The Bluff of Virtue

By Peter Batchelor

A story of the effects of trauma across three generations of family. A boy dies and a boy is left to navigate an un-envisioned adulthood. Members of subsequent generations find their individual way to function, each driven by the enigma that is virtue.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Tellwell Talent
• Release date: Nov 19, 2023
• ISBN: 9781779411235

Peter Batchelor

The tale began as a short story during a most difficult time. The challenges continued, and so the story grew. Since retiring, Peter Batchelor thought to finish the work and polish it. For him, it became a healthy solution to an unhealthy time in his life.Peter Batchelor's first novel, The Bluff of Virtue, is a similar therapeutic exercise where the work of writing became medicine. 'Things may die, but imagination is eternal' is an elixir he finds worth drinking.

Book preview

The Bluff of Virtue

Peter Batchelor

The Bluff of Virtue

Copyright © 2023 by Peter Batchelor

The following story is fiction. The settings of real events are fictional and do not represent any person who is living or has passed.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the author, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other non-commercial uses permitted by copyright law.

Tellwell Talent

www.tellwell.ca

ISBN

978-1-77941-122-8 (Hardcover)

978-1-77941-121-1 (Paperback)

978-1-77941-123-5 (eBook)

Dedication

Patience, encouragement, and inspiration have a name. That name is sister.

To my dear sister Marion.

Table of Contents

Dedication

Part 1: Silas

Chapter 1: The war to end all wars.

Chapter 2: Keelin.

Chapter 3: Jimmy and the Runt.

Chapter 4: Saturn in Aquarius.

Chapter 5: A gammy leg and a mind that limped.

Chapter 6: Upper Bathurst Street.

Chapter 7: The girl in green.

Chapter 8: Glory.

Part 2: Thane

Chapter 1: The twenties that failed to roar.

Chapter 2: The Depression comes to Tassie.

Chapter 3: The Canadian.

Chapter 4: Dad and Dave.

Chapter 5: ‘Sir’ surprises.

Chapter 6: The White House.

Chapter 7: Daydream and day-mare.

Chapter 8: Rabbits.

Chapter 9: Then came Stella.

Chapter 10: Monkey Boy.

Chapter 11: Three birds.

Chapter 12: The RAN comes to the Basin.

Chapter 13: Herbert.

Chapter 14: The Seagull.

Chapter 15: The gift of sister.

Chapter 16: Chief P.O. Wood

Chapter 17: Kamikaze.

Chapter 18: Monkey Girl.

Chapter 19: Riverina Ruth.

Part 3: David

Chapter 1: A Second Son.

Chapter 2: Jesus in the milk shed.

Chapter 3: A ruthless vow for Vincent.

Chapter 4: The Curate and the Saint.

Chapter 5: Too Close for Comfort.

Chapter 6: Callan Park.

Chapter 7: The fog of family.

Chapter 8: Silas versus God.

Chapter 9: Night visitor.

Chapter 10: Evergreen.

Chapter 11: Art, Music, and silence.

Chapter 12: I killed my father!

Chapter 13: ‘Yorked’, on and off the field.

Part 4: Consuela

Chapter 1: End-of-Year dance.

Chapter 2: Moonlight Sonata.

Chapter 3: Madness is a private thing.

Chapter 4: Peace breaks out.

Chapter 5: The Great Grandfather of the Church.

Chapter 6: David talks with a dead man.

Chapter 7: A charismatic, one size fits all, ‘tut tut’.

Chapter 8: The sacramental font.

Chapter 9: Vincent chooses.

Chapter 10: David nails himself to his piece of wood.

Chapter 11: El Nino.

Author’s Note

Part 1

Silas

Chapter 1

The war to end all wars.

Dawn, 25th April 1915

Behind was the enlistment and training. In front was Jimmy and his backpack. In front of Jimmy was the beach, the patient guns of the Turks and fear. Silas had prepared for this and was willing to accept the outcome; Silas had prepared for death. He looked to the sky; he remembered Saturn in Aquarius.

The open boat crammed with frightened humanity, dressed as soldiers, ducked, and rolled its way to the beach. Silas still felt the tightness in his chest that had come over him on the voyage to the Dardanelles. Now, in the overcrowding, it threatened to overwhelm him. It sucked away at his breath and his loss of control edged closer. Although an atheist, he thanked God that it would all soon end. There was no talk in the landing craft now, it would be too revealing. Anything Silas could say would only expose fear, it would not be welcome in the boat. His silence and clench of the muscles in his legs and hands was the only tool he had left to prevent his collapse. He was not the idealistic recruit, who had paraded with Jimmy on the decks of the transport ship out at sea; a cold sweat had formed beneath his resolve.

