I

Born in Sydney in the southern hemisphere’s spring of 1935, after Mussolini had in another unimaginable continent invaded Ethiopia, and while my parents were down from the country town of Kempsey trying their luck in bad economic times, I had been named Michael Thomas by my mother. But my father incorrectly registered me under the name Thomas Michael. At home and in the world my mother and father called me Michael. It suited my nature to have an untouched and unsuspected legal first name in reserve, though two-named possibilities did not tease me at that stage nor need delay us here. For this is not an exhaustive tale of boyhood but of the one reckless, sweet, divinely hectic and subtly hormonal year. That is, in my case, 1952. It seems to outweigh the other years, to be the most succulent and the most dangerous. Its consequences, lightly embarked on, have not to this day ceased to tease, govern and turn on me.

At sixteen, I was in the business of defying gravity in an unlikely place called Homebush. I think it might have been named this because it had once been a tangle of scrub not much more than fifteen miles west of Sydney and encountered by nineteenth-century colonial gentry as they rode west or came up the Parramatta River to their country homes in Strathfield. By 1952 Homebush was a lesser suburb of the remote Commonwealth of Australia in the still existent British Empire.

In 1952 I did not smoke, and abhorred jovial adolescent farting. I seemed even to myself barely to eat. I studied both alone and with a blind friend, Matt Tierney. I worked, ran races and did my best to be everywhere at once – an undiscriminating blob of European yearning.

I shared my aesthetic impulses in particular with a calmly anarchic boy called Mangan, angular, dreamy and stubborn, who lived in grander but not grand Strathfield. He had the goods over all of us and over his suburb: he intended to be a Trappist monk. Mangan had given a name to the axis he and I and a few other conscripted souls formed: the Celestials. I have always thought of us since under that title. We were a gang whose main act of subversion was to pretend we were not where we were.

At night, by the railway line in Homebush, I slept as lightly as the teenage eighteenth-century prodigy of poetry, Thomas Chatterton, whose work I had found in the Mitchell Library in Sydney. He was one of my heroes because he proved you could become immortal by seventeen years of age. At five years, said his biographer, Chatterton ordered a cup to be made with an angel blowing a trumpet, so that it might blow his name throughout the earth. And the angel did a great job, since Chatterton’s poetry, much of it in ‘bogus Middle English’ and supposed to have been written by a medieval priest called Rowley, was hugely praised, even though people objected to the deception. When Chatterton took arsenic in London in 1770, Wordsworth called him ‘the Marvellous Boy’, and Keats dedicated Endymion to him.

Arise, good youth, for Sacred Phoebus’ sake!

I know thine inmost bosom, and I feel

A very brother’s yearning for thee steal

Into my own …

As I slept in the Eastern Australian nights of 1952, in Tennessee Elvis – soon to be discovered – was scowling and thrusting his way towards fame. Rock was imminent. But I went against the age, and Chatterton was my rocker. I too wanted to be a marvellous boy without having to take arsenic. I was a very strange little bugger.

Wafer-thin dreams occupied these nights by the railway embankment between Homebush and Flemington, the Western Line being only thirty yards from and level with my parents’ bedroom window in our upstairs flat at No. 7. Sydney’s umber electric trains passed east to town, and west to the Blue Mountains and the mulga, the bushweek towns in the great plains, from which came Australia’s wealth – wheat, beef, wool. The big 52 locomotives, such as my grandfather had driven, hauled the imports from the port of Sydney into that hinterland we called the bush. Accustomed pulsations from those New South Wales Government Railway’s steam engines were barely felt in my Chatterton sleep. The railway line ran through our senses like a river, dragging memory and compartments full of lovers by our windows.

The railway had been the road of high drama for the four of us. My mother, father, little brother Johnny, me. Now having grown angelic and having read modern poetry, I had contempt for it. As I stood at the top of the outside stairs, the embankment ran across my vision like a gag on the imagination. But earlier, as an infant down from the country with my parents, I had been excited to see the traffic of electric and steam trains, had stood on the little castellated balcony of our upstairs flat just to watch.

During the Second World War sentimental Yanks (some of them, of course, Southerners) had been borne down that rail to training camps in the bush. When we waved, they showered us with two-bob coins, used comic books and gum. A silver rain of coin of the Realm and Wrigley’s gum falling in Loftus Crescent.

