Free Homebush Boy by Thomas Keneally

cigarette papers out of which, as he expatiated on Shakespeare, he rolled masses of skinny cigarettes for consumption out of class hours. He was frumpy, Moose. His soutane was carelessly kept and sprinkled with ash, he had large bullish features, and he was dearly loved by all of us. As his hands worked in the opened leather case, he advised us that he was slow to anger, but to be wary when it came, and that the only thing he couldn’t really stand was a boy horse-laughing.
    â€˜If you’re wise boys, you won’t horse laugh. It drives me mad, and I can’t help it.’
    Moose’s method of preparing us for exams was rather like Buster Clare’s method of teaching History. Faced with a large poem like Keats’ Hyperion , he would say, ‘I don’t know about this one. It was on the paper four years ago. I might go and test out Dinny about it over the weekend.’
    For Dinny McGahan was stellar enough to have been given the job of setting the examination for all the Christian Brothers Schools. Moose had a special talent for enraging Dinny, for teasing probabilities out of him. For gauging exam paper omens in what was said over the flummery at the monastic table in the Brothers’ house on the corner of Edgar Street.
    The next Monday Moose would be back with his briefcase of Verity’s Shakespeare, Romantic poetry, cowboy novelettes and tobacco.
    â€˜I think we’d better do Hyperion , boys. I said to Dinny at dinner on the weekend, I don’t think I’ll bother teaching the boys that. And he said, Ah … ah … I tell you, your boys better be prepared with Hyperion if they want to do well.’
    Thus the odds on Hyperion had shortened, and Moose explained to us what the poem was all about, and then set us to learn it and its notes and its study guide all by heart. Everything had equal value with Moose – the merest footnote by some junior English academic, and the highest imagery of John Keats. In fact, footnotes were probably more useful for exam purposes, for they explained the Classical allusions.
    â€¦ she would have ta’en
    Achilles by the hair and bent his neck;
    Or with a finger stay’d Ixion’s wheel.
    Her face was large as that of Memphian sphinx …
    This material represented in many ways the world Mangan and I would have preferred to Homebush. Other boys said, ‘What’s it got to do with getting a job, Brother?’ Mangan and I really kindled to Wordsworth’s On Westminster Bridge and Keats’ On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer . We thought these men were reporting a real world, and didn’t understand that they were lost souls, too, in the moils of a squalid Industrial Revolution and trying to ignore it.
    We had both already written poetry like theirs. Some of it still exists, composed all over the flyleaves of textbooks. With its mixture of Romanticism and theology, it is as embarrassing as teenage love letters. It is in fact a series of love letters, since I saw it as near publishable and likely to impress Curran with its promise when published amongst my Early Poems . None of it will be brought into play in these pages.
    But back to the 1951 exam. On top of baiting Dinny, by the end of the year, through methods which included exploiting his spies in the senior year who showed him the sort of questions Dinny was setting in term exams there, Moose had a sophisticated betting sheet, and we followed it. In English exam terms, we were the equivalent of the first steroid takers in the decathlon. As an unnatural advantage, we knew as no other Christian Brothers’ boys did which areas to concentrate on. The result was that I was first in the state, my name published in the Catholic Weekly to the gratification of my parents. And my repute with Dinny McGahan was set somewhat higher than I knew I quite deserved.
    Dinny probably had a more accurate sense of my attributes as an athlete than as an English scholar.