Harbour Glimpses

Kevin Scully

Description

1950s Australia and the conservative starch is stiffening the fabric of society.Michael Keogh, son of a federal cabinet minister, feels out of place and time. His father wants to be seen in a good light, and Michael is part of his political and social ambitions. Increasingly isolated from those around him, Michael seeks refuge in the beauty and bush of Sydney harbour. Into his lonely world comes Virginia Smythe, a girl who teaches him that there is more to life than is apparent and that friendship can grow from the most chance of meetings. Harbour Glimpses is the story of a year when life looked as if it could and did change irrevocably.

Informations

• Publié par: eBook Versions
• Date de parution: 24 mai 2017
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781843964704
• Langue: English

Extrait

Published by Dwyer Editions

Copyright 2017 Kevin Scully
All rights reserved

Kevin Scully has asserted his right
under the Copyright, Designs and Patents
Act 1988 to be identified as the author
of this work

Author s website
www.kevin-scully.com

ISBN 978-1-84396-470-4

This novel is a work of fiction.
Any similrity between the characters,
events and locations it depicts and
real life is purely coincidental.

Cover image copyright © Julie Scully
Cover design by Scott Malcolm

Ebook production by
eBook Versions
27 Old Gloucester Street
London WC1N 3AX
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About the author


Kevin Scully is the author of a range of published and performed works.
His non-fiction includes Sensing the Passion, Women on the Way, Into Your Hands, Imperfect Mirrors, Five Impossible Things to Believe Before Christmas and Simple Gifts.
His radio dramas Verbal Assaults and A Grain of Rice were broadcast in Australia and Ireland respectively.
Ten works, including There’s One in Every Unit, The Glint of the Irish and Hard Up have been seen on stage in the United Kingdom and Australia.
His short stories won a number of awards and a some of his poems have been published.
Three Angry Men, a spiritual memoir of his father, Ken, who was also known by his pen name John Dawes, is available through his website, HYPERLINK "http://www.kevin-scully.com" www.kevin-scully.com.
Kevin is a former journalist, with experience in newspapers, television and radio.
He trained as an actor at the National Institute of Dramatic Art in Sydney and worked professionally on the stage, film, television and radio for ten years.
He is a priest in the Church of England and is married to the opera singer Adey Grummet.

