I was impressed not so much by the size of the building as by the view that might have been available on clear days to a person occupying one or another of the rooms behind the north-facing windows that I had stared at while I walked through the front garden towards the building. I had never been further north than the city where I lived at that time, but I thought often of the districts that lay in that direction. I hoped that they consisted of mostly level grasslands and not the red sand or gravel that I saw sometimes in pictures of inland Australia.
My father had told me in the tram that the building of two storeys was a convent of an order of nuns founded especially to serve the country districts of Australia. (The teachers at my school were nuns but of an order founded in Ireland; nor had I ever seen the house where they lived.) The nun that we were going to meet would almost certainly have occupied a room on the upper storey. However, it would have been unthinkable for any male person, even a child as young as myself, to go beyond the front parlour of the convent.
In that front parlour, during our visit to the convent, which visit took place on some or another hot afternoon in the mid-1940s, my parents and my brother and I were received by a woman whose appearance I can hardly recall. Her brown robes covered all but her face, which appears to me now as no more than a pink blur. I understood that my father and the nun had known one another at some time before I had been born, and it came to me just now that my father had introduced her to me as someone who had been in her younger days a fearless rider of horses across paddocks and through swamps.
I remember no other visit to the convent, but for several years after our meeting with the nun my brother and I each received from her through the post at Christmas one of the cards called by Catholics of those days holy-cards. My family moved house twelve times between the mid-1940s and the last year of the 1950s, when I left home, and most of my keepsakes from those years were lost long ago. Just beyond the reach of my right arm, however, in the topmost drawer of my nearest filing cabinet, is an envelope containing the handful of holy-cards that I still possess. I have not looked at the cards for at least two years. When next I look at the cards they will all seem familiar, but as I write these words I am able to see in my mind only one of the cards. On the rear of that card is a greeting to me from my father’s nun-friend, written more than sixty years ago. On the front is a picture only. The card, so to call it, is unusual in that it has no pious message or prayer and not even a caption beneath the picture displayed on it. The picture shows a male child, perhaps five years of age, sitting with his chubby legs outstretched on the altar of a Catholic church. The child is leaning expectantly, so it seems, towards the tabernacle. (This was the domed container, about the size of a small milk-can, where was kept by day and by night in a gilt-lined ciborium the so-called Real Presence. The contents of the ciborium would have seemed to a non-believer a collection of small, circular white wafers. The nun and I and all believing Catholics considered each wafer to be the body of the personage that we usually named as Christ or Our Lord or, sometimes, Jesus. The domed container was made of bronze or of some such metal and was always draped on its outside with satin hangings the colour of which was determined by the liturgical season. The container had at its front a door that was always kept locked except during the few minutes when the priest celebrating Mass either took out the consecrated wafers — the Real Presence — for distribution to the faithful as Holy Communion, so called, or afterwards stored the remainder for the next Mass. As for the interior of the tabernacle, the average lay-person saw no more of it than he or she might have glimpsed if he or she had been kneeling in a front seat of a church and had happened to look towards the altar just when the priest was genuflecting out of respect for the Blessed Sacrament, so called, before he closed and locked the tabernacle door. Even I, during the two years when I served as an altar-boy at a parish church in an outer suburb of Melbourne in the early 1950s — even I, although I strained from only a few paces away, saw no more than the white curtain — was it of satin? silk? mere linen? — that hung in the doorway of the tabernacle. The priest reached through the pleated white cloth in order to take out or to put away the sacred vessel, so called, but the cloth seemed always to fall back into place a moment afterwards. I could only try to imagine the interior of the tabernacle, and whenever I thus tried I liked to suppose that the white curtain I often saw was only the outermost of a series of such hangings, so that the priest, whenever he pushed his fingers inwards towards the ciborium, felt his way through layer after layer of gently resisting plushness.) Even I, who was only a few years older than the pictured child, understood the message of the uncaptioned holy picture. At the same time, I understood the folly of the message.
I had no doubt that any Catholic child of the age of the altar-climber would have learned to be in awe of sanctuaries and altars and, above all, tabernacles. In the city where I lived when I received the card, any Catholic child found even so much as trespassing in the sanctuary, let alone clambering onto the altar and fiddling with the tabernacle — any such child would have been thrashed by parents and teachers. If the child had already made his or her first confession, he or she would have been advised to confess at the first opportunity the mortal sin of sacrilege. The child’s escapade might later have been made public, but only as an example of the sort of gross offence that no right-minded child would even contemplate. It would have been unthinkable for someone to record the offence for posterity, as it were, by painting on the front of a holy-card the scene of the crime, so to call it. And yet, the fact remained: there I was, a resident of the city mentioned earlier in this paragraph and also the owner of a holy-card that seemed to advertise the unthinkable. Admittedly, the little altar-sitter in the picture seemed more like a cherub in a church-mural than the sort of child that I mixed with. But whenever I stared at the portrait of the curly-haired, pink-cheeked boy, I felt the beginnings of a peculiar hopefulness. Somewhere, in some layer of the world far beyond my own drab layer, it might have been possible sometimes to follow one’s own desires without incurring punishment. The curly-haired child might have explained away his escapade by telling the adults that he felt sorry for Jesus, locked up all day on the altar with nobody to visit him; or perhaps the child’s excuse was that he had something to tell Jesus: something so private that it had to be whispered to Jesus through the keyhole of his house. And the lisping trickster might have got away unscathed. The adults judging his case might have exchanged smiles of mock-exasperation before deciding that he had meant no harm. I inferred all this from the mere facts that the holy-card had been designed and printed by adults and had been sent to me by an adult — and a nun, moreover.
My pondering over the holy-card led me to no new course of action, although it would surely have made my daydreams somewhat bolder. I may well have daydreamed sometimes about an afternoon when the sender of the card, won over by my innocent-seeming ways and by the long words that I had used on her, showed me up the stairs of her two-storey building and allowed me to look out from the upper verandah at the view, which I hoped would be of far-reaching grasslands in northern Victoria, where I had never been. I may even have daydreamed that the sender of the card, again impressed by my feigned innocence and precocious words, persuaded some priest-friend of hers to hold open in my sight the door of a tabernacle and even to part the inner hangings with his hand in such a way that I would be able always afterwards to see the exact arrangement of folds of cloth and dark interstices in a tabernacle in my mind.