Homebush Boy Read Free

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’