The Good Boy (18 page)

We arrived safely in Naples in mid-September and after a few days there a group of us went on together by train to Rome. After a further few days of sightseeing, our little party broke up and we all went our several ways, I making my way by train to Paris. A French missionary priest who had travelled with us on the
Australia
had recommended that while in Paris I stay in the famous ‘No.104' university hostel in the rue de Vaugirard run by the Marist Fathers and which counted François Mauriac and François Mitterand among its past students. I took his advice and stayed there for two weeks before taking the train to Bordeaux, to my posting at the Lycée Michel Montaigne. The priests and students at No. 104 seemed to mix together much more easily and pleasantly than had been the case at Newman, and although I was only
de passage
or in transit for two weeks, I found that every day someone or other would speak to me and proffer advice about sightseeing in Paris or about walking around the Latin Quarter where No. 104 was, or would question me in a friendly fashion about Australia and my trip to Europe, just making sure that I felt that someone in that big, new city cared about me. I quickly took in the major sights – Notre Dame, the Eiffel Tower, the Louvre and so on – and would discuss my day's sightseeing over the evening meal with those students who sat near me and could understand my then execrable French. What I did
not
discuss with them was my urge to go to Montmartre and to explore Paris's legendary nightlife.

Early one evening I did get as far as the foyers of both the Moulin Rouge and the Folies Bergères, but while the glamorous posters certainly attracted me, the cost of entry tickets was well beyond my very limited budget. As I walked disconsolately away, I noticed a number of attractively dressed women loitering in the nearby streets. After a few tries I was able to understand what they were saying to passing males. They were offering
un peu de bonheur
, ‘a good time'! I eventually picked out one who did not look quite as alarmingly painted and professional as the others and asked her the price. It seemed just affordable.

When I did not pull away she said, ‘
Alors, je vous emmène
?' I replied ‘
Oui
,' and she led me to a nearby rather sleazy little hotel where the male concierge gave us a casual glance and scribbled something in a notebook as we walked towards the stairs. My ‘lady of the night' opened the door of a large, dim bedroom with furnishings in Belle Époque style, quite possibly dating from that period. It was her working area, presumably rented by the hour or even half-hour.

She waved me in. ‘Take off your shoes,' she said, in wellmodulated and easily understood French, and proceeded to do the same herself and then to squat over a bidet and give her working parts a quick rinse. I had never seen a bidet before (there was no plumbing in the rather spartan rooms at No. 104) and had never seen a woman do that before. But I realised I was expected to follow suit, and did so, leaving shoes, socks, trousers and underpants on the floor but keeping the rest of my clothes on, as she had done. By this time
elle
was lying on the bed waiting for me. I went to climb on too – she seemed just a little bit impatient – when she stopped me short with: ‘You've got something to give me, haven't you?' I must have shown my confusion at this, not sure whether she was speaking metaphorically or factually, so she then explained very clearly, ‘That will be 100 francs' or whatever the charge was.
Don't squeeze the fruit until you have paid for it!
as the signs used to say in Australian fruit shops.

I found the money, put it on the bedside table, climbed onto the bed and away we went. ‘Do you mind if we turn off the light?' I asked, finding the situation not quite as romantic as I had hoped.

‘Is it your first time,
chéri
?' she asked, and when I confessed that it was (almost) she agreed and turned the lights down, but not off. She took a drag on a cigarette she had lit while I was undressing, then put it out and looked in a ho-hum sort of way to see if I was making any progress. I was, despite her lack of enthusiasm, and it was all over even faster than it had been with His Highness in our back garden. In next to no time we were washed up, re-dressed and back on the street.

I walked all the way back across the city to the rue de Vaugirard, to save on the Métro fare and to sort out my thoughts. On arriving, I headed straight for the showers and washed and washed and washed. How stupid could I be! What a waste of money! What a risk I had taken, in terms of health and of being mugged by an accomplice! Talk about balls ruling brains! And if that was all having sex with a woman in romantic
Gay Paree
amounted to, I wasn't interested. Masturbation was better, safer and cheaper … and I have never been back to Montmartre or to any of its imitations since!

