The Good Boy by John Fiennes Page A

Headmaster arrived at St Kevin’s to replace the outgoing Brother, who had been getting along very well with my father and whose transfer came as quite a surprise. I later learned that the outgoing Headmaster had been ‘demoted’ because a senior Brother on an inspection visit had discovered that he did not always get up for early morning Mass. For this he was considered by his superiors to be giving a bad example to the other Brothers in the house. Ironically enough, the ex-Headmaster shortly thereafter left the Christian Brothers, studied to become a priest, and was in due course appointed a Parish Priest in a neighbouring diocese … and able to say Mass, rather than to attend it, at whatever hour of the morning he pleased. Rather inexplicably, unless it was from some sort of solidarity with my father’s choice of friends, I resented the new Brother’s appointment, and let my feelings show. I also bridled at a remark of his soon after his arrival that while Rostrevor College in Adelaide (where he had previously been stationed) was the leading Catholic boys college in that city, Xavier College, being a Jesuit college, was the leading Catholic boys college in Melbourne … rather than St Kevin’s. I saw this remark as disloyalty to St Kevin’s and to the Christian Brothers, so for two years I waged a quiet war of resistance, never allowing myself to acknowledge the new Headmaster’s gifts as a teacher or his skills in school administration. Brother gave as good as he got, while always treating me fairly and patiently, despite my simmering hostility. I often recall what may well have been his final piece of advice to me, and his only veiled reference to my war campaign: ‘Understand this, John, the world is not black and white, as you seem to think; it is very, very grey.’ How right he was and how much time and energy I and others like me have wasted in not accepting that fact of life, in trying to classify everyone and everything as either ‘good’ or ‘bad’, ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ and in trying to force square pegs into round holes.
    Schooldays are, for fortunate Western children, interwoven with holidays, and for many children the planning of coming holidays and the remembering of ones completed constitute major incentives to getting through the routine of the school day. My sister, brother and I did not need to find paid holiday employment until our mid-teens and enjoyed what I now see was a rather indulgent and easy lifestyle. Once we had started school our holidays were, of course, restricted by the school timetable.
    The term holidays, two weeks off in May and again in September, as well as the six or seven weeks of the Christmas holidays each summer, were often spent away from Melbourne, as my parents thought it desirable to give us city children some good, fresh, country air. Sometimes this was achieved by going caravanning, and a couple of times we rented a house at the beach, once in Mentone and once at Edithvale; another time it was a house in the Dandenongs between Monbulk and Olinda, but I doubt that that sort of holiday was very restful for my mother, who ended up doing more housework and cooking on holiday than at home. The house at Mentone was a large, rambling, verandahed turn-of-the-century rendered brick place with a huge front garden and sweeping lawn, one on which I can still remember rolling in the warm summer evenings. The smell of the warm mown grass and its soft touch to my arms and legs, the sensation of my body rolling, rolling, free of any control or contact other than the pleasurable smell and feel of the grass, was perhaps the first awakening of sensuality in me.
    Sometimes we went to Tatura and spent the term holidays on the farm of Dad’s cousins, Mick and Nora. My brother Peter and I had a wonderful time on the farm, ‘helping’ with the milking in the morning, learning how to separate the milk and to