes, but he hoped she read the title of the poem.

For the next few minutes he stared at the poem and moved his lips to show that he was learning it by heart. Each time he practised reciting a stanza he stared out of the window, past the backyards and clothes lines, as though he really could see a lake where no birds sang. Out of the corner of his eye he saw her watching him with some interest.

At the last station before Accrington he put his anthology away. He knew it was unusual for a boy to like poetry and he dreaded her thinking he was queer or unmanly. He pulled the Sporting Globe out of his bag and studied the tables of averages for the visiting South African cricketers. He twisted himself around and leaned back a little so she could see what he was reading and know he was well balanced.

For two weeks Adrian travelled in the girl’s compartment. Every night he feasted his eyes on her. Sometimes she caught him at it, but usually he looked away just in time. His worst moment each night came when he opened the train door and looked for her in her usual corner. If she wasn’t there it would have meant she had rejected his advances and moved to another compartment.

Some nights he was so frightened of not finding her that his bowels filled up with air. Then he had to stand in the open doorway for a few miles and break wind into the train’s slipstream. His Earth Angel might have thought he was showing off—so many schoolboys hung out of doorways on moving trains to impress their girlfriends. But it was better than fouling the air that she breathed. In any case, she was still in the same compartment after two weeks, and he decided she must have been interested in him.

A wonderful change came over Adrian’s life. For years he had searched for some great project or scheme to beat the boredom that he felt all day at school. In Form Four his journeys across America had helped a little. But it hadn’t always been easy to keep the map of America in front of him—sometimes he had traced it with a wet finger on his desktop or kept a small sketch of it hidden under his textbook. In Form Five his Earth Angel promised to do away with boredom forever. All day at school she watched him. Her pale, serene face stared down at him from a point two or three feet above his right shoulder.

With her watching him, everything he did at school became important. When he answered a question in class, she waited anxiously to see if he was correct. If he cracked a joke in the corridor and made some fellow laugh, she smiled too and admired his sense of humour. When he rearranged the pens and pencils on his desktop or looked closely at his fingernails or the texture of his shirtsleeves, she studied every move he made and tried to guess its significance. Even when he sat motionless in his seat she tried to decide whether he was tired or puzzled or just saving his energy for a burst of hard work.

She was learning a thousand little things about him—how his moods changed subtly from minute to minute, odd little habits he indulged in, the postures and gestures he preferred. For her benefit he deliberated over everything he did. Even in the playground he moved gravely and with dignity.

Of course she couldn’t watch him every single moment of the day. Whenever he approached the toilet block she discreetly withdrew. He wasn’t embarrassed himself—he felt he knew her well enough to have her a few feet behind him while he stood up manfully to the urinal wall. But she was much too shy herself, especially when she saw the crowd of strange boys heading for the toilet block with their hands at their flies.

It was hardly ever possible for her to watch Adrian in his own home. She hovered above him on his walk home from Accrington station and saw that he lived in a nearly new cream-and-green weatherboard in a swampy street. (She was intrigued to see him choose a different path each night through the lakes and islands in his street—it was one of those teasing little habits that made his personality so fascinating.) But when he stepped over his front gate she melted away so she wouldn’t have to see the dreary life he led with his family.

He was glad she would never see his bedroom furniture—the wobbly bed he had slept in since he was three years old, the mirror that had once been part of his grandparents’ marble-topped washstand, and the cupboard that came originally from his parents’ room and was always known as the glory box. He would have been ashamed to let her see the patched short trousers and the pair of his father’s sandals that he wore around the house to save his school trousers and his only pair of shoes.

After tea when his mother made him wash the dishes, he was relieved to think his Earth Angel was safe in her carpeted lounge room on the other side of Accrington, listening to her radiogram while he was up to his elbows in grey dishwater with yellow fatty bubbles clinging to the hairs on his wrists.

Later at night when he was in trouble with his parents, and his father said that when he had been a warder he used to charge prisoners with an offence called dumb insolence for much less than Adrian was doing, he decided he would never even try to describe to his Earth Angel, even years later, how miserable he had been as a boy. And just before bed, when he stared into the bathroom mirror and pressed a hot washer against his face to ripen his pimples or held a mirror between his legs and tried to calculate how big his sexual organs would be when they were fully grown, he knew there were moments in a man’s life that a woman could never share.

As soon as he was in bed he was reunited with her—not the girl who watched him all day at St Carthage’s but the twenty-year-old woman who was already his fiancée. He spent a long time each night telling her his life story. She loved to hear about the year when they met on the Coroke train and he was so infatuated that he used to imagine her watching him all day at school.

While they were still only engaged, he didn’t like to tell her he had thought of her in bed too. But she would hear even that story eventually.

Just out of Swindon, the Coroke train travelled along a viaduct between plantations of elms. On summer afternoons when the carriage doors were open, shreds of grass and leaves blew against the passengers, and the screech of cicadas drowned out their voices. The dust and noise made Adrian think of journeys across landscapes that were vast and inspiring but definitely not sensual.

Every day in February his Earth Angel was in the same corner seat. Sometimes she glanced up at him when he stepped into her carriage. When this happened he always looked politely away. He was going to introduce himself to her at the right time, but until then he had no right to force his attentions on her.

One afternoon on the Swindon station Adrian saw two fellows from his own class watching him from behind the men’s toilet. He suspected they were spies sent by Cornthwaite and the others to find out who the girl was who had turned Sherd away from film stars.

Adrian edged along the platform before his Earth Angel’s train pulled in. That night he got into a carriage well away from her own. He did the same for the next two nights, just to be safe. During his three days away from her he kept humming the song ‘If You Missed Me Half as Much as I Miss You’.

When he went back to her compartment again he thought she glanced at him a little more expressively than before. He decided to prove that he really was seriously interested in her and not just trifling with her affections.

He waited for a night when all the seats in the compartment were filled, and he had to stand. He walked over and stood above her seat. He took out an exercise book and pretended to read from it. He held it so that the front cover was almost in front of her eyes. The writing on the cover was large and bold. He had spent half an hour in school that day going over and over the letters. It read:

Adrian Maurice Sherd (Age 16)

Form V

St Carthage’s College, Swindon.

She looked at the book almost at once, but then she lowered her eyes. Adrian wanted her to stare at it and learn all she could about him. But he realised her natural feminine modesty would prevent her from seeming too eager to respond to his advances.

During the next few minutes she glanced at his writing twice more. He was still wondering how much she had read, when he saw her opening her own school case. She took out an exercise book. She pretended to read a few lines from it. Then she held it in front of her with her own name facing him.

Adrian heard the blood roaring in his ears and wished he could kiss the gloved finger that held the name out naked and exposed for him to stare at. He read the delicate handwriting:

Denise McNamara

Form IV

Academy of Mount Carmel, Richmond.

When the train reached Accrington Adrian pretended to be in a hurry and dashed off into the crowd ahead of Denise. He did not want to look at her again until he had thought of a way to express the immense love and gratitude he felt for her.

‘Do you remember the afternoon in the Coroke train when you unfastened your case and took out an exercise book and held it in your dainty gloved hands so I could stare at your name?’

Adrian got used to calling her Denise instead of Earth Angel. Knowing her name made it much easier to talk to her in bed at night, although he still hadn’t spoken to her on the train.

Each afternoon he stood or sat in her compartment and practised under his breath some of the ways he might start a conversation when the right time came.

‘Excuse me, Denise. I hope you don’t mind me presuming to talk to you like this.’

‘Allow me to introduce myself. My name is Adrian Sherd, and yours, I believe, is Denise McNamara.’

Whenever he glanced at Denise, she was grave and patient and understanding—just as she was at night when he talked to her for hours about his hopes and plans and dreams. She wasn’t anxious for him to babble some polite introduction. The bond between them did not depend on mere words.

Their affair was not all peaceful. One night a girl from Canterbury Ladies’ College stood near Adrian on the Swindon station. She was one of the girls he used to see chatting to Eastern Hill boys on the trams. (Adrian wondered why she was waiting for a train to the outer suburbs when she should have lived deep in the shrubbery of a garden suburb.) If she got into his compartment and saw him looking at Denise and guessed that the girl from Mount Carmel was his girlfriend, the Canterbury girls and Eastern Hill boys would laugh for weeks over the story of the Catholic boy and girl who travelled home together but never spoke.

Adrian was ready to walk up to Denise and say the first thing that came into his head. But the Canterbury girl got into a first-class compartment, and he was free to go on courting Denise without being judged by non-Catholics who didn’t understand.

Every day Adrian wrote the initials D. McN. on scraps of paper—and then scribbled them out so no one would know his girlfriend’s name. It bothered him that he couldn’t write her address or telephone number and enjoy the sight of them in private places like the back covers of his exercise books.

One night he stood in a public telephone box and searched through the directory for a McNamara who lived in Accrington. There were two—I. A. and K. J. Adrian knew how to tell Catholic names from non-Catholic. He guessed the K. J. stood for Kevin John and decided that was Denise’s father. Kevin’s address was 24 Cumberland Road.

Adrian found Cumberland Road in a street directory in a newsagent’s shop and memorised its location. Every night, walking down the ramp from the Accrington station a few paces behind Denise, he looked across the railway line in the direction of Cumberland Road. There was nothing to see except rows of white or cream weatherboard houses, but just knowing that her own house was somewhere among them made his stomach tighten.

He longed for just one glimpse of her home, and envied the people who could stroll freely past it every day while he had to keep well away. If Denise saw him in her street she would think he was much too forward in his wooing. The only way to see her house was to sneak down Cumberland Road late at night, perhaps in some sort of disguise.

On Saturday nights Adrian worried about Denise’s safety. He hoped her parents kept her inside the house, out of sight of the gangs of young fellows wandering the streets all over Melbourne. The newspapers called the young fellows bodgies, and every Monday the Argus had a story about a bodgie gang causing trouble. Bodgies didn’t often rape (most gangs had girl members known as widgies) but Adrian knew a bodgie wouldn’t be able to control himself if he met Denise alone on her way to buy the Saturday night newspaper for her father.

Adrian looked through the racks of pamphlets in the Swindon parish church. He bought one called So Your Daughter Is a Lady Now? The picture on the cover showed a husband and wife with arms linked watching a young man with a bowtie draping a stole over their daughter’s shoulders. They were all Americans, and the girl was obviously going on a date. Denise hadn’t been on a date of course (Adrian himself would be the first and only man to date her) but she was old enough to attract the attention of undesirables.

Adrian intended to warn her parents of their responsibilities. He sealed the pamphlet in an envelope addressed to Mr K. J. McNamara, 24 Cumberland Road, Accrington. He kept the envelope hidden in his schoolbag overnight. Next morning he could hardly believe he had planned to post it to Denise’s father. He saw Mr McNamara opening the envelope and holding up the pamphlet and saying to his daughter, ‘Got any idea who’d do an idiotic thing like this? Any young fellows been making calf’s eyes at you lately?’

Denise looked at the young man in the bowtie and thought at once of Adrian Sherd who stood devotedly beside her seat in the train each afternoon. She was so embarrassed that she decided to travel in another carriage for a few weeks until Sherd’s ardour had cooled a little.

Adrian tore up the pamphlet and burned the pieces. On the back of the envelope he rearranged the letters D-EN-I-S-E M-C-N-A-M-A-R-A, hoping to find a secret message about his and Denise’s future happiness. But all he could compose was nonsense:

SEND ME IN A CAR, MA

or SIN NEAR ME, ADAM C.

or AM I A CAD, MRS NENE?

He counted the letters in her name and took fourteen as his special number. Every morning at school he hung his cap and coat on the fourteenth peg from the end. Every Sunday in church he walked down the aisle counting the seats and sat in the fourteenth. He looked up the fourteenth verse of the fourteenth chapter of the fourteenth book of the Bible. It described Judah and the Israelites taking rich booty from captured cities. Adrian interpreted the text metaphorically. It meant that God was on his side and he would prosper in his courtship of Denise.

One night he wrote the names of all the main towns in Tasmania on scraps of paper and shuffled them together. The fourteenth name he turned up was TRIABUNNA. The quiet little fishing port on the east coast was destined to be the place where he and his wife would consummate their marriage.

The Tasmanian countryside was at its most beautiful in early autumn. In the days when dead elm leaves blew against the windows of the Coroke train, Adrian thought of the first days of his marriage.

Sherd and his wife spent their wedding night on a ship crossing Bass Strait. The new Mrs Sherd was still shy in her husband’s presence. She went on chattering about the day’s events until nearly midnight. Sherd knew she was worried about undressing in front of him. When she couldn’t put off going to bed any longer he decided to make things easier for her. He took out a book and buried his face in it. He looked up at his wife once or twice, but only when she couldn’t see him.

Sherd undressed quickly while his wife was kneeling with her face in her hands and saying her night prayers. Then he made her sit beside him on the bed. He kissed her gently and told her to forget all she might have heard from radio programs and films about the wedding night. He said he had never forgotten the story in the Bible about Tobias or someone who told his wife on their wedding night that they were going to pray to God instead of gratifying their passions.

Sherd said, ‘The whole story of how we first met in Our Lady of Good Counsel’s Church and got to know each other on the Coroke train and then learned to love each other over the years is a wonderful example of how God arranges the destinies of those who serve Him.

‘I know you’re tired, darling, after all you’ve been through today, but I want you to kneel down beside the bed with me and say one decade of the Rosary just like Tobias and his bride on their wedding night.

‘We’re doing this for two reasons: first to thank God for bringing us together like this, and second’—Adrian hung his head and sighed, and hoped she realised he had been through a lot before he met her—‘because I want to make reparation for some sins of mine long ago and prove to God and you that I married you for love and not lust.’

Sherd was surprised how easy it was to spend his wedding night like Tobias. While his wife dropped off to sleep beside him in her nightdress (should it have been a style recommended by the National Catholic Girls’ Movement, or was it all right in the privacy of the marriage bed for a Catholic wife to dress a little like an American film star to help her overcome her nervousness?) he lay with his hands crossed on his chest and congratulated himself.

He remembered the year long before when his passions had been like wild beasts. Night after night he had grunted and slobbered over the suntanned bodies of American women. Nothing could stop him. Prayers, confession, the danger of hell, even the fear that he might ruin his health—they were all useless.

Then he had met Denise McNamara, and in all the seven years since then he had committed not one sin of impurity, even in thought. Of course, many times during those seven years he had looked forward to marrying Denise. But he had proved on his wedding night that his dreams of marriage were certainly not inspired by any carnal desire.

His only regret was that Denise herself would never know his story. He could hint to her that she had changed his life and saved him from misery. But in her innocence she could never imagine the filth she had rescued him from.

Sherd lay awake for a long time thinking over the wonderful story of his life. As the ship neared the pleasant island of Tasmania, his heart overflowed with happiness at the thought of the weeks ahead. His honeymoon was the last chapter of a strange story. And one day he would write that story in the form of an epic poem or a play in three acts or a novel. He would write it under a nom de plume so that he could tell the truth about himself without embarrassment. Even Denise would not know he was the author. But he would leave a copy in the house where she would see it and read it. She could not fail to be moved by it. They would sit down and discuss it together. And then the truth would slowly dawn on her.

At school Adrian kept away from Cornthwaite and his former friends. He thanked God that they all lived on the Frankston line and never came near his train at night. He could never have faced Denise again if she had seen him with them and imagined they were his friends. He saw them leering at her and heard O’Mullane scoffing at him (almost loud enough for Denise to hear), ‘Christ on a crutch, Sherd, you mean you gave up your American tarts for her?’

Adrian’s new friends were some of the boys whose names he had once marked with golden rays on a sketch of the classroom. They were obviously in the state of grace. All of them lived in garden suburbs and travelled home on trams. They talked a lot about the Junction. (Adrian eventually discovered that this was Camberwell Junction but he was not much wiser, since he had never been there.) Every night at the Junction, girls from Padua Convent crowded onto the boys’ trams. At St Carthage’s, Adrian’s friends squealed or waved their arms or pushed each other hard on the chest or staggered and reeled and did strange little dances whenever someone mentioned the Padua girls.

At first Adrian wondered if he had stumbled onto something shocking—a pact of lust between these fresh-faced boys and the Padua girls. Groups of them were meeting in a park somewhere in tree-shaded Camberwell and behaving like young pagans together. But when he had listened closely to his friends for a few weeks and learned to ignore their animal noises and bird squawks, he realised the most they ever did was to talk to some of the Padua girls on the crowded trams (although some of the more daring fellows did play tennis with the girls on Saturday mornings).

It puzzled Adrian that their only aim seemed to be to know as many Padua girls as possible. Sometimes they held frantic conversations that meant almost nothing but gave them the opportunity to blurt out dozens of Padua names.

‘Helen told me Deidre couldn’t play on Saturday because Carmel and Felicity called round with Felicity’s mother to take them out in the car.’

‘Yes, but Deidre told me she was upset to miss the doubles comp and Barbara had to forfeit. She couldn’t have Maureen or Clare for a partner.’

Adrian listened to them impatiently. He wished he could have told them he didn’t have to babble to a tramload of giggling Padua girls because he had already chosen the pick of the Catholic girls on the Coroke line for his own.

Adrian always parried the question. His friends would never have understood that he and Denise had no need for tennis and dances.

Sometimes Adrian’s new friends seemed so innocent that he wondered if they had ever experienced an impure temptation. But one morning Barry Kellaway rolled his eyes and pretended to stagger and said, ‘It’s all right for you lazy baskets. You were snoring your heads off last night while Mother Nature was torturing me.’

Martin Dillon made eyes at Kellaway and sidled up to him and said, ‘Did Mummy’s little Barry mess his pyjamas in his sleep, eh?’

Damian Laity grabbed Kellaway from behind and twisted his arms and said, ‘Tell us everything, Kaggs. Who were you holding in your arms when you woke up this morning?’

Adrian listened quietly. He knew Kellaway had had a wet dream. Over the next few weeks, every boy in the group had one and talked about it next day.

Their talk was very different from the stories that Cornthwaite and his friends used to bring to school. Adrian’s former friends were reticent and modest about their adventures. Seskis would say simply, ‘Rhonda Fleming nearly killed me last night.’ Or O’Mullane would say, ‘I saw a colossal tart on the train and when I got home I went into the woodshed and rubbed myself nearly raw.’ The others would nod quietly as if to say, ‘It could happen to anyone.’

Kellaway and Dillon and Laity were proud of their dreams and recounted them like adventure stories with themselves as heroes. It was all the more fun because nothing they did in dreams was sinful. (Adrian had his own wet dreams now, but he didn’t enjoy them. They were confused struggles in landscapes suspiciously like America.)

Adrian’s new friends looked forward to their dreams. Laity marked his in his pocket diary. He had calculated that he had a wet dream every twenty days or so. On the eighteenth or nineteenth day he would tell the others it was due any day. Kellaway and Dillon would say, ‘Better not stand too close to Catherine or Beth in the tram this afternoon or you might end up married to them in bed tonight.’ Adrian thought of himself and Denise in the Coroke train and was disgusted by the loose talk about the Padua girls.

If a fellow described a dream that was too unseemly he usually apologised at the end of his story. Kellaway said one morning, ‘The tram was somewhere in East Camberwell. I kept praying, “Please, God, make the Padua girls get off before it’s too late.” But they kept crowding round me. The conductor asked me what was the matter and I told him to stand between me and the girls to hide what I was going to do. But then it happened. Some of the girls screamed. The conductor started wrestling with me. And I know you’ll never forgive me for this, Dillon, but I reached out and tried to grab you-know-who. Yes, it was your one and only Marlene with the adorable legs. I just couldn’t help myself.’

