VIII

I recovered from that as I did from most things: I called in at the Frawleys’ kindly hearth. One thing seemed definite barring death: Rose was going to become a Dominican nun and wear their brown and white habit. The name Margaret already earmarked for her. She had that glory chest too, just like a girl going to be married, and into it she was stacking bed linen with her initials, pillowcases likewise, and the linen shifts and bloomers which nuns wore. She would hold some of them up to the light and say, ‘Would I remind someone of Ava Gardner in these?’

Gentle Mrs Frawley said to me on one of those afternoons, ‘Did the girls tell you Mother Concordia is dying?’

I must have frowned, because Mrs Frawley remarked that the old nun had had a good life. Concordia was the woman who had intimidated with a white chalk line all us six-year-old piddlers at St Martha’s Convent. Death seemed in one sense a likely proposition – Concordia had seemed old ten years ago, when she urged us not to cause the Virgin Mary to blush.

‘We’re in the nuns’ chapel hours on end praying for her,’ said Rose, as if she did not see herself as a nun yet, the nuns being still them.

I thought of Curran, lean and olive, reciting the Sorrowful Mysteries in the wood-panelled chapel at Santa Sabina.

The mention of so austere a figure as Concordia of course by indirect paths reminded me that I was close to the time limit of pretending to be a potential priest. All the funkholes out of that destiny seemed to be guarded by arguments and ideas sharp as razors already unsheathed, and put in place by everyone from Father Byrne to the Cardinal.

For example: ‘I’ve decided to go to university first.’

‘Yes, but many a vocation is lost that way.’

‘I’ve decided I don’t have a vocation.’

‘Yes, but how can you tell until you’ve tested it?’

Could I manage to say, ‘But I like girls too much. One in particular’?

Or equally impossible, ‘I had a revelation during Sunday Mass. God revealed that he had other plans for me.’

I was painted into the piety corner as certainly as Mother Concordia was herself cornered by nature and piety on the tall bier of her bed in the Dominican Convent. But I wasn’t going. I couldn’t go. It would have to be said.

The next morning I practised breaking the news to Matt.

‘I’ve just about decided against going into the priesthood,’ I told him.

He put his head on the side in his intelligent, tolerant manner, in a way which sometimes made me believe that he saw through all the posturing.

‘There’s always time afterwards,’ he said with the hopeful, upward intonations which were his nature. This was a time of year when Dinny McGahan was letting the two of us sit outdoors on the verandah to go through our Pass subjects. We studied long hours, so that there was always time for a little desultory conversation. Even as Matt and I walked home we were still quizzing each other on Modern History or Shakespeare’s soliloquies.

Coming back to Mattie’s little bungalow on one of those first afternoons of knowing about Mother Concordia and her impending death, I saw Curran and her well-dressed mother walking together down Shortland Avenue. Past the little suburban gardens they walked like two equals, intently discussing something. Bernadette Curran even wore her maroon Dominican Convent gloves, and Mrs Curran’s gloves were white. They were two women dressed not so much to represent motherhood or daughterhood, but an impenetrable sisterhood. What they talked of was unguessable but, you couldn’t doubt, marvellous. It occurred to me that whatever was going on there, my mother had been deprived of it in her two-boy, all-male family.

I told Matt, ‘There goes Mrs Curran and Bernadette. They’re dolled-up exquisitely!’

Matt gave a half chuckle. ‘That must be pretty exciting for you, Tom,’ he murmured.

I gave him a small nudge on the upper arm. But what they spoke of, the Curran women, transcended our chirping and banter. It had crux, it had weight.

Calling in at the Frawleys yet again, a household in which because of Mrs Frawley’s kindness, Mr Frawley’s serious purposes and the Frawley girls’ genial mockery I felt appreciated, I found out what the Curran women had been discussing.

It was to do with Concordia, the matriarch of the Order. Like Mother Margaret, she had not borne earthly children. Yet this fact made all of them – the Frawleys, the Currans and all the rest – her children. In batteries, her daughters, class by class, girls small and large, in their impeccable maroon, had entered the Dominican chapel to pray for her deliverance or happy death. The Leaving Certificate girls were asked to come and go to the chapel only at their leisure, but come and go they did. A hush hung over their futures. Some may have even felt a pulse of an ambition to achieve in the end a death as notable, as reverberating as that of Concordia. Such a departure from the normal suburban or bush deaths of grandfathers and grandmothers!

