The Good Boy by John Fiennes Page B

hand and able to go with him for a drive on calls taking him into the country … or even into the city, where he sometimes went to visit patients who had had to be taken to one of the major hospitals. As we lived in the catchment area of the Alfred Hospital, that was the one most visited and as many of my father’s patients were Catholic, St Vincent’s and St Benedict’s (which later became the Cabrini Hospital) were also on the list.
    Another fascinating destination was the Good Shepherd Convent a couple of kilometres from our house (and since demolished and replaced by the Chadstone Centre, the largest shopping mall in the country). The convent was a huge, grey building set well back from the road and surrounded by a high grey wall and acres of farmland. The path from the front door to the front gate had been replaced by a long masonry ‘tunnel’ or enclosed walkway at the end of which was a massive outer front door opening directly on to the footpath. There was a ‘Judas’ or small grilled window in the door, so that when answering a ringing of the doorbell the nun inside could slide open the wooden panel, look through the grill at the visitor, and decide whether or not to open the door. The door always seemed to open almost immediately for my father (who had probably been telephoned and asked to call) and I had visions of a little nun roller-skating down the tunnel’s highly polished tile floor from the convent proper to the door and breathlessly opening it to my father. I often wondered how long less-distinguished visitors had to wait, and longed to see someone arrive, ring the bell, and be turned away … but that never happened.
    My father was the government-appointed Medical Officer of the institution attached to the convent … a ‘home’ for young and old women ‘in trouble’. My parents were always a bit vague about the precise nature of this trouble. I slowly worked out that it included more than being orphaned and recalled my mother saying that ‘there were too many keys’ in use, that some of the girls had been referred to the home by the courts and that spending time in the institution was seen as a happier alternative to spending time in jail … I assumed that they had been caught stealing or throwing stones or something of that sort and much later on realised that prostitution was at that time a crime and that some of the inmates had been ‘working girls’.
    The Good Shepherd nuns had been founded in France in the early 1800s with the mission of caring for poor and destitute girls, of which there were many in the years after the social upheavals of the French Revolution and the subsequent Bourbon Restoration. The aim was to provide a safe home and a basic education, and to teach skills which would enable the girls to earn a living when they ‘graduated’. The order’s first convent in Australia was established in 1863 on a large piece of farmland beside the Yarra in Abbotsford, Melbourne, and the nuns had soon taken into care over a hundred women and children. The place grew to become a huge establishment providing, a hundred years later, a home to over 1000 women and girls and 100 nuns. The Good Shepherd nuns had come at the invitation of Melbourne’s first archbishop, who was particularly concerned about the large numbers of women and children being more or less abandoned in the town by their menfolk and breadwinners who were heading off to the gold rushes in Ballarat and Bendigo. After twenty years at Abbotsford the nuns opened a branch in a small farming settlement on Dandenong Road beyond the eastern edge of Melbourne. The branch was, I only recently discovered, destined to become a ‘Reformatory for Female Adolescents’ and was a very big place indeed by the time I came to visit it with my father in the 1940s. The convent stood on a hundred or so acres of land, some of which was used as a dairy farm