The True Story of Spit MacPhee (25 page)

Like actors now, waiting for curtains to rise, the performers themselves were ready. Judge Laker cleared his throat and looked at each one of them as if they all needed to be closely inspected before being judged. A few appellate words from Laker, S.J., and the comedy would soon be over.

But Judge Laker took out his little notebook and looked at it carefully. Then he made another note before beginning. ‘I have been looking at the 1928 Adoption of Children Act very carefully,’ he said thoughtfully, ‘and within the Act there are two quite different directions that, in judgement, I can take. There are very specific limitations about parental fitness that simply must be accepted. But on the other hand the Act gives me fairly wide discretionary powers. The applicants might not understand all this, but I have to put it on record, in view of my decision.

‘Now then,’ he went on, and Grace had the feeling that he was trying to be as gentle as he could, although he was not himself a gentle man. But he was trying. ‘I have tried,’ he said, ‘to interpret the Act as a protective cover, both legal and humane, for an eleven-year-old boy in need of proper care and attention, as well as using the law to decide whether an applicant is a fit and proper person. In this case, I must decide which of two families can be judged as the better adoptive parents for a boy whom they both want. At the same time I have to think of the boy, not only as he is now, left quite alone, but his life in the future as he grows into manhood. So my decision here is based on both the immediate as well as the long-term needs of the boy. And, thinking about both applications, I find myself worrying more about the long term than the short term in this.’

Judge Laker bent forward a little as if he had suddenly noticed that both Sadie and Ben were sitting in their places on the bench.

‘What are they doing here?’ he asked. ‘There is no need for them to be here this morning.’

‘I thought you might need to question them further, your honour,’ Mr Strapp said. ‘That is, for our part.’

‘I simply forgot to tell them they weren’t needed, your honour,’ Edward Quayle said. ‘I apologise, although I suppose you might have needed them.’

‘No. No. I have finished with them. They can go. They’re better at school than they are sitting here.’

Spit, who felt that he had swallowed his silence long enough, suddenly stood up. ‘I don’t want to go to school, your honour. I’m not leaving here now.’

Judge Laker looked a little startled, and then he made a fragmented gesture with his pencil as if to recognise Spit as a factor in the case rather than an object of it. ‘What do you want to stay here for, young man?’ he said. ‘You’re not needed, you know. You don’t have to stay.’

‘What if I don’t like what you’re going to do to me?’ Spit said in his loudest voice.

‘Mr Quayle,’ the judge said, amused enough to allow himself a slight smile. ‘Don’t you want to say something?’

‘No, your honour. If you’ll permit it, the boy is doing rather well for himself.’

‘Well, then,’ Judge Laker said, leaning forward to look a little closer at Spit. ‘What if you don’t like what we decide? What will you do about it?’

Spit closed his mouth in a tight, stubborn grip, and it was Sadie who leapt up and said, ‘He’ll run away again, your honour. He won’t do what you can’t make him do …’

For a moment there was an almost passionate silence in the room. Everybody in the court looked at the two children; at Sadie who was blushing but who nonetheless had her head well up; and at Spit who was staring into the space he seemed to be aiming at.

‘Is that true?’ the judge asked Spit.

Spit still kept his mouth grimly shut, but he nodded as if words now meant nothing.

‘Don’t you trust us, Spit?’ the judge said.

It looked as if Spit would persist with his threatening silence but then he burst out, ‘Next time, your honour, they’ll never catch me. I’ll go so far …’

Edward Quayle raised a hand then and said, ‘That’s enough, Spit,’ and he said to the judge, ‘As you can see, your honour, the boy has spirit, and he already has a real if naive sense that his destiny is being decided here. So I suggest that you allow him to stay so that he can understand what we are trying to do for him, whatever the outcome. But I must point out too that he is warning us, sir, and I think the court must take him seriously. We don’t want a tragedy …’

‘Oh really, Mr Quayle,’ Strapp interrupted. ‘That is ridiculous.’

‘Now really, Mr Strapp,’ the judge said. ‘Has this become a private argument between you and Mr Quayle?’

‘Well, sir, let us not exaggerate,’ Strapp said, his hands in the air.

‘Speak for yourself, Mr Strapp,’ the judge said. ‘Personally I am in no fear of my own exaggerations. And I’m sure Mr Quayle isn’t either, since he is a past master at it sometimes.’