The prefects of Santa Sabina were, I heard, admitted in a bunch into the large convent parlour, where Concordia’s deathbed had been moved to allow for room for visitors. They saw the brave, rugged, sculpted face of Concordia, still cowled in the Order’s regulation clothing for the sickbed at this supremest moment. They saw her lowered lids, and the effort of the discourse she pursued with God on earth’s furthest up-jut, on land’s end.

This was a death from an ancient and baroque tradition. Had there been what the Frawleys called ‘some mad girl’, some girl, that is, who was a temperamental echo of the mad boy I was, she might have been overly influenced, morbidly fascinated, inflamed by divine ambitions. But Curran was sensible, had no time – as I knew – for exorbitant responses. She should have come out safe from the visit to Concordia.

The full and potent magic of the death of the great Irish matriarch had not yet, however, been unleashed.

Imagine a room where the Honours English and History girls are at their desks, preparing for the coming public examination, when a messenger enters, a younger nun, and whispers to Curran. Mother Concordia wants to see Curran on her own. Walking out of the study, does Curran – who looks so settled in all life’s circumstances – feel unsettled to be chosen to share some of Concordia’s last seconds? She must not be totally at ease with such an excessive act of graciousness.

Here at last drama has found a way to penetrate Curran’s matter-of-fact, no-nonsense, Aussie advance towards the greatness everyone agrees will mark her later life.

She approaches the sickroom where only the last watchers remain, the most senior nuns who have shared table and cloister with Concordia for years and who are now easing her on her way. Monsignor Loane is long gone from the bedside, with the canisters of holy oil with which he has anointed Concordia in the sacrament called Extreme Unction. Two nuns rise from their knees and take Curran by the elbow, bringing her forward to the deathbed. One of them touches Mother Concordia’s shoulder. The old nun half opens her eyes. She tears her gaze away from Yahweh’s long enough to say, ‘Bernadette, I call upon you to become a Dominican nun and take my name, Concordia. I will pray for you and support you in the Presence of God.’

I still wonder if as Bernadette left the deathbed (and indeed the old nun would die overnight, eased of the question of the inheritance of her name) any nun said to her, ‘Think closely about this. A command from Concordia is not necessarily a command from God!’

It had been after Concordia had made her severe bequest to Curran that I saw the Curran women speaking so earnestly on their way home and mentioned it to Matt.

It is wrong to surmise the decision was made for her by Concordia’s deathbed edict. Sensible and democratic Curran was not so readily deprived of will as all that. But it must have had an effect in some scales of decision, and it seems she made the decision pretty quickly afterwards. She did not trumpet it though – I heard about it not from her lips. I had gone home with Matt to his house in Shortland Avenue, and his mother offered us tea and told us.

‘Wow,’ said Matt. ‘What’ll you do now, Mick?’ Did he mean, how to top that? Or how to deal with it? I sat in a vacuum, my hands prickling. As soon as I could I left. It was as if this were a war, but all the maidens, not all the young men, were about to vanish. I walked bemused to the Frawley house in Broughton Road, and everyone was home except Mr Frawley the wiry grouper. Rose Frawley had answered the door with a half-smile.

‘Have you heard the news?’ all three women were asking. ‘What will you do?’ asked Rose. ‘Join the Foreign Legion?’

She of course was delighted that she would have a sister, a Strathfield girl, a Santa Sabina girl, her own head prefect and ‘brain’, with her in the novitiate.

We discussed it. I felt a constraint over my heart, sharp edges against my ribs. The Oxford University Press Edition of GMH. I knew I did not need that discomfort any more. I took it out of my breast pocket and absent-mindedly slid it into my schoolbag.

The younger, gentler Frawley girl, Denise, cried, ‘Did you see what Mick just did?’

Rose said, ‘Sick of strung rhythm, are we?’

‘Sprung rhythm,’ I told her without any passion.