It was all different back then. The commanders had said that Lord Kitchener’s request that the Australians training in Egypt be diverted from the Western Front in Europe to Gallipoli; ‘would only be a cruise in the Sea of Marmara’. But it had changed. News from the Western Front had described the inhuman horrors of trench warfare and the tens of thousands of men sacrificed. This was to be the war to end all wars, sanity would demand that never again would the leaders of nations seek war as a solution. The cost had escalated to mass inhumanity and savagery, a cost manifestly too great. This same horror now awaited them on the beaches they headed toward.

The men were informed that the landing sites selected for the assault on the coast of Gallipoli could not be gained without great difficulty. It was ‘brass-talk’ that every man knew called for uncommon, even lethal bravery. Silas and Jimmy had no illusions about the poor prospect of their survival and so had prepared themselves. They were to be the first ashore, their courage would be the headstones on which a victory was to be based. Their resignation was not suicide, ‘anyone can do that’, Jimmy had said when they had spoken of the grave risk they were about to face. However, their youth was fertile ground for seeds of idealism to have rooted. They would die together, their shared mortality now certain. Their last battle was to usher in the eradication of war forever. To give all for others and for the greater good was a commitment made to each other. Their forebears may have been convicts in chains, but they were free Aussies now.

The sergeant shouted ‘Forward!’ as the boat slid onto the sand. It was a relief to move, to run, to run. Jimmy ran ahead, ‘forever true!’ He shouted over his shoulder to Silas. The sergeant barked ‘Forward!’. Once more, soldiers poured like lemmings out of the boats that had made shore. ‘Forward!’ The demands from other boats were punctuated by the deadly spit of metal in air and the splash of shrapnel around standard issue boots. Silas was exposed. Jimmy, his best friend, had fallen and lay in an expanding pool of his life as it pumped from the gape in his neck. Jimmy had stopped the bullet meant for him; Silas was prepared for the end.

The Turks now withered the brave lines of men. The misread of the generals and an uncooperative tide had pushed the troops further north. Silas ran across the last meters of the beach; it would be claimed by a nation’s eternal memory as Anzac cove. Three machine gun bullets entered his left leg, one severed his femoral artery. The one-legged soldier stumbled and fell face down. The sand of Gallipoli entered his mouth, it tasted of the sand back home. Silas began to bleed out. This was the end of it; his valour would be remembered. He had served his country with uncommon bravery, he had lived up to his own demands of duty, and he had prepared for this. Now under a foreign sky, Silas, along with his pain, waited for exit.

Silas re-entered consciousness in the open boat crammed with broken, half-alive, soldiers; they wore decorations of gore. He was disoriented and sick with his own loss of blood. The dismembered writhed around him. The horror played out in silence, he could not hear, he was deaf. Like undelivered mail, this tangle of men was returned to the Hospital Ship that waited offshore. They were safe from the guns of the Turks. ‘I should have stopped’, Silas broke down. ‘He would have stopped for me!’ His cry mingled with the chorus of anguish in the boat. ‘Jimmy died alone’, he called to no one. ‘Jimmy died alone!’ He called again. Silas had prepared for death’s sentence; Jimmy was so full of living that life after the war should have been his due. The officers had been open about the insanity of such a landing. Silas had prepared for death; he had not prepared for wounding. Not prepared at all, to sail away from the fight on day one; to sail away alone. ‘It was supposed to be both of us’; tears burst the dams his eyes had become, then his pain anesthetised him again.

The casualty barge pulled alongside the hospital ship, HMHS Gascon, moored just beyond the range of the shore batteries. Thirty-two stretchers loaded with soldiers in different phases of dying, and the struggles of those who still clung to life, lay two abreast on the wide floor of the boat. Silas lay unconscious on his litter between a man with no legs and a boy with half of his face. A cram of bloodied and patched men stood in the bow area of the barge. The torture of a steep ladder was the climb ahead, from the first aid on the beach to more professional care on board. In that boat load, seven men died by the time they had made it to the deck.