After two or three weeks in Paris I took the train to Bordeaux and my job at the Lycée Michel Montaigne. The Lycée was near the centre of the city, close to one of the remaining mediaeval gates, and was housed in a rather grand eighteenth-century building originally built as a Jesuit college. It was a prestigious institution, offering the final three years of secondary schooling leading to the Baccalauréat as well as the post-Bac
classes préparatoires
in which students prepared themselves to sit the
concours
or competitive entrance examinations of the
grandes écoles
such as the École Polytechnique, the École Normale Supérieure and the École Nationale d'Administration. There were a thousand or so students there, 300 of them living in, as did I and the other
assistants
and
surveillants.
³⁹

I enrolled at the university which was just a short stroll away, bought a
beret Basque
, wore black corduroy trousers and a suede jacket like my peers, and felt that I really was making progress with my French. However, the experience of living far away from my family and in an environment which, though endlessly interesting, was nonetheless quite different and in some ways almost alien, was unsettling.

So it turned out that religion was one of the things that helped me feel at home and secure in France. These were pre-Vatican II
⁴⁰
times, and Sunday Mass in Bordeaux was exactly the same as Sunday Mass in Melbourne … said entirely in Latin, the priest wearing the same sort of vestments in the familiar liturgical colours, the choir and organist using the same music (mostly Palestrina or Gregorian). The sermon was of course in French and instead of being a boring interruption of the ritual it became for me an excellent opportunity to hear well-articulated and carefully prepared spoken French. So I became a regular churchgoer (to the amusement of many of my student friends, most of whom were rather anti-clerical), even going to additional services when I thought the music or the preacher or the architecture of the particular church warranted it. I came to find comfort in talking about what to do with my life with an elderly canon of the cathedral, sometimes at the cathedral and sometimes in his rooms at a nearby convent where he lived as the chaplain. By the end of the academic year I had decided that I should give the religious life a try: perhaps my father had been right in thinking that I would make a priest, perhaps my aunt had been right about the ‘Hound of Heaven'. I told my ghostly father that I thought I would ask to join the Cistercians,
⁴¹
or more precisely the Trappists
⁴²
and sought his advice as to which abbey to contact. He advised me
not
to settle on an abbey in France, saying that the language and the different culture would constitute additional difficulties to those already awaiting me in the religious life. He suggested that instead I should contact the Trappist abbey in Ireland which had just opened a daughter house in Australia, in which he thought I would have the best chance of successfully adapting my life to the demands and routine of monastic life. As a result, when the end of the first year came around, I advised the French authorities that I did not want to take up the year in Paris that they had offered me and I set off for Ireland.

The best-known Cistercian/Trappist abbey in Ireland was Mt Melleray, near Waterford, and when I arrived there unannounced one day the place was in turmoil, the guesthouse full and overflowing, and I was advised to head for the ‘daughter' abbey, Mt St Joseph, at Roscrea in County Tipperary. The cause of the fuss was that the old abbot had died and I had arrived on the day before his funeral, which was to be attended by every priest and bishop in Ireland who could get a bed in or near the abbey and by hundreds of other well-wishers from all over the country. So I made my way to Roscrea and was welcomed at the abbey guesthouse, and a day or two later was able to talk with the abbot of Mt St Joseph on his return from the proceedings at Mt Melleray. The abbot eventually agreed to accept me as a novice, suggesting at first that I go to Mt St Joseph's daughter abbey in Scotland, near Edinburgh, where the abbot was apparently a distant kinsman on my father's side. But he then decided that Scotland would be too cold for me and I would do better in Australia. He had at first thought to accept me as a novice there and then at Mt St Joseph, and to send me out to the Australian foundation after a year or two, but finally decided to recommend that I ‘remain in the world for another year' to see if I was really sure about my decision. He urged me to return to Australia, to complete my studies (which needed another year to qualify me fully as a teacher), to think the matter over carefully and then, if I still wanted to proceed, to contact the Novice Master at the new abbey not far from Melbourne with a view to joining the order in Australia. I followed his advice, returned to Melbourne by ship and resumed both teaching and teacher training.