I got home and my mother did not notice merely the phantom shape of GMH in the grey serge coat she looked after so arduously. She had met Mrs Frawley outside Cutcliffe’s Pharmacy in Rochester Street and had been told.

‘This shouldn’t have any influence on what you decide,’ she told me.

When my father came home from his store in Granville, he said the same thing. ‘Just because everyone else is volunteering it doesn’t bloody mean you have to.’

He knew whereof he spoke. He had been a volunteer in his day, and had not been fully happy in the service.

What was worst for me was that I could tell that whatever Curran was renouncing in the name of the Deity and Concordia it was not me. No messages or hints had been sent. There was no chance of a last hand-hold.

Nonetheless, amongst the quicksilver shifts of sentiment occurring to me, there now grew a desire to be associated with such a brave drama. Curran’s sincere choice put the question to me in a lasting way the Cardinal had not been able to. On the one hand the sublime path. On the other hand, the chance of a normal university degree and a little double-fronted brick cottage in a suburban street. GMH had been a priest in his cell and had sung like an angel in his chains.

There were references of pure and sublime love as well: Eloise and Abelard, St Francis and St Clare. And then there was the other, Australian example – Father Tenison-Woods and Mother Mary MacKillop. MacKillop the seraphically handsome woman, and Julian Tenison-Woods a priest like GMH, but a famed geologist rather than a poet. Mother Mary MacKillop had founded the Sisters of St Joseph, who lived in poverty and taught poor children in the Australian colonies. She spread her Order right through the world, so that she constituted an early Australian success story. I had seen Tenison-Woods’ works in the library of the Brothers’ house – History of the Discovery and Exploration of Australia, Volumes I and II, Fish and Fisheries of New South Wales and Geological Observations in South Australia. He quarrelled with Mother MacKillop, yet enthused her to found an Order and at the same time had an heroic sense of Australia’s ancient geology. They – Tenison-Woods, elegant Brit, former Times journalist, and MacKillop, colonial girl – had once been photographed side by side, and made a remarkable pair. Mother MacKillop’s piercing, enormous eyes. No fainting mystic. A good, practical woman. Like Curran in that. Could there be some possible similar and future alliance between Curran and myself?

The following Sunday the Currans had us all up to their little brick house at Strathfield for an afternoon tea. It was a kind of celebration and farewell. I did not take my GMH, what was the point? As we drank the tea and ate the Women’s Weekly’s best sponge cake – it was still an era where women felt ashamed to serve cake from a cake shop – Curran did not make much of her decision, although Rose Frawley kept talking about it excitedly. She still remarked continuously on the fact she and Bernadette Curran would be Dominican novices together. I began to see that this blustery, open-faced girl-woman had been genuinely and pathetically scared of the tests in front of her, amongst novices she had never seen before. Now she would be able to look across the choir stalls to a known face.

Either Matt or Larkin the agnostic said, ‘Which one of you will be Mother Superior first?’ and we saw Mr Curran hide his face and turn his shoulder, which began to shudder. A shamed silence fell over everyone, and Mrs Curran went and laid a hand on his arm.

In that second I knew that I was going too. The sense of seeing the rituals from the inside, the way GMH had, overtook me again, but now it did not fill me with terror. It was in part a matter of crazily knowing that grief could not be avoided, and this grief displayed by the Curran parents was purposeful and noble. In the Currans’ house at tea the richly-coloured skeins of motivation – a yearning for GMH’s God, a desire to serve, a desire to instruct, a taste for drama, a preference for fleshless love, an exaltation in the Latin rites. I would never be bored by them, I knew. I would never listen surreptitiously in the confessional, between penitents, to the Saturday races.

So I walked home with Matt and Mangan knowing I would go. How the decision chastened, calmed and yet exhilarated me. I said nothing though, no longer a braggard. For a time I would imitate the style of the Currans and keep my decision secret. It struck me delightfully that I would have no bad news to announce to the Cardinal or Father Byrne, but I wondered how my father would take it.