Silas was critically low on blood when he reached the emergency surgery bay. It was not until early in the night that he surfaced from the blankness he sought. A British padre stood by the bed and tried without success to imagine the suffering before him. He had a breviary in one hand and a purple stole around his neck. Silas was in a ward that overflowed with damaged men. The blood transfusion, which still dripped into his veins, had brought his anaemia to a conscious level. He was nauseous and his heart raced, the fever had set in; his pain appalled. He was not one of the wounded who was given morphine as the stocks were limited and to be administered only to amputees.

‘You are wasting your time,’ Silas shouted to the empathy above; his hearing had returned, he could hear himself shout.

‘Keep fighting, my son,’ said the priest.

‘I am tired of the fighting,’ sighed Silas. Now the silence between the priest and the sorry humanity before him, enlarged the groans of the ward.

‘God will comfort,’ was all that the priest could drag from his own weariness. He was close to despair; his church would not allow that.

‘God may be interested in the manoeuvrings of nations…the progress of battles…but…but…what goes on in the bowels of a hospital ship…no God would tolerate,’ said Silas. His betrayal was delivered in gasps and stutters between the shafts of pain. His message had crossed to the empathy that stood over him. He then lapsed into the blackness again. The priest blessed the blackness and went off in search of another soul that needed comfort.

Silas and Jimmy stood on the poop deck at the stern of the transport steamer. They wore their greatcoats, it was cold. A sea fog had settled around them and prevented sight of their future. They mirrored each other’s stance with one foot on the lower guard rail. The air was wholesome here, not like the fear that had fouled the air below decks with the troops. They had asked several of the men to come up on deck and watch with them, but the sedative of card games prevailed. Always hungry, teenager Silas had brought the crust end of a loaf with him. The two soldiers in battle fatigues, watched the wake recede; it was a chain of white water relevant to the world that they had come from and the new world for which they headed. Jimmy and Silas stood, side by side, in a moment extracted from time. A moment that was only a moment. A moment impatient to empty into the rush to war. The mates spoke rather than smoke.

‘You scared Jimmy?’ asked Silas.

‘Yeah runt,’ Jim replied. He looked at his mate, the blueness of his eyes became bluer. The moment enlarged. ‘I was scared,’ Jim added, to prevent the fall into silence. He was contemplative now. Silas turned to the thoughtfulness beside him. It was the quality that Silas most admired in his friend. Jimmy was almost eighteen but his time at Astrid’s had produced a wisdom in advance of his years.

‘It’s goin’ to be rough,’ said Jim. ‘But this is to be the end of war you know.’ Silas’ nod was agreement with Jimmy’s clear claim. ‘The powers that be, have finally come to their senses now that they understand the carnage that is Europe.’ Jim had become his vision. ‘It is in the papers, ‘The war to end all war’,’ said the intent blue. ‘This is the last battle of the wars men will fight!’ Jimmy had made his peace with the battle of Armageddon. ‘What is happening in Europe, and is about to happen here, will never be repeated.’

‘It is the only saving grace of modern warfare; we are good at killing each other.’ Silas’ dark eyes were just as keen.

‘Yeah…our outstanding ability to slaughter has finally brought war’s demise.’ Jimmy shook his head; he could not understand man’s stupidity. ‘I truly believe that the sacrifices made last year, and this year in France, and the one we are about to make here, will be the end of war,’ repeated Jim. He was not convincing himself, there was no need now, he knew.

Jimmy looked at his little mate.

‘I’ll go in front of you in the morning, stay in my shadow.’ Silas rarely questioned Jimmy and was not about to do so now.

‘I’ll cover you, Jimmy…Understanding has come late for us, but it is just in time for the world.’

‘Unfortunately for you and for me, to end all war, we must fight this one first.’ said Jimmy.

A curtain drew over the conversation, it had not stalled; it continued in each of the men’s thoughts. Sometimes an idea does not need words. Silas and Jimmy knew, with the certainty of young blood, that they were to be part of the final abolition of war; part of the universal saving of man from himself. Silas broke the stolen crust and gave half to his mate. Time out here was a side show to their eternal commitment to each other; it did not tick. The night air made it all clear out here.

A while later, or soon, Jimmy rifled through his coat pocket for the cigarette he had rolled earlier. It was still dry. The flare from his match printed a snapshot on his face of the truce he had just made. Silas struggled with his damp fag.