Towards the end of the school year I went out to the new abbey at Tarrawarra, in the hills 60 or so kilometres east of Melbourne, discussed my situation with the Novice Master there, and applied to join up in the following year. My family and friends accepted my decision and announcement quietly, all of them, I am sure, wanting me to do whatever would make me happy. My mother, I know, was unhappy with the idea, but she tried to keep her views to herself and to let me work things out for myself. Her sister, Nell, and her youngest brother, Bert, my uncle and aunt, were both much more open in their scepticism, not just of my decision but, by then, of the whole idea of the religious life and of religion itself.

The abbey at Tarrawarra was located in a beautiful part of the Yarra Valley, where the river gurgled and swirled in a rather shallow bed between tree-lined banks and where the mountain walls of the valley began to close in and seemed to point the way to the near-perfect peak of Mt St Leonard at the top of the valley. The monks had bought several hundred acres of grazing country along with a rambling wooden farmhouse and adjoining shedding, and had quickly built a simple wooden church, a big dormitory, an ablutions block and several lecture/study rooms. The collection of buildings looked like a very poor cousin indeed of the architectural wonders of the great, stone French and Irish abbeys but, perhaps surprisingly, my enthusiasm and idealism seemed to transport me far above such mundane considerations. There was already a piece of land next to the newly-built church which had been carefully fenced off and designated as the monastic cemetery. A simple white wooden cross marked the grave of the first Irish monk to have died at Tarrawarra. I silently agreed with one of the other novices who, when asked in class by the Novice Master what his ambitions were, said that he hoped to spend his life as a good monk in the monastery and to be buried there in the little graveyard with his monastic brothers. He in fact did achieve this ambition, but I did not.

I had joined the monks in the abbey on Easter Sunday and stayed until the middle of the following year. The regular life, simple and rather spartan as it was, with the day structured around the celebration of the Mass, the singing of the Divine Office in Latin (this was just prior to the changes brought in at the end of Vatican II), the wonderful Gregorian chant, the beautiful and ageless ceremonies, the silence and peace, interspersed with study and work on the farm, seemed to suit me, and I was happier there than I had been for many years. With the agreement of the Novice Master, I wrote briefly to the old canon in Bordeaux telling him that I had indeed made it to the monastery and was very happy. He responded with a short note and the phrase that I still remember:
vous voilà au port
… ‘you're safely in harbour now'.

Even now I can recall an afternoon soon after receiving the canon's note when I had been kneeling alone in the abbey church ‘lost in prayer', as the saying goes. I had, I think, been meditating on the motto
Ubi Caritas Ibi Deus
,
⁴³
and within the space of fifteen minutes or so was so overcome with a feeling of happiness and gratitude to God for having brought me safely to the monastic life that tears of joy started to run down my face. A bell rang and I had to leave the church for some other duty. As I rose to go another monk, the choirmaster, suddenly appeared from around a corner. Seeing the happiness on my face, he broke the rule which counselled against unnecessary communication between monks and with a broad smile made the Trappist sign of ‘joy' to me. I responded with the sign for ‘thank you'. Mental prayer had not come easily to me in the monastery and that afternoon was an extraordinarily uplifting, even ecstatic experience. I walked on air as I hurried off to weed the vegetable garden or scrub out the showers or whatever task it was that called me.

The feeling of divine consolation faded only slowly over the ensuing few days. But a day eventually came when I lost my temper over some trivial matter, pretended conviction that sensible men in the twentieth century could not be expected to observe the detail of a rule written in the eleventh century, and declared that I did not want to spend another day there. I was quietly helped to calm down, with assurances that I would be helped to catch the first train to town next morning if that was my wish … and that is what I did. My mother (whom the monks had telephoned once I was on the way back to town on the morning train) welcomed me home without any ‘I told you so', as did everyone else, and within a few days I was back into teaching, paying my way, and saving for a car. I had given the religious life a try, and it had not worked out.