Down the rail, too, went the guarded carriages of Italian POWs. Militia and regulars of Mussolini’s Italian Empire. They’d gone to a lot of trouble to prove the Australian 6th Division were supermen by surrendering to them in platoon, company, or battalion lots.

The night my father, Leading Aircraftman Edmund Thomas Keneally, had gone to the Middle East, my pregnant mother and I had come down that line wistfully by electric train afterwards. I heard my mother tell someone later that my father harboured an ambition to move on to Europe during his foreign service in the Middle East (as from our position in the world’s far south we dutifully called it). He might go to Ireland on leave and see his own emigrant father’s village in north Cork. But the Japanese would soon come to preoccupy Australia’s military and rule European service out.

As for us, Homebush was the one option. I can taste the flavour still of that extraordinary, fatherless Tuesday night, the blacked-out city, the special glow of dismal lights within the shuttered carriage, my grief for the warrior’s leaving and my triumph in having my mother under my seven-year-old protection.

I woke at sundry times in the next three years feeling the first savage, gasping regret in my life, all to do with my father. At Auntie Kate’s at Penrith one weekend, I’d said during an argument with him that I hoped he would be taken prisoner. Indeed his ship came close to being sunk by the Japanese in the Indian Ocean. He and other airmen slept on deck in life jackets as, in the radio hut, call after call from torpedoed vessels came in.

As male of the family, I gave my mother an anxious time. I would not be able to climb out of the lower half of my class. I was frequently incapacitated by asthma, which in those days mothers – not infections, the humid climate, the backyard grasses, the dust mites in households – were blamed for. At five, in Kempsey, I had been admitted to hospital with a severe respiratory seizure which came close to taking my life. Then she would nurse me through pneumonia in 1944, and ended so exhausted the doctor put me in the Children’s Hospital so that she could have a night’s rest.

But despite these vulnerabilities, she invested me with the proud position of household male. I carried the napkin bag. I walked beside her to Mass. Our alliance was no doubt intensified by the absence of father and spouse. She had a preposterous faith in my survival and that I would succeed at school.

Then, when history had had its way, the railway by our windows delivered the soldiers home. First, a very spruce-looking Lance Corporal Frizzell, yellow from taking Atabrin for malaria. My father was still with a squadron in Egypt, but Laurie Frizzell had had to return only from the closer shores of New Guinea. He carried the rifle with which he’d made the Yellow Peril think twice, and was still gaitered in case he encountered swamps. An immaculate hero just stepped off the electric train. And towards him ran Dulcie Frizzell, a honey-blonde woman. Until that point, I’d thought of her as ancient – twenty-eight years, something like that. But I was astounded by her ardour. When alerted by neighbours she ran up the street and flung herself into Laurie’s arms. A phenomenal kiss occurred, far more primal than anything I’d seen at the Vogue Cinema. All by courtesy of the steel river which had washed up Lance Corporal Frizzell.

From observing the kiss, it struck me at ten years that in some ways women were girls for a long time. This was a piece of information I would later temporarily forget when I became a Celestial.

One day in late 1945, we caught more or less the same train which had delivered Lance Corporal Frizzell. It was a case of my mother, myself, and my nearly three-year-old fair-haired brother going to collect my father from the war. Train first, then bus to a great barn of a hall at Bardwell Park. We were there by ten in the morning, the hall packed with young mothers waiting to show husbands the two or three or four-year-old fruit of the pre-embarkation leaves of 1941 or ’42. And all the old children like me believed that the war had transformed their fathers to sages and heroes, that there would never be a quarrel with them as in the previous dull days before the old man went off to the cataclysm.

Men arrived from the ship all day, in some sort of order, alphabetical or otherwise, and two thousand reunions had taken place before a jovial middle-aged corporal told us that the Ks were coming, and we were taken out to meet a truck from which Sergeant K and other men jumped, each one with a kitbag and a suitcase, and there were extraordinary caresses and an unfamiliar paternal patting of my cheek. I had a sense of proudly surrendering care of the hearth back to him. Yet I felt odd with him, like many of the children of that era who greeted returning fathers. Later generations would receive this sense of hiatus on the way to adulthood through divorce. My generation got it through the wartime removal of the father. He embraced for the first time my handsome little blond brother, who reassured himself by saying, ‘Daddy? Daddy?’

And then of course we all went home by train on the Western Line, the Western Line serving all drama, restoring paternity too.