‘Here runt,’ said Jim. Silas flicked his nervous effort over the stern and took a soothing drag. "Keep facing Egypt, the smoking light is out.’ The smell of the smoke from the coal fired steamer would be more of a giveaway than their fags if an onshore wind blew. It didn’t, it was calm. They now smoked rather than talk. Silas blew a cloud of smoke over Jimmy’s head. Jimmy reciprocated.

The sound of three muffled bells rang; it was 1.30am.

Consciousness returned, as a litter with a covered dead soldier was carried away. Silas was in a different part of the ship. In a panic he threw off the sheet to see if he still had his leg. It was still there, bandaged from his groin to his ankle. An Indian orderly appeared at his bedside.

‘Calm down Sahib,’ he was stern.

‘My leg!’ shouted Silas. He was less loud than before; his hearing had improved.

‘The doctor, he will be coming soon, Sahib. If you not quiet down, I am having to restrain you with the leather strap.’

The doctor came. The white coat he wore was bloodied; his forehead lined by the dead and dying. He did not look like a doctor; he had the bare forearms of a stoker.

‘The damage to your femoral artery was what nearly killed you. You almost bled out! You were within one fluid ounce of death.’ The doctor, also, was matter of fact. ‘Your femur is fractured, and you no longer have a kneecap,’ the doctor’s litany had not finished. ‘You have a fever you will have to fight; it is now your biggest danger. You are lucky to have a leg, young man, and even more lucky to still be alive’. Silas wished that his luck had run out back on the beach with Jimmy. Now, in this hades, Silas had not worked out if his will, or the absent God of war, would cure him or kill him.

Silas was returned to Alexandria. The voyage was punctuated by men who died, men who cursed their wounds, men who slipped into mental breakdown, men anxious, men in panic and men thankful. It was nightmarish. Silas had seen and heard things that should have been reserved for hell. But Silas’ pain saved him. Saved him from a headfirst fall into depression. He did not count it as a Godsend, but it was.

On arrival in Egypt, he was taken to the 1st British Red Cross Hospital at Montazah for his further treatment and convalescence. His return to a semblance of the man he was before Anzac Cove was arduous. The infection that had riddled his leg after the surgery on the Gascon was hard to treat with early 20th century chemicals and antiseptics, and a busted leg healed at its own pace. Penicillin had not yet been discovered. The treatment of severe infection was rudimentary. Maggots and bleeding helped, however there was still a cavalcade of deaths.

Silas was careful not to make any close friends, only fellow invalids who were easy to avoid. His body had been wounded and was repairing, his mind had been permanently scarred. Unexpected and unwanted, he had a life to live beyond the war. He had thoughts to make the best of it, but his loss was such that he had to find a way to endure it.

Chapter 2

Keelin.

December 1915.

Silas was repatriated to England to the AIF Auxiliary Hospital set up in Harefield House in Middlesex. He spent a further three months learning to walk again and was deemed unfit for military service. He returned to Australia in December 1915 on HS Karoola, Australia’s 1st Hospital Ship. He disembarked in Adelaide.

‘Where are the crowds?’ asked the one and a half-legged soldier on crutches as he shuttled his way down the narrow gangplank in front of Silas.

Silas dragged his left leg as if shackled by ball and chain. ‘It’s the dead, not cripples, that they come to watch,’ said Silas.

The returning soldiers could not accept that the nightmare of the Gallipoli Campaign would be one of Australia’s finest hours; that was several years away. For now, they struggled to forget the unforgettable, to push deep inside of themselves things that needed light to heal.

The Australian Government did not have in place a defined method of support for returned veterans. Even if they did, Silas would have rejected all; he despised pity and those who dispensed it. The veterans did have access to the support of some voluntary organisations with very limited resources, however Silas convinced himself that he had the option to ‘sink or swim’. He chose to dog paddle his way through the next phase of his life. He did not realise then that life would require even greater valour than that he had shown on Anzac Cove. Enormous demands yet to be made on his physical, mental, and emotional resources, which now hung on the thread of his sanity.

Silas had made it back to Australia and along with his limp, a life-long guilt burdened him. He, and not Jimmy came home. He had been meddled with; he was not the man who went to fight. He had gone to serve and had prepared himself for a bad outcome; his survival had ruined his life.

Silas had nothing to come home to. His mother, Keelin, had died almost three years before. He had to start over again. But now, he was only half the man who went to fight; the other half of him lay in a foreign grave.

