Homebush Boy Read Free Page A

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