CHAPTER FIVE: FRANCIS
Monday 2 May 1938
This is the first chapter with a recognisable character’s name as the chapter title, highlighting to the reader how well they have come to know the Westaway family. This chapter allows the reader to experience Frank’s perspective as teenager just before (and then after) the funeral of his father. The events in this chapter occur before Chapter One, so the non-linear structure means that the reader has to keep cross-referencing the chapter with the events of ‘Kip’ and ‘Jack’. This chapter explores the day Frank is confronted with a series of choices, ultimately compelling him to make a choice about who he wants to be—an academic boy or a petty thief. The chapter begins with ‘thirteen [-year-old]’ (page 147) Frank pretending to be Cranston [a.k.a. The Shadow], ‘an American crime-busting hero, worshipped by boys the world over’ (page 98). Given he criticised Kip in ‘Jack’ for pretending to be The Shadow, by accusing him of being ‘a baby’, this sets up the idea that Frank is full of contradictions. The Westaway home is full of cakes which have been dropped by from well-meaning ‘friends and neighbours and people from the church and mothers from school’ (page146). The Westaway family faces a series of difficult choices, some easier to resolve than others. Tom’s unexpected death means certain poverty for the family and unless they respond quickly and pragmatically they are destined for ‘Those slum shacks in Mahoney Street, what they call the Valley of Death on account of the diphtheria’ (page 148). Frank and Kip are still trying to come to terms with the fact of their father’s loss. Frank packs a cake in his schoolbag to distract anyone who tries to speak to him about his father and the image of him running his hands over the kitchen seat his father ‘sat, every single night’ is very moving. The story of Mr and Mrs Westaway’s marriage is also described. It is revealed that ‘Dad’s people were of different persuasion and didn’t approve and wouldn’t even come to St Ignatius for the wedding, and that’s how come we don’t know our grandparents and aunties and uncles from that side. All Father Donovan asked, Ma says, was that we were brought up Catholic and went to Catholic school and Dad gave his word’ (page 151). This echoes, presumably, the Protestant/Catholic rivalry set up thematically in the first chapter (and which flows on into the third) and prefaces Jack and Connie’s relationship later on when people will be prepared to ‘[give] up everything’ for love. Mrs Westaway [Ma] is going to work as a ‘housemaid in a big place at Kew’ (in her mind, a respectable job—not a job ‘in a common factory’) (page 149) and the family ‘is taking in boarder. Myrna Keith’s sister-inlaw, the widow’ (page 150). Ma is ‘close to forty’ (page 148). Connie offers to get a job rather than go back to art school and Kip offers to drop out of school. Mrs Westaway tells Connie that she can look after Mrs Keith and the boys to keep the boys from ‘roaming the streets like urchins’. Mrs Westaway’s desperate dream that she and her family will live a respectable life is aided by kindness of the religious brothers at St Kevin’s and her local parish priest, Father Lockington. It is Father Lockington who arranges Ma’s job and Brother Cusack had a word to Ma at the funeral to reassure her that, ‘The scholarships keep going till you finish...and the brothers’ll find whatever books you need, and uniforms, and anything’ (page 150). Ma dreams of her sons going to university but doesn’t have any such hopes for Connie. (The fact that Stanzi is planning to complete her PhD provides a satisfying coda to this and shows how much attitudes towards women and study changed towards the end of the 20th century.) Kip and Francis respond very differently to their father’s death. Frank is preyed upon by the nasty gang of Jim Pike, Cray and Mac who show no sympathy for the family’s loss. Instead, they talk the gullible Frank into joining them in ‘charitable works’, which turns out to be a ruse for robbing elderly people. Why Frank decides to join them is simple—it represents safety: ‘No more handing over sandwiches, getting tripped, watching where I sit and where I walk’ (page 155). However, Frank’s hubris leads to suffering. Having thought that they’d chosen him because, ‘They’ve noticed my potential, the big life I’ve got in front of me’ (page 155) the truth is that they chose him because of his gullibility. In the meantime, Kip’s grief leads him to leave school, despite being underage, tormented by memories of images of his father lying in state and the fact that the undertakers had to cut his father’s best clothing to dress him. Frank is unable to comfort Kip in his grief, calling him a ‘Piker’ (page 159) rather than what he wants to say, that Kip ‘needs to think of his future, of Ma’s and Connie’s…[that] Dad would understand’. Instead, Frank chooses to go with the gang and it ends disastrously. They are almost caught and Frank makes a secret pledge to honour his mother’s dreams for him to ‘be the most serious, most studious, most hard-working boy’ (page 170) and ‘shoulder the responsibility for this family’. Despite this pledge, he still steals the ‘purple jewel hanging on a gold chain’ (page 174) from the ‘old lady’ whose house the gang tried to burgle.