The girl who would become his mother was born in 1869. Her parents had previously come to Australia as ‘potato famine immigrants’ in 1849. They settled in Launceston. Her parents struggled with the displacement caused by ‘the great hunger’. County Cork, where they had rented a small farm from the Anglo-protestant landholder, was especially hard hit by the blight. Though most of the population in Ireland were Catholics, they were treated as second class by the protestant rule of the English who had been granted the land. Keelin’s early memories of home life in Launceston, were the stories of the potato famine brought to each breakfast by her parents. Breakfast never quite satisfied after the hunger fears of Cork had been served; she felt ungrateful for her full stomach.

After both parents passed, her father in 1893, her mother in 1896, she fell on hard times. She hoped to improve her situation by marriage. This did not go well. She fell in love with a young boy. They had a torrid affair. The boy deserted her after she fell pregnant. Keelin hoped that her first love would return after the baby they had conceived was born. He did not return, she never heard from him again. The baby was born after a most difficult labour, on Christmas Day in 1898, Keelin named him Silas.

Silas was named after one of Keelin’s favourite New Testament saints, Saint Silas. He was a member of the early Christian community and a follower of Saint Paul. From Keelin’s study of the bible as a young girl she learnt that the name Silas originated from the Greek and meant ‘of the forest’. As her son had no surname, she decided that he should be known as Silas Wood. Silas would never know his father; Keelin’s amen to desertion was that a saint’s name suited her son better than that of his father. She did not want her son to be tagged with the constant reminder of a quitter.

Keelin raised Silas as best as she could without a husband. To cover the scandal of birth outside of wedlock, she married soon after the desertion of Silas’ father. Her second husband, Alfred, died of TB when Silas was six. ‘Freddy’, as Keelin called him, was hard working but had to spend much of the time away in the mines. His work in the Cornwall Valley mines in North-eastern Tasmania debilitated him; he died a broken man.

Silas had some memory of Alfred. Three recollections were clear. First was the visit to the hospital where Alfred was treated. Silas was not allowed to enter the ward, so he was sent outside to wait for his mother. Time by himself was usual, and indeed from the earliest times he could remember, welcome. He climbed a tree in the hospital grounds. He recalled the strange sight of his masked mother when she came outside to look for him. He had never seen his mother’s face covered. He only saw two moist pores; he knew then that it was bad news that caused her to cry.

The second memory was the church where the funeral for Alfred was held a few days later. There were no relatives present as they had none, just some local people. The service was also sparse, like the lack of flowers. The priest said kind words reserved for the anonymous and made a cross of air at the foot of Fred’s coffin. Silas, in borrowed clothes, stood manfully by his mother. Keelin wore the blue dress with cream roses that Albert had bought in the second-hand store in Launceston. Her wedding-day green ‘flowerpot hat’ with fine netting gathered her memories. ‘Fred will be pleased,’ she said to Silas when they dressed for the funeral. Now, as the casket was removed from the church, she shed quiet tears. Silas did not cry.

The third memory was the grave side that same day. The priest had also come. He had changed from his church clothes into a white frock over his black dress. He stood beside a large hole in the ground. There were fewer people than had come to the church, even if the two men in navy singlets with shovels were counted. A small girl, who was not much older than Silas, placed a white rose on the coffin before it was lowered into the hole. Then came the shock. Silas was startled by the thump of clay clods on the lid of the box tossed by the men with shovels as they filled in the hole. He feared that it may wake Alfred. It was a noise that buried itself in his memory and would reappear from time to time.

Now there was just Silas and his mother. Keelin believed that their lack of pennies did not mean they were poor. She believed beyond their present horizon were better times, she had to. They lived many miles from any school and Keelin had expended her patience on home lessons, and after nine months she and Silas moved to Hobart.

Keelin’s Catholic upbringing was the reason that she was able to find rough accommodation close to the Hobart Catholic Cathedral, Saint Marys. Not able to afford the uniforms and fees of the catholic school, Silas was put into the local public school. His classrooms were dingy and airless. Many of his classmates would miss weeks of school through sickness. There was a time when he had sore tonsils and had to stay home and eat custard and sloppy porridge. He was not a sickly child though. The energy that coursed in him would find him up a tree or running about the yard. Keelin took in washing to earn the money to live off. She also mended old clothes and darned socks. A further supplement to her meagre resources was the local parish priest who had arranged for her to wash and starch the altar coverings. Old father Clarke also informed the better off parishioners of her services; only two would send her their washing.

