An Angel In Australia Read Online Free

there. So she had recognised him as the curate of St Margaret’s. Was she one of the young soldiers’ wives who had confessed loneliness or temptation to him? Had he, unconscious of her loveliness, absolved her and imposed a penance: ‘Say one decade of the Joyous Mysteries.’ Darragh nodded, and the woman settled back and resumed a secret whispered conversation with her son.
    Central Station that dangerous February was a melee of Sunday people, children in light summer hats, beach-bound with their parents. Skylarking soldiers bearing kitbags made their way towards the steam trains which would take them—who knew?—to some banal camp in the bush, or to immolation in the Pacific. These warriors among whom he could not be counted! On the broad concourse at Eddy Avenue, a larger amy of sailors, airmen and soldiers posed for the pavement photographer on the arms of their mothers, wives or girlfriends. The papers talked about Australia being stripped of troops, but there seemed enough to raise substantial regiments waiting with their womenfolk for the Bronte and Bondi trams.
    And, some distance away, among the crowd by the tramline stood the mother and son. She had the air of a woman who was used to waiting, of not resenting queues and crowds. Probably a country girl, he thought, building a history in his mind, whose husband had brought her out of the bush to the city, looking for some work in the Depression. Darragh saw her lift her son onto the running board of the Clovelly tram. A militiaman who lookedperhaps sixteen stood, doffing his slouch hat, and offered her a seat. She took it with a frank smile, and with a steely howl the tram bore her and her tribe of fellow travellers away to Elizabeth Street. When his Rose Bay tram came along five minutes later, he boarded it, and a boy in a school blazer stood up to offer him his seat. Some instinct that he should now separate himself from the memory of the lovely mother, and that this was better achieved in the discomfort of standing, caused Darragh to smile and say, ‘No, I’m perfectly fine, thank you. You sit.’
    To the edification of any Catholics who might be on the tram, and the mystification of others, he pulled from the pocket of his black jacket his Breviarium Romanum . The volume he had was marked Hiemalis —Winter—since it was winter in Europe, winter in the Vatican surrounded by Italian Fascists, winter in Russia where Hitler’s men correctly suffered at the hands of Soviet troops, winter over the bomb sites of England, and of course over the neutrally undisturbed and poverty-stricken farms of Ireland, from which his own ancestors came. This word ‘ Hiemalis ’ in dull-gold lettering on the spine of the beautifully printed little book, when taken in conjunction with the humid summer day, told you that Australia was in a remote and inverted relation to the well-springs of the European faith, to the locales of monasticism and mysteries of faith, and of strategic importance. That was the basic question which Smith’s Weekly and the Telegraph kept asking: Could Mr Churchill be made to take an interest in the destiny of a place so distant? So far off that a priest, reading the Hiemalis volume of his daily breviary, felt no shiver of northern wind but sweated instead into his black serge, in the close air of a tram beneath a ruthless February sun?
    Each day, diocesan priests like Frank Darragh were required to recite their breviary—the office, as it was called. In the traditionof those monks who sang in plainchant the sundry so-called hours of the office—named Matins, Lauds, Prime, Terce, Sext, None, Vespers and Compline—busier souls like Frank and the monsignor were allowed merely to recite the psalms, hymns, lessons, versicles and collects making up the text which, according to one of Darragh’s seminary professors, sprang from ancient Jewish tradition and had been formally recited from the second