But these days a Celestial, I would walk miles rather than catch a train. Mangan and I and sightless Matt Tierney, who listened to music with his chin lifted, and the Frawley girls caught the train in to the free Town Hall concerts of the Sydney Symphony Orchestra, conducted by a genius named Sir Eugene Goossens. But we would have flown there on the wings of desire if we could have.

I possessed a handy belle dame sans merci named Bernadette Curran, head prefect of Santa Sabina convent school in Strathfield, who sometimes joined us for those afternoon concerts. She was slim, athletic, and had olive, unmarred skin and a forthright manner. Occasionally I crossed her path, and this tale is in part an exorbitant log of these transits of Venus.

My Byronic friend Mangan and I walked rather than rode to school because we had become neo-Gothic children and needed time for reflection on how to deal with our placement in time and the universe.

Mangan was very happy that Trappist monks had come from France and England and settled outside Melbourne, thus making it possible for him to make his way back to the Middle Ages. The Trappists lived in utter silence.

‘It’ll be nothing but gesturing then, Mangan,’ Larkin, a fringe though mocking Celestial, told him. Larkin was one with Mangan and me aesthetically, but he was also a solemnly self-declared agnostic. Even though he had to sit through Religion classes, brief as they might be at our senior level, he had frankly announced his state of mind to his parents. He made up for his heresies by his taste for poetry and history, and both he and Mangan were united in contempt for my own main heresy. Sporting passion. The ideal of the poet-athlete. ‘No poet has ever worn shoulder-pads,’ Mangan told me.

Those two and Matt had this over me: their relationship to the Western Line was in my eyes the right, southern one, whereas I found myself improperly located on the north. The line’s flinty, iron stench marred the dreams of incense. The old and by now clichéd story which I must try to tell as well as possible was this: the line separated me from the better suburb of Strathfield, from the older, more settled, hilly, leafy and genteel streets. As always in these situations, most of what I believed I loved and wanted was on the other side. Teachers and other boys said, ‘You live down the other side of the line in Homebush, don’t you?’ So it was either in the school records or legible in my features. I was one street beyond the municipal pale.

I made up for it by dressing rakishly, as the Romantic poets had. If I could get away with it, and prefects generally could, I wore my blue-and-gold tie loose as a cravat. My grey felt hat was crushed. For Byron never did his hair. The seventeen-year-old prodigy Chatterton’s shirt had been unbuttoned when he committed suicide. Percy Bysshe Shelley didn’t wear neck ties. Within the limits of the grey serge uniform of St Patrick’s Strathfield, I did my best to show people I was an aesthete and a wide-open spirit.

My father, who was a much more dapper person than I, saw through all the dishevelment I strained for. I heard him tell my mother that I was ‘flash as bloody paint’. He groaned to see what I did to the school suit he went without beer to pay for. I worked on jamming the Oxford University Press Edition of the poet-hero-Jesuit Gerard Manley Hopkins (GMH to me) into my inside breast pocket, where both it and the fabric were forced weirdly out of shape. My mother was half-amused and thought it was other-worldliness, and that gave me hope that other women would too, particularly the Frawley girls, and above all of course Bernadette Curran of Strathfield, for whose sake all the perverse Chattertonian treatment I gave my clothes was designed. I believed Curran in particular needed to be captured by the sight of a suit pocket strained out of shape by the transcendent load it carried, the rectangular force of Hopkins’ fierce, eccentric English.

I caught this morning morning’s minion, kingdom of daylight’s dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding

Of the rolling level underneath him steady air …

In case the emanations of GMH didn’t work on Curran, who was such a level kid, I spent a huge time making my auburn hair seem negligently done, fixing it then into Beethoven-esque licks with a gluey white preparation called Fix-a-Flex. My cowlick thus cemented could stand up against wind and rain, and remained in glued insouciance throughout an afternoon of English, History, Maths, Science, Rugby League practice and a long dawdle home with Matt Tierney, and Mangan the potential Trappist.

I went through all this brutalism of suit and hair not for the sake of a certain meeting, but on the off-chance of encountering the Frawleys and/or Curran in Meredith Street or elsewhere on the way back home. Mangan and I dawdling like a literary school beneath the box trees Strathfield Council lined its streets with; and handsome Matt listening sagely to us, and Larkin the sub-agnostic taking gentle shots at us. My most significant curl glued to the corner of the forehead, complementing Mangan’s severely disordered tresses. Rose Frawley, the earthier of the two sisters, was always quick to say she thought Mangan and I were ratbags. But both of us thought that was just the girls’ defence and that they all really knew that they were meeting serious presences. So when Rose Frawley asked, ‘Haven’t you finished reading that bloody book yet, Mick?’ I thought it was just her way of dealing with the intensity of the Chattertonian and Hopkins-like splendour of Mangan and me.