About two years later, Silas recalled a rare lift in his mother’s spirits. He came home from school one day to find his mother singing. She stirred a load of washing in the copper under the lean-to out back. The fire under the copper had damped down and the smell of wood smoke was in the air, sweat from her neck formed a V-shaped stain on her grey cotton top. She saw Silas and like a girl ran to him, took both of his hands, and danced in a circle with him. It was too sudden for Silas to hide his embarrassment. Silas heard a sound come from his mother that he had never heard, she was giggling; a sound he thought his mother incapable of making. Then she started to sing their favourite song. Silas was swept up in her playfulness and they sang together:

Farewell to old England forever,

Farewell to my numskulls as well,

Farewell to the well-known Old Baily

Where I always did look such a swell.

Singing too-ral-li-ooral-li-addity,

Singing too-ral-li-ooral- li-ay,

Singing too-ral-li- ooral li- addity,

Oh we’re bound for Botany Bay.

Some of the words were wrong but that was the way that mother and son sang it. They danced and sang until spent, then both flopped onto their backs in the middle of the yard, panting. The smoke of burnt wood draped over them, it was a scent that would return Silas to this happy moment for the rest of his life. After Keelin had regained enough breath to speak without giggle, she told Silas she had met a man with a good job and that he wanted to marry her. The little girl had shared her happiness with Silas. He caught the joy that had entered his mother, he looked forward to having a new father and a full belly.

Keelin’s third husband, Mason, was a monster. After a short period of restraint, his flaws became manifest. He was a hard, emotionless man and jealous of Silas. Silas was regularly beaten for behaviour that he did not understand, his mother too. When he was nine, he spent time under his bed hiding after he had seen his new father strike his mother with a kitchen pot. Mason saw Silas who stood by the door. After he had finished with his mother, Mason ran outside to look for him. Silas stayed under his bed for hours. How he wanted Mason to vent on him and not his mum, but Silas’ lack of age and size made it a vain wish. So, he hid. He tied and untied knots in the fibres of his dilapidated mattress that hung below the wire bed base. His new father came back drunk several hours later. He raged at his mother for his dinner, half scoffed the meal, then collapsed on the lounge to sleep the anger off.

Silas’ worst memory was the time that his mother copped a hiding when she protected him. It was a Sunday. Silas and his mother had delivered a spotless, starched altar cloth to the church. Father Clarke had invited Keelin and her boy to stay for Mass. Though she was not what some of the parishioners would class as a regular mass goer, Keelin accepted.

‘Be warned Father, the walls may fall in on us all,’ said Keelin.

‘The convicts built the walls Missus, they built it strong. Besides, with the convicts, you, me, and Jesus inside, God will be having second thoughts.’

Silas laughed along with his mother and the daredevil priest. Even though Father Clark did not mention him by name, Silas wanted to take his chances within those walls too. Keelin was thankful for an hour in the peace of the church. They returned home a bit after ten o’clock. Mason was cold sober, but his mood heated.

‘Bin’ with the holy Joes you little bastard,’ he snarled at Silas.

‘Don’t speak to Silas like that,’ said Keelin.

Silas ran past Mason to the back yard to get away from the man’s impulse to hit. Mason followed. Silas climbed into the Blue Gum that stood in the back corner by the dunny. The fluffy white gum flowers and shiny green leaves he brushed past would have been fitting decoration for this morning’s altar. Mason stood at the foot of the trunk, more puffed by anger than his lack of fitness. He had snapped a twitch off the quince tree. Keelin stood by the chook-pen, she wrung her hands. The three chickens stopped their scratching and scampered to the wire in the hope of kitchen scraps, they had no interest in the commotion.

‘Come down precious or your mother will cop your punishment. Nobody runs past me!’

Silas started down.

‘Please Mason not the boy again, he will say sorry.’

Mason pushed Keelin to the ground and grabbed Silas by his hair as his feet touched earth. Silas felt the sting of the twitch. Keelin recovered and threw her arms around Mason to stop the beating. Mason filled, then overflowed with frustration. He knew he was loved less than the boy, not loved at all. The violence that flowed out of him now, stopped him from seeing who he had become. Keelin’s chipped tooth, busted lip and black eye would need an explanation; a door perhaps; her broken heart and bruised soul would not.

Threats and violence were Silas’ home for the next five and a half years. There were many bad things during this time that he had to bury from his memory, or pretend that they did not happen. He was more successful by day, but nights were often interrupted by a bad dream or by the real thing.