At last on an ordinary Tuesday morning at school, I told Matt. He turned to me with his face on its normal questing angle. A morning in October, the month I would turn seventeen. The wattle was out in vivid bloom and air was beginning to take on what the Romantic poets would have called a Lethean weight in preparation for the usual hot and humid Australian Christmas. We were reading Pass History on the verandah outside Fifth Year Blue, in pleasant shade.

‘Secular or monastic?’ asked Matt. What sort of priest would I be. Parish or in the cloister like Mangan.

‘I’m going into Springwood,’ I told him.

‘Good,’ he said. ‘So we’ll see you every Christmas.’

Whereas Mangan would disappear for life. I would serve in a parish and go to Rugby League games. I wouldn’t be on a par with Mangan. I would never be a Trappist who kept custody of the tongue and spoke only on Christmas Day or in the extremest emergency. I would keep the more normal monastic silences of the diocesan seminaries at Springwood and Manly. But again, who said that a diocesan priest couldn’t write like GMH if he chose?

I said, ‘I’m sorry, Matt. It means I won’t be beside you at university.’

There was a little expulsion of breath and a faint reddening of his skin. ‘You couldn’t be anyhow, doing Law or Medicine.’

‘I would possibly have done Arts first.’ Would publish poetry, become renowned, and not have had to go any further.

He said quietly, ‘They won’t let me go anyhow. They’ve got ordinances that forbid it.’ He knew the world was fortified with edicts aimed to keep him on the edge of life. ‘But I’ll be fine anyhow if they do let me go.’

Neither of us feared that study companions for Matt would be lacking amongst those young men and women who were not frightened of his blindness.

‘It’s a good thing, Mick,’ he told me. ‘If it doesn’t work, you can always come out and go to university anyhow.’

But my absolutist temperament didn’t like people saying that. Having decided to become a seminarian, I would not be the sort of seminarian who left.

That afternoon, in the little flat by the railway line, I broke it to my mother. ‘I’m sorry,’ I told her. ‘But I’m not just playing around with the idea any more.’

She wept but said that she was in favour of anything which made me happy. This had always been the pattern – firmness, ambition for her children, but finally she was an encourager and indulger of unexpected directions they might take. This last and climactic time she went down to visit my father labouring with his tomatoes and onions at the bottom of the garden, and I watched her talking to him, and he shaking his head.

How I appreciate that fellow at the bottom of the back yard now. I have learnt from experience at many a bar and over many a dinner since that he was a robust drinking man, but he could not afford to drink at all during those years, even though he came from a tribe whose lives did not seem to have been at all shortened by drink. He possessed that taste for fashion which his negligent child lacked. He preferred good clothes and highly polished shoes and tailor-made cigarettes. But he had to heel-and-sole his shoes himself, and he had to smoke the world’s thinnest roll-your-owns to enable us to go to St Pat’s and get the glimmering of what people call ideas above our station.

Through the squat Irish mother who had raised him as the last of nine children, the last beloved son, he retained a passionate though ambiguous relationship with the Church. He knew that if your son was called, you had to cop it sweet – there was nothing else to be done.

At tea that night he made some remarks about ‘throwing away your education’. And it was then, to keep him happy, that I fell back on Matt’s line.

‘Don’t worry. If it doesn’t turn out to be right, I’ll come straight out and go to university.’

My mother spoke to him over days, and gradually he began to take some whimsical pride in having a son a potential priest. One day I asked him if he wanted to walk up to the school at Strathfield and play some tennis with me. We ran around the court chasing tennis balls until he was red-faced. A vigorous fellow though, I could see. Standing up with a retrieved ball in his hand, he said, ‘Do you think I’ll get a discount in bloody purgatory? For having a son a sky pilot?’

That’s what they called ministers of religion in the bush town he grew up in, and in the RAAF in Egypt during the war. Sky pilots. He could not understand the honour which, as sky pilot, I intended to bring on the family name. The literary as well as the ecclesiastical honour.

One night though, cutting away at his well-done meat, he returned to an earlier theme. ‘I hope this isn’t some bloody reaction to that Bernadette Curran deciding to take the veil.’

I was innocently sure it wasn’t.