Earth, sweet earth, sweet landscape, with leaves throng …

Gerard Manley Hopkins, Society of Jesus. On his death bed he’d asked that all his poems be destroyed, and I imagined myself in that situation in a large, beeswaxed, cold room you could willingly slip away from into another state, and saying to crowds of Mangan-like peers, ‘Burn all my poems, they were vanities.’ Then when I had expired as lightly, fragrantly, crisply as biting into an Adora Cream Wafer, my literary executors would say, ‘Not on your life. The stuff Mick wrote when he was sixteen, in particular that must live!’

Walking with or without Mangan on my way to collect Matt Tierney, I passed some big nineteenth-century houses located on the Strathfield side of the line. St Lucy’s School for the Blind, Matt’s earlier alma mater, was such a mansion, the home in the bush in Homebush-Strathfield for a family of nineteenth-century grandees called Meredith. One of the Meredith women had written a book on Victorian life in the Australian settlements. Of course it wasn’t the sort of book I would ever write. We Celestials were too transcendent merely to report back colonial small talk.

From St Lucy’s School for the Blind, when he was eight years old, Matt had engineered a remarkable escape with a friend. The two of them found out by intelligence – maybe one of the children who had not always been blind had told them – that you could be seen moving beyond the fence through the gaps in the palings, particularly if you had Matt’s snow-white albino hair. So he and his accomplice had crawled a hundred yards on their hands and knees up Meredith Street to avoid being spotted from the school. Tussocks of grass, which always grew at the base of paling fences, screened them. Eyeless, they got as far as the Tierney house in Shortland Avenue, where Mrs Tierney had found them extracting coins with a knife out of Matt’s money box.

I knew from this story, and from the way a smile took the corners of his mouth when Mangan and I were at our most rarefied, that Matt had plenty of go. He was stuck with us because he was in a sense our hostage. We were the ones who studied with him and read to him those books which were not yet in the Braille Library. He was, after all, a forerunner – the first blind child to attempt the Leaving Certificate – and the New South Wales Braille Library had not yet caught up with his needs.

He had the physique, the quickness of gesture, which would have made him a sportsman if he had been suddenly freed, and he would have hung around at least part of his time with the surreptitious smokers and beer drinkers and appreciators of ‘women’ (as they hopefully called the sixteen-year-olds from the Dominican Convent). But at least he was able to share with them and with me an athletic enthusiasm. And he had also the aforesaid advantage of living in Strathfield.

Amongst the occasional mansions were ordinary brick bungalows of the kind in which the unruly, un-punctual Mangans lived, in which the orderly Tierneys could be found, in which Bernadette Curran’s parents raised their splendid daughters. The fragrant little gardens of these smaller houses were full of shrubs and flowers whose names I did not know but which did the service of bearing away the coaly, electric smell of the railway. At the height of summer, the Strathfield gardens looked desiccated and heat-frazzled, but they were as close as I could get to seasons of mists and mellow fruitfulness.

I was the sort of kid men took aside for serious talks. One was Mr Frawley, the Frawley girls’ father. The other was Mr Aldo Crespi, who lived at Mrs Talbot’s boarding house in the Crescent and who – everyone said – was her lover. He was an amnestied Italian prisoner of war who had escaped from a camp in the bush. He had found a place with Mrs Talbot who had fallen for his Italian palaver. Turning himself in at the end of the war, he returned to Italy and then re-emigrated to Australia to be with Mrs Talbot.

My father disapproved of Crespi and called him ‘the Red Wog’, since Mrs Talbot was a Leftist in the Strathfield Branch of the Labor Party and Aldo was her ideological sidekick. He had lived well with handsome though tubercular Mrs Talbot while – to quote my father – ‘silly, bloody Australians’ were off in foreign parts fighting the war he had abandoned.

I would sometimes meet Aldo as I walked up the hill in the Crescent, on the far side of the railway line. The Crescent was as straight as a die, and I’d see Aldo coming down the hill with his sample bag. He sold lotions and soaps and detergents door to door – my mother was one of his clients and said he ‘really laid it on’. He seemed to make a good living since he was always so buoyant, a dapper little man. If he met me, he would put his sample bag down, because he had plenty to tell me.