Chapter 3

Jimmy and the Runt.

1912

Keelin died from unexplained causes when Silas was thirteen and a half years old. Mason immediately went to the gold fields near Queenstown in Southwestern Tasmania and left Silas with one of his woman acquaintances, Astrid.

Astrid was a onetime beautiful girl. Her blond hair had turned grey years ago, the ravages of smoking and partners who did not care had aged her and damaged her spirit. She was a survivor who had not managed to break free of excuse. She accepted affection where she could find it, and the cash that came with it. Another boy lived with her; his name was Jim.

Silas had clear memory of his first encounter with Jim.

‘What’s yer name runt?’

The question pleased Silas: nobody had ever cared enough to give him a nickname.

‘Silas,’ said Silas to the stout, almost man who had asked.

‘Me name’s, Jim.’ A hand the size of a dinner plate hung in the space between them. Silas placed his scrawny hand onto the plate, it was warm, it was strong.

‘Bin dumped here too?’, asked Jim, who knew about being dumped.

‘It’s for my education,’ said Silas.

‘No need to put on airs with me.’ Shafts of blue, set beneath a scrub of black hair, looked him over. Silas’ attempted to reply; no words stumbled from him.

‘You’ll get a feed and a bed here,’ said Jim. ‘Education is optional.’ Jim picked up Silas’ excuse for a suitcase. ‘C’mon runt, I’ll show you where we sleep.’

Jim slapped his hand on Silas’ shoulder. Silas felt the assault of Jim’s hand, he recoiled from the blow. It was unlike the savageness of Mason. It was unspoken friendship from an almost man.

‘Sorry runt’, said Jim.

‘Don’t put on airs,’ said Silas. ‘I will be strong like you one day.’ In one exchange Silas had grown. Jim smiled at the five-foot nothing tough nut.

Silas felt safe, he liked Jim. Silas could come out of the cave that protected from Mason. He had stepped into the light and was exposed, but now there would be two in the fight. Sure, he was still told where to go and what to do by Astrid and her men friends, but he was the ‘runt’; and the runt had a mate. The closeness of Jim had sent Mason further away. It was remarkable that such cruelty faded so quickly. Silas’ want was to move on. The cemetery he had prepared for his memories allowed his prospects to emerge. A brighter future had risen from the ashes of his unlived childhood. The boy Silas had named his future Jimmy.

This was the happiest time in Silas’ life. The homelife into which he had been thrust lacked parental guidance, despite the men who walked in and out of the run-down house where they lived. Silas and Jimmy were left to their own devices and began to fill that void with each other. Silas thrived and became a smaller version of his robust mate. He had dressed his bones with muscle that would never overpower big Jim, but his spirit was a match. Jimmy was two years older than Silas, and Silas found purpose in the presence of his tall companion. In turn, Jimmy ran protection for his new skinny shadow.

The local priest often saw the two unkempt boys visit the cemetery with stolen flowers to lay on a gravesite. He was a man who understood that a school run by the Brothers would benefit them both.

Two months after Silas had come to live with Astrid, they were put into a school run by The Christian Brothers. The school was called Saint Virgil’s and it was close to the centre of Hobart; within a thirty-minute walk from Astrid’s shanty. It was against their wishes. The thirteen-year-old had no say. ‘Damn you Silas, it is for your own good,’ said Astrid who found the presence of two pubescent boys a damper on the business. Fifteen-year-old Jim decided that a little education would not harm.

For the next two years; as Jim put it; ‘we learned how to speak proper and to do mathematics.’ On day one, the brothers were at pains to point out to the two new dayboys, that Saint Virgil was a rebel. He had been born in Ireland over twelve hundred years ago and was an exceptional astronomer and mathematician. Virgil was called a heretic because he believed the world to be round. This side of the aged St Virgil appealed to Jim; he liked history. More importantly, he liked heretics. Stories of men and women on untrodden paths appealed to Jim; he did not have the same liking for maths. Silas was good at maths. Both heads were used to good effect and by start of their second year at St Virgil’s, they had become what their school master called, ‘good students’. Silas and Jim were a jigsaw that worked.

The two mates found the practices and prayers that the brothers insisted all pupils follow, did not apply to them. Their experience had proved to them that they had no need to rely on prayer to better their situation. Jim said, and Silas agreed, ‘that waiting around for a