Slowly the news got up and down our block in Loftus Crescent, Homebush, and was uttered as trains thundered through on the Western Line. Jimmy Smart, a great St Pat’s batsman who lived at the corner, had a sister who married a Protestant, a genial man who worked for some department in the New South Wales Government. He was particularly amazed by the news. One afternoon when I met him on the street he gently asked me how I felt about never marrying. I forget what I told him.

Fellow Catholics by contrast began to look at me with new wonder and enquiry. Sometimes, outside Martha’s on a Sunday, where Curran was a regular but not a relentlessly early visitor, the group of us – Mangan, the Frawley girls, Matt, Curran – would stand talking, and people who had heard of our various intentions would look on us with a new surmise. We had acquired an esprit. Dahdah was already in the seminary, Mangan of course was committed to be a monk according to the Spartan rules of St Bernard of Clairvaux, and one Frawley girl and Curran and I were bound for a great transformation from children to austere figures.

My parents were in the strange position of receiving greetings which were halfway between condolences and congratulations.

One afternoon immediately after my decision became known, while I sat with Matt on a brick fence by the Stockade, flush from making choices, I watched lean Larkin come up and bend towards me in a scholarly way he might have learned from his weekend drinking companions in the pubs around Sydney University.

‘So you’re really going to do it?’ he asked.

I said of course I was.

‘Why don’t you join the police force, that might be easier?’

‘Why do you say that?’

‘Organized religion is a form of social control, and so is the police force. But you don’t have to live in a monastery to be in the police force.’

‘I don’t understand what that means. Social control?’ Had GMH been a sort of copper? Impossible!

‘Religion is in place,’ said Larkin, ‘to distract the working class from what they haven’t got.’

‘That’s old stuff,’ said Matt. And indeed I had heard the opium of the people argument put by a number of folk, including Crespi the salesman. But I felt profoundly disturbed by this idea as uttered by Larkin; the accusation that all that motivated me was a desire to do this or that to the working and middle classes. He knew about GMH.

How easily it could have been argued if we’d been on some campus and a year older (by which time I might have agreed with him). But to have my vast choice depicted as the equivalent of becoming a junior constable turned the air sour.

‘That’s not what I’m going in for,’ I told him.

‘Oh, I know you see yourself as a clerical poet,’ said Larkin. ‘But look all around you. Do you perceive poetry?’ He waved his hand round the surrounding streets – Hyde Brae, Merley, Francis. ‘This is the stupor of real estate, and religion exists to protect it. To make the working class pleased to have nothing, and the middle class content with their sad little bungalows.’

‘That’s not it at all,’ I said, but when I said it I thought of sleek Monsignor Loane.

Matt said nothing more. Did he have a grudging feeling of support for Larkin’s position?

We went on arguing, but I was at a disadvantage from feeling betrayed by Larkin. He was speaking up for other, newer friends. He was not speaking up for the Celestials. My face burned. It was because I respected Larkin’s intelligence, and wanted to be seen by its light as engaging in something Hopkinsian and inexpressible. I hated the way he depicted me.

Of course, I did not see that in his own way Larkin was a neophyte too. He was writing off property with the same lightness of touch with which I had written off sex.

In the indefinite era leading to my decision, time had seemed to erode a grain at a time. Now, in this definite season, it evaporated, and I soon recovered from the intense but momentary hurt of my argument with Larkin.

In the midst of this period of slightly self-conscious wonderment, Matt and I had all at once to do the Leaving Certificate. We had been for some time ready, at least at the Pass level. We walked together, casually, from St Pat’s to the state school, Homebush High, to do our Pass English. Homebush High had a good reputation and many future notables of Sydney and New South Wales would go there. It was of solid red brick and its catchment area was pretty much what St Pat’s was, the west and south-west of Sydney. Its corridors were barer, slightly dustier, and of a different odour than St Pat’s. This was the odour of secularism, the un-Gothic-ness of ordinary Australia. Having made the decision I had made, it didn’t appeal to me. Yet I remember exactly its ambience now, forty years later, and its smell.

A special room had been set up for Matt, since he was making history, and an amanuensis – a young graduate of Sydney University appointed by the NSW Department of Education – had sat ready to write down Matt’s answers.