Edward Quayle ignored the judge’s easy jibe at him and said, ‘Can I also suggest that Sadie Tree be allowed to stay if her parents don’t object. The boy deserves the moral support he needs from this young lady, who is virtually his surrogate sister.’

‘Mr Quayle,’ the judge said sharply. ‘Don’t take advantage of everything that comes your way. Don’t press your case all the time.’ He turned to Spit and Sadie then, and he said, ‘All right. You can both stay. But no more declarations of intent, please, from either of you.’

It was Ben then who stood up and said, ‘Can I stay too, your honour?’

The judge looked down at Ben and sighed in despair. ‘Oh dear. It’s becoming a children’s matinée. All right, Ben. If your parents don’t object you might as well hear it out too. But sit down and don’t wriggle.’

As Ben and Sadie and Spit sat down the judge swallowed in his dry throat as if he longed now for a short brandy to get him through the rest of this.

‘Now for heaven’s sake let us get on with it,’ he said and looked carefully at his little notebook. ‘First of all,’ he went on, ‘I must make an important comment about the boy himself, because it may help both applicants to understand my decision. Spit MacPhee is obviously a very self-sufficient Australian boy, intelligent and, if a little turbulent, at least able to be guided by a firm hand if the firm hand is the right one. At the same time he seems to be very stubborn, and in his determination not to be restrained he could become a potential danger to himself and others, particularly if he is confused by conflicting interests, or resentful of restraint and discipline.’

He turned then to Betty and Frank Arbuckle. ‘So let me take your application first, Mr and Mrs Arbuckle. You are obviously fine and respectable people, and I liked your son Ben and the way he spoke up for his friend Spit. He is the best advertisement you could have given me for your claim. I was always impressed too, with Mrs Arbuckle’s deep convictions, and her belief in a faith that, in her severe devotion to it, could move mountains. But is Spit MacPhee a mountain? That was the question I had to ask myself, and I decided that he wasn’t a mountain. Spit MacPhee is a small, rough, ready-made little boy who would certainly be unable to accept Mrs Arbuckle’s faith as a guiding light, or even as a discipline. Not the way he is now. The boy himself is obviously determined not to be guided or disciplined by Mrs Arbuckle’s evangelical methods. And I have to take very seriously his childish threats to abscond if he is forced upon them. I don’t really believe he would do anything violent to them, but what his threats really mean is that a powerful resistance is at work which, if he is forced upon the Arbuckles, would almost certainly make a bitter rebel of him. As an adult he would probably become a man who would retain a deep and violent resentment as well as a bad memory of what had been done to him by this court. Inevitably that would lead him into serious trouble.’

Judge Laker took a glass of water and sipped it this time as if it was brandy or whisky – anything but Murray river water.

They waited on his lips, his wiped mouth, his slight sniff.

‘So,’ he went on, ‘with this background to a difficult choice I must unfortunately reject the application of Mr and Mrs Arbuckle, much as I am sorry to do so …’

‘But he would learn our ways, your honour,’ Betty Arbuckle cried out. She was standing up, her hands over her breasts and her face on fire. ‘And we would love him like a son.’

‘I’m sure you would, Mrs Arbuckle,’ Judge Laker said, ‘but love is not enough. And in your case I don’t think the justification of your Protestantism is enough. In your case it would, I’m afraid, become an impediment to this boy.’

‘But please …’ Betty Arbuckle cried out again.

‘Sit down, Mrs Arbuckle,’ the judge said sternly. ‘It’s done and you cannot change my decision. Your application is refused so please be quiet. Now … before giving my decision about Mr and Mrs Tree, I would like to tell both sides that, in order to be fair to both applicants, in order that I am not seen to be favouring one family or the other, or that I am making a simple choice of one against the other, I made it my business to look into the question of my discretionary powers on alternatives, such as adoption agencies and existing homes for boys like Spit MacPhee.’

‘But your honour …’ Betty Arbuckle tried again.

‘Be quiet, Mrs Arbuckle. Otherwise I shall have to ask you to leave the court. I am already familiar with the two Boys Homes in Bendigo. I have had dealings with them for reasons of probation. So they don’t frighten me as they might some people. Nor does the prospect of a boy like Spit MacPhee ending up there seem to me to be necessarily a bad thing, if it becomes necessary. Particularly for a boy like this one whose self-sufficiency would survive very well among a lot of other boys equally endowed. He would easily fit in and make his own way quite well. So I thought I must take that into consideration in all fairness, although I felt from the outset that a family home would be far more desirable than an institution. So I come now to Mr and Mrs Tree.’

