An Angel In Australia Read Online Free PDF

air. ‘Rommel’s army on the run in Libya, and our dear boys having Christmas in Egypt. Poor things. They look so young. Will they last the year?’
    â€˜Will any of us?’ asked Mrs Darragh, chewing her lamb resolutely.
    Darragh felt a familiar spurt of concern and wondered whether she was really afraid, in the way the people in the confessional were afraid. She had never shown him any fear except when he was ill with whooping cough and pneumonia as a child. She looked levelly at her son.
    â€˜You should go and speak to Mr Regan.’ Regan was the next-door neighbour, a thoughtful man, father of three daughters. Darragh had never seen him, even at the most casual moment, dressed in anything less than a shirt with detachable collar, a vest and watch chain, and well-pressed, well-tailored pants. ‘Mr Regan has room for me, and for Madge if she chooses, in his air-raid shelter.’
    Aunt Madge declared, ‘I might come over here, but it is a mile.Whereas there’s a shelter in the park right next door to me. I have a choice between being killed with the sight of Mr Regan’s long, droopy face, or among strangers at the park.’ She laughed, tickled, ‘But, God’s will be done …’
    Mrs Darragh murmured, ‘Nice talk for a socialist. And for a friend of Deborah Kerr.’
    â€˜If you’d read Rerum Novarum ,’ said Aunt Madge, referring to a famous social justice encyclical of Pope Leo XIII, ‘you’d see that there is no conflict between social democracy and faith.’ Aunt Madge had been a great supporter of the Labor premier of New South Wales, Jack Lang, and had given out ‘How to Vote’ cards in Rose Bay among what she called the ‘silvertail’ voters. She was able to quote from the encyclical, as she did now, for it was the holy text of progressive, political Catholics. ‘“Hence by degrees it has come to pass the working men have been surrendered, isolated and helpless, to the hardheartedness of employers and the greed of unchecked competition …” No one with eyes in his head would argue with that one.’
    It was hard at that moment for Darragh to believe that all the particularity of Aunt Madge and his mother could be wiped out by a stray Japanese bomb. And Mrs Darragh had already told him on previous visits that in the event of the invasion itself, she and Madge had been invited to join the Sisters of the Sacred Heart in their convent-fastness at Rose Bay. The nuns were confident that even the Japanese would not violate such an obviously august cloister. Indeed, Frank Darragh could not think of a better place for his mother to shelter should those terrible hosts that had sacked Nanking improbably arrive in the suburbs of Sydney. He feared he himself would be engaged with his congregation in Homebush and Strathfield. What place, apart perhaps from the abattoirs and the brickworks, Homebush and Strathfield couldplay in the grand plan of a Japanese Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere was difficult to imagine, but that might add to the peril of the event. Somehow he could imagine the soldiers of the emperor becoming so enraged by the irrelevance of the suburb that they might be provoked to obliterate its people.
    At his mother’s urging, Frank Darragh went next door to see Mr Regan. Sweet-faced and slightly dazed, Mrs Regan sought to feed him another meal, and the Regan daughters, who had known him in his adolescence, quivered with excitement to have Frank Darragh, translated into priesthood, present in their home. The fact he was wearing shirtsleeves seemed to amuse them.
    â€˜I must talk to you, Father Frank,’ said Mr Regan under his breath, and collected from his ice chest a bottle of Dinner Ale and led him out of the cooing and fluttering and teasing of the Regan girls into the back garden and down plank steps into the bomb shelter he had so industriously dug among his backyard shrubs. Frank felt