At first it all went well. The Pass English Richard II and all the Romantic poets – no problem to such a Celestial, such an intimate of GMH, as I. Physics and Chemistry were a pleasant trot. Latin, which I would now most certainly need at Springwood and Manly, were equally accommodating – translating Catullus and Horace. Catullus’s less obvious poems to his beloved and the verse addressed to his canary. In Pass History we regurgitated what Buster Clare had taught us to regurgitate, and found his bets on what would be on the paper quite accurate. I added in a little more from other reading I’d done in secret defiance. Just to make sure I got an A.

Late-night studying at Matt’s, late-night studying at home. In the frenzy of preparation, my mother tells me, I appeared from the second bedroom which I shared with my brother Johnny, sleepwalking like Lady Macbeth.

But now the examinations got tougher. The General Maths paper was appalling – they were punishing us, Mangan and I told each other, for preferring to the sure firmament of algebra such useless things as imagery and the date of Mussolini’s accession to power.

Writing for hours. St Pat’s boys mixed in with Homebush High boys at desks in the examination hall, all united in the fragrance of paper and ink from the Government printery, writing our answers on the fragrant stationery of the New South Wales Government.

Soon the Pass process was over. Ten days. Matt, pleased with himself, was done. For me, Mangan, Larkin and others there were still the Honours examinations to be sat. Over at Strathfield High, Curran – the future Sister Concordia – would also sit down to the Honours exams.

I found that with both Honours English and History my knowledge was too particular. I wanted the examiners to honour GMH by asking a specific question about him, something which would allow me to expatiate on sprung rhythm. It was – like other years – more general than that.

‘Poetry is image. Discuss.’

Instead of being what the yobbos who did Pass English thought – merely a rhyme. ‘I’m a poet and don’t know it.’

History too honoured the wide smear of knowledge rather than the particularities. I knew that Curran and her comprehensive knowledge would do well in all of this. At last I too had the exhilaration of handing over the last exam and walking away. No longer a schoolboy. In fact, by the time I reached the railway line between Homebush and Flemington, three blocks from Homebush High, already a putative adult.

I had been told the Archdiocese was willing to offer me a scholarship to the seminary, but I had to raise some money to pay for other expenses, and had seen an advertisement in the Catholic Weekly from Pellegrini’s, the Devotional Object Dealers and Booksellers, George Street, Sydney. They needed extra staff before Christmas and then through January, as the orders came in from various schools. I went in and applied. The thin manager had a calm, judicious, devout air which I supposed would permeate the entire company. I had heard that future seminarians got preference at Pellegrini’s.

So I was put to work with a number of boys taken on specially for the season. We wrapped packages with missals and priests’ breviaries and rosary beads and the latest works by Jacques Maritain or Frank Sheed, the cricket enthusiast and theologian, or his wife the theologian Maisy Ward. We boxed statuary and other objects – chalices, altarboy uniforms, surplices and stoles such as priests wore in the confessional. A label which would be attached with glue to the package had the name of the destination typed on it, some little bush convent, some parish priest in the sweltering Darling or Riverina districts.

The packing room lay out the back of the store in a Dickensian yard and up some ramshackle steps. Its supervisor came to me early on the first day and said, ‘What sort of fucking knot is this?’

So it appeared that gravity of demeanour wasn’t universal in Pellegrini’s. To avoid further bullying by the man I observed other packers and saw how the classiest knots were tied, and soon became expert. After the year of hectic study and yearning I enjoyed the small challenges of packing.

The supervisor of the packing room, amongst the as-yet-unblessed and still purely commercial rosary beads, altar linen, surplices and devotional books, also exhorted us to watch out about string, we weren’t rigging a bloody ship. And measure the paper carefully too. Fucking paper didn’t grow on fucking trees. He was a nephew of a famous monsignor, and swore like a publican’s nephew.

One afternoon he ordered me to go with him and a girl, a label typist from the office (a regular not a casual), down into the dank and humid basement to find some crates for shipping larger objects. The crates lay there amongst other bric-à-brac, and I dragged one of them out into the yard. When I returned for more, the supervisor was kissing the girl and fondling her breasts and she was resisting. I was shocked by what you could only call the naked grin on his face. Though it was theologically certain, as the supervisor’s uncle would have told him, that mortal sin cut in when a man felt women’s breasts, it wasn’t dogma that worried me. It was the ugliness, sweatiness, goatishness.