Some of the stories were lost on Adrian because the people or the places in them were known only to the Camberwell boys. But one morning he heard a story as sensational as any that Cornthwaite or his dirty friends had told.

It was the time of the Royal Tour of Australia. Every morning the Argus had full-colour pictures of the Royal couple, showing Her Majesty’s frocks and hats in all their gorgeous detail. One Saturday the Royal car was due to pass only a few miles from Swindon. St Carthage’s and every other school for miles around had a space reserved along the route. Nearly every boy from St Carthage’s turned up early and waited for hours in the sun for the Queen and the Duke to drive past.

On the following Monday, Damian Laity gathered his friends together and told them solemnly that his dream had come a few days early and it was nothing to laugh about this time.

He said, ‘It must have been all those hours I sat in the sun. I must have gone mad with sunstroke. I couldn’t eat anything for tea except half a family brick of ice cream just before bed. All I can remember after that is waiting and waiting for Her car. When I saw it coming I turned into a raving lunatic. I ran out onto the road with only my singlet on and jumped up to the running board of the car. The kids from the public schools were all roaring and screaming at me. I think the Padua girls saw me too. I couldn’t stop myself. I jumped into the back seat beside Her. She was wearing that beautiful lime-green shantung frock and the hat with white feathers. I tried to put my arms around Her. As soon as I touched Her elbow-length gloves it ended. Thank God I didn’t do anything worse to Her with all those people watching. I lay awake for hours after it was over. I kept seeing the headlines in all the papers on Monday: MONSTER FROM CATHOLIC COLLEGE DISGRACES AUSTRALIA.’

Mr and Mrs Adrian Sherd arrived at Triabunna in the early afternoon. They had been married exactly twenty-four hours. They unpacked their suitcases in a sunlit room on an upper floor of a hotel with every modern convenience. Then they strolled hand in hand along the beachfront.

The place was deserted. Sherd was glad there was no one around to overhear them when they stopped every few yards and he whispered, ‘I love you, Denise,’ and his wife answered, ‘I love you too, Adrian.’ He remembered a fellow at school named Cornthwaite who used to change his seat in a train to get a better view of a couple smoushing (as he called it) and to watch where the fellow put his hands.

On the way back to the hotel for tea, Sherd seriously considered waiting for another night to consummate the marriage. He could see his wife was in no hurry for it—she was quite content just to hold hands and hear her husband say he loved her.

Sherd felt the same way himself. He was experiencing the truth of something he had first discovered years before (when he lay awake at night thinking of a girl in a beige school uniform to save himself from a habit of sin)—that the joy of hearing a beautiful chaste woman say, ‘I love you’ was far more wonderful than rolling around naked with all the stars of Hollywood.

Later that night, when they were sitting together reading, Sherd reminded himself that his wife had grown up in the same pagan world as himself, that she must have learned from films and magazines what people expected newlyweds to get up to on their honeymoon, and that if he didn’t introduce her to the physical side of marriage soon, she might start brooding over it or even suspect that he was not quite normal in mind or body.

When she was ready to undress for bed, he decided after all that now was the time to reveal the mysteries of the marriage bed. But he was determined that what he was about to do should be as different as possible from the purely animal things he had once dreamed of doing to American women. Denise must not have the least suspicion that he had ever been attracted to her purely for the physical gratification he might get from her.

He knelt down and closed his eyes to pray while she got into her nightdress. When she had said her own prayers and climbed into bed, he turned out the light and undressed himself. He did not want her to glimpse his organ before he had prepared her for it by a long speech.

Sherd lay down beside his wife and spoke. ‘Denise, darling, no matter how carefully you were protected by your parents and the nuns at the academy, you probably still stumbled on some of the secrets of human reproduction.

‘Perhaps you had to go into a public lavatory once, and your eyes strayed up to the wall and you saw a drawing of a huge, thick, hideous monster of a thing and lay awake for weeks afterwards wondering whether men really had organs like that on their bodies and whether, if ever you were married, your husband would threaten you with one on your wedding night.

‘Perhaps you borrowed a novel from a non-Catholic library without realising what it was about, and read a few pages about some American gangster with the morals of an alley cat. You shut the book in disgust and returned it to the library, but you wondered for a long time afterwards how many men treated women as pretty playthings to be used for their pleasure.

‘Perhaps you innocently looked into the practical notebook of a schoolfellow who was doing biology and saw her drawings of a dissected rabbit and noticed the little lump with the label ERECTILE PENIS AND SHEATH and went away alarmed to think that male rabbits and therefore men, and your own future husband too, had something on them that could actually stretch and grow bigger.

‘Perhaps you once spent a holiday on a farm and your parents were careless enough to let you see the bull running like a madman to climb on top of a cow. Or perhaps you were just shopping in Accrington one Saturday morning and there, right in front of your eyes, were two dogs in the gutter and one of them suddenly poked this long red sticky thing at the other one and forced it to submit.’

Adrian paused and sighed. He hoped Denise realised it was not his fault that she had had these rude shocks. If only it had been possible, he would have shielded her from all sight of male animals and broad-minded books and films. Then she could have learned the whole story from her husband.

He waited for her to speak. He was anxious to find out just how much she knew. Then she answered him, and he treasured for the rest of his life the words she said.

‘Adrian, I understand how concerned you are for me, and I don’t blame you for imagining that some of those dreadful things might have happened to me. But you needn’t have been all that anxious.

‘Oh, of course I was puzzled sometimes about things I read in the papers or heard non-Catholics whispering about. But don’t forget I was a Child of Mary. (Didn’t you ever go to eight o’clock mass on the third Sunday of the month and see the rows and rows of Children of Mary in our blue-and-white regalia and hope that your future wife was somewhere among them?) And whenever I did wonder a little about those things, I told myself they were none of my business. I knew if I ever got married I could learn all I had to know from the Pre-Cana Conferences for engaged couples. And if my vocation was to remain single, it was better for me to know as little as possible about that side of life anyway.’

When Sherd heard this he was so overjoyed that he kissed his wife and told her again and again what a rare treasure she was. He would almost have been content to lie there looking at her lovely face until he fell asleep. But he owed it to his wife to finish what he had begun explaining to her.

He said, ‘Denise, my innocent angel Denise, now that I know how carefully you’ve guarded yourself all these years, it makes my task tonight so much easier.

‘If you had in fact seen a dog or a bull chasing the female, or a foul drawing on a toilet wall, you probably would have thought people were no different from animals when they mated. I’m sorry to say there are plenty of men who do treat the whole thing as a kind of game for their own pleasure. But thank God you’ll never come into contact with them. God Himself saw to it that your beauty and virtue attracted the sort of Catholic husband who understands the true purpose of sexual relations in marriage.

‘I won’t beat about the bush, Denise darling. In one sense, what I’m going to do to you tonight may seem no different from what a bull does to his cows or a Hollywood film director does to one of his starlets.’ (Denise looked startled and puzzled. He would have to explain this point to her later.) ‘It’s not a pretty thing to watch, I’m afraid, but it’s the only way our poor fallen human natures can reproduce themselves. If it seems dirty or even ridiculous to you, I can only ask you to pray that you’ll understand it better as time goes by.

‘The trouble is that a man is cursed with a very powerful instinct to reproduce himself. One day when we’ve been married long enough to trust each other with our deepest secrets, I’ll tell you a little about 1953. That was a year when I plumbed the depths of despair because’—Sherd chose his words carefully—‘I could hardly find the strength to resist the male instinct to reproduce my species. And when you hear my story you’ll realise what a mighty urge it is and why you’ll have to excuse me for giving in to it about twice a week—at least until you find you’re expecting a child.’

Sherd wanted to say much more, but he was anxious not to confuse his bride with too much information all at once. The moment he had waited for all his life had arrived.

He switched on the bedlamp, kissed his wife to calm her fears and rolled back the bedclothes. She was still in her nightdress, but fortunately she had closed her eyes and gone limp. He removed the nightdress as gently as he could and admired her nude body.

Her eyes were still closed. He wondered if she had swooned. But he said in any case the words he had memorised years before for just this occasion. (They came from a book that his mother had borrowed from the sixpenny lending library in Accrington. When his parents were out of the house he used to look through their library books. Most were respectable detective stories, but in one historical novel he had found a scene where a man surprised a young woman bathing nude in the village stream. Young Sherd had been so impressed by the man’s words that he learned them to use on his honeymoon.)

Sherd said over his wife’s body, ‘Denise, it’s almost a crime that such charms should ever be concealed beneath the garments that our society decrees as conventional. Let me feast on your treasures and praise them as they deserve.’

Before Sherd could praise his wife’s charms separately, she opened her eyes briefly and looked shyly up at him and said, ‘Please, darling, don’t keep me in suspense too long.’

As gently and considerately as he could, Sherd lowered his body into position and engaged in sexual congress with her.

Afterwards he lay beside her with the blankets covering them both. He was ready to say, ‘I’m sorry, Denise, but I did my best to warn you beforehand,’ when she looked at him and said, ‘Why, Adrian, I think it was somehow rather beautiful. Not that I don’t appreciate all you said to prepare me for the worst, but really, I can’t help being amazed at the wonderful way God designed our bodies so they complement each other in the act of generation.’

While she pulled on her nightdress in the darkness she said, ‘And Adrian, if you feel a need for my body again in the next few days, please don’t hesitate to ask me. After all, I did promise to honour and obey you. So if this act gives you all the pleasure I think it does, you’re welcome to do it whenever you wish—within reason, of course.’

The Tasmanian honeymoon of Mr and Mrs Adrian Sherd lasted for twelve days of a year in the early 1960s, but the thought of it sustained Adrian Sherd all through the autumn months of 1954. In all that time he never once confessed a sin of impurity in thought or deed.

Sometimes, while he knelt outside the confessional, Adrian arranged a debate between two of the many voices that started arguing whenever he tried to hear what his conscience had to say.

FIRST VOICE: Sherd is about to tell the priest that the worst sins he has committed in the past month are disobeying his parents and losing his temper with his young brothers. But in fact he lies awake every night dreaming of coition with a naked woman in a hotel room in Tasmania. I submit that these thoughts are mortal sins against the Ninth Commandment.

SECOND VOICE: In denying the claims of the previous speaker, I rest my case on three points.

1. When Sherd thinks about his marriage to Mrs Denise Sherd, née McNamara, he does not enjoy any sexual pleasure. True, he experiences a sort of exalted joy, but this is purely the result of his finding himself married at last to the young woman he has loved since his schooldays. We can see the truth of this, my first point, if we examine Sherd’s penis while he contemplates the happiness of his honeymoon. At no time does it seem aware of what is going on in his mind.

2. When, some time ago now, Sherd was unfortunately in the habit of thinking at night about the American outdoors and of lewd orgies with film personalities, he was enjoying something he knew to be quite imaginary. On the other hand, his thoughts of his marriage to Miss McNamara are thoughts of a future that he has every intention of bringing to pass. Far from indulging in idle dreams, when he thinks of his honeymoon in Tasmania he is making a serious effort to plan his life for the good of his immortal soul.

3. It goes without saying that in all his visits to America, Sherd never once married or proposed marriage to the women he consorted with. Mrs Sherd, however, is his wife. All the endearments he offers her are proper expressions of his conjugal love and, as such, are perfectly lawful.

Adrian Sherd as adjudicator awarded the debate to the Second Voice and was sure that any reasonable theologian would have done the same.

So long as Adrian was in love with a Catholic girl and in the state of grace, he wasn’t ashamed to visit his Aunt Kathleen and talk about Catholic devotions.

One day when she said she had enrolled him as a Spiritual Associate of the Sisters of the Most Precious Blood, he was genuinely interested to know what benefits this would bring him. In the days of his lust, the things his aunt did for him had been wasted, but now they earned valuable additions to his store of sanctifying grace.

Aunt Kathleen said, ‘The names of all Associates are kept permanently in a casket beside the altar in the Mother House of the Sisters at Wollongong. Each day after their Divine Office, the Sisters recite a special prayer for all Associates. And best of all, they keep a lamp burning perpetually in their chapel for the intentions of you and me and all the other names in the casket.’

While his aunt was out of the room, Adrian leafed through her stacks of Catholic magazines, looking for other leagues or confraternities with special privileges for members. He puzzled over a magazine he had never seen before—St Gerard’s Monthly, published by the Divine Zeal Fathers at their monastery in Bendigo.

The centre pages were full of photos with brief captions: The Hosking Family of Birchip, Vic.; The McInerney Family of Elmore, Vic.; The Mullaly Family of Taree, NSW. Each family consisted of husband and wife and at least four children. Four was the bare minimum. In some of the magazines Adrian found plenty of eights and nines and tens. The record seemed to belong to the Farrelly family of Texas, Queensland. There were sixteen people in the photo. Five or six were adults, but Adrian assumed that these were the oldest children. One of the women was holding a baby—she was probably the mother of the fourteen.

Adrian thought at first that the families were entrants in some kind of competition. But there was no mention of prizes. Apparently the only reward for a family was the pleasure of seeing themselves in the pages of St Gerard’s Monthly and feeling superior to the Catholic families with less than four children.

The mothers were all what Adrian’s father would have called well preserved. Some were even quite pretty. There were none with fat legs or large sagging breasts like Mrs De Kloover, who led nine children into mass every Sunday at Our Lady of Good Counsel’s.

It was this that interested Adrian most. He was planning to become the father of a Catholic family himself, and there were still a few things he wasn’t sure about. One thing that worried him was whether he would still be attracted to his wife after she had borne him several children. The pictures in St Gerard’s Monthly reassured him. Men like Mr McInerney and Mr Farrelly were apparently drawn to their wives long after the romantic excitement of the honeymoon had died away.

It would be possible for Denise to have at least ten children and still keep her youthful figure and complexion. Over the years she would probably develop a Catholic mother’s face like some of those in the photos. This was very different from the face of a non-Catholic mother of two or three children. The Catholic mother wore very little make-up—the non-Catholic plastered herself with powder and lipstick and sometimes even a little rouge. The Catholic’s face was open, frank, quick to smile, but still as modest as a girl’s in the presence of any man other than her husband. The non-Catholic’s looked as though it concealed many a guilty secret.

The difference between the faces was probably the result of Catholic husbands’ copulating with their wives quietly in the dark while their children were asleep in the surrounding rooms, whereas non-Catholics often did it in broad daylight in their lounge rooms while their children were packed off to their aunts or grandparents for the weekend. Also, the Catholic men would have done it fairly quickly and without any antics that might have overemphasised its place in the marriage, while the non-Catholics probably talked and joked about it and thought of ways to make it last longer.

As well as a Catholic face there was a Catholic figure—Catholic breasts with gentle curves and not enough prominence to attract unwanted admirers, and Catholic legs with ankles and calves neatly shaped to lead the eye away from the area above the knees. As the years brought her more children, Mrs Denise Sherd would develop these too.

It was only logical that there were also Catholic and non-Catholic pudenda. Although Adrian had got out of the habit of thinking of such things, he allowed himself to distinguish briefly between a modest shrinking Catholic kind and another kind that was somehow a little the worse for wear.

Each issue of St Gerard’s Monthly had a column called ‘The Hand that Rules the World’ by someone called Monica. Adrian read one of these columns.

Recently on our holidays in Melbourne I boarded a tram with six of my seven. (Son No. 1 was elsewhere with Proud Father.) Most of my readers will be familiar with the cool stare of scrutiny which I had from Mrs Young Modern in the opposite seat with her pigeon pair.

Of course I returned her gaze. After all, I had far more right to be critical, with six bonny young Australians to my credit.

Well, it turned out that she was more interested in inspecting my children than their mother. Of course she was hoping to find a shoe unshined or a sock that needed darning. ‘Sorry to disappoint you, Mrs Two Only,’ I said under my breath, ‘but while you were gossiping at your bridge party or out in your precious car, I wasn’t wasting my time.’

I had the satisfaction of seeing her face fall when she realised my six were at least as beautifully turned out as her two. If we had got on speaking terms I’m sure I would have had to answer the old question for the hundredth time—Readers, are you tired of it, too?—‘How on earth do you manage?’

There was much more, but Adrian paused to think. He wished Denise could have read ‘The Hand that Rules the World’. As the mother of a large family she would have to be ready for all those stares and questions from non-Catholics. Monica’s columns were full of arguments that Catholic mothers could turn to when they were tempted to feel discontented with their lot. For instance, she pointed out that bringing a new soul into the world was infinitely more worthwhile than acquiring a luxury such as a washing machine. (And anyway, as she reminded her readers, a thorough boiling in a good old-fashioned copper did a much better job than a few twirls in a slick-looking machine.)

Adrian decided that after his marriage he would send a subscription to the Divine Zeal Fathers so Denise would get her St Gerard’s Monthly regularly.

When his aunt found him reading the magazine she took it politely from him and said, ‘No harm done, young man, but St Gerard’s Monthly is really more suitable for parents only.’ Adrian was angry to think there might have been much more useful information in the magazine that he hadn’t found. He resented his spinster aunt treating him like a child when he was seriously concerned about the problems of Catholic parenthood.

One night towards the end of their honeymoon, Sherd reminded his wife that the natural result of their love for each other might well be a large family. He was about to list some of the problems this might bring, when she interrupted him.

‘Darling, you don’t seem to realise. Ever since I can remember, my mother got St Gerard’s Monthly. It taught me what to expect from marriage and to accept whatever family God might send. And you might think this was silly of me, but after I fell in love with you, one of my favourite daydreams was opening up the centre pages of the Monthly and seeing a picture of the Sherd family from wherever we came from.’

While Sherd and his wife were still honeymooning in Tasmania, Adrian spent ten minutes each morning in the Swindon parish church searching among the racks of Australian Catholic Truth Society pamphlets. He was looking for one simple piece of information. When he found it he would know all that was necessary for his role as a Catholic husband.

Each day he borrowed two or three pamphlets and read them under the desk in the Christian Doctrine period. Next morning he returned them to the racks in the church and went on with his search. He read page after page advising husbands and wives to be courteous and considerate, to set a good example to each other, and to co-operate unselfishly in the upbringing of the children that God sent them. But he did not find the information he needed.

What he wanted to know was how often he should have carnal relations with his wife to be sure of fertilising her as soon as possible after the wedding. He believed there was a certain time each month when it was easy for a woman to conceive. If he (or his wife) could discover when this was, he could arrange to copulate with her on the correct date each month and so make it easier for God to bless them with children.

But the problem was to find when this important date occurred. Anyone could tell when a female dog or cat was on heat from the odd way it behaved, but it was unthinkable that Denise should have to get into a state like that to let him know she was ready to be impregnated. If women were no different from dogs or cats in this respect, the odds were that somewhere, at some time, he would have seen a woman on heat. But in all the years he had been watching women and girls on trains and trams he had never seen one who looked as if she was even thinking of sexual matters.

Adrian searched the pamphlet racks for a week and then gave up. But without the information he could not think realistically about his future. He decided to invent a game that would make his marriage to Denise seem true to life.

Each night when he got home from school he took two dice from his brothers’ Ludo box. He shook the first and rolled it. An even number meant that Sherd (the husband) felt in the mood to suggest intercourse to his wife that night.

Before throwing the second of the dice he saw himself saying casually to Denise (they were still on their honeymoon, so the conversation could take place as they strolled back from the beach to their hotel) that it might be nice to give themselves to each other that night in bed. Then he rolled the die.