‘So you’re going off to those bigots again?’ he’d ask me. ‘Those Franco-lovers who tell you to pray for poor Godless China? I tell you, China is better off under the Reds than it was under the warlords. Less than ten years ago, fifteen million Chinese were dying of famine. More than the population of this little country of ours. But that was okay with the bigots because the missionaries were still there.’

But sometimes he would be a residual Fascist. ‘Those bigots will run down Mussolini while they praise Franco. I tell you, if Mussolini hadn’t been silly enough to put his money on Hitler, he’d still be in business, and Italy a much better place. Crikey, I’ll give you the decent oil. Mussolini even treated political prisoners nicely. The world is bloody complicated, son, and they’ll try to tell you, those bigots, that it’s bloody simple.’

I could not ask him the questions I was really interested in. Had Mrs Talbot known he was the escaped enemy? And then the matter Mangan knew about somehow – that TB made people twice as sexual, destroyed their control. But it was hard to put that together with Mrs Talbot’s severe good looks, and her pallor, and with how one day, as I was passing the boarding house at the top of the Crescent, which was not a crescent, I’d seen her put a handkerchief to her mouth and bring it away drenched with blood. There were mysteries to do with Crespi which superseded the mystery of how the Chinese were fed.

‘Don’t let them cross your wires,’ he advised me. ‘They have nothing better to do. My wires were crossed when I was a boy. First, the Church, then the Fascists. You think at first the one is the cure for the other. But they dance together. Look at the industrial groupers as they call themselves. The landscape of Fascism.’

‘But surely you think that Stalin is a threat to Australia, Mr Crespi?’ I asked him as always.

‘Stalin is not as much a threat himself as what they will make of him. Besides, don’t be fooled into thinking it’s a choice between Stalin and the groupers. Between the inhuman and the inhuman, other choices can be made.’

I liked Crespi because the idea of galactic struggles between ideologies of good and evil suited my temperament. I suspected that even a pimple came from a struggle between the white deity of spirit and the dark one of flesh.

To my dialogues with Crespi I brought a selective sense of history. Some of the Brothers in my earlier years at St Pat’s talked a lot about the Spanish Civil War, for in it the forces Crespi talked about had come face to face. We were never told that the Republicans had been a democratically elected government of Spain. We were told, however, that they were nun-slayers and priest-killers, and that in Madrid at the Alcazar, trusting in the Virgin Mary, the garrison had held out for an astounding time and been delivered at last by faith.

The other fellow who would take me aside and talk to me as if I had a mission in the cosmic battle was wiry little Mr Frawley, father of the Frawley kids, the two older girls Rose and Denise, and two smaller boys about my brother’s age. Frawley was one of the industrial groupers Crespi abominated. The groupers believed something like this: Dr H. V. Evatt, leader of the Labor Party, a scholar, a lawyer, first Secretary of the United Nations and a former Cabinet Minister of the governments of Curtin and of Chifley, was either too soft on Communism of perhaps even a fellow traveller. The nexus between the Labor Party – saviour of the working class and guarantor of equities – and the Communist-controlled unions was a scandal to men like Frawley. Look in Doc Evatt’s speeches and correspondence now, and you will not find much to justify their broad fears. Poor old Doc, who competed with the Conservative Prime Minister Menzies to express fealty to the dying King of England and the coming Queen! But to Mr Frawley, either a dupe or a co-conspirator.

My father harboured the same suspicions and would often utter them over the Sydney evening paper, the Mirror. He did not become a grouper, however, an activist. The war seemed to have given him a certain cynicism about joining things. Frank Frawley had been deprived of his war and was fighting it here on the Western Line.

Frawley was a little wiry man like Crespi. He had a cowlick and worked as a purchasing officer in the New South Wales Government Railways, the crowd who with their brute locomotives ran their steel rail right through my sleep. He was a reader, and he too liked to believe in this struggle of dogmas at the end of time, and felt that 1952 was getting pretty late in the century and in history in general.

Mr Frawley’s war was territorial, too. ‘The Catholics founded the Labor Party,’ he pronounced, ‘and now we’re being forced out of it by Reds.’