I felt sorry for the girl too, who was shamed in front of me. She was fearful I’d spread gossip about this.

‘What are you bloody looking at?’ the supervisor asked me, as if in that fairly prudish age he could do what he was doing and not be looked at. A pained and dangerous smile took over his face. He was beginning to feel a bit silly, and threatened too. The girl straightened herself and left.

So this was sex – shame, awkwardness, reluctance, bullying and fear. Not such a big thing to miss out on. Better to be St Francis and St Clare.

Like the packing supervisor, however, I would soon enough make a fool of myself. It was towards Christmas, marked by high temperatures and high humidity. And yet Christmas must have counted for a great deal in the celebrations of Scottish, Irish and English settlers to the country, since it has always been robustly celebrated there, the heat bringing forth a profoundly-based, primordial Australian hedonism.

Even in the devotional goods business, there was a tremendous overload of packing to be done to mark all the torrid bush and suburban Yules.

The normal after-hours way out of the packing department was via a door which locked shut behind you, down a stairwell and through another self-locking door into George Street. But we were told one Friday that if we were working very late, that was not the way to take, since the door at the head of the stairs had been somehow set to lock after us, and the door to the street would be unopenable from the inside. I don’t know why this was so – perhaps management had got word of some proposed devotional goods heist. In any case, that night we were told to exit by a back laneway into Kent Street, and make our way around the back of all the businesses, and so by Liverpool Street to George, and then to the Town Hall underground station.

Leaving last after an overtime packing spree, I put out the lights, entered by habit the main building and exited the normal way, closing the door at the head of the stairs behind me and so finding myself trapped. I went down to the outer door, but it was immoveable. If I had broken the glass in that outer door, it would have left all the riches of Pellegrini’s devotional warehouse open to plunder. I went back to the head of the stairs and contemplated staying the night. It was at this point that I ran out of stamina, and all the dark shadows of the manic exhilaration in which I’d spent the year struck me. A night is easy to wait through for a spiritual heir of GMH, but all at once the exhaustion from that feverish year seized me and I was unwilling to wait through this one. Using as a buffer a book I was reading – I believe it was Conan Doyle’s The White Company – I punched a pane out in the upper door. So I let myself through into the body of Pellegrini’s, and out by the laneway to Town Hall station and home.

I remember that this act of damage to property worried me greatly, and I lay awake thinking of excuses. What sort of person would the sage manager of Pellegrini’s think I was?

The next day I turned up to work and absolutely nothing was said. Towards lunchtime, the packing supervisor came up and said, ‘Are you bloody cut?’

I showed him the few grazes I had from the pane-breaking exercise.

‘Next time, bloody sort it out in your head before you leave, will you?’

I bought plenty of Christmas presents (even a Graham Greene novel for my mother), and books and ties for my father. My mother laid special stress on its being my last at home. I would of course be back the following year, but she rightly knew I would be another kind of child by then.

That morning I made a brief visit to the Tierneys with a present for Matt, to the Frawleys with a gift for the Frawley girls. Mr Frawley was wistful. Rose would not be back next year, unless she fled the novitiate, which for some reason seemed unlikely. Though I had posted a fulsome Christmas card, I did not go to the Currans. Eloise and Abelard severely apart at Yuletide.

In the middle of January, just before Curran went away, we got our Leaving Certificate results. I had received two second class Honours and four As, even an A in the awful General Maths. This was what was called in those days a maximum pass, even though first class Honours would have been the real maximum. Matt had got three As and three Bs. The Daily Mirror came out to photograph him, and all of us gathered at his place – Larkin (who had done badly in Maths but got a first class Honours in History), Mangan (two second class, two As, two Bs), Dahdah come home on holidays, and myself.

The Sydney Morning Herald and the Frawleys had let me know that Curran had done dazzlingly. Like me she only received second class Honours in English, but first class in History. Rose had acquired a more pedestrian pass.