If it showed an even number, Denise would answer something like, ‘Yes, darling, I’d be more than happy if you used your marriage rights tonight.’ If it showed an odd number she said, ‘If you don’t mind, I’m not feeling strong enough for it. Perhaps some other time.’ And she smiled warmly to show that she loved him as much as ever.

On a night when both dice came up with even numbers, Adrian would rest now and then from his homework and enjoy the quiet contentment that a husband felt when he knew his wife would willingly submit to him a few hours later. But it was almost as pleasant on the other nights to look forward to a half-hour in bed together sharing their inmost thoughts and looking forward to years more of such happiness in the future.

But throwing the dice was only part of the game. Assuming that a woman could conceive on one day of each month, there was one chance in thirty that an act of intercourse would be successful. Adrian chalked a faint line around a section of thirty bricks on the outside of the lounge-room chimney. On one of the bricks near the centre of the marked area he put a faint X. Then he hid a tennis ball in a geranium bush near the chimney.

Each morning after a night when the two dice had showed evens (and Mrs Sherd had yielded to her husband) Adrian walked quietly to the lounge-room chimney on his way back from the lavatory. He found the tennis ball and wet it in the dew or under the garden tap. Then he took aim at the panel of bricks, closed his eyes tightly and tossed the ball.

He tossed it carelessly and with no deliberate effort to hit the brick marked X. When he heard the impact of the ball he opened his eyes and looked for the wet mark on the bricks. If this mark (or the greater part of it) lay within the perimeter of the brick marked X, then the conjugal act of the previous night between Mr and Mrs Sherd would have resulted in conception.

Adrian shook the dice each night until the honeymoon was over. On four of those nights a pair of even numbers came up, but in each case the mark of the tennis ball was well wide of the lucky brick.

At the end of this time he was satisfied with the way the dice and the ball were working, except that things weren’t happening fast enough. He wanted to share with his wife as soon as possible the joys of Catholic parenthood, but at the rate he was going it might take years—so many years, perhaps, that it might be time to marry Denise before he had discovered what marriage was really like.

He decided to throw the dice seven times each night. This meant he would experience a week of marriage every day of his life in Accrington. At that rate a year of marriage would take less than two months of 1954. By the end of Form Five he would have been married for nearly four years and fathered as many children. At that stage he would probably have to speed things up a little more. He would have to be careful not to get too close to the time (he could hardly bear to think about it) when Denise would begin to show signs of ageing. According to the pictures in St Gerard’s Monthly she could produce at least a dozen children before this happened. But if he had a lucky run with the dice and ball they might have twelve children long before they were forty years old.

After the birth of each child beyond the fourth, he would have a special throw of three dice to decide his wife’s health. If the number thirteen came up, she would be showing signs of varicose veins in her legs. He would send her to a Catholic doctor for a thorough check-up. If nothing could be done for her, he could alter the rules of the game so that he abstained unselfishly from time to time to give her a sporting chance.

Living through seven nights of marriage each night was not as interesting as he had expected. The high point of each week came each morning at the chimney. Sometimes he had to toss the ball three or four times for a week when Denise had been unusually compliant.

At last, after eighteen weeks of marriage (eighteen days of Accrington time) he opened his eyes one morning at the chimney and saw a broad wet blotch in the middle of the brick that stood for conception. He had always thought he would be able to take such a thing calmly, but he found himself wanting to run and tell the news to someone—even his parents or brothers. All that day at school he wished he had a friend to share his secret.

Adrian went on throwing the dice for a few more nights. His wife couldn’t be sure she had conceived until she saw a doctor. They were entitled to perform the act a few more times until then. But as soon as the doctor had pronounced her pregnant, Adrian put away the dice and spent his nights at Accrington living through the weeks when he and his wife spent their time before sleep holding hands and talking about their first child.

Much as he loved Denise, he found he was bored. It wasn’t that he needed sexual gratification. He had always said, and he still maintained, that the touch of Denise’s hand or the sight of her bare white shoulders was enough to satisfy all his physical wants. And it wasn’t that he was running out of things to talk about. There were still hundreds of stories he wanted to tell her about his early years. The trouble was that he couldn’t endure the long months of her pregnancy without the fun of seeing the dice and ball do their work.

The next day was Saturday at Accrington. Adrian knew what he had to do to make his future more inviting. He took the dice out into the shed in his backyard. He had a sheaf of pages from an exercise book to use as a calendar. There was enough space for all the years he wanted. He threw a die once to decide the sex of their first child. It was a girl. They named it Maureen Denise.

In the first week after the mother and child came home from hospital, nothing happened. Then the dice started rolling again. Adrian threw them thirty times and scored five acts of sexual union. He went outside and tossed the tennis ball five times without success. Then he went back to his calendar in the shed and crossed a month off his married life and rolled the dice again.

Adrian worked all day with the dice and ball. (He told his brothers he was playing a game of Test cricket, with the dice to score runs and the ball to dismiss batsmen.) By evening he had been married nearly nine years and was the father of five daughters and one son.

As soon as he was home from mass on the Sunday morning, he went out to the shed again. He was looking forward to throwing the ball at the chimney again, but he couldn’t face another day with the dice. He decided on an easy solution. He would simply toss the ball ten times for each month. It seemed silly after so many years of marriage to be always asking his wife’s permission before the act. In future she would have to submit to it ten times a month whether she liked it or not.

By midday the best part of his life was over. He had been married fifteen years and fathered eleven children—eight daughters and three sons. Their names and birthdays were all entered in his calendar.

Now that he had worked out a future for himself he was exhausted and a little disappointed. He was almost sorry he had cheated by speeding up events instead of using the dice and ball patiently and enjoying each year as it came. He knew what people meant when they said their life was slipping away from them.

He sat beside the chimney wondering what he could think about in bed that night. A simple solution occurred to him. He multiplied fifteen by twelve to obtain the number of months of his active sexual life. Then he went back to the shed and cut up small squares of paper. He numbered them from one to one hundred and eighty and put them all into a tobacco tin. Each night he would shake the tin and draw out a number. He drew out a number for that very night. It was forty-three. From his calendar he learned that in month forty-three he was trying to father his fourth child.

That night (Accrington time) Adrian went to bed eager to meet the Denise who was already the mother of three young children. And the next day at school he wondered which of all the possible Denises would share his bed that night after he had consulted the numbers in the tobacco tin. She might have been a radiant young mother, fresh from breastfeeding her first child, or a mature woman like the mothers in St Gerard’s Monthly with the curves of her body gently rounded by years of child-bearing and about her eyes the faintest shadows of weariness from caring for her eight or nine children all day.

On the last evening of their honeymoon, Sherd and his bride stood looking at the scene that had been called Triabunna with Distant View of Maria Island in the coloured booklet, Tasmania: A Visitor’s Guide, on the bottom shelf of the bookcase in Sherd’s boyhood home.

The newlyweds had to decide where to make their permanent home. Sherd wondered what was to stop them from settling among the low hills of Maria Island that were just then strangely bright in the last rays of the setting sun. If he could have been sure there was a Catholic church and school and a Catholic doctor on the island, he and his wife would have been happy for the rest of their lives on a small farm that looked across the water to Triabunna.

He only decided to return to Victoria for the sake of his wife. She was just a little homesick, and she said she preferred to live where she could visit her mother two or three times a year.

All that Adrian knew of Victoria was the western suburb of Melbourne where he had grown up and gone to primary school, Accrington and the few south-eastern suburbs that he crossed in the train to St Carthage’s or explored on his bike at weekends, the landscape on either side of the railway line between Melbourne and Colac and a few miles of farmland around his uncle’s property at Orford. None of these places seemed a fitting backdrop for the scenes of his married life—carrying a radiant Denise across the threshold of their first home, bringing her home from hospital with their first child and so on.

But Adrian knew of places in Victoria that were worthy settings for a great love story. They were landscapes so different from the suburbs of his childhood that even the trivial events of his married life would seem momentous, and Adrian, the husband, would forget all those Sundays when he had come home from mass with nothing to do but climb the solitary wattle tree in the backyard and look across rows of other backyards and wait for the six o’clock Hit Parade in the evening.

As a boy Adrian had travelled each January by train from Melbourne to his uncle’s farm at Orford. On the morning of each journey he leaned against the dark-green leather backrest and studied the photographs in the corners of his compartment.

The titles of the photographs were brief and sometimes curiously imprecise—Erskine Falls, Lorne; In the Strzelecki Ranges; Road to Marysville; Walwa; Camperdown with Mount Leura; Near Hepburn Springs. In some of the pictures a solitary traveller, with arms folded, leaned against a tall treefern, or a motorcar empty of people stood motionless on an otherwise deserted gravel road leading towards a tiny archway where distant trees closed over against the daylight. Adrian knew from the waistcoats and moustaches of the travellers and the shapes of the cars and the brown hues of the sky and land that the photos had been taken years before. The bewhiskered men and the unseen people who had left their motorcars standing on dusty roads might have died long since. But Adrian was sure, from their grave gestures and solemn faces and the way they had stationed themselves at unlikely spots in the forest or by the roadside, that these travellers of olden times had discovered the true meaning of the Victorian countryside.

Leaning back in his window seat at Spencer Street station while drab red suburban trains dragged crowds of clerks and shop assistants into Melbourne to work, Adrian wanted to leave the city forever and journey to the landscapes of the dim photographs. Somewhere among forests of mountain ash or damp treeferns or beside a foaming creek, he would search for the secret that lay behind the most beautiful scenery in Victoria.

But the Port Fairy train followed the same route each year and Adrian had to get out at Colac and travel with his uncle to the same bare paddocks near Orford. Yet, as a married man at Triabunna, Tasmania, Adrian had still not forgotten the country of the photographs. He told his wife they would make their home in a valley beside a waterfall at Lorne, or on a hillside overlooking Camperdown with Mount Leura, or, best of all, in the trees above a bend in the road near Hepburn Springs.

He would need a suitable job or profession. Farming was too hard—it would leave him too little time with his new wife. But there were men who drove up sometimes to his uncle’s farm and strolled around the paddocks without soiling their hands. He would be one of them—a veterinary surgeon or an expert from the Department of Agriculture. Looking back, he saw he had always been destined for this sort of life. As a boy in Form Four he had often relieved his boredom by staring at pages in his General Science textbook with diagrams of dissected rabbits or pictures of soil erosion labelled Before and After.

Sherd took his bride to their new home on a timbered hillside near Hepburn Springs and bought a savage Queensland heeler dog to protect her while he was away in the daytime. On the first night, after they had arranged their furniture and unpacked their wedding presents, he sat down with her in the spacious lounge room and looked thoughtful.

When she asked him what was the matter, he said, ‘I was only thinking of the grave responsibility on my shoulders—to carry on where the nuns and priests left off and teach you the rest of the facts about marriage. Perhaps I should deal with one topic each night.

‘Tonight I’ll discuss a subject that probably made you shudder if ever you heard it mentioned when you were young and innocent—birth control. What I’m about to say is a summary of all I’ve read about birth control in Catholic pamphlets, and all I’ve been taught by priests and brothers.

‘Any impartial observer would agree that the marriage act—that operation I’ve performed on you in the privacy of the marriage bed—must have a serious purpose quite apart from the fleeting pleasure associated with it. The purpose, as any rational person will agree, is the procreation of children. Now, this purpose is a part of what philosophers and theologians call the Natural Law. And the Natural Law was designed by Almighty God to make the world run smoothly. It must be obvious, then, that any tampering with the Natural Law is likely to have disastrous consequences. (Can you imagine the consequences if someone interfered with the way the planets revolve around the sun?)

‘Well, birth control violates the Natural Law by removing the purpose from the marriage act. (You may be wondering how this is done. Without going into the sordid details, I can tell you there’s a certain little piece of slimy rubber that non-Catholic chemists sell for profit. Armed with this disgusting weapon, a man can enjoy the pleasure without the purpose and defy the Natural Law.)

‘You won’t be surprised to learn that this grave sin has grave consequences. It’s a known fact that artificial birth control causes profound physical and mental disturbances. I’ve heard from a priest who knows all about these matters that many non-Catholic couples are so afraid of the psychological effects of birth control that they just will not practise it. So you see the Natural Law is not just something the Catholic Church made up.’

While Sherd paced up and down the lounge-room carpet, his wife reclined on the sofa and drank in every word he said. Behind her the huge windows framed a vista of a twilit forested valley more satisfying than any of the scenes that the young Adrian used to stare at in railway carriages, wondering what was the secret behind their beauty.

When the Sherds had first moved into their home near Hepburn Springs, they were so happy that they seemed to be enjoying a taste of heaven on earth. But looking through his lounge-room window after his discussion of birth control, Sherd realised that all they were enjoying was their rightful reward for following the Natural Law.

What he saw through his window was a valley where no sexual sin was ever committed. The Natural Law governed everything in sight. It caused the sky to glow and the treetops to tremble all over the forests near Hepburn Springs. It was at work too at Walwa, on the road to Marysville and in Camperdown with Mount Leura.

Sherd knew now what had drawn him to these scenes in the Port Fairy train years before. The mysterious secret beyond those lonely roads, the thing that travellers had abandoned their cars to search for, was the Natural Law.

He himself would never have to search for it again. He could see it in operation outside his lounge-room windows and even in the privacy of his own bedroom.

One night when the dice and the numbered tickets had transported Adrian to a night in the fourth month of his marriage when he would have liked to be intimate with his wife but she wasn’t feeling up to it, he lay back with his hands behind his head and began to discuss with Denise the history of marriage down the ages.

He said, ‘The union of Adam and Eve in the garden of Eden was not only the first marriage—it was the most perfect marriage in history, because it was God who introduced the young couple to each other and because the way they behaved in marriage was exactly as He had intended.

‘You can imagine them meeting for the first time in some leafy clearing far more pleasant than any place we know of near Hepburn Springs. They were both naked—yes, stark naked, because Adam’s reason was in full control over his passions and there was no need for Eve to practise the virtue of modesty. With their perfect understanding of what God wanted them to do, they would have agreed to live together there and then—there was no long courtship such as we had to observe. No doubt they went through some simple wedding ceremony, and surely it was God who officiated. What a wonderful start to married life!

‘They had no need to go away for a honeymoon. There were scenic spots and secluded walks all round them already. What happened next? Well, we can deduce that their acts of sexual communion would have been the most perfect ever performed. They would have looked into each other’s eyes one afternoon and understood it was time to co-operate with God in creating a new human life. As they lay down together Adam’s body would have shown none of those signs of uncontrollable passion that you might have glimpsed on me some nights in bed. Of course, at the last moment, when it was time to deposit his seed in the receptacle designed for the purpose, his organ must have behaved more or less like mine, but whereas I (with my fallen human nature) tend to lose control of myself for a few moments, he would have lain there quite calmly with his reason fully operative. He may well have chatted to Eve about some gorgeous butterfly flitting above them or pointed out some inspiring view through the trees around them.

‘They lived in such close contact with God and obeyed His Will so completely that in all probability it was He who reminded them now and then that it was high time they mated again. The Bible tells us that God came and walked with them in the cool of the evening. You can imagine Him politely suggesting it to them as the sun sinks below the treetops of Eden. They smile and say what a good idea it is and then lie down on the nearest grassy bank and do it without any fuss.

‘Of course they wouldn’t have been the least ashamed to have God beside them while they did it. And He wouldn’t have been embarrassed either—after all, it was He who invented the idea of human reproduction. I can see Him strolling a little way off to look at a bird’s nest or let a squirrel run down his arm. Occasionally He glances back at the young couple and smiles wisely to Himself.

‘Just to remind you of the vast difference between our First Parents in their perfect state and ourselves with our fallen natures, I’d like you to imagine how we would have managed if we’d tried to live like Adam and Eve.

‘Think of me getting into your compartment on the Coroke train for the first time. I haven’t got a stitch of clothing on and neither have you. (We’ll have to suppose the other passengers are naked too.) I look at your face to try to assess your character, but I’m such a slave to my passions that I let my gaze fall on your other charms below. Meanwhile you notice the way I’m looking at you, and you can’t decide whether I’m thinking of you as a possible mate for life or just the object of my momentary lust. So you don’t know whether to sit still and meet my eyes or fold your arms in front of you and cross your legs tightly.

‘And when I put my schoolbag on the rack above your head and I lean on tiptoes over your seat and the most private parts of me are only a foot or so from your face, what do you do? If your human nature was as perfect as Eve’s in Paradise, you would look calmly at my organs to satisfy yourself that at least I was a fully developed man capable of fathering children. But because you have a fallen nature you’re too frightened or horrified to look at them dangling in front of your eyes, so you go on reading your library book.

‘This example might seem far-fetched, but believe me, it’s the way God intended us to court each other. It was the sin of our First Parents that made us shy with each other. If we hadn’t been born with Original Sin on our souls, our whole courtship would have been simple and beautiful. Instead of waiting all those months just to speak to you, I would have walked hand in hand with you to your parents’ place on the first night I met you. (Your home would have been a mossy nook with walls of some vivid flowering vine—Accrington before the Fall would have had a subtropical climate and vegetation.)

‘We find your parents sitting happily together coaxing a spotted fawn to eat from their hands. They come forward smiling to greet me—both naked, of course, but their bodies have no wrinkles or varicose veins or rolls of fat. I take no notice of your mother’s body because I’ve seen thousands like it all over Melbourne. Your parents talk to me and soon understand what an ideal partner I’d be for their daughter. Next morning I come to take you away. There’s no long-winded ceremony or speeches. They give us their blessing and we go off to find our own bower of blossoming foliage.

‘It all seems so impossible and of course it is, because we live nowadays in a fallen world. And the worst result of our First Parents’ sin is that a man can scarcely look at a woman now without his passions urging him to sin with her in thought or deed.

‘I can see you’re surprised to hear this, but you must remember that very few men have learned self-control the way I have. It’s unpleasant to talk about, I know, but many men use their wives entirely for their own selfish pleasure.

‘This sort of thing apparently began almost as soon as Adam and Eve’s descendants started to populate the earth. The oldest cities in the world, Sumer and Akkad, had their walls covered with obscene drawings and carvings, so Brother Chrysostom told us once in his History class. The men of those cities must have had sexual thoughts all day long. The hot climate probably helped, but the main reason would have been that they had never heard of the Ten Commandments.

‘You might have heard in your Christian Doctrine classes, Denise, that God gives every man a conscience, so that even a pagan in the days before Christ knew the difference between right and wrong. I’m afraid I find that hard to believe.

‘One day I deliberately imagined myself growing up in Sumer or Akkad in those days. I discovered I would have had no conscience at all. I would have been a thorough pagan like all the others and enjoyed scribbling filth on the temple walls. (Don’t be alarmed, darling. It’s not the real me I’m talking about. The real Adrian Sherd is the one who’s in bed beside you now.) I saw myself strolling along the terrace between the Hanging Gardens and the river. The sky was blue and cloudless. I was wearing sandals and a short tunic with nothing underneath. All the women walking past wore brief skirts and primitive brassieres.

‘Well, as soon as a young woman took my fancy, a kind of raving madness came over me. (Remember, it’s only an experiment I’m describing.) No thought of conscience or right and wrong entered my head. I was very different from the young Catholic gentleman who courted you so politely and patiently in the Coroke train. I was as bold as brass with the pagan girl—asked her name and address and arranged to meet her that evening at one of the lonely oases beyond the city walls.

‘I didn’t wait to see what happened after that, but it wasn’t hard to guess from the storm of temptations rising up inside me. From that day on, I knew that if I hadn’t been lucky enough to be born a Catholic and learn the proper purpose of my instincts, I would have been some kind of beast. No girl in Sumer or Akkad would have been safe from me.

