Read Online Homebush Boy by Thomas Keneally - Free Book Online

christening’. Lanky Verna Banks, their daughter, was, ‘straight up and down like a yard of pump water’.
    My mother said he got his imagery, his bush word-smithery, from his Irish mother, who had had a range of earthy things to say about the people who’d surrounded her in the valley of the Macleay earlier in the century. The coming of in-house plumbing therefore hadn’t yet cancelled her image about pump water in her son’s mouth, and it ran forth and hit Verna Banks behind the ear in Homebush in 1952.
    Poor Verna. I carried in childhood like a writ against her the memory that late in the war, when the Bankses put on their daughter’s twenty-first birthday party and somehow got a keg of beer into Flemington Town Hall for the party, they’d had to invite boys from the nearby air force depot to make up the crowd. Verna danced with a tall, leering Leading Aircraftsman while the band played Coming in on a Wing and a Prayer . I did not have the imagination to see Verna as a victim, stuck with Mrs Banks. What must it have been like for a daughter with dreams to listen to her mother’s horrifying misnomers and malapropisms? I had myself heard Mrs Banks call camouflage flamagage , the actress Maureen O’Hara Moran Harara , M&B tablets ham and beef tablets , pneumonia pew-mania .
    The Bankses had turned out to be readers of The Rock . Mrs Banks in particular quoted everything that was in it. ‘I’ve never had anything against you Romanian Catholics,’ she had been telling my mother every week since we moved down from the bush ten years past.
    One night, I overheard my mother say with some venom, ‘Mrs Banks came to me today and asked whether I was worried about Michael and John. I asked her why, and she said that there were so many stories in The Rock of brothers interfering with boys, that some of them had to be true.’
    â€˜This comes from Evatt,’ my father said. ‘Beating the sectarian drum. Evatt is the choir master, and old Banksie is the monkey’s arse.’
    But my mother’s concerns were more local. ‘Even if there was occasionally something like that, I think the boys would tell me.’
    â€˜Chrysler Six!’ said my father. ‘You’re not taking Mrs Banks as a guide to the real bloody world, are you?’
    Yes, I would have liked to say. Dinny is interfering with me. He has given me Graham Greene to read, and W. H. Auden, and he’s played some Mahler and pointed out GMH’s Thou mastering me God! And I will never be the same.
    For I was not only reading Silas Marner , I was reading Brighton Rock , in which the young English razor gangster felt a Manichean disgust for the flesh of his girlfriend. This wasn’t just a story about gangster fighting gangster. This was about salvation and flesh and spirit. It was like finding out that James Cagney was really a walking battleground between angels of spirit and flesh. Who gave a damn about Mrs Banks and The Rock ?
    The crass accusers of The Rock knew nothing either about the humane face of Brother Digger Crichton, simple and generous soul, veteran of World War I, who had seen the world’s deadly pomps and now taught nothing but woodwork. He was a natty little man whose cassock showed the marks neither of glue nor nails nor sawdust.
    He had unwittingly developed one quasi-sporting and religious rite of his own. The Rugby League goalposts were kept in his huge woodwork room throughout summer, and towards the end of the first term every year, about Easter time, they would be carried to the oval by crews of junior woodworkers, one pole at a time, along with the cross bar, striped in the middle – where all the most perfect goals sailed over – with the school’s black and blue and gold. A seasonal rite for which he chose only the finest boy carpenters! Two years before I had somehow cack-handedly assembled a glass-fronted bookcase which my mother keeps to this