Judge Laker pulled in his lips and looked down at Spit MacPhee with an almost puzzled air, as if judgement here was so difficult that he might still change his mind. Spit was wriggling, and as if a small postponement might help his decision, the judge asked Spit what he was wriggling for. ‘You usually sit there as still as a statue,’ he said.

‘I think I’m still wet,’ Spit said.

‘What does that mean?’

‘He fell in the river yesterday and got wet,’ Grace said hurriedly. ‘But it’s his imagination. I dried and ironed his trousers thoroughly, your honour.’

‘Then sit still, Spit,’ Judge Laker said to him, ‘otherwise you’re a disturbance.’ He then made a curious, resigned sort of gesture towards Edward Quayle, as if he wanted to attract his attention. But Edward Quayle looked so impassive and so still that he was obviously not going to be tempted to be anything else. ‘So I come now to your clients, Mr Quayle,’ the judge said.

‘We are waiting, your honour.’

‘You have made a very persuasive and sympathetic case for Mr and Mrs Tree, Mr Quayle. If the Arbuckles had been as flexible as your clients they would have had the boy without question. But Spit obviously prefers Mrs Tree, and I know from their daughter Sadie how well he has fitted in there, even if he has kept his own particular rules for his own particular behaviour. I note, too, that Sadie looks on him already as a brother. Is that right, Sadie?’

‘Yessir,’ Sadie said.

‘So in all fairness,’ Judge Laker went on, ‘It has to be said that with Mr and Mrs Tree Spit MacPhee seems to have found something near his own environment. Everything sensible and possible, everything desirable, everything I could ask of adoptive parents is there. And yet … And yet …’

Judge Laker was so reluctant that Grace felt sick to hear those words.

‘… And yet I have had to consider the problem of religion. I am not afraid of making an unusual decision in this. I am not afraid of setting a precedent. But I have to consider this question of legality in parentage; the legal rights of the adoptive parents, automatically, to have the right to do what they wish with a child within the limits of civil law. It is a very difficult obstacle to overcome.

‘The 1928 Act makes it clear that in the long run the primary need is to match the faith of the child to the parents. I cannot ignore this. If I did, it would be a limitation on the boy’s inalienable right to be what he was born to be. It would become a serious denial of this right if I hand him over to adoptive parents who would have a legal right then to do what they like with him. The right to a faith in our law is not simply a civil right. It is a constitutional and historical one, bound into our lives by hundreds of years of opposing concepts, bitterly fought over, and yet defined constitutionally into a human right. In the case of a child it is a right that has to be protected by the courts if his own protections are lost.

‘So I am dealing here with something far more important than the faith of one small boy who could easily be thrown to the winds of fate. I am dealing with a vital heritage that in law I cannot and dare not alienate. It is not my choice. It is the law itself which, quite rightly, insists on safeguarding and protecting a child’s right to the faith of his forefathers. So, with real regret …’

‘Just a moment, your honour,’ Edward Quayle said brusquely, standing up. It was surprising enough to be startling. ‘Your honour …’ he said again as the judge began to protest. ‘If you please …’

‘What on earth is it, Mr Quayle?’ Judge Laker said. ‘What are you interrupting me for?’

‘Before you go any further, your honour,’ Edward Quayle said in a calm voice, sitting down again, ‘I wish to withdraw Mr and Mrs Tree’s application for adoption before you pass any judgement on it.’

‘You what?’ Judge Laker said, astonished.

‘I withdraw our application for adoption, your honour.’

‘Now? At a minute before midnight? What is this, Mr Quayle? One of your tricks?’

‘Certainly not,’ Edward Quayle said, still calm. ‘I am withdrawing the application for a very good reason.’

‘It had better be good, Mr Quayle, and you had better explain yourself.’

Grace, staring at Edward Quayle in amazement, was trying to find in his English face an explanation of what he was doing. She could see nothing but the unshakable man she was used to and did not always understand. ‘What on earth does he mean?’ she whispered to Jack. ‘What’s he doing?’