‘But it wasn’t just the pagans who couldn’t control themselves. If you read your Old Testament you’ll realise how far some of the Patriarchs were from being good Catholic husbands. Solomon had hundreds of wives and treated them like playthings to minister to his lust, David coveted another man’s wife, and Abraham had a bondwoman to amuse himself with when he tired of his lawful wife.

‘I have to confess that when I was much younger I sometimes felt like complaining to God that I was born in New Testament times instead of the centuries BC. It didn’t seem fair that those old fellows all pleased God and got to heaven after having all the women they wanted, while young Catholic chaps like me had to turn their eyes away from pictures of girls in bathers and only go to films for general exhibition.

‘But after I met you and fell in love, I realised the men of the Old Testament were far worse off than me after all. They never knew the rare pleasures that I enjoyed in the years when I was wooing you. Solomon might have gazed all day at the hundreds of indecently clad wives sprawling on cushions in his luxurious palace, but he never knew the happiness of sitting in the Coroke train and waiting for one long soulful look from a girl who kept her beautiful body carefully concealed beneath a convent uniform. And no matter what pleasure he got from his women when he summoned them to his bedchamber, it could not have equalled my joy when I first kissed you on the day we became engaged and I knew I would one day possess a bride who had never even glanced immodestly at another man.’

A few weeks before the September holidays, Adrian’s mother told him he deserved a rest from all his studies and homework. His uncle and aunt had agreed to have him at Orford for a week. If he behaved himself around the house he could go by himself on the train.

Adrian was anxious to let Denise know about his trip. When he went with his mother to book his seat at the Tourist Bureau he took away a coloured leaflet entitled Spring Tours to the Grampians—Victoria’s Garden of Wildflowers. (The Grampians were a hundred miles from Orford, but there were no leaflets for any place nearer.) The following night on the Coroke train he stood near Denise and made sure she noticed him poring over the leaflet. She might have been surprised to think he was interested in wildflowers, but at least she would know what direction from Melbourne he was when she wanted to think of him during the holidays.

Adrian had a window seat in the 8.25 a.m. to Warrnambool and Port Fairy. He left a few inches between himself and the window for Denise. He and she were not long back from their honeymoon, and the trip to Orford was to show her off to his relatives and let her see something of the Western District.

The pictures in the carriage were Treeferns, Tarra Valley and Bulga Park, Yarram. Adrian whispered to Denise that a moist valley in Gippsland would be the perfect spot for a weekend trip. She snuggled closer to him and squeezed his fingers. She understood that he was thinking of the kisses he would give her under the shady treeferns.

They looked into all the slum backyards between South Kensington and Newport and told each other how lucky they were to be able to live in a modern home with the bush right up to their windows. After Newport, when miles of grazing land came up to the windows for their inspection, they passed the time by imagining how they would like to live in this or that farmhouse, and giving each place a points score out of ten.

Adrian’s uncle, Mr McAloon, met them at Colac station. Adrian left a space for his young wife in the back seat of his uncle’s car. He watched her face closely all the way and enjoyed the surprises she got. She had no idea that Colac was such a busy town. She had never seen such green paddocks and rich red soil as she found on the farms near Orford. And she thought the view of rolling plains from the McAloons’ house was nearly as exciting as all the mountain scenery in Tasmania (and gave Adrian’s hand a squeeze when she mentioned the place where they had spent their honeymoon).

Two of Adrian’s cousins, a boy and a girl, sat in the back seat with him. They had pale faces with freckles of all shades from fawn to deep chocolate. Adrian always found it hard to talk to them. The girl went to the little brick Catholic school at Orford and the boy to the Christian Brothers in Colac. He travelled to and from Colac each day in a truck driven by a Catholic neighbour of the McAloons.

Mr McAloon said to Adrian, ‘I suppose you’ve read in the papers all about the school-bus dispute.’ (Adrian had never heard of it.) ‘It’s the same old story. Catholics have to pay taxes to support the secular education system, but when they ask for a few seats in the high-school bus to Colac, all the non-Catholic bigots and wowsers for miles around are up in arms and writing to the Chief Inspectors in the Education Department in Melbourne.

‘Of course all the top inspectors and public servants are Masons, as you should know.’ (He spoke as though Adrian and his parents should have done something about this years before.) ‘Anyway, the result is that all the Catholics round here have banded together and organised a roster of cars and trucks to take the kids to secondary schools, and all the Catholic teachers in state schools have resigned from their union because of the anti-Catholic stand it took. We’ve got a long hard fight on our hands but we’re not going to give up until we get elementary British justice for our children.’

After lunch Adrian showed his wife, Denise, around the farm. The freckle-faces weren’t interested in going with him. They stayed on the back veranda and played Bobs and Disney Derby. Adrian pitied them. They mooned around the house all day and never knew what was missing from their lives. Two or three of them were old enough to have boyfriends or girlfriends. The miles of green dairy country should have inspired even the dullest freckle-face to fall in love with a face across the aisle in St Finbar’s Church and then wait for months in suspense until the face turned round one day and showed by the faintest of smiles that there was some hope.

Adrian of course was much more advanced in his love affair than that, because he had so many proofs already that Denise returned his devotion. As he walked towards the farthest paddock he was already sharing with his wife the joy of looking back on the September holidays in 1954 when he walked alone across bare paddocks and wished his loved one had been with him.

That night Adrian found he had to share a bed with his oldest cousin, Gerard McAloon. Adrian kept his genitals carefully hidden while he undressed. Since meeting Denise he had rarely looked at them himself. They were no longer exclusively his, but the joint property of his wife and God and himself, to be used only in the marriage act on the nights when his wife agreed to it. He shuddered to think of the pale McAloon boy peering at things that were a secret between Denise and himself.

Next day Mr McAloon took Adrian and Gerard and two younger McAloon boys to visit a place called Mary’s Mount. They drove to Colac and then south into the steep timbered hills of the Otway Ranges. Adrian’s uncle talked all the way about the people of Mary’s Mount.

‘They’re modern saints. Some of them are doctors and legal men and chaps with university degrees. They’ve given it all up to get back to the medieval idea of monasticism and living off the land. They bought nearly six hundred acres of bush with only two cleared paddocks and they’re turning it into a farm to supply them with all their needs. Except for books and clothes they share almost everything in common. They built their cottages and chapel with their own two hands. In a few years they’ll be weaving their own clothes and tanning their own leather for sandals or shoes. It’s the only sensible way to live.’

Mr McAloon aimed his words at Adrian. ‘I don’t know how much your father has told you about the world yet, young fellow. But if you’re going to grow up a responsible Catholic layman it’s time you realised this country has never been in worse danger. I don’t know how you city people survive with all those trashy books and films. And what about the spread of Communism?

‘The only safe place to bring up a family nowadays is somewhere like Mary’s Mount. You’ll find in a few years there’ll be thousands of Catholic families getting back to the land and cutting themselves off from the city altogether. If anything can save Australia, the move back to the land can do it. Closer settlement. We haven’t got much time left. The experts reckon by 1970 at the latest the whole of Asia will have gone Communist. We need a population of at least thirty to forty million to defend ourselves. You can see what the Communists are doing right now in the jungles of Malaya. Well, people like the settlers at Mary’s Mount are doing something about it.’

It was early afternoon, but the hills were so steep that the road between them was deep in shadow. Mr McAloon said, ‘I think the time I admired them most was when the Bishop of Ballarat refused to give them one of his priests to live on the settlement as their chaplain. Well, some of the leading families fixed up some tarpaulins and made a sort of covered wagon and loaded some tents and blankets on pack horses and started off walking and riding from Mary’s Mount to Ballarat.

‘I forget how many days it took them, but they got there and drove their wagon up the driveway of the Bishop’s Palace and squatted right there on the lawn. Now, don’t get me wrong. They’re fine folk. It’s just that they’re influenced by the customs of Catholic Europe. They don’t seem to care what ordinary Australians think of them. Some of the men wear their hair down over their collars, and one fellow who used to belong to the university has a bushy black beard. And I heard they had some homemade wine in their wagon and they started drinking the stuff on the Bishop’s lawn and handing round pieces of rather ripe cheese on the end of a knife. And Doctor Ray D’Astoli (he’s a talented man, Ray—gave up a wealthy practice in Melbourne to go back to the land), Ray D’Astoli rang the bell and said, “The Catholic farmers of Mary’s Mount within this diocese are come to wait upon the pleasure of His Grace, the Bishop, and crave audience with him.”

‘Those were the very words he used. He’s a wonderfully clever man, Ray. And the young priest who opened the door got all hot and bothered and didn’t know how to answer him. And they say the Bishop himself peeped through the curtains upstairs and thought a tribe of gypsies had descended on him. In fact the police in Colac went down to the camping ground when they were passing through because someone actually rang up and said the gypsies or some escaped lunatics had come to town.’

‘Unfortunately, no. It’s a long story and some of it’s not for young ears.’ (Mr McAloon glanced at his sons.) ‘You’ll see for yourself when we get to the Mount the single men and women have their own separate dormitories at least a hundred yards apart with all the married couples in between. But some people—even Catholics, I’m sorry to say—some people love to spread scandal and gossip whenever they see young men and women living up to ideals too high for themselves to match. More than that I’m not prepared to say. The Bishop didn’t want one of his priests serving a community with even the faintest breath of scandal about it. And so Mary’s Mount only has a mass in the chapel when a young priest comes down from Melbourne—he’s a brother of one of the founders of the settlement.’

Mary’s Mount was on the side of a hill so steep that the driveway for cars stopped halfway up. The McAloons and Adrian walked up a footpath with logs set into the slippery soil for steps. They passed small timber cottages that reminded Adrian of the illustrations in Heidi.

Mr McAloon stopped at a long building like a barn and asked a man was Brian O’Sullivan at home. The man led them inside. Mr McAloon whispered to Adrian, ‘The single men’s quarters—laid out like the dormitory of a Cistercian monastery—marvellous stuff.’

Ten little alcoves opened off a central passage. O’Sullivan came out of his alcove and took them inside. He and Mr McAloon sat on the bed—a camp stretcher covered with army blankets. Adrian and his cousins sat on stools cut from logs with globules of amber sap still stuck to their wounds.

O’Sullivan said, ‘I spent the morning weeding potatoes, and now I’ve been reading St Thomas Aquinas.’

He held up a large volume entitled Summa Theologica. ‘You know what we say up here at the Mount? “A man know’s he’s living well when he gets callouses of equal sizes on his knees and hands and backside.” It means he’s been kneeling in the chapel and working on the farm and reading in the library—all in equal proportions.’ Mr McAloon laughed loudly.

When the men started talking about the potato crop, Adrian asked could he visit the chapel. The McAloon boys took him outside and further up the hillside. The chapel walls were of logs with the bark still on them. The seats inside were of unvarnished timber, but the altar and tabernacle were the real thing—polished wood draped with starched linen and coloured silk. And in the tiny sacristy Adrian opened the drawers of the cupboard and saw a coloured chasuble in each. While Adrian fingered the vestments, Gerard McAloon said he thought some clever women from the Mount had made them all with their own hands. There was supposed to be one lady who spent her whole time washing and ironing them and dusting the chapel and polishing the sacred vessels ready for the day when the community would have its own priest to say mass there every morning.

Adrian shut the drawers and stood still. Leaves were scraping against the chapel roof. A blue-green bull-ant wandered across the well-scrubbed floorboards. Specks of dust drifted in and out of a thin shaft of sunlight.

Denise was still beside him (although he had almost forgotten her in the excitement of visiting Mary’s Mount). He led her out of the chapel and pointed out to her the beauty of it all—the cottages half-hidden among the trees, the rows of green potato plants in the rich red soil, the little sawmill with its heaps of pale-yellow sawdust—and whispered to her, ‘How could we think of bringing up our children near Hepburn Springs when we could have them all here protected from the world with our own chapel on the property?’

Back in the single men’s quarters, Mr O’Sullivan said, ‘I tried my hand at baking bread yesterday. It’s not too bad.’ He gave them each a piece spread with soft butter from a billy-can. Adrian’s piece tasted like a salted scone, but he finished it out of politeness.

On the way home Adrian asked his uncle whether the McAloon family might settle at Mary’s Mount one day.

Mr McAloon said, ‘Don’t think I haven’t given it a lot of thought. The only thing that stops me is I’d like to wait a bit longer and see what sort of farmers they turn out to be. Last year they lost a lot of money on potatoes through planting them at the wrong time. And they can’t sell any milk or cream because they won’t make their dairy conform to health standards. They should manage to be self-supporting in a few years, but they’ll always need some ready cash to pay for the little extras they can’t make themselves—like trucks and generators and machinery and rainwater tanks and cement and stuff.’

‘Yes, books too. But just quietly I think some of those university chaps ought to spend a bit more time dirtying their white hands with work and a bit less time with their books.’

At the top of a low hill near Colac Adrian looked back towards the Otways. From that distance he could see only gentle grey-blue slopes rising up from the cleared country. He was relieved to think that none of the people in Warrnambool trains or the cars that passed along the Princes Highway would guess what was hidden beyond those timbered slopes. Even if the Malayan terrorists or the Chinese Communists invaded Victoria, the Catholic couples of Mary’s Mount might still be safe and undiscovered in their shadowy gully.

Mr McAloon said, ‘Now, don’t get me wrong. Those people ought to put us to shame. One day the rest of Australia will copy their way of life. But there’s always got to be humble soldiers like yours truly to go on fighting Communism in the outside world. I could tell you about the Communists we’re up against in the Labor Party, but that’s a story in itself. You just wouldn’t believe the terrific battle that’s going on all round us right now.’

They left Colac behind and headed north towards Orford between tranquil green paddocks and through the long afternoon shadows of huge motionless cypresses.

Sherd and his wife spent several weeks planning their move from near Hepburn Springs to a Catholic rural co-operative called Our Lady of the Ranges, deep in the Otways. Denise was taking just two dresses, two sweaters, two sets of underclothes and her bathers. Her husband was taking one suit, one old pair of trousers with an old shirt and jumper to match, a pair of overalls and his swimming trunks.

They filled a small crate with all the books they would ever need—a Bible, the Catholic Encyclopedia, a History of the Church in twelve volumes, a bundle of Australian Catholic Truth Society pamphlets (mostly on purity and marriage to instruct their children in years to come) and some leaflets on farming published by the Department of Agriculture.

They were going to sell their house and furniture and pay the proceeds to the co-operative. They would draw a small living allowance if they needed it—Our Lady of the Ranges was a true community like a medieval monastery. (People often forgot that monks and nuns were practising the perfect form of Communism centuries before Karl Marx was ever heard of.)

One night just before they left for the Otways, Mrs Sherd asked her husband to continue the talks he had begun a little while before on marriage through the ages.

Sherd propped a pillow under his head, arranged the lacy collar of his wife’s nightgown into a pretty frame for her chin, and said, ‘Like everything else, marriage changed a great deal after Our Lord came down to earth to teach. We know that He made marriage one of the seven sacraments of His new Church, but we don’t know exactly when He did it. Some theologians think He instituted the sacrament of matrimony while He was a guest at the wedding feast at Cana. If so, then the lucky couple of Cana were the first man and wife to be properly married in the Catholic Church.

‘This doesn’t mean, of course, that all the couples who married in Old Testament times were not properly married. If their intentions were good and they were following their consciences to the best of their ability, then their marriages were probably valid. (It’s the same with well-meaning non-Catholics today—many of their marriages are quite valid.)

‘Anyway, the important thing is that Our Lord did make marriage a sacrament. And He taught his disciples quite a bit about it too. He said, “What God has joined together let no man put asunder,” which of course makes all divorce impossible. And He said those beautiful words about the physical side of marriage. (I used to feel embarrassed whenever the priest read them out in the Sunday Gospel, but I suppose they were over your innocent head.) You know—the bit about a man leaving his father and mother and cleaving to his wife so they become one flesh.

‘But the words I can never forget, the saddest words, I think, in the whole New Testament, are the ones He said when the Scribes and Pharisees told Him about the woman who had seven husbands on earth and asked Him which one would have her for his wife in heaven. And He told them there was no marrying or giving in marriage in heaven.

‘They say everyone finds some stumbling block in the Gospels—some teaching of Christ that doesn’t make sense and has to be accepted on faith alone. Well, those words about marriage are my stumbling block. I think they’re cruel and unreasonable, I wish they weren’t true, but because Christ Himself said them I believe in them.

‘Bearing in mind what Our Lord Himself has said, let’s be coldly realistic about the life we’ll lead in heaven. After the end of the world and the Resurrection of the Dead and the General Judgement we’ll all be given back our bodies. They’ll be glorified bodies of course. So, beautiful and flawless as your body is now’—Sherd gently stroked the whiteness of his wife’s throat—‘it will be a thousand times more perfect in those days. And let’s be quite frank about it—none of us will be wearing clothes. Theologians believe we’ll lose all our blemishes and moles and scars. I think myself we’ll probably also be without the ugly hair under our arms and elsewhere on our bodies.

‘There’ll be millions of people around heaven, but eternity is a long, long time and sooner or later you and I will meet up with each other again. Our glorified bodies will be based on those we had as young adults. So there we are, just as we were in the early years of our married life, meeting in some place even more beautiful than Tasmania. How will we feel towards each other?

‘Well, because I’m in heaven and my soul is saved, it would be absurd to think of me having an impure temptation when I see you, even though you’re stark naked and more beautiful than ever you were on earth. Besides, I would have got used to seeing beautiful young women naked all over the lawns every day in heaven (including, I suppose, a few film stars who repented on their deathbeds). In fact, if Our Lord was right about heaven (and He should have known, because all the time He was on earth His Divine Nature was enjoying Itself in Heaven, and as God the Son He helped to create the place anyway), you and I won’t feel any more affection towards each other than we feel towards any of the millions of other men and women of all colours in heaven—because otherwise we’d start to fall in love again and want to get married.

‘But the unfortunate thing is, we can’t help remembering all our lives together on earth. So when I look at your perfect body and all its most striking features I actually recall how excited they used to make me, although I don’t feel the slightest excitement any more.

‘When I look at your firm young breasts I probably admire them for the part they played in God’s plan for us by catching my eye some nights as you slipped into your nightgown and prompting me to ask you to yield to me in bed. Or else I simply praise them for the wonderful job they did each time you brought another child into the world—swelling to a prodigious size before the great day and then pouring out gallons of nourishing milk through the conspicuous nipples during the weeks when your infant pressed its hungry mouth against them.

‘And when I happen to glance at your supple white thighs and my eye quite naturally travels up them and rests for a moment on the intimate place enclosed between them, I suppose all I do is praise God for designing your body so that a part of it could accommodate my seed and afterwards perform its noble task of propelling another new creature into the world.

‘And that, I’m afraid, is all that will happen between us in heaven. I still think we’ll be allowed to stroll now and then through pleasant groves that remind us of Tasmania or Hepburn Springs or the Otways. And because those places once meant so much to us, we surely wouldn’t be breaking the laws of heaven if we held hands now and then or even exchanged an innocent friendly kiss.

‘If we feel like it we can both dive into a crystal-clear stream and swim around naked. You can even lie floating on your back all afternoon if you like and I won’t be the least bit interested. I won’t even have to be on guard against strangers finding our secluded spot. If a whole tribe of men and women saints suddenly appears beside our stream and stands looking down on us, we’ll just wave to them and go on swimming.