Image copyright Sean Pines
HARBOUR
GLIMPSES


Kevin Scully





DWYER EDITIONS
Contents


Cover
Copyright Credits
About the author

Title Page

North Shore

Brisbane Water

Ebb Tide
NORTH SHORE


I was born a minister s son. Not of the church. My father s vocation was that prostitute of all professions - politics. He was, nevertheless, a good man. Or so I was told. Often. I knew my father more by repute than by personal exposure. My father to me now is more a presence, some feint ghost who haunts the memory of my early years.
There can be no doubt he was successful. The comfortable lower North Shore home even then, in the fifties, was a symbol of material wealth, a standard declaring either inheritance or attainment. My father had been in business, the respectable calling of his class after the war. The details of his financial struggle are lost to me, for it was sufficient to know that business worries now concerned him in the wider arena of parliament.
Those duties took him away from home for prolonged periods. His Canberra jaunts were at first, my mother told me, short - only three days a week. These absences lengthened as my father rose through the ranks of the party, gaining more important positions on committees, getting more responsibilities and finally, receiving his accolade - ministry of state.
The details of my father s career are a blur to me, as fuzzy as my personal memories of him. By my birth he was firmly entrenched in his ministry. I would sometimes hear him on the radio - the wireless at home permanently tuned to the ABC s broadcast of parliament when it was in session - and my mother would look at me and tell me how proud I should be to be the son of such an intelligent, committed man who was also deeply religious.
Indeed, my father s returns to the house had almost a missionary fervour about them. I suppose he saw himself like the priests who came to our church once a year. These missions were thinly disguised spiritual rabble rousing. A man we had never seen or, at best, had not been seen for the past twelve months, would from the pulpit implore us to become devout and holy, to spend the week in prayer and supplication and, as a token of our faith, give generously. You will have gathered by now that not only was my father a good Conservative but a good Catholic as well. This apparent contradiction in status was a source of much amusement to his critics and great chagrin to me.
For days before my father s return from the House my mother would spiral into activity. She would order his favourite foods, stock good wines and whisky, perhaps buy a new dress and always visit the hairdresser. Her enthusiastic preparations were passed on to me by way of instruction - mow the lawn, trim the edges, sweep the paths, clean up my room and, like her, get my hair cut. The house would be thus ready for the return of the prodigy.
The government car would arrive and from the lounge room we could hear my father exchanging hearty farewells with the driver. The car door would slam and, as he walked up the drive, my mother and I would form a reception line just inside the front door, which had been standing open. The screen door would swing back, my father would kiss my mother lightly on the cheek - no more than a discreet peck - and pass me his suitcase which I would dutifully deliver to the master bedroom.
On my return to the lounge room I would find my father sitting in a chair, my mother adoringly watching from the lounge. I would then stand in front of him as he sat on the throne and answer a succession of ritualistic questions about my schooling, sporting prowess and rectitude. I would give him chapter and verse on my progress in all three, after which I was despatched to my homework while my parents made for the bedroom to unpack . The noises which emanated from that room were a mystery to me for years but, like most things from childhood, the solution was far more interesting than the allure of the problem itself.
All my mother s personal and deputised preparations were dismissed in that unpacking as my father would then proceed to devote his time at home to his electoral duties. These, in addition to the ministerial matters that invariably followed him, reduced my mother to an answering service. I would augment my mother s secretarial functions by answering the phone and giving one of a formula of responses which accorded with my father s engagements diary, his brief on who was an allowed caller or other instructions. He always left a sheet of paper on which his daily timetable would be laid out, enabling us to keep abreast of his progress. He had that politician s knack of knowing that work was no work at all unless somebody else knew about it.
It is hard to say whether my father gave me such a passionate distaste for politicians and the process they epitomise or whether that distaste came from other experience. The progression from the bountiful fifties through the recessed eighties and nineties was something which followed me. Or me it. I have never been able to tell.

If childhood is supposed to develop a refined sense of isolation then it achieved its purpose with me. My formative years, as they re called, are held from me, as though separated by a shield of bullet-proof glass. Games, playing, friends, all the things I later learned one should expect as a child, were denied to me. Not that their denial caused me pain. Like most children in unusual circumstances, I took that which was happening around me to be the norm and judged odd activity foreign to that.
To me there was nothing unusual in one s father being away for months on end. Nor was it peculiar when he was at home that he should spend his days either at a city office or a small one in the local shopping centre. His nights were for meetings, business and social. The fifties were not a time for entertaining contacts in the home. Conservatives were big on family life. So sacred was it that only fundraising events could take place at home. We were spared my father s company for just about all else.
My father saw to it that my education fulfilled electoral expectations. Foremost in his consideration was that my schooling display his significant social status. This meant I had to attend what was laughingly called a preparatory school. The school was one of those institutions which plumb the zenith of idiocy in Australia. In a country where temperatures of thirty degrees and over in summer were commonplace, my father chose to send me to a school where I was forced to wear thick grey woollen socks, grey serge shorts and jacket, topped by a red and white striped cap. The uniform, I later learned, was based on those inappropriately named public schools in England. Nothing could be less public.
My school was stocked with the progeny of those who had succeeded or who held a substantial place in society . Our preparation for life was simply a predetermination to be surrounded by similar people, and a future for our children to do the same. When I look back I tell myself the children around me at school did not intend to be arrogant or hateful. They were, I hope, simply the products of ignorance in its worst form. That is, that lack of knowledge through comfort. If my classmates heard of people starving or out of work they could, with no crisis of conscience, suggest solutions to which Marie Antoinette would have given approval.
Around this time Paddington was a suburb for the working classes , as my father called them, despite his own boast of being a Balmain boy - such a background was to be overcome. The houses, old Victorian terraces, close together, too near the city for comfort, were solid sandstone, cold, in their original condition because of the poverty of their occupants. It would be fifteen to twenty years before the young and the rich would spy these same properties with a view to development, ensuring the original features would bring great financial rewards.
It was to this suburb that, in a concession to the progressive ideas in education, my class from prep was sent on an excursion. Such an event was not to be shrugged off lightly. Throughout the entirety of the preliminari