I remember a telegram from my father’s cousin, Pat the lawyer, expressing amazement at how well I’d done. For some reason I still remember it with secret delight. It was soon followed by a letter from the Federal government informing me that I had won a scholarship to university. I could postpone it in case it was needed at a later date, of course. Mangan was also uselessly offered a scholarship.

Almost simultaneously with it came a letter from Sydney University addressed to Matt and his parents, indicating that the University Senate was powerless to alter the ordinances to allow Matt to undertake a degree. This decree fell like an axe across his triumph, but he seemed almost composed, as he had when Basher refused to let him run against his own age group. He and his parents had a valiant conviction of ultimate success and were sure the ordinance would be revoked in a year or two. (Their confidence in this was, I am happy to say, justified, even though Mr Tierney would not live to see his son graduate.)

My mother was already sewing my name to shirts and underwear for the seminary. My parents seemed almost happy and I had begun going to the bottom of the garden to chat directly with my father about radio programmes and Beethoven and poetry. ‘Too bloody deep for me,’ he told me jovially when I tried to explain sprung rhythm to him. ‘Give me Banjo Paterson any day.’

I presumed that at the Mangan household, rather more disorganized than mine, similar preparations were afoot. I happened to run into Mangan one afternoon in Rochester Street and asked him again when it was that Trappist novices were supposed to turn up at the monastery in Victoria.

‘Oh,’ he said. ‘I’ve been meaning to say something about that, but what with the exam results …’

‘Yes?’ I asked.

‘The friars have actually recommended that a person should go to university first to learn how to deal with timetables. So I’m going off to university to study Arts for a year or so.’

I kept walking with him, but was pole-axed. We had been going to tread together back to an earlier, more mystical time, and now he was not going to keep stride with me. Rose Frawley and Bernadette Curran would go together, but I would be on my own.

‘My parents would prefer it that way too,’ said Mangan, who had rarely mentioned his parents before, given that he was a phenomenon, a bolt from the blue, a manifestation rather than someone’s statistical child. I was astounded that he had listened to his parents. To what extent did I listen to mine, and to what extent flummoxed and harangued them?

I saw him go in the gate of his house, down the side to the disorganized Viney back yard. We were no longer troubadours. We weren’t singing the same song.

I thought, So, I’ll go alone. That was suitable. GMH had gone alone into the thickets of sprung rhythm and half-rhyme, tying his thick knots of imagery.

I stood alone in Rochester Street, ennobled by purpose.

It was still the height of summer, the middle of January, and Sheffield Shield cricket was in full cry at the Sydney Cricket Ground. The turning of the year race carnivals my father went to and modestly wagered at had barely subsided when Mangan, Matt, the Frawleys, the Currans and myself travelled to Newcastle, to the new location of the Dominican novitiate Rose Frawley and Bernadette Curran were about to enter. It had previously been in the northern suburbs of Sydney but had now been moved to this grimmer locale. The Frawleys, mother and father, were in their best, and looked as transformed, as drenched in new light as people we know on a daily basis do when extraordinary circumstances descend on them. But I could tell, even from the viewpoint of the cock-eyed planet I occupied, that the Frawleys were more at ease with their daughter’s destiny than were the Curran parents. I now know that the Currans would have preferred we were not there, in the parlour of the vast nineteenth-century Gothic novitiate, saying goodbye to their daughter. To Curran whose hand would go unheld ad eternum.

While the Frawleys looked proud, the Currans looked bereaved, and their bereavement – I wanted to say to them but thankfully didn’t – would not be final. They too would enjoy the ultimate pride of the accommodation their daughter was making with the more real, the only important world.

The Currans it seemed were going to stay overnight with relatives in Newcastle, that fairly dour mining town part-way up the New South Wales coast, drab itself but named for a drabber town in Northumbria. I can imagine them now, how they might have stood by the convent walls the next day, Mr Curran inconsolable, looking at the bare brick with longing, wondering whether their daughter was thinking, ‘Dear God, why am I here?’

‘When do you go in?’ Curran had been kind enough to ask me in the parlour at Newcastle as we waited for her and Rose to disappear utterly.

‘Middle of next month,’ I told her.

She smiled the smile which I now know could have got her into the movies.

‘Some people have it easy,’ she said.