And he would say such things as, ‘At least one classic Marxist objective is part of the platform of the Australian Labor Party. It’s right there – The Nationalization of all means of production, exchange and communication. It lies there like a serpent at the heart of the party. And all of us told ourselves it didn’t really matter. Mr Chifley said it didn’t matter, Mr McGirr, Mr Cahill.’

Joe Cahill, the premier of the state, a good friend of Cardinal Gilroy’s and a Papal Knight, escaped too much vilification from Mr Frawley though. No one believed he was Marxism’s running dog. Besides, he was only a power at the state level. The Federal level, and above that the world and the universal level, were what interested Mr Frawley and me.

Some of the Brothers at St Pat’s told us a lot about brave work undertaken by industrial groupers. The Communists intimidated union members and always insisted on an open ballot to intimidate them better. If that didn’t work, we were told, the Reds then stole the ballot boxes for counting, and opened them in their own headquarters. The security of ballot boxes was one of the things the groupers fought for. There was a young man in Lewisham, a grouper who – Brother Markwell swore – had his arm broken with a cricket bat in a fight over a ballot box.

Mr Frawley couldn’t take on Communism directly though. His office was not a Marxist breeding-ground, but was in fact full of members of the Knights of the Southern Cross, an Hibernian society, reliable men. There was little call for him to break his arm in his workplace defending ballot boxes. Instead, the occasional rough stuff Mr Frawley’s band of groupers got involved in was aimed not against Reds but against the commandos of a rabid newspaper called The Rock.

The Rock was a very juicy scandal sheet edited by a man called Campbell. He did this on behalf of a fundamentalist group who were worried about Papism and its pomps and its decadence. It was so hugely popular, with its tales of pregnant nuns and buggering brothers, that people had to reserve it at Rossiter’s newsagency on Parramatta Road to be sure of getting a copy when it came out on Tuesdays. It confirmed for Protestants all they had ever thought about the Whore of Babylon, but Monsignor Loane of St Martha’s Strathfield had to exhort his own flock not to buy the rag since it only encouraged Campbell.

Early on, Campbell had excited his readers by telling them he intended to raid convents and liberate young nuns enslaved by Popish superstition and imprisoned in the cellars. To ward off Campbell, Mr Frawley served under the lieutenancy of a meat wholesaler called Kelleher, who lived in Homebush. Kelleher’s corps of groupers would defend the convents from attack.

On the Western Line there were two places in particular which were susceptible to Campbell raids. One was St Anthony’s Home for Fallen Girls at Ashbury, and the other was Lewisham Hospital, run by a company of genial nuns whose robes were sky blue and white. Both these convents had superb gardens, as if to fulfil the well-known dictum about flower beds and the Deity’s heart. And nuns of both Orders had actually caught Campbell’s scouts snooping around amongst the rhododendrons on reconnaissance.

In between serving as an undoubtedly brave convent sentry, Mr Frawley, whose parents like my father’s were Irish emigrants, was a student of Ireland’s grievances. He told me once, ‘You have to suspect anyone called, say, Neill. They’re probably descendants of Soupers. That’s people who drop the O’ from their name and abandoned their faith during the Famine in return for soup.’

I wondered why that didn’t apply to Frawleys, if they’d all been O’Frawleys once. But I was almost manically polite, so I didn’t force the issue.

In this way, during my journeys to and from the house of Matt Tierney, ground breaker, I would receive vigorous though intermittent and contradictory instruction on the nature of the world.

In that year of high circulation for the mad rag The Rock, I guiltily believed I’d met Campbell once. That had been three years before, in 1949, before The Rock became famous, before Campbell had brought what would now be called his ‘tabloid’ talents to it.

My mother was taking my brother and me back to Kempsey in New South Wales, where my maternal grandmother lived, on the North Coast Daylight. There had been a big good-looking man in a grey suit in our compartment. He’d worn his tie loosened and had an edge of danger. It was increased by the fact he got out and drank at each refreshment room at every station we stopped at. This wasn’t uncommon on country trains in the late 1940s – men would jump off the train before it had stopped and run, suited and hatted and in the hope the beer was on, for the refreshment room. If it was, they would order three or four beers and drink them fast before the train left and come back to their seats meritoriously flushed and a little uncertain in speech.

Once, between Maitland and Taree, as I came back from the toilet, I saw the man from our compartment standing in the corridor with his face slackened. He was drinking from a flask he must have got filled at Maitland. He looked at me, first coldly and then with a good-natured derision. I was of course wearing my St Patrick’s grey uniform, Luceat Lux Vestra on my breast pocket.