‘In fact our little outing will probably end with some handsome young man wading out to you and looking down on you with nothing but friendship in his eyes and telling you the story of how he was martyred fighting the Saracens in the siege of Acre. You and he will stroll off hand in hand, with you looking up into his eyes and telling him how you were married to a chap in the twentieth century and all about your children. I’ll watch you go, knowing I mightn’t run into you again for years, but I won’t be at all concerned.

‘Well, that’s what the Gospel teaches us, anyway. I still think it’s hard that couples like us who love each other so passionately must be no more than good friends in heaven. Perhaps the trouble is that my love for you is far greater than God expects of a husband. After all, He only requires people to be attracted to each other so they’ll marry and ensure a constant supply of new souls to do His Will on earth and glorify Him in heaven. If you and I have the largest possible number of children and turn them out good Catholics, that should be a sufficient reward in itself. We’ve got no right to expect that we’ll enjoy for all eternity the emotional and physical pleasures of being in love.

‘If you look at the history of the church you won’t find any saints who got to heaven simply because of their love for a wife or husband. The people honoured by the church as saints are those who never yielded to their emotions or passions. And I don’t mean just priests and brothers and nuns. Only today I was looking through my Daily Missal at the notes on some of the saints who were ordinary lay people like you and me.’

St Praxedes consecrated her virginity to God and distributed all her wealth to the poor.

St Susanne, a holy virgin of high lineage, refused to marry the son of Diocletian and was beheaded after grievous torments.

St Frances of Rome was the type of a perfect spouse and, after her husband’s death, of a perfect religious in the house of Oblates which she founded.

St Cecilia, of an illustrious Roman family, converted her husband Valerianus and her brother-in-law Tiburtius, preserved her virginity and was beheaded.

St Henry, Duke of Bavaria and Emperor of Germany, used his power to extend the kingdom of God. By agreement with his wife he preserved virginity in marriage.

‘These are the people we’re supposed to model ourselves on. There’s no record of any man who was canonised because he had an extraordinary love for his wife and gave up every other happiness to serve her as I’ve done for you.

‘When the saints I’ve mentioned got to heaven you can be sure they didn’t moon around looking for their lost loved ones. St Henry would have smiled politely whenever he passed his wife on some heavenly avenue. He might not have seen her for months, but he didn’t miss her because he had learned on earth that there are things more important than conjugal love.

‘I’ve never mentioned this to you before, and I hope it doesn’t dismay you, but I think I envy the people who haven’t been baptised. At least they have a chance of meeting their wives or husbands again in limbo and continuing their great love affairs. Limbo, as you know, is a place of perfect natural happiness. It seems reasonable to suppose that the greatest natural happiness of all will be permitted there. In fact, when all bodies have been resurrected after the General Judgement, there might be nothing to prevent a man and his wife in limbo from enjoying also some of the purely physical pleasures they once enjoyed in this life.’

Early in the third term Adrian’s class went on a retreat at the monastery of the Pauline Fathers. For three days and nights the boys lived at the monastery and observed some of its rules. They kept the Great Silence from evening prayers until after mass next morning; they ate their meals in the refectory while a lay brother read aloud the life stories of great saints; and they walked in the garden for a half-hour of meditation after breakfast.

The monastery was in a garden suburb a few miles from Swindon. Adrian arrived in a bus after dark. Next morning he stood at his upstairs window and looked across the huge lawns to the tall front fence and couldn’t work out the direction of Swindon or Accrington. He knew the name of the street and the suburb where he was. But it was a part of Melbourne he had never visited before. He might have walked for miles from the front gate of the monastery before he came to some tramline or railway station that could give him his bearings.

All the time Adrian was at the monastery he enjoyed feeling cut off from the world. He was hidden for a few days in one of the best suburbs of Melbourne for the purpose of looking into his soul and making sure he was on the right path.

Before the retreat, the brother in charge of Adrian’s class had suggested that each boy should take some spiritual reading. He said there would be free periods during the retreat when the best thing a boy could do was to read and chew over the sort of things he didn’t usually have time to read because of the pressure of his studies.

Adrian arrived at the monastery with three Australian Catholic Truth Society pamphlets and a Reader’s Digest in the bottom of his bag. The pamphlets were called Purity: The Difficult Virtue, Now You’re Engaged and Marriage Is Not Easy. The Reader’s Digest had an article entitled ‘Physical Pleasure—What Should a Wife Expect?’ Whenever the retreat program allowed free time, he went to his room and read.

On the last evening of the retreat, the priest in charge called the boys into the monastery parlour and invited them to start a discussion on some problem facing a Catholic young man in the modern world. The priest said he would act as chairman and perhaps give a short summing-up at the end.

The boys seemed embarrassed about talking in front of a strange priest, but at last John Cody stood up and said they ought to discuss the moral problems of boys and girls mixing together. The priest said it was an excellent topic and told Cody to start the ball rolling.

Adrian was glad he had taken a seat on the very edge of the boys and almost out of sight of the priest. He was angry with the priest for letting the boys choose such a frivolous topic.

The boys in his class talked for hours at school about girls they met on trams or at dances. They said such and such a girl was adorable or gorgeous or luscious or cute, but no boy ever dared to claim one of them was his girlfriend. Adrian knew that all these fellows dreamed of was to walk some girl home from tennis on Saturday or fetch her a paper cup of lemonade at the learn-to-dance class and stand beside her while she sipped it.

Adrian was sure none of his classmates ever lay awake for hours at night planning seriously his whole future with the young woman he loved. They wasted their time on tennis and dances and parties, and yet they were ready to discuss in all seriousness (in a retreat house, too) the moral problems of their childish games.

Adrian was spared all the petty troubles of teenagers because he had found quite early in life a young woman worthy to be his wife. At the first sign of any temptation against purity with any female he happened to see in the street, he only had to think of Denise McNamara and the danger was over. But his danger was far less than other fellows’ anyway—knowing that Denise returned his affection, he didn’t have to worry about dances and parties and company-keeping and goodnight kisses and all the rigmarole of modern courtship.

He looked out of the window into the dusk. The fence around the monastery was hidden in shadow. From where he sat he could see no sign of any street or even a neighbouring rooftop. If he could have kept his eyes on the dark shapes of trees and shrubbery and shut out the affected voices of his classmates as they stood up by turns and had their say and sneaked a look at the priest to see if they were saying anything heretical, he could have imagined himself in a forested landscape—the sort of place he preferred when he wanted to talk seriously to Denise.

A boy was saying, ‘Although we’re all students, and the main duties of our station in life are to obey our teachers and pass our exams, just the same we have to live in the world outside. You know what I mean—we go to dances and mix with the opposite sex. Some of us might even attend parties where the girls’ parents don’t come to collect them afterwards. So we’re expected to walk the girls home to their front doors. Now, the problem I’d like to hear discussed is this business of the goodnight kiss. You take this girl home and get to the front door and she says, “Thanks for everything.” And then what do you do? I mean, do you kiss her or just leave her standing there? I’d like to hear some other fellows’ opinions on this.’

Adrian was very anxious to be alone with Denise. Only a few hours before, in the recreation period after lunch, he had found information in his pamphlets and his Reader’s Digest that he had to share with her.

There was no time to fuss over which month or year of their marriage they were meeting in. He led her straight out through the french windows onto the deserted veranda. She sat on the stone parapet and leaned back prettily against the ivy-covered pillar. They both stared into the sombre forest.

Sherd said, ‘I know the Reader’s Digest is a non-Catholic magazine, but a lot of the things it says are quite useful if you’re careful to see that they’re not about faith or morals and they don’t contradict the church’s teachings.

‘Only today I found something in a Digest article that you ought to think about carefully. It seems that one of the causes of so much boredom in marriages these days is the wife always waiting till her husband asks her whether they can be intimate. This might shock you (I was a little surprised myself when I read it) but there’s no reason why the woman shouldn’t ask the husband sometimes whether he feels inclined to perform the act.

‘From my own point of view, I wouldn’t think any less of you if you whispered to me in bed now and then that you wouldn’t say no if I asked you.

‘And just to prove that all this isn’t just some idea dreamed up by sensual Americans—I’ve read in an ACTS pamphlet that each partner in a marriage founded on Christian charity learns to anticipate the moods and inclinations of the other. Which means for our purposes that you could make an effort sometimes to watch my moods and learn to tell when I’m likely to approach you. Then you can take some of the responsibility off my shoulders by asking me before I have to ask you.’

This was one of the most difficult conversations that Sherd had ever had with Denise, and he thought it best to leave her alone for a few minutes while the full meaning of it sank in. He turned back to the parlour of the retreat house.

Barry Kellaway stood up and said, ‘Wait a minute. Doesn’t it make all the difference whether the girl’s a Catholic or not? I mean, if she’s a good Catholic she’ll naturally be very careful what happens when she’s alone with a chap outside her front door.

‘If she thinks it’s the time and the place for a quick little goodnight kiss, the chap can do it quickly and she’ll make sure none of them puts themselves in any moral danger. And if she’s not a Catholic, then the chap ought to examine his conscience because he could easily be going into an occasion of sin whenever he takes her home on her own.’

The priest said, ‘For argument’s sake we’ll assume we’re talking about Catholic young people. It’s hard enough to make rules for ourselves without trying to sort out non-Catholics’ consciences for them. But I do agree that there’s no reason whatsoever for boys of your age to be hanging around front doorsteps with non-Catholic girls.’

Adrian went back to Denise and took her hand. He was a little afraid he might have spoken too frankly to her or given her too much new information at once. But her smile told him she was grateful for all the trouble he was taking to explain the whole range of Catholic teaching on marriage and the latest findings from America.

He said to her, ‘It’s interesting to note that both the ACTS pamphlets and the Reader’s Digest think it’s most important for each partner to make the act of love enjoyable for the other.

‘The pamphlets don’t use those words exactly, but they do point out that either partner would commit a mortal sin if he or she executed the sexual act for no other reason than his or her selfish enjoyment.

‘I think we both ought to examine our consciences to see if we’re doing all we can for each other in this matter. And perhaps in future you’ll do your best to make the act more enjoyable for me, while I make sure you’re perfectly comfortable with a nice soft pillow under your head and treat you gently and not get carried away with selfish lust.’

Denise stared into the twilight. All the talk about intimacy had put Sherd in the mood for it, and he hoped Denise would soon notice he was a little more agitated than usual and guess the reason for it.

Just then Alan McDowell stood up behind him and said, ‘No matter whether the girl’s a Catholic or not, she must have seen some modern films and realised it’s the custom nowadays for young people to have a quick goodnight kiss at the front door after a night together. If you don’t do it you could be making a fool of yourself and next time you see her she won’t be so easy to get on with.’

McDowell kept his eyes away from the priest, but several boys looked round as though they expected the priest to break in and explain how wrong McDowell was. The priest only pressed his lips tightly together and made notes on a slip of paper.

McDowell kept talking: ‘I reckon it all depends what sort of kiss you give her and how long it takes.’ (The room was suddenly very quiet.) ‘If it’s just a quick little one where you just brush your faces together it’s probably no worse than a venial sin. But if it’s one of those other sorts you sometimes see in films where they take a long time to finish’—someone blew his nose with a peculiar sound that might have disguised a snigger—‘well, I think they’re probably dangerous and they ought to be forbidden for Catholics.’

Adrian didn’t bother to listen any more. It digusted him to think of big, lumpish Alan McDowell trying out different sorts of kisses on girls he had no intention of proposing marriage to.

Sherd put his hand gently on Denise’s knee and said, ‘I found something else very interesting in the Reader’s Digest. You know, for many years people have thought it was only the man who was supposed to get some pleasure from the marriage act. The woman was expected to be a good wife and put up with whatever her husband did to her and get her happiness from the romantic love they shared.

‘Well, just lately these scientists and doctors in America have discovered that if a woman tries hard enough and learns not to be frightened, and the man doesn’t hurry too much, she might be able to get a sort of pleasure almost equal to her husband’s.’

On the veranda it was almost too dark to see what Denise thought of this. Sherd wondered whether she would say she didn’t need any more pleasure than she already got from seeing him happy and rested after the act, or whether she would smile shyly and say she would try to be more relaxed next time and see if the Reader’s Digest was right.

But before Denise could speak, Bernard Negri said, ‘It’s all right for Alan to concentrate on what sort of goodnight kiss you’re going to give a girl, but I think the most important thing for a Catholic boy to worry about is where the kiss takes place. I mean, we’ve been taught all our lives not to go into an occasion of sin. I think I heard once that if you deliberately go into an occasion of sin that you know full well will probably cause you to sin, you’ve already committed a mortal sin as serious as the one you thought you were probably going to commit anyway.

‘Well, as I was saying, it depends where you are when the kiss takes place. If you’re standing on her front veranda with the front light on and you know her parents are sitting up inside waiting for her, there’s probably no danger in it. But if you’re at one of these parties where the parents go away and leave the young people on their own and somebody turns the lights off, isn’t there a grave danger that you’ll be tempted to do something worse than kissing?’

Adrian congratulated himself for having avoided all the tangled moral problems of company-keeping. He kissed Denise tenderly on the forehead and said, ‘So much for the pleasures of marriage. To speak of more serious matters—even many good Catholics are not aware of all the graces and spiritual benefits they’re entitled to get from marriage. Luckily for us, I’ve always read everything I could find on the subject. And buried away in an ACTS pamphlet today I found a wonderful bit of news.

‘The author (a priest, of course) says marriage is a sacrament that goes on providing grace for the marriage partners all their lives. Year after year they can draw on this bottomless reservoir of grace to increase their own sanctity and earn for themselves a higher place in heaven. How? Well, believe it or not, every act of sexual intimacy between the partners (provided it’s performed with the right motives and isn’t sinful for some other reason) actually earns them an extra amount of grace.

‘That’s something to think about some night when you’re just about to say you’re too tired for it. If you can make a special effort to oblige me, you’ll enjoy a spiritual reward.’

It was now completely dark on the veranda. Sherd couldn’t see his wife’s face, but she squeezed his fingers to show she was quietly thrilled by what he had told her.

Inside, the boys had finished their discussion and the priest was walking out from his corner into the middle of the room to sum up.

The priest said, ‘You’ll notice I kept right out of the discussion, boys. It’s very important in a job like mine to hear the views of people like yourselves who have to live in the world, and let you explain your attitudes without any fear of having your heads bitten off by a priest for contradicting the church’s teachings.

‘By and large, most of you seem to have a fairly sound idea of where a young Catholic man stands when he’s dealing with the opposite sex. But I think the whole discussion went wrong somehow when you got onto this business of the goodnight kiss.’ (He looked at the notes in his hand.) ‘Now, I don’t want to single out any one boy for what he said, but one of you seemed to think that just because “it’s the custom nowadays” or “everybody’s doing it” or “you see it in all the latest films”, then a Catholic has to be in it and go along with the mob for fear they’ll laugh at him or think he’s old-fashioned.

‘If any boy still thinks after all his years at a Catholic secondary school that he’s going to decide what to do in life by what the rest of the world is doing, he’d better use the time remaining in this retreat to sit down and ask himself some very serious questions. Or, better still, he’d better make an appointment to see me or one of the other priests for a man-to-man chat.’

The priest paused and looked at his notes. The boys all knew it was childish and unfair to look at Alan McDowell just then, but most of them sneaked a look, even so. McDowell was pale and still, but otherwise he was taking it fairly well.

The priest said, ‘Perhaps this is the time to go over very briefly the few facts a Catholic has to know about this whole matter of mixed company-keeping.’

While he talked, the priest looked hard at one boy after another. Adrian was sure the priest was annoyed with the boys. He hoped the priest had noticed how he himself kept aloof from the childish discussion. Perhaps the priest would even realise from the look on Adrian’s face that he was far beyond the stage of kissing on doorsteps and already deep into the church’s teachings on married life.

The priest was saying, ‘It’s quite simple, really. The basic rules cover all possible situations that you’re likely to come up against. To commit a mortal sin you have to fulfil three simple conditions. There must be grave matter, full knowledge and full consent.

‘Now, there’s no need to explain about knowledge and consent. All of you are sane, rational creatures and you all possess free will. You know what it means to know fully what you’re doing. And you know what it means to consent to something fully with your will. These things are clear-cut. The third condition—grave matter—might not be so clear in your minds, but the church’s rules are very simple.

‘The pleasures of the body are for married people alone. At your age anything you do with a girl that gives rise to physical pleasure is sufficient material for a mortal sin. With regard to the bosom, the breasts of a girl—those are grave matter at all times. And you shouldn’t have to be told that her private places are absolutely out of bounds.

‘But of course you can commit a mortal sin with any part of a girl’s body. I can readily imagine the circumstances when a young fellow would sin over a girl’s hands or arms, the exposed skin around her neck, even her feet or her bare toes.

‘It’s no use saying afterwards, “But I only intended to give her an innocent kiss.” The church is older and wiser than any of you. Listen to her advice.’

While the boys followed the priest into the chapel for evening prayers, Adrian looked at their solemn faces and pitied them. They could do no more than look at the faces and forearms, and perhaps the ankles and calves, of all the girls they met until they finally married. How could they face such a bleak future without the thought of someone like Denise to inspire and console them?

Sherd’s daily life at Our Lady of the Ranges left him plenty of time for thinking. Thrusting his potato fork into the clotted red soil and lifting out the ponderous tubers, swollen with nourishment, or perched on a handmade stool in the milking-shed, resting his head against the glossy flank of a Jersey cow and squirting her warm creamy milk so that it rang against the silvery metal of the bucket or lost itself with a rich satisfying sound in the fatty bubbles all over the surface, he looked back on his youth or pondered over the problems of the modern world.

He often remembered the year before he met Denise—the year when he became a slave of lust and couldn’t sleep at night until he had seduced some film star. When he looked back on that year from the peace of the Otways (where he and his wife went to mass and communion every morning and confession every fortnight—although they had only a few petty faults to confess) he squirmed with shame. It was the episode in his life that still disturbed him.

Sometimes, to make himself more humble and less self-satisfied, he deliberately paused just before making love to his wife and thought, ‘If I were to do to this angelic creature beneath me what I once did to those bold-faced film stars; if I grabbed those parts of her that I used to handle and slobber over on their bodies; if I did everything slowly to prolong the act and tire her as I tired them; or if I lost control of myself at the last moment and said to her the crazy things I used to blurt out to them—’ But he could never imagine what she would do—the very idea was preposterous.

He often tried to work out why he had turned, in that year, from a normal Catholic boy in a decent household to a sex-crazed satyr rampaging across America. Thinking it over in the quiet valleys of the Otways, he was inclined to blame American films.

Not that he had ever seen his favourite film stars on the screen. It was not as simple as that. Adrian Sherd the schoolboy never saw more than five or six films a year. Half of those were Walt Disney films and the rest were chosen by his mother because they were classified ‘For General Exhibition’ and recommended for children.

Adrian’s mother used to say before he went to one of these films, ‘There’s bound to be a bit of love and romance and that sort of rot. But just put up with it and wait for the adventure parts.’

From the distance of the Otways, Sherd suspected that these supposedly harmless films might have started him on his year-long orgy of lust. Meditating on a leafy hillside, he watched them again and blended their complex plots into one.

An American man arrives in a strange town near a jungle or a desert or an enemy country that he must soon venture into. He looks across a hotel lobby crowded with foreign faces and finds himself staring into the eyes of a beautiful American woman aged about twenty-five. He falls in love with her at once, but he knows from the cold way she meets his eyes that others before him have fallen for her and been repulsed.

