Departures By Barry Hayes, Sydney: Little Red Apple Publishing, 2002, 300 pages, paperback, $25.00. Reviewed by Christine Choo in the June 2004 issue. Help more readers find out about this article
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An Irish Catholic family living in Bathurst gives up one of its sons to the Junior Noviciate of the Order of Saint Francis of Assisi, where he will begin his journey to Holy Orders. It is a proud moment for the family and a proud yet devastating one for young Barry Hayes who has chosen that path at the end of his primary school years. Departures is the memoir of Barry Hayes in which he chronicles his childhood before and his life after that fateful day when he entered the Franciscan Junior Noviciate at Robertson in New South Wales -- a place shrouded in mist and mystery.
To readers raised in a Catholic environment before the Second Vatican Council in the mid 1960s, when dramatic changes were introduced in the Catholic Church by Pope John XXIII, the world that Hayes describes will have a ring of familiarity -- his schooling with the De La Salle brothers, the awe in which nuns, brothers and priests were held, church attendance, religious practices and firmly held beliefs. Hayes describes the inner sanctum of the religious order which, even to devout lay Catholics, remains a mystery. This is the world Hayes entered when he was barely out of short pants, having hinted in a state of religious fervour that he thought that he might like to become a priest just like the visiting missionary priest who had come looking for vocations. Young boys who thought they wanted to become priests and brothers were removed from their families, sent to the Junior Novitiate for their religious formation and secondary education, and raised in an institutional environment devoid of contact with women or with their families. Hayes description of his first encounter with the students at Robertson captures the strange world in which he found himself:A bell sounded for lunch. The students filed out of the recreation room through the entrance hall to the refectory on the other side. We had to move closer to the walls to let them pass. They passed in silence, some of the smaller boys glancing at us as they went. I was afraid as I watched this quiet group of fifty children pass, ranging from my age to seventeen or eighteen and one or two looking a little older, all in black soutanes with black cords about the middle. It was a strange world I had come to. I wanted to move close to my mother and brother and hold them, the last links with the ordinary and homely and familiar. I wanted to tell my mother that I wanted to go back with her. At that moment I determined to do so during lunch which was about to be served. (p 58) Of course Hayes never found the right moment to tell his mother and then lost his opportunity entirely, running after the car and crying out as his mother and brother were driven away to the railway station. The first Departure.
One of the problems with this book is that it is repetitious in a number of places and a little tedious in its detail, which could have been handled with judicious editing. However, that style, in a way, reflects the author's personality -- his indecision, and his harking back to the familiar.
The strength of Departures lies in Hayes's evocation of his inner life from the moment he leaves his family and the realisation of separation dawns on him. His is a tortured soul filled with doubts and scruples that grow daily as he tries to 'be perfect as [his] Heavenly Father is perfect'. As the title suggests, the book is shaped around a number of 'departures' as Hayes moves through his life into adulthood. We get a hint of the torment that Hayes must have experienced as he struggled for perfection and as he faced personal failures. I suspect that we have been saved the worst of it. But we also get a wonderful sense of the landscape and how it affected the young trapped Hayes. It is the glimpses of the distant horizon and his encounter and later familiarity with the bush and the night sky that ease his troubled soul. Hayes is filled with respect for nature and the land, a truly Franciscan gift. He describes some of these moments of deep peace and bliss. Finally Hayes finds his true vocation which takes him outside the religious order, his family and Australia.
This story takes us into territory about which very little has been written for the general reader, Catholic and non-Catholic. It takes us on a journey into a foreign cultural and religious environment and into the interior landscape of the brave soul of the author. Hayes has now found his niche as a playwright and librettist. For his honesty and sincerity I am grateful.
The cover illustration by artist, Freya Blackwood, captures the gentle quirkiness reminiscent of the illustrations in St Exupery's Le Petit Prince. Perhaps it is the roses. Citation - Christine Choo. 'Review: Departures by Barry Hayes' [online]. Network Review of Books (Perth, Australian Public Intellectual Network), June 2004. Availability: <please cite the web address here> ISSN 1833-0932. [accessed 20 May 2013].
Back Cover Blurb - Departures is a sensitive, often moving account of a young boy's Catholic childhood. From his boyish concept of a calling, he moves toward adulthood in a world that is itself changing. In a religious boarding school, run by Franciscans, the boy becomes the man who wrote this book, looking back with affection, but not uncritically, at a world that has much changed. This book depicts a poor but staunchly Catholic country family, resolute in its conservatism. This conservatism is contrasted with the emerging questioning resulting from the Second Vatican Council, about which the young man becomes aware. Finally, the world beckons into which the hero enters with the same reluctance. This book offers an insight into a period which for older people is a memory, and for others may offer a kind of inspiration.
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