‘The Brothers’ boy,’ he told me, as if it was a joke between us. He hadn’t been like this with my mother. He’d been flirting with her, and every town we passed – Gosford, Wyong, Maitland, Merewether – he knew a story about, knew what the local economy was like, knew what houses were worth and what was the rent for shops. Whether it was worth owing a milkbar in Wingham. He’d quoted cousins and friends he had everywhere. I knew my mother considered him a pain, a blowhard. But out here in the corridor, I knew he wasn’t going to tell me anything about the cost of housing, or how the timber mill at Dungog was going.

‘You had your first hard one yet, sonny?’ he asked.

I wasn’t exactly a Celestial then, but I was on my way to being one, and am abashed to have to admit I had only the dimmest idea of what he meant. An erection, for certain. But something else as well? I was unworldly, and proud of it, so I said nothing.

‘I’ve got a brother-in-law. A bit straight-laced. Doesn’t smoke, drink. He has a paper. The Rock. Ever heard of The Rock?’

‘No.’

‘Well, that’s bloody understandable. They ought to smarten themselves up. What they write about mostly is the evils of drink. To most Australians, the only evil with drink is we don’t have enough. But stories, too, about the evils of the Church of Rome.’

He uttered this sentence lightly, as if he didn’t really believe it himself. ‘They ought to concentrate on that more. People like reading that. I could give you money for a good story. For example, do the Brothers sit you on their laps? Do they unbutton you? Things like that?’

‘Nothing like that happens,’ I said.

In primary school, one of the Brothers would sometimes sit boys on his lap, not surreptitiously, but in front of the lot of us. Classrooms operated from the desire to be noticed and favoured by the teacher, but this was a mark of favour I never envied. I didn’t understand the reason for this behaviour though. A few knowing boys sniggered about it. Most of us were not knowing. The unease I felt when I saw it, the itchy, bilious sense – that was my business. It wasn’t the business of this joker with the loose tie. This fellow who was one kind of smart-alec with me and another with my mother.

‘If you had any stories like that, I could give you ten bob a pop. I’ve got a telephone number.’

He took out a card and gave it to me. ‘Better put it away somewhere. Careful your mum doesn’t find that when she’s ironing your suit.’

What he didn’t know was how well the Dominican nuns first and then the Brothers had prepared me for this hour. They had prepared me, in fact, for Satan in an Akubra hat to torture me, to offer me martyrdom. This fellow was a stupid man not to understand that. Ten bob wasn’t even a temptation. It was an anti-climax. It was – though I didn’t know the word then, and wouldn’t until three years later when I came under the influence of literary Brother McGahan – bathos.

‘See, I’m just going to Lismore to visit my wife. She’s not too keen on me.’ He winked. As if I had women trouble too. ‘Then I’ll be back at Sydney, that number. You could be my agent in the field. How would you like that?’

He extended his hand, but I didn’t take it even though I was scared of him. We made our separate ways back to the compartment, and he returned to being the flash know-all all the way from Dungog to the small hamlet of Kundabung. Here we began to gather our luggage. My mother drenched a handkerchief from the solid glass water carafe in its silver plated bracket on the wall, NSWGR (New South Wales Government Railways) frosted on the surface of the bottle, and began the last tidying up of my brother’s face, and combing of his hair. She wanted to show her parents in Kempsey that she had sparkling boys.

The man, whose name was not on the card I had been given – it said only The Rock, and had a telephone number – insisted on jovially carrying our ports to the door of the train and setting them down on the station. Emanations of conspiracy still came off him, I thought, aimed at me. But they evaporated when I saw my grandfather’s face bearing down on us. The man did not try to make a friend of my grandfather or impress him with any information about dairy farming in the Macleay. He got straight back on the train and it was the last I saw of him.

I never told anyone I’d had this brush with possible Campbell. Later, I was fascinated to read in my father’s copy of Truth – very much a secret activity with me, though I could manage to do it if I went to a different Mass from my parents – that Campbell’s wife in the bush was angry with him because he was unfaithful and had used a horse whip on her. The Rock said that she had been bribed by the Knights of the Southern Cross and by the Vatican to say these things. And he, the man on the North Coast Daylight who had carried our bags, was the general against whom Mr Frawley stood as a brave NCO of Christ.