The man goes to hire the native porters for his expedition or to rendezvous with an army officer or a master spy who will give him his final instructions. When he returns to the hotel, he finds the woman sitting alone at a table in the dining room. Because he is leaving next day on a mission that may well cost him his life, the man is keyed up to an extraordinary pitch of bravery. He sits down at the table without being asked, and even starts a conversation with the woman.

He soon learns that she is single. (If she had been married, the romantic interest of the plot would have ended there and then—the man would have apologised for bothering her and left the table.) She has never allowed a man to do anything more than hold her hand or give her a friendly goodnight kiss. (This becomes apparent when the man’s eyes glance downwards at the inch or so of cleavage above the neckline of her evening frock. She catches him at it and gives him a long severe look that makes him glance away and fiddle with his glass from embarrassment.) She is visiting remote parts of the world to recover from a broken heart. (She is understandably vague when she talks about her past, but the most likely interpretation of her pauses and broken sentences is that she fell in love with a man in her home town in America but found her love was not returned.) Finally, she has no steady boyfriend just at present. (She says quite explicitly, ‘There’s been no one else since—I don’t think there ever can be.’ The man at the table understands from this that he is free to become her suitor.)

The man and woman dance together in the hotel ballroom, then walk out to the marble balcony. He tells her a little about the journey that he must begin next morning. A stranger leaps out of the shadows and throws a knife at the man. The man dodges the knife and shields the woman with his body. He is so anxious to protect her that the mysterious stranger escapes. However, the man is well rewarded when the woman leans on him and clutches the lapels of his coat. He does not hide his pleasure at having her so close to him. And it makes it clear to her that she has awakened his strongest instinct—the urge to protect a beautiful helpless woman at a moment of danger.

Because she is now frightened of the foreigners in the hotel, the woman asks the man to her room for a drink. While he fills her glass and hands it to her, he looks her over. Her hair is so neatly done and her lipstick and make-up are so carefully applied that she would obviously not welcome any man who tried to kiss or embrace her and disturb it. Her dress is securely fastened across her breasts. (It has not slipped a fraction of an inch during the whole time that Adrian has been watching it.) The dress is such a tight fit that no man could hope to loosen it even a little without her noticing what he was trying to do. Below her breasts the cloth is as taut and forbidding as a suit of armour—and there are no fastenings visible on it that a man could try to interfere with. Even the furniture in the room is designed to keep a man at a distance. She sits with her arm outflung along the back of a thickly padded couch that makes her look as regal and unapproachable as a queen.

Nevertheless, the man does dare to kiss her once before he says goodbye and leaves her room for the night. He does it in a restrained polite way, pressing his lips against hers for no more than half a minute and holding her so that no other parts of their bodies come into contact.

The man starts on his journey next day. He has many worries on his mind, but when he looks back for the last time at the town where the young woman is waiting, he is obviously hoping she will be true to him until he returns to continue his wooing.

Soon afterwards, the woman learns how perilous the man’s journey is and prepares to set out after him. When she explains this to a girlfriend, the girlfriend teases her and accuses her of getting too serious about a man who is only an adventurer. The young woman denies this, but with a dreamy look in her eyes that suggests she really is falling in love. She appears to have known from the way the man kissed her that he was in love with her, and now her own heart is beginning to melt.

For a long time after this the film shows only the troubles of the man on his journey. The woman is captured on her way to join him. It seems as though they will never meet again and have the chance to declare their love for each other. But in the end, the man (helped by loyal natives or friendly foreigners) outwits his enemies and approaches the place where the woman has been kept captive.

The very last scene between the couple has to be watched closely to reveal its full meaning. First, the man notices that the top buttons of the woman’s blouse have come undone during her struggles with her captors. She is still tied to a post with her hands behind her back. She is at his mercy. If he were only interested in her body he could lean forward for a moment and peep down the front of her gaping blouse or even slip his hand inside it or do much worse to her. But he does not even pause to consider these possibilities. He rips away the ropes that bind her and takes her tenderly in his arms.

This time she lets him kiss her more than once. She knows from the gentlemanly way he has rescued her that he really is in love with her. And in the excitement of being rescued she sees no harm in allowing him a few extra kisses, especially since the leader of the native porters or the foreign peasants is standing only a few yards off and grinning at them.

The film ends before the man actually proposes marriage. But anyone can see from the more relaxed way they behave towards each other that the man is only waiting for the right moment to ask her and that he knows already what her answer will be. And the woman seems to know what is in his mind and to be only waiting for the chance to say yes.

Looking back at such films from the pure air of the Otways, Sherd understood how they had contributed to his year of sin. The films had introduced him to a kind of woman he never came across in Australia—the attractive young woman in her twenties who had no boyfriend but travelled around waiting for the right man to fall in love with her and begin courting her. Because her heart had been broken in the past, she was fairly reserved with a new suitor. She only let him kiss her after he had given some proof of his devotion, and she would have slapped his face if he had tried to touch her improperly.

Adrian had never seen one woman of this kind in Accrington or anywhere in Melbourne. Yet he learned from films that thousands of them sat waiting at hotel tables from Maine to California—and even in foreign cities. If Adrian had had a girlfriend of his own at the time, he could have rejoiced to see films showing other people achieving the same kind of happiness that he himself enjoyed. But those were the days before he had met Denise. When the films were over he went home to his lonely bed and envied the men who met these young women on their travels.

What happened next was only too familiar to the man Sherd. He remembered it and did penance for it every day. In the heat of his lust he had invented a sequence of events that was a travesty of the films that inspired them. Like the male stars of the films, he had met eligible young women. But instead of courting them patiently and waiting for some sign of encouragement before he kept exclusive company with them or ventured to kiss them, he had undressed them and defiled them only hours after their first meeting. It was all so absurd compared with what really happened in films.

After years in the peaceful Catholic community of Our Lady of the Ranges, Sherd could see clearly all the faults of modern life in Australia. He knew there was something very wrong with a society that made it so hard for young men to meet young women with a view to marriage.

A young man growing up at Our Lady of the Ranges was free to choose a girlfriend from one of the families he mixed with every day. Their affection for each other grew steadily over the years. A smile from her at morning mass or a few words as they met on a rustic pathway would inspire him to work like a Trojan all morning in the potato paddocks or bend over his books of theology and church history all afternoon in the library. The years passed quickly until the fellow was old enough to call on her parents and ask for the young woman’s hand. From then until the day of the wedding, the young couple would sit together by the riverbank on Sunday afternoons, within sight of their elders but far enough away to talk privately together.

As more and more people left the cities and settled in co-operative rural communities, there would be fewer young women in any country who had to spend hours doing their hair and putting make-up on their faces and then sitting alone at hotel tables waiting for the right man to turn up. And of course there would be fewer single men walking past those tables and noticing the women sitting there. But best of all there would be fewer young men who had to spend years of their lives as solitary sex maniacs because they could only watch those single men and women meeting in films and never get the chance to do the same thing in real life.

During a House football match one Wednesday, it rained so hard that the brother who was umpire sent the boys to shelter under trees. Adrian Sherd and his teammates crouched under the dripping branches and looked for a break in the weather. The sky was unnaturally dark. Someone started talking about the end of the world.

The boys of Adrian’s class often discussed this topic when no brother was around. One or two of them had tried to bring up the subject in Christian Doctrine periods, but their teacher had always ended the discussion before it got interesting. The brother would agree that the world was going to end some day, but he insisted that no one—not even the most learned theologian or the holiest saint—knew whether it would happen tomorrow or a thousand years from now. The brother would allow that parts of the Apocalypse described the last days of the world and the signs of the coming end, but he said it was a risky business trying to look for these signs in the present day. All a Catholic boy had to do was to live each day of his life as though it was his last day on earth, and leave it to God to work out His plans for bringing the world to an end.

A boy looked out at the sodden football ground and said, ‘We know He won’t destroy the world again by water or send a terrible deluge again because in the Old Testament He showed Noah the sign of the rainbow when the flood had gone down.’

Another boy said, ‘It can’t happen yet because the prophet Elias hasn’t come back to earth. And there was someone else in the Old Testament who didn’t die properly either. Elias went up body and soul in a fiery chariot, and the church teaches that he has to come back to earth again and die properly. I’ve heard he’ll come back when the church is really in trouble and lead us in battle against our enemies.’

‘The Antichrist is going to be the church’s worst enemy. But he hasn’t come yet, and the world can’t end until he does.’

‘Will Elias know he’s Elias when he comes back? Or will he grow up thinking he’s just an ordinary Catholic schoolboy? He could even be one of us now.’

‘Wouldn’t he more likely come back the way he went up? I don’t mean in a fiery chariot, but roughly the same age.’

‘His body is somewhere in heaven right now. Seems creepy to think about it.’

‘That’s nothing. Our Lady’s body is there too according to the dogma of the Assumption.’

‘I used to think Stalin was him, the way he persecuted Catholics. But he’s dead now and the church is still going strong. Anyway, isn’t the church supposed to be defeated or nearly die out just before the end of the world? That’s not happening now, is it?’

‘Our Lord said, “Behold I am with you all days even to the consummation of the world.” The church can never be defeated.’

Stan Seskis joined in and said, ‘Listen. My old man’s a nong most of the time. But he’s right when he talks about Communism. You droobs don’t realise what the Communists are doing in Australia right now. When my father heard the Russians were coming into our country during the war he packed everything into a little leather bag and my mother carried me and my little brother in her arms and we got for our lives. After the war we sneaked across the border of Germany into the West. We had to cross a ploughed paddock and I was bawling the whole time because my shoe fell off and I couldn’t go back to get it. That’s all I can remember—I lost my shoe. I wonder what the Reds did with it if they ever found it. But my father knows what Communism means because he’s lived with it.’

Seskis kept talking. No one wanted to interrupt him. ‘And you know all this Petrov business and all the facts about Russian spies in Australia? Well, my old man’s known all about it for years. He knows the names of dozens of Communist spies in all the unions and the Labor Party and if it hadn’t been for him and his anti-Communist mates, the Commoes would have taken over Australia already. When I was a kid and we had all those strikes in Australia and grass was growing on all the train tracks and tramlines for months, well, my father came home one night and told us the Communists were just about ready to overthrow the government. He said it could happen any day, only this time they weren’t going to drive him out of his homeland a second time—he was going to stay and fight. And if you saw the list of Communists in his secret notebook (they’re all written in code) you’d be amazed how many enemies we’ve got all round us.’

Another fellow said, ‘That Bishop from China who spoke to all the senior forms that day—the one with the white beard who wrote Chinese words on the blackboard and showed us his chopsticks—didn’t he say the Chinese Communists had a plan to come down through the islands to Australia? That’s why these terrorists are fighting in Malaya right now.’

Someone else said, ‘But the Bishop told us there were millions of secret Catholics all over China—all the people the Columban Fathers had converted for fifty years. And if they get the chance they’ll rebel against the government and kick the Communists back where they came from.’

Adrian Sherd said, ‘I was reading in a Reader’s Digest the other day how the greatest allies the West has are the millions of Russians and Poles and Czechs and so on who hate Communism. They’re waiting for the chance to rise up if only we could encourage them.’

‘Well, why doesn’t America just send an army in? The Russian people wouldn’t fight for Communism, would they?’

‘But the Russians have got the hydrogen bomb. There was a story in the Argus one day about a foreign power dropping a hydrogen bomb on Melbourne. (They meant the Russians, of course.) Well, this old bushman from the Dargo High Plains rode his horse down to Gippsland once a year and caught the train to Melbourne. Only this year he wondered why everything was so quiet and the trees all looked as though a bushfire had passed through. And about fifty miles from Melbourne he started to notice all these dead bodies. Well, he headed back to the bush, but the whole of Melbourne was wiped out.’

‘But why would the Russians pick on Melbourne anyway? Wouldn’t they bomb New York or Washington first?’

‘You know Therese Neumann. She’s a living saint in Germany. She’s still alive today in a village called Konnersreuth. For thirty years now she’s never eaten any food or drunk any water. The only thing that keeps her alive is her holy communion every morning. And every Thursday night she starts to suffer all the wounds and pains that Our Lord suffered in His Passion. And by Friday afternoon her face is covered with blood as if she had a crown of thorns pressing into her forehead, and all the marks of the stigmata appear on her hands and feet. The cleverest Protestant doctors in Europe have studied her for years and no one can explain how it happens. My mother wrote away to Germany once and got back a bundle of holy cards from Therese Neumann’s own village. All the prayers were in German but my cousin translated some of them. And there was this little leaflet with the whole story of the Miraculous Stigmata of Therese Neumann.

‘Anyway, Therese Neumann has made some prophecies, and the worst one I can remember is that priests will be hanging from lamp posts in Melbourne in 1970.’

No one spoke for a while. All round the tree where they crouched, the raindrops made little holes like bomb craters in the mud. On the far side of the deserted football field, a ragged file of boys stumbled and ran towards the pavilion. Further still, on the other side of the creek, was a long grey paling fence that marked the end of all the backyards in some street of a suburb that Adrian Sherd had never entered. (He guessed it was Woodstock or Luton or even the edge of Camberwell.) The back porches were swept by rain and the doors and windows were all shut.

Adrian answered, ‘Only about twenty-five per cent,’ and looked at the rows of locked non-Catholic houses on the hills around them.

A man came towards them with a black oilskin cape hiding his face. It was a brother to tell them the football matches had all been abandoned and they’d better get for their lives back to the pavilion.

The football pavilion had timber nailed over the windows where the glass should have been. The sky was so dark that the boys inside could barely recognise each other. Some of them went on talking about prophecies while they changed into their school uniforms.

A boy said, ‘There was an old Irish monk centuries ago. His name was Malachy, I think. He made all these prophecies about the popes who were going to come after his lifetime. He said a few words about each pope like “Great Builder” or “Defender of the Faith” or “Destroyer of Heresies”, and so far they’ve all turned out true. He called Pius the Twelfth “Very Saintly Shepherd” or something, and it’s true he’s one of the holiest of all the popes.

‘Well, the scariest thing is—there’s only five or six popes left on Malachy’s list. So if he’s right, the end of the world could happen before the year 2000. Because the Catholic Church has to last until the end of time, and if there’s no more popes that’s the end of everything.’

A fellow said, ‘But the Antichrist still has to appear. He’s probably alive now—a young man growing up in Russia or China and planning to destroy the church.’

‘Who wins in the end, anyway? Does the Apocalypse say whether the Catholics or Communists win the last battle?’

‘Our Lady told the children at Fatima that if enough people all over the world offered up prayers and penance, she would make sure Russia was converted and there’d be no Third World War after all.’

Adrian Sherd said, ‘We won’t have to fight the Russians on our own. I read a Reader’s Digest article about Turkey, and the Turks have always hated the Russians, even before they turned Communist. And they’re ready to fight them again if the Russians start anything. The end of the article was this big Turkish soldier looking across the frontier and saying, “One Turk has always been as good as three Russians in battle.”’

‘What about the secret message that Our Lady of Fatima gave to the children in a sealed envelope and told them not to open it for twenty years? And didn’t Francesca give it to the Pope and when he opened the first part of it a few years ago he fainted? And Francesca is a nun now, and her hair’s turned white because she knows the first part of the message too. When are they going to open the second and third parts?’

‘I’m not sure, but the nuns told us at primary school that when the Pope was seriously ill a few years ago he had a vision of Our Lord that he wouldn’t tell anyone about. But people in the Vatican think Our Lord must have told him something about the future and what will happen to the church and he’s hardly ever smiled or laughed since.’

‘If only Our Lord or Our Lady would appear to the Russians and show them a cross in the sky to frighten them or convert them or make them leave us alone.’

‘Even if they appeared in Australia to tell us how many years we’ve got before the end of the world! If it’s only going to be a few years we all ought to study for the priesthood instead of going to work or getting married.’

‘Did anyone read in the paper last year about that woman who drowned her two little kids in the bath and tried to gas herself because she didn’t want to be alive when the Communists took over the world? They put her in the loony bin but one of my mother’s friends knew her well and she said she could understand how any woman with young kids would do a thing like that nowadays.’

Adrian and the little group around him were the last to leave the pavilion. They walked across the playing fields in pouring rain to the East Swindon tram terminus. No one talked any more about the end of the world.

In the tram back to Swindon, Adrian stood near the door because his clothes were too wet to sit in. He stared at the enormous houses along the tramline and wondered, as he always did, who else beside doctors and dentists and solicitors could be wealthy enough to live in such places. In all his life he had never been inside the front gate of any house like them. But instead of envying the people inside (as he usually did), he almost pitied them.

While hundreds of millions of Chinese and Russians were preparing for a Third World War, the people of Melbourne’s garden suburbs were going about their business as though there was nothing to worry about. They were thinking of wall-to-wall carpets and radiograms and washing machines while saints and prophets and the Reader’s Digest foresaw at least a terrible war and perhaps the last days of the world.

Even if they went to church, the garden suburbs people only sang Protestant hymns or listened to long sermons about Hospital Sunday or gambling or being converted in your heart. Their sons went to Eastern Hill Grammar and enjoyed themselves at parties or looked forward to years at the university and careers in the professions, while Adrian prayed to God every night to put off the end for a little longer so he could enjoy a few years of happiness as the husband of Denise McNamara.

But it wasn’t unfair that thoughtful Catholics had such worries while non-Catholics enjoyed themselves in their spacious homes. It was far better to look at the future realistically than to live for the pleasure of the moment. Adrian and his classmates had been brought up to think deeply about the things that really mattered. Their Catholic education had trained them to use their reason—to probe beneath the shallow surface that Protestants and atheists never questioned. And if the price that Catholic intellectuals had to pay was to worry about the terrible times ahead—well, at least they would have the last laugh one day when the Communists took over the garden suburbs or the armies of Elias and Antichrist drew up for battle on the outskirts of Melbourne.

Adrian hoped that all these prosperous doctors and solicitors and their spoilt sons and daughters would have time before the end to apologise to the Catholics and admit they were right after all. Of course the fools would spend all eternity blaming themselves for their folly anyway, but it would be very satisfying to have some big golden-haired Eastern Hill fellow come up to the boy he hadn’t even noticed on the trams years before and say, ‘For God’s sake, why didn’t you Catholics tell us what was coming?’

The answer to the fellow’s question, of course, was that he wouldn’t have listened anyway. All over Australia, Catholics like Stan Seskis’s father were trying to warn people about Communists in the unions, but how many listened to them? Only forty years before, Our Lady of Fatima had worked one of the most spectacular miracles of all time—the sun had danced and spun around and floated down towards the earth in front of sixty thousand witnesses—but how many people were doing what Our Lady had asked, and praying and offering up penance so that Russia would be converted?

Even while the non-Catholics of Melbourne were sitting in front of their electric fires and their wives were fiddling with their expensive pressure cookers, a holy woman in Germany was still alive after fasting for twenty-five years—but who listened to her prophecies or took notice of her visions?

The tram climbed the last hill towards the Swindon town hall. Adrian looked back at the miles of dark-red roofs and grey-green treetops and the mass of rain clouds above them. He knew it was wrong to gloat over the fate of thousands of people who had never deliberately done him harm. But he whispered into the breeze blowing past the tram that they were all doomed. And he saw the end of the world like grey rain bearing down on suburb after suburb—Oglethorpe by its winding creek, Glen Iris on its far hills, yes, and even Camberwell, the leafiest of them all—and the people in their last agony crying out that if only they could have had a Catholic secondary education they might have seen it coming.

Early in the third term, the boys of St Carthage’s started practising for the House Sports Meeting. Adrian Sherd decided to train for the B-Grade 880 yards. Three nights each week he got out of Denise’s compartment at Caulfield and went to the racecourse to run. On those nights he always let his bag dangle open in the train so Denise would see his sandshoes and running singlet and realise he wasn’t deserting her for some frivolous reason.

He thought of her all the time he trained. In his last year at St Carthage’s, after he had started to talk to her on the train, she would tell a white lie to her teachers and turn up at the Swindon Cricket Ground to see him run in the A-Grade 880. Meanwhile he improved his stamina by hissing her name under his breath as he ran.

One night three other boys agreed to run a trial 880 yards with him at the racecourse. Adrian dropped out well behind them in the early part of the race. His breath came easily and he barely whispered Denise’s name. With about three hundred yards to go, he began his run. The effort to reach the others made him puff. He hissed the beloved name fiercely and didn’t care who heard him.

The other runners were stronger than Adrian had expected. In a last desperate effort to catch them he fixed her face, pale and anxious, a little to one side of the winning-post and punished his weary body savagely for her sake. A few yards short of the finish he caught and passed one of his rivals, but the other two were already crossing the line.

When the runners all stopped and looked at each other, Adrian suddenly heard the strange noise he had been making. It was always hard to fit the word ‘Denise’ into the rhythm of his breathing, and in the strain of the last hundred yards it had changed to a meaningless gasp, ‘Nees-A! Nees-A,’ that was no help at all to him.

That night, for the first time since he had met Denise, he wondered if her influence over him might be weakening.

A few nights later Sherd and his wife were climbing down towards a lonely riverbank in the Otways. It was Sunday afternoon and they wanted to be alone for a few hours, away from the people of Our Lady of the Ranges. They were surprised to hear squeals coming from the river. They got to the little beach in time to see a naked man and two naked women dash out of the water and sprint towards a big beach umbrella and a heap of towels and clothes.

One of the women was a tall leggy brunette, and the other was a blonde with ample curves. Each of them kept an arm across her breasts and a hand between her thighs as she ran, so that Adrian was not forced to shield his eyes from them. But he flung himself in front of his wife to save her from seeing the man’s big hairy organ flopping up and down.

Sherd took his wife to the far end of the beach, but he kept thinking of the man and the two women. More than once he was tempted to stroll over and start a friendly conversation with them. He tried to convince himself there would be no harm in it, since the women would almost certainly be fully dressed. But when he remembered he was a married man with a beautiful young wife beside him, he came to his senses and admitted he was experiencing an impure temptation.

The boy Adrian Sherd was as shocked as the man when he realised how close he had come to turning his back on his wife and going into an occasion of sin. A few months before, the thrill of chatting to his wife in her bathers would have been so powerful that he could have kept his back turned all day on a beach full of naked film stars.

He realised that the married life of the Sherds was becoming too remote from the daily life of the young Adrian Sherd. Mrs Denise Sherd was a wonderful wife, but perhaps a boy in Form Five needed someone nearer his own age.

Adrian decided to act. On the very next night, he lay down in bed as usual, but instead of reaching out a hand to stroke the long black hair and the pale shoulder of his wife, he leaned across the compartment in the Coroke train and said to Denise McNamara, ‘Excuse me, but I’ve been meaning to speak to you for some time.’

He wasn’t brave enough to look her in the eyes as he spoke. He watched her hands and was encouraged to see her fiddling with her gloves and exposing the creamy-white skin of her wrists. When she answered him, her voice was just as gentle and sincere as he used to dream it might be when he sat opposite her in the train and waited for them both to grow older so he could talk to her and begin his long patient wooing.

They called each other ‘Denise’ and ‘Adrian’ without formally introducing themselves—although they were both too shy to mention the day when they showed each other their names on exercise books. There was so much to talk about—the subjects they studied at school, the sports they played, the radio programs they listened to at night, the things they did at weekends. When Denise said she liked going to the pictures when she got the chance, Adrian knew she was inviting him to ask her to the pictures in Accrington some day when they knew each other better.

Adrian got more pleasure from hearing the schoolgirl Denise talk about her likes and dislikes and hobbies than he had once got from imagining her as his wife. He chatted to her every night for nearly two months. The only bother he had was that sometimes when he stood near her in the train of an afternoon, he almost forgot himself and blurted out the story he was saving for their conversation that night.

When it was almost December, Adrian decided to speed up events so he would be deeply involved with her before they had to part for the long summer holidays. One night in bed he asked her quietly would she care to go to the pictures with him on the following Saturday night. It was much easier than he had expected. She even blushed a little as she answered, proving that this was the first time any young man had asked her out. She told him she would ask her parents, and the next day it was all arranged.

On the Saturday night Adrian and Denise sat together in one of the special buses that took crowds of young couples from outlying suburbs into Accrington to the Plaza or the Lyric.

During the first picture Adrian leaned his upper arm against Denise’s shoulder and was pleased to see she did not draw away from him. At interval he gently grasped her elbow when she was jostled by the crowds around the ice-cream counter.

The main picture had a lot of kissing and romance. Adrian was not interested in the plot. He was planning for the moment when he would reach out boldly and take Denise’s hand. It was lying naked and limp and easily within his reach, just above her knee. He couldn’t approach it where it was—Denise might see his hand coming and think for an instant he was going to touch her on the thigh. But at last she lifted it onto the armrest between them, which he had left unoccupied for that very purpose. He still had to wait until there was no kissing on the screen. (He reasoned that if he reached for her hand at a moment when a man and woman were pressed together in the film, Denise might think he was planning to court her with kisses and hugs like a man from Hollywood.)

At last, when a band was playing a song with only a suggestion of romance in its words, he rested his hand on hers. The white hand did not move. He lifted it up with all the tenderness that his five fingers could express and laid it between his palms (keeping it as far away as possible from his own thighs and lap). Still it did not even twitch or tauten. He saw from the corner of his eye that Denise was watching the film as if nothing had happened to her hand.

He knew it was only modesty that made her hand so limp. She must have suspected he was deeply in love with her, but she would have to be absolutely certain of it before she could yield any part of her body to him. He kept her hand in his and tried to convince himself that his dream really had come true at last, that he was actually sitting beside Denise McNamara and caressing her hand. And then he had a powerful erection.

It was the biggest and strongest that he had ever had in a public place—almost certainly more fierce than the monster that had appeared for no reason one morning in Form Three and lasted all through a Latin period. It made a conspicuous mound in his trousers as it tried to stand upright and flex itself.

Adrian’s first thought was that he must keep the thing hidden from Denise. He lifted her hand back onto the armrest, gave it a farewell pat, and left it there. Then he slid his left hand (the hand farther from Denise) into his trousers pocket and slowly eased the huge thing until it lay pointing along the inside edge of his thigh. It was uncomfortable and restless in its new position, but at least it no longer made a threatening lump in his trousers. He thanked God that Denise kept her eyes on the screen while all this was going on.

Adrian gave up trying to follow the film and prepared for the moment when the lights came on and he had to stand up and walk outside with Denise beside him. He concentrated on the most frightening thoughts—losing his trousers on the way back from the communion rails at mass; letting off a thunderous fart as he walked past the microphone to receive his prize on the stage of Swindon town hall at St Carthage’s Speech Night; vomiting all over his examination answers just before the supervisor came to collect them in the crowded Exhibition Building. But he could not make his erection go down.

When the film finally ended Adrian kept his left hand in his pocket to hold the thing down. He had to walk very slowly, but he pretended to yawn a lot so Denise would think he was tired. In the bus he had some trouble getting Denise to sit on his right side, away from the battle going on in his trousers.

Denise invited him to her house for a cup of tea. Adrian limped towards her front gate, trying to look down at himself in the light from a street lamp to see how much was visible.

He prayed that her parents would be in bed, but they were in the lounge room listening to Geoff Carmichael’s Supper Club on the radio. Of course Adrian had to take his hand out of his pocket to be introduced to them. He was sure Mrs McNamara didn’t notice anything unusual. (She looked to be in her forties, so she probably hadn’t seen anything like it for years.) But Denise’s father looked him up and down quickly before shaking hands. Adrian was sure the father of a girl as beautiful and innocent as Denise would be always alert for signs that her purity was threatened. If Mr McNamara had noticed the least sign of movement in Adrian’s trousers he would be too polite to say anything about it with his wife and daughter in the room, but he would tell his daughter afterwards that she was forbidden to associate with that young Sherd fellow any more.

The parents soon left the young people alone in the dining room. Denise leaned forward across the table to talk to Adrian about the film. He said to himself (slowly and distinctly, so the message would travel down his nerves into his groin) that he was looking into the eyes of the most chaste and modest and beautiful girl in the world. But instead of dying of shame, the thing in his trousers reared up as if he had promised it some filthy pleasure.

For the rest of his time in the dining room, Adrian let his erection do what it liked out of sight under the table while he took a pure delight in looking at Denise’s pink earlobes, the white hollow at the base of her throat, and the faultless symmetry of her face.

When it was time to go, he walked behind her to the front door. Then he dodged quickly past her and said goodnight over his shoulder. He had never intended to kiss her after their first outing together. He wanted to emphasise that it was not physical gratification he was looking for when he went out with her. It was just as well—he shuddered to think what might have happened if he had stood with his body close to hers and no free hand to keep in his pocket.

By the time he had closed the McNamaras’ front gate his erection had shrivelled up and promised to cause no more trouble that night. But Adrian was already planning how to outwit it when he next went out with Denise.

After school a few days later, Adrian took a tram from Swindon into the city and went to a shop he had learned about from advertisements in the Sporting Globe. In the window he saw wheelchairs, artificial legs, bedpans, braces for injured backs, strange thick stockings and things he supposed were trusses. He asked the man at the counter for an athletic support and hoped he looked like a footballer or bike rider who needed one for a genuine reason. The man came towards him with a tape measure. Adrian shrank back. He couldn’t believe he had to take out his privates in the shop and have them measured. But the man only pulled the tape measure around Adrian’s waist and went to some drawers behind the counter. Adrian would have asked for a size smaller than his fitting but he was afraid the man would think he was some kind of pervert who tortured his organ before he masturbated.

That night Adrian wore the jockstrap to bed under his pyjamas. Before he lay down, he pressed his penis flat against his testicles and pulled the belt of the jockstrap as high as it would reach around his waist. Purely as a part of his experiment, he teased his organ by poking it with his fingers. It swelled a little, but the elastic easily held it down. Adrian was satisfied it would give him no trouble that night, no matter how long he held Denise’s hand, or even if she responded by squeezing his.

A little later he was chatting to her again in the Saturday night picture bus to Accrington. Everything was peaceful between his legs because he knew he wouldn’t be reaching for her hand until they had settled down in the theatre and the lights had gone out. Suddenly the young woman in the seat in front of them leaned her head on the shoulder of the young man beside her and shifted her body until it pressed against his. Adrian shifted an inch or so away from Denise to show her he didn’t approve of couples making an exhibition of themselves in public. Denise sat very still. He supposed she was as irritated as he was by the couple. But then she placed her hand calmly and deliberately on the seat between them, with the fingers neatly arranged as though she meant him to place his own hand over them.

Before he had time to consider whether Denise was actually inviting him to hold her hand and whether he ought to take it so early in the evening, there was trouble in his jockstrap. His member was straining against its bonds and arching itself into a shape like a banana. He clasped Denise’s hand quickly to distract her attention.

He held Denise’s hand all through both films. He avoided giving it any unusual signs of affection such as squeezing it or stroking it, and he was glad to find that it lay quietly under his the whole time. Some time after interval his penis seemed to concede defeat and lay down peacefully.

As the film ended Adrian was looking forward to talking with Denise on the bus and in her dining room. He was halfway to the bus stop before he realised he had underestimated the enemy in his jockstrap. While he had been watching the second film it had eased itself into a new position. (He might even have helped it unwittingly when he shifted his legs around.) Now it was pointing ever so slightly upwards and stretching just enough to keep itself there. Whenever it chose—in the bus, or in McNamaras’ lounge room in front of Denise’s parents, or more likely on the front veranda when he tried to kiss her goodnight, it could draw itself up to its full height and stand out like a broomstick against the front of his trousers and make a mockery of his courtship.

Adrian stood for a minute in the middle of his darkened bedroom. He took a few steps forward and then reached down once more to check what was happening beneath his pyjamas. His enemy had consolidated its position still further.

Adrian realised he could never escape from the danger of mortal sin. He would always be at the mercy of his own penis. He took off his jockstrap and hid it in his wardrobe. Then he put on his pyjamas and climbed into bed.

There was just one more thing to do before he went to sleep. He walked up the path to McNamaras’ house and knocked on the front door. Denise herself opened it. She was not his wife or his fiancée or even the young woman he had twice taken to the pictures. She was a sixteen-year-old schoolgirl in the tunic and blouse and jacket of the Academy of Mount Carmel.

She hesitated to ask him inside because her parents were both out and she was alone in the house. He stepped past her and strode into the lounge room. She closed the front door and stood in front of him. She had never looked more beautiful and pathetic. She said something like, ‘I always thought it would end like this,’ or ‘It was impossible from the start.’ But he was not really listening.

He gripped both her wrists with one hand. With his free hand he tore at her clothing. Something, perhaps the memory of all she had once meant to him, made him hesitate to undress her completely. He simply exposed the charms that he would never enjoy and stared at them for a long, solemn moment. Then he released her.

She stumbled backwards and fell among the cushions on the couch. She lay there, fumbling with her clothes to cover herself. The last thing Adrian saw before he turned and walked out of the house forever was the emblem on the pocket of her jacket, the snowcapped holy mountain of Carmel with a circle of stars above it, falling back into place over her naked left breast.

After his jockstrap had let him down, Adrian still caught his usual Coroke train, but he got into the rear carriage, well away from the Mount Carmel girl’s carriage, and he only travelled as far as Caulfield. He was training every night at the racecourse for the House Sports. He wore his new jockstrap whenever he trained, and found it improved his running.

One morning instead of the usual Christian Doctrine period, Adrian’s class had a priest to speak to them.

The priest was a stranger. He put his hands in his pockets, leaned back against the brother’s desk and said, ‘My name is Father Kevin Parris and my job is to visit secondary schools to give advice to any young chaps like yourselves who want to find out about the work of the secular priest.

‘You all know the difference of course between a secular priest like myself and a religious priest—a member of a religious order—who takes a vow of obedience to the head of his order. I think it’s fair to say that the secular priests are the backbone of the church. Not even the most ancient of the religious orders can trace its history back as far as we can. The first priests that Christ ordained were secular priests. I’m talking of course about the Apostles—the very first Catholic clergy. And the work that Christ sent them out to do is the same work that the secular priests of the Melbourne Archdiocese are doing today.

‘You boys know without being told what that work is. Maybe a few of you live in parishes that have been entrusted to some order or other, but the great majority of you were baptised by a secular priest, you made your first confession to a secular priest, and you received your first communion from a secular priest. Those of you who marry in later life will probably receive that sacrament in the presence of a secular priest. And when you come to die, please God you’ll receive the last sacrament from one of us too.

‘Of course there’s a thousand and one other tasks we perform as well. You might compare us to the rucks and rovers in a football team. We have a roving commission to go wherever we’re needed and do the heavy work. And boys, just like any other football team, the priests of your archdiocese need a steady stream of recruits.

‘You might be interested in a few facts and figures about vocations to the priesthood here in Melbourne. I was ordained myself in 1944—that’s ten years ago now. At the ceremony in St Pat’s Cathedral there were seventeen of us ordained for this archdiocese. Now, in those days, seventeen new priests were barely enough to meet the demands of the archdiocese. I remember the Archbishop telling us all that we were only going to fill the gaps left by deaths and serious illness among the priests of Melbourne.

‘Well, that was 1944. Now, I don’t have to tell you how Melbourne has grown in the last few years. Think of all the new suburbs stretching for miles out towards Frankston and Coroke and Dandenong where there were only farms and market gardens a few years back. And all those suburbs need Catholic churches and schools for the families growing up there. Then think of the thousands of New Australians who’ve come to this country since the war—most of them from Catholic countries. All these people need priests to serve them.

‘And what do we find? This year, 1954, we had twenty-three ordinations. That’s just six more than in 1944. You can see we’re not really keeping up with the demand for priests. It’s been calculated that we need a minimum of fifty to sixty ordinations each year until 1960 just to properly staff the parishes we’ve already got and keep some of our overworked priests from cracking up under the strain. Our team is up against it. We’ve got our nineteenth and twentieth men on the field and we’re fighting overwhelming odds. The coach is crying out for new recruits. And this brings me to the point of my little talk to you.

‘Theologians tell us that God always provides enough vocations for the needs of His church in every age. In others words, this year all over Melbourne God has planted the seeds of a vocation in the hearts of enough young men to meet the needs of our archdiocese. But God only calls—He never compels. So if we find next year an insufficient number of candidates entering our seminary, we can only conclude that a great many young men have deliberately turned their backs on a call from God.

‘And now I’m going to speak bluntly. Bearing in mind the needs of our archdiocese at present, I would say that each of the major Catholic colleges (and this includes St Carthage’s of course), that each of them should have at least ten boys in the matriculation class this year who’ve been called by God to be priests in the Archdiocese of Melbourne. Next year most of you chaps will be in matric and the same will apply to you. Which means there could well be ten of you listening to me now who’ve already been called, or will soon be called by God, to serve Him as priests.

‘To have a vocation to the priesthood, a boy needs three things—good health, the right level of intelligence and the right intention. Good health means an average constitution strong enough to stand up to a lifetime of hard work—you all look to me as if you’ve got that. As for intelligence, any boy who can pass the matric exam (including a pass in Latin) will have the intelligence to cope with the studies for the priesthood. Health and intelligence are fairly easy to judge. The third sign of a vocation is the one you have to be really sure of.

‘A boy who has a right intention will first of all be of good moral character. Now, this doesn’t mean he has to be a saint or a goody-goody. He’ll be a good average Catholic boy who’s keen on football and sport and works hard at his studies and doesn’t join in smutty conversations. Of course he’ll have temptations like we all do. But he’ll have learnt how to beat them with the help of prayer and the sacraments. And as for the right intention, well, it could be the desire to win souls for God—to give up your whole life to do His work.

‘An example of a wrong intention would be, for instance, to want to be a priest as a way of advancing yourself in the eyes of the world. But thank God in these days it’s very rare for anyone to offer himself for the priesthood for reasons like that.

‘And that’s really all there is to it. If you have good health, the right level of intelligence and a right intention, you’ve almost certainly got a vocation to the priesthood. The trouble is, too many young fellows think they have to get a special sign from heaven. They expect an angel to tap them on the shoulder and say, “Come on, son, God wants you for a priest!” Or perhaps they think they’ll have a vision some morning after mass, and see Our Lord or Our Lady herself beckoning to them. Nonsense! All the priests I know have been thoroughly normal young chaps like yourselves who realised one day that they had all the signs of a vocation. Then they prayed and thought about it and talked it over with a priest and that was that.

‘Sometimes a fellow can realise he’s got a vocation in funny ways. One of our outstanding young priests always maintains he got his vocation at a dance. It seems he was standing in a corner watching all the happy young people enjoying themselves around him when he suddenly realised that all this was not for him. God was calling him all right, and compared with the life of a priest, all the pleasures of the world seemed worthless.

‘Some men say they knew from the time they were small boys that they had a vocation. Others never realise it until they’re grown men—sometimes years after they’ve left school. The idea that God is calling you can grow on you slowly or it can hit you like a flash of lightning. There may be someone in this room right now who has never before asked himself this simple question, “Is God calling me to be a priest in the Archdiocese of Melbourne?” If any one of you is in this position, it might be a good time now, when you’re approaching your last year of school and wondering what you’re going to do with your life—it’s a good time to ask yourself seriously and honestly, “Is God calling me?”

‘Boys, would you each take a pencil and a piece of paper and write down something for me. For the sake of privacy I must ask you all to write something. If you can say in all honesty that you definitely don’t have a vocation to the priesthood, just write “God bless you, Father” or something like that on your paper and don’t put your name. If you’re at all interested in the priesthood, just sign your name and write the word “Interested”.

‘Those who are interested can have a chat with me in the brothers’ front parlour some time today. I’m not a salesman, remember. No priest would ever dare to put pressure on a boy in such a serious business as this. If you care to have a chat with me I’ll arrange to send you some literature and leave you my phone number if you want any further advice from time to time.

‘Now, would every boy write on his paper and fold it up small and pass it to the front, please.’

Adrian wrote, ‘Definitely interested—Adrian Sherd.’ He folded his paper and passed it forward. Then he sat back and told himself he had just taken the most dramatic step of his life. But then he remembered you couldn’t make a decision as important as this without a lot of prayer and thought. Yet the young man at the dance had decided in a flash that he would give it all up. (Some of the girls in their ballerina frocks would have been almost as beautiful as Denise McNamara.) And now that man was an outstanding young priest and the girls were all happily married to other chaps.

Soon after lunch a message came for a certain boy to see Father Parris in the brothers’ parlour. The whole class watched him get up from his seat and go. They were not surprised—he was quiet and solemn and he objected to hearing dirty jokes.

Adrian waited for his turn to visit the priest. He was worried about Seskis and Cornthwaite and O’Mullane seeing him leave the class. He saw them putting up their hands and saying, ‘Please, Brother, Sherd can’t talk to the vocations priest—last year in Form Four he committed nearly two hundred mortal sins.’

Father Sherd stepped up to the pulpit to begin his first sermon in his new parish. He saw the three of them grinning up at him from the back seats. They were ready to heckle him with shouts of ‘What about Jayne and Marilyn?’ They had already sent an anonymous letter about him to the Archbishop.

But God would keep their lips sealed. He would never allow one of His own priests to be reproached in public for sins that had been forgiven years before. And how could Seskis and the others speak out without revealing their own guilty secrets?

When it was Adrian’s turn to leave the classroom, he stood up boldly and strode to the door and silently offered up his embarrassment as an act of reparation to God for the sins of his past life.

Adrian said to the priest, ‘My story is probably unusual, Father. When I was at primary school I served as an altar boy for years and developed a great love for the mass and the sacraments and often wondered whether I might have a vocation to the priesthood. But I’m sorry to say a few years ago I fell among bad companions and had a bit of trouble with sins of impurity—not with girls, fortunately, but on my own—mostly thoughts, but sometimes, I’m sorry to say, impure actions.

‘Luckily I never gave up trying to fight against these sins and I’m happy to say that now for a long time I’ve led a normal life in the state of grace. I’ve thought a lot lately about the life of a priest, and I’ll certainly be praying about it before it’s time to make up my mind next year about entering the seminary. But I sometimes wonder if my past sins would mean that I couldn’t possibly have a vocation.’

Adrian was surprised at how calmly the priest heard him out. Father Parris said, ‘Take my advice and forget all about whatever you might have done years ago. You know your sins have all been forgiven in the sacrament of penance. What counts now is the sort of fellow you are now. Keep on praying to God and Our Lady and you’ll soon find out what’s expected of you.

‘Now, let’s have your name and address and I’ll send you a booklet about the life our young fellows lead in the diocesan seminary. Have a good look at it and just go on quietly with your studies and have a chat to your parish priest from time to time. And next year, if you’re still interested, we can talk about your applying to enter the seminary.’

The priest looked at his watch and consulted a list of names in front of him. He said, ‘Now, would you ask John Toohey to see me when you get back to your room?’

When Adrian left school that afternoon he knew he could catch Denise McNamara’s train if he strolled down Swindon Road to the station. But he walked into the Swindon church and knelt in one of the back seats.

He saw how the last few troubled years of his life were really part of a wonderful pattern that could only have been worked out by God Himself.

First came the year of his American nonsense—it revolted him now, but its purpose had been to show him that sinners were never happy. Then came Denise’s year. God had arranged for him to meet Denise because at that time the influence of a pure young woman was the only thing that could have rescued him. Now, Denise had served her purpose. The terrible scene in her lounge room only a few nights before had proved that she no longer had the power to keep his lust in check. It was God’s way of warning him not to rely on a mere woman to save his soul.

Now, after a year without sin, Adrian was the equal of those average Catholic boys of good moral character that the priest had talked about. The next part of the pattern was becoming clear. He was almost certain he had a vocation to the priesthood. Like the young man on the dance floor he had sampled the joys of mixing with the opposite sex and found them shallow and unsatisfying.

He still had a year to wait before he could enter the seminary. He would devise a scheme of meditations on his future as a priest to sustain him through his year of waiting.

Adrian knelt and prayed until he knew he had missed Denise’s train. Then he left the church and hurried to the station. He decided to visit the church each afternoon until the end of the year to spare himself and Denise the embarrassment of meeting again after it was all over between them. She would be puzzled for a while, but a girl so beautiful would soon attract other admirers. And one day, eight years later, she would open the Advocate and see pages of pictures of the newly ordained priests and realise what had been on his mind when he stopped seeing her on the Coroke train years before, and forgive him.

In the last weeks of the school year, Adrian had to spend most of his time preparing for his Leaving Certificate exams. But every night before he began his studies he allowed himself to consider his future as a priest.

He lifted the well-polished bronze knocker and rapped at the door of a comfortable double-fronted solid-brick house in a peaceful valley of a suburb beyond Camberwell. The middle-aged woman who answered the door was a stranger to him, but when she saw his Roman collar she said, ‘Come in, Father.’

Reverend Father Sherd remembered that a priest should never give occasion for scandal. He asked the woman, ‘Are you alone in the house, madam?’ When she said yes he began talking to her on the doorstep, where the neighbours could see them if they were peeping from behind their front curtains.

The woman and her husband were lapsed Catholics. She admitted to Father Sherd that they played golf on Sundays instead of going to mass. Father Sherd chatted amicably to her for a few minutes to show her he was human. Then, when he saw that she was off guard, he gave her three minutes of his best preaching.

He used all his most powerful arguments—the infinite mercy of God; the joy of the angels in heaven when a sinner repented; the sufferings endured by Christ to redeem every member of the human race; and many more. When he had finished, the woman bowed her head. He allowed himself to touch her gently on the arm as he said kindly, ‘Tell your husband I’ll be expecting you both at mass next Sunday.’

As he walked down the path between the neat beds of standard roses, he reminded himself that his success with the woman was not due to any ability he might have possessed but to the grace of God working through him.

A booklet with the title The Priest came in the post to Adrian from Father Parris. It was made up of articles written by young priests of the Melbourne Archdiocese. Adrian was especially interested in the articles describing life at the seminary where the young priests had trained. This was the life he himself would lead for seven years after he had left school.

The seminary was surrounded by quiet farmland a few miles past the western suburbs of Melbourne. The students were safe from all the distractions of the city. Instead of reading about the Cold War and the bodgie gangs in the Argus, they got up before six each morning and went to mass. They had hours of lectures each day. They called their teachers ‘professors’. The place was like a university except that the seminary courses were longer and harder. And instead of the merely descriptive sciences such as physics and chemistry, the seminarians studied the Queen of Sciences—theology. Adrian wondered how he could wait a whole year before he threw himself into the life of the seminary.

Several articles in the booklet were written by young priests to describe their experiences in their first parishes. They could hardly express in words the joy and excitement of their first masses and the satisfaction that they got from administering the sacraments to people.

Father Sherd settled himself in the dark confessional. He adjusted the violet-coloured stole around his shoulders and pulled back the wooden screen near his head. A young man began his confession. Father Sherd kept his eyes closed to avoid embarrassing the penitent.

The fellow confessed impure thoughts about the young woman who worked beside him and occasional impure actions by himself. Father Sherd advised him to keep his eyes on his own desk at work and to take up a hobby to occupy himself in his spare time at home.

The fellow said ‘What hobby did you take up to cure yourself, Sherd?’ It was O’Mullane grinning through the grille of the confessional.

What could the young priest do? Force O’Mullane to confess the additional sin of sacrilege for having shown disrespect to one of God’s anointed priests? Tell him the true story of how a good Catholic girl had saved him, Sherd, from a life of sin and then bind O’Mullane under pain of mortal sin never to repeat the story outside the confessional? Ask the Archbishop for a transfer to a quiet rural parish where O’Mullane and the others would never find him? But the list of priests’ transfers was always published in the Advocate. O’Mullane or Cornthwaite or Seskis would read about his transfer and drive to his parish to torment him. If ever they were short of money, they could try to blackmail him—five pounds each week from the collection plate or else they would print the story of his past life on a duplicator and leave sheets on all the seats in the church before his Sunday mass.

Adrian worried whether he was truly suitable for the priesthood. He knew that Canon Law would not allow a man to be ordained if his appearance was likely to cause amusement. (This law was hard on devout young men with St Vitus dance or huge warts on their faces. But its purpose was to preserve the dignity of the priesthood.) If the enemies of the church got to hear about the pranks being played on young Father Sherd, other clergy might be subjected to disrespect.

Adrian visited his Aunt Kathleen. He remembered the many occasions when he would sit in her front room among her altars and flickering fairy lights, asking her about indulgences and reliquaries and other esoteric Catholic subject matter while inwardly he was like the Pharisees in the Gospels—a mass of corruption. Now, at last, he could look her in the eye with nothing to conceal from her.

He said, ‘I’ve been wondering lately whether I might have a vocation to the priesthood, but whenever I think of the daily life of a priest in his parish it doesn’t attract me. I mean, being for years in some suburb like Accrington and trying to preach to people and save their souls but they remember me when I was a schoolboy in short pants.’

His aunt did not answer at first. She bowed her head and moved her lips. She walked to her statue of Our Lady and murmured something. Then she sat down beside Adrian and said, ‘No one can ever say I’ve tried to influence any of my nephews or talk them into vocations. All these years, I’ve deliberately said nothing to put the thought into your mind. But now I can tell you my great secret. Every day since you were born, I’ve prayed that you or one of your brothers would be called by God. And now that my prayer has been answered, I’ll see that nothing stands in your way.’

She looked hard at him. ‘Now, who’s been talking to you about the life of a secular priest? They’ve sent their vocations salesman around the schools, have they? And I suppose he told you the secular clergy have got first claim on you, and the religious orders shouldn’t come poaching on the seculars’ territory.’

She got up and walked to a corner of her bookshelf. ‘I’ve left these here for ages, hoping you’d take an interest in them, but you were always more interested in my magazines whenever you visited me. The poor old Orders never get a chance to reach you young chaps in secondary schools.’

She was holding a stack of booklets and pamphlets. She dealt them like cards all over her coffee table and said, ‘Last year, when they held that big Catholic Life Exhibition in the Exhibition Buildings, I went to every one of the stalls run by religious orders of priests and collected their vocations literature. Young fellows just don’t realise what a wonderful life they could have in a religious order instead of being stuck for year after year in a dreary parish.’

Adrian and his aunt spent all afternoon comparing the different orders that he could join. Mostly, he leafed through the pamphlets and booklets while his aunt talked. It was like learning about the histories and traditions and club colours and mottoes and past champions of the various clubs in some glorious football league, and savouring the pleasure of deciding which club to give your allegiance to.

Some orders had special devotions or aims. The Blessed Sacrament Fathers dedicated themselves to the perpetual adoration of Our Lord in the Blessed Sacrament—at every hour of the day or night, a member of the order watched and prayed before Our Lord exposed on the altar in the chapel of the monastery. The Carmelites spread devotion to Our Lady under her title of Our Lady of Mount Carmel and promoted the wearing of the miraculous scapulars (brown, red, white, blue and green) that she had given to St Simon Stock when she appeared to him in a vision. The Columban Fathers worked all their lives as missionaries with the aim of winning over the whole of Asia to the church. The Dominicans were the intellectuals of the church and were often to be found in the great Catholic universities of Europe. The Redemptorists were famous as orators. They travelled from parish to parish conducting missions. Some of their sermons about the punishments of hell had converted lifelong sinners. The Passionists had a special devotion to the Passion of Our Lord—his sufferings during his last days. Each Passionist, in addition to the usual vows of poverty, chastity and obedience, took a vow to spread this devotion worldwide.

Some orders had attractive habits or emblems. Adrian admired the sweeping white robes and black capes of the Dominicans. The brown of the Franciscans was quietly distinctive. The Redemptorists wore peculiar collars that looked as if they were missing a button. The Passionists caught Adrian’s eye in their black robes with a striking white badge over their hearts.

When Adrian had made himself familiar with the uniforms and special devotions of the different orders, he spent a pleasant hour with an atlas of Australia, studying the location of their provincial houses, monasteries, seminaries, retreat houses and priories. He was especially curious about the places where the students and novices spent their years of training. He was delighted to see that most orders kept their students well away from the capital cities, in converted mansions or huge brick buildings with cloisters and a private chapel and rows of windows overlooking a formal garden and views of farmland or distant mountains.

Adrian’s favourite picture in all his aunt’s collection showed a group of young men with a billy can and a sugar bag of provisions setting out for a picnic. The men were in the driveway of a massive stone building with a tower that seemed to Adrian to belong in the Balkans. Behind the building was a broad vista of farmland and beyond it a blur of rooftops in the outlying streets of a fair-sized country town. Visible in the background of this picture was a path bordered with flowering cannas. A student might have walked up and down that path, reciting the Divine Office or praying or meditating, with nothing to distract him but the sound of bees in the shoulder-high canna blossoms. Each time the student reached the end of the path and turned to stride back, he glimpsed the vista of paddocks and the distant roofs. Men were at work in the town. Women were shopping. Children were swinging their legs under their desks in school. All of them—men, women and children—had forgotten the real purpose of life. The student in the grounds of his hilltop monastery, with the Blessed Sacrament in the chapel under the Balkan tower and a library of theology books somewhere on the second storey and the rules of his order regulating every hour of his day and bringing him gradually nearer to perfection—the student would offer up a pious ejaculation on behalf of the people in the far town and would turn back to his meditation between the stately cannas.

The caption beneath the picture read: Lads off for a day’s hike at the Charleroi Fathers’ junior seminary near Blenheim, NSW. But who were the Charleroi Fathers, and what was a junior seminary?

Adrian’s aunt explained that some religious orders allowed boys of secondary school age to test their vocations in junior seminaries—places just like boarding schools except that students followed a modified version of the rule of the order concerned. Junior seminaries were common in the Catholic countries of Europe, according to Aunt Kathleen. She thoroughly approved of them. It was tragic how many young chaps felt they had vocations at the age of thirteen or fourteen but later got distracted by the temptations of the world.

As for the Charleroi Fathers, their real name was the Congregation of Christ the King, which was too much of a mouthful for most people. They had been founded at Charleroi in Belgium in the early eighteenth century by St Henry de Cisy. He was a young nobleman who wanted to serve as a soldier in the cause of the Catholics against the Protestants. But as a young man he had a vision of Christ wearing a golden crown and enthroned as the King of the World. Christ asked Henry why he chose to serve an earthly ruler when he could serve a heavenly king, and Henry was a changed man from that moment. He studied for the priesthood and later founded the Congregation of Christ the King. The special aim of the order was to turn the whole world into the kingdom of Christ. Their mother-house was in Belgium, and they had numerous houses in Europe, but they were a comparatively small order in Australia, and Aunt Kathleen didn’t really know much about them.

When Adrian heard about the junior seminary in the remote countryside of New South Wales, he knew that he had found his order. If his parents agreed, he could join the Charleroi Fathers as a junior seminarian as soon as the Christmas holidays were over.

Before he finally committed himself, there were a few more things he had to find out. What sort of robes did the Charleroi Fathers wear? The pictures of priests showed them in black cassocks, but some sort of emblem could be seen near the collar. Adrian’s aunt believed it was a cross surmounted by a crown. Adrian hardly cared what the design was, so long as it was embroidered in a rich colour. His aunt seemed to recall that it was red or blue.

Where exactly was Blenheim, and where would a Charleroi student study for the priesthood after he had left the junior seminary? Adrian and his aunt consulted the leaflet. Blenheim was about a hundred and twenty miles south of Sydney on the main railway line to Melbourne. After the junior seminary came the novitiate year in the hills near Adelaide and then three years of philosophy at a modern brick monastery in Canberra followed by three years of theology in the headquarters of the Australian and New Zealand Province of the order—a spacious building of two storeys in a northern suburb of Sydney.

Adrian would do none of his training in Victoria. By the time he was ready to be ordained, the boys of St Carthage’s, and even Denise McNamara, would have forgotten him.

Last, what sort of work did the Charleroi Fathers do? Did they manage any parishes in Victoria, for instance? As far as Aunt Kathleen knew, the order mostly conducted missions in parishes all over Australia and gave retreats for priests and nuns, although they were not often seen in Victoria. Reverend Father Sherd CCR (the letters stood for the Latin Congregatio Christi Regis) would spend most of his time far from the dreary suburbs of Melbourne, the site of his shameful sins and romantic daydreams.

Mission priests worked in pairs. During the fortnight of each mission, they preached in the parish church at night and visited Catholic homes by day, always with the aim of rekindling the faith in the lukewarm or the lapsed. In the late 1960s, Father Sherd began a mission in an outer southeastern suburb of Melbourne. During his first sermon, he thought he recognised one of the several upturned faces in the congregation. He faltered for a moment but quickly recovered. From that moment on, he preached like a man inspired. Each time he paused for breath, he saw some tough old workingman drop his head into his hands or some hard-faced housewife press her hand to her mouth in shame.

Next day, in a quiet street, Father Sherd rang the doorbell of a neat cream-brick veneer. According to the parish records, it was the home of Mr and Mrs Gerard O’Connell and their five children. The young mother opened the door. It was Her!

They looked at each other for a few moments before either spoke. Motherhood had made her even more beautiful and rounded the curves of her still-youthful body. She would have seen lines in his face and hollows in his cheeks from the harsh life that he led as a religious priest, but his eyes burned with the zeal of a man who had given up everything for God. And in his gaze was no trace of the regard he had once had for her—respect, yes, but romantic affection, no!

They sat for five minutes in her lounge room. He addressed her as Mrs O’Connell, and she called him Father. Her younger children played around her while he asked her politely about the state of her soul. Of course, she was as pure and devout as ever. Her husband was at work. She said he was a God-fearing man who treated her well.

When Father Sherd was leaving, she asked him to bless her and the children. She knelt on the polished boards of the lounge-room floor and gathered her children around her. He stood, tall and gaunt in his black cassock, above her. The afternoon sun streamed through the venetians and lit up the red or blue insignia below his collar. He uttered the Latin formula for the blessing with all the fervour that he could summon. Then he farewelled her and strode to the front gate without looking back.

The sermons given by Father Sherd on the following nights were so impassioned that word of his preaching spread to neighbouring parishes. A loose-living bachelor named Cornthwaite thought he would travel from one of those parishes to sit in a front seat and embarrass the acclaimed mission-priest. Cornthwaite rode over on his motorbike, but the church was empty. The fortnight of the mission had ended, and Reverend Father A. Sherd CCR was in a window seat of the Spirit of Progress express, travelling back towards New South Wales in the service of Christ the King.