The Missing Heir

by Kylie Tennant

  ‘It was down at the end of the Chinamen’s gardens, where there was a big dam we used to go swimming in. It was pretty filthy but we didn’t care. Then the Chinamen’s gardens were made into playing fields, and the war memorial fountain was dismantled and lay for years behind the lavatories at the back of the grandstand. Later, a rose-garden was made up near the railway station and this drinking fountain was taken there and put together again. On Anzac Days they used to go there to hang wreaths and hold memorial services.

  ‘It’s no use you trying to check on me because what with the one-way streets and the big shopping centres, there’s not a place to park your car. But if you do you’ll see the name: F.V. Smith, Killed at Bloemfontein. Never did know what the V stood for. I am telling you this,’ my father would say wistfully, ‘because nobody would remember who F.V. Smith was. He was Fred, my cousin.’

  When the Parent was seventeen he had a truly magical moment. The Tennant family in England advertised for Thomas Walter and sent his aunt Elizabeth to Australia to look for him. By this time he was an office boy in the firm of Lysaght, importing steel from England. He was to go to England and become a cadet in the family business. His mother, an austere lady of frugal habits, wanted to know how much he would be paid. His allowance would be about twenty pounds a year. He was earning fifteen shillings a week at Lysaght’s. Of this his mother allowed him five shillings and saved the rest for him. She thought poorly of sending the Missing Heir away from home. ‘Until he is twenty-one,’ she declared, ‘he is my son and he stays here. After that he can do as he likes.’ She refused to let him go to the splendour that awaited him. Whenever the Parent spoke of Sir Charles Tennant, the head of the firm, that being sounded like God the Father in gold clouds in a stained-glass window. The redoubtable Sir Charles, who had left smoggy Glasgow to become an international financier, was not lacking in offspring. He had sixteen children from two wives.

  ‘Of course, when I was twenty-one,’ the Parent would say wistfully, ‘I married. So I never did get to be Sir Thomas. Ernest took over the place I should have had and became Sir Ernest.’ Women again — spoiling a man’s prospects! (Actually he married at twenty-three.)

  When I was a child I detested the Tennant family. The Parent’s pompous references to his cousin Margot, who had married Prime Minister Asquith, his side glances at Lord Glenconner and so forth sickened me. I became a terrible little anti-snob and decided to join the Communist Party when I grew up, having heard the Parent speak of the Communist Party.

  As a handsome young man living in Artarmon where his mother had a roomy house of ugly brick — she also owned two houses in nearby Chatswood — the Parent was set to follow his father into the Presbyterian ministry. He became a lay preacher. However, he told my husband, he was seduced, in a hammock, by the lady organist. This made him lose faith in the Presbyterian Church. He should have been warned against lady organists because my mother was one.

  He also had dreams of military glory when World War I broke out. Had not his father, Dr Tennant, formed a regiment at Tenterfield which was, according to the Parent, known as Tennant’s Own? On one occasion this regiment of horse was to be reviewed by some notable — the Parent said it was the Duke of Edinburgh. To present a more uniform appearance it was decided to dye the horses brown. One can imagine that this may have been some ploy of the shadowy Cracky the Coachman. The horses were dyed with Condy’s crystals, but it came on to rain and they all turned green. I can imagine the vast laughter of the local horsemen as they spoke of Tennant’s Own.

  I still have my grandfather’s cavalry sword — a heavy long blade, a metal scabbard, a twisted metal hand protector. I don’t quite know how I came by it but my mother was in the habit of foisting anything she didn’t want on me. She certainly wouldn’t have wanted the sword around the house. Nevertheless, my father had a photograph of himself as a handsome cadet in the cadet corps of Shore where he won the King’s Medal for marksmanship. Yes, the World War must have offered opportunities. I was two years old in 1914 and my sister a small baby — that would not have held him back. But he contracted appendicitis — or peritonitis — and lay in hospital with a large jagged wound across his stomach while other men were enjoying that masculine mateship of muck and danger. He lay at death’s door once again without firing a shot.

  I remember visiting him in hospital when my sister was a baby. He was, of course, the life and soul of the ward, making friends, learning the life history of every one of his ward mates. Limping out of hospital he attained importance in the collecting of funds for the troops in an organisation known as the War Chest. He mingled with the great, leaving my mother in a pokey terrace house with two tiny daughters, while he attended functions and banquets.

  I remember being taken to see lines of khaki-clad soldiers marched down Macquarie Street to the troopships. Some kind of road repairs were going on and we stood on the edge of a ditch of yellow clay as though it were an open grave. The nurses in their white uniforms passed, the men in khaki went by with a squeak of leather boots, a pounding of a huge drum that filled my heart with terror. There were cheers but below the cheers, the blare of the bands, I felt a terrible silence with the ominous drum thudding over all. I hated the procession — I hate all processions because they are a false showing, changing individual worth to a fused blind clamouring of power. I always weep at processions and circuses — the circuses because little children are being asked to applaud the cruelly trained animals and the stupidities of clowns. They are trained to think circuses — the remnants of the old arenas — wonderful.

  My father was in his element. Recovering from his stitches he even took us for a holiday to Stanmore Park, a beach on the South Coast where my parents spent their honeymoon. There on the verandah of the boarding house, an officer in uniform, who was trying to flirt with my pretty mother, picked me up and teased me. I screamed at him. To me he represented all that masculine arrogance which later made me a pacifist. The World War I period had an hysteria of a hateful falsity that a child could sense. But, as I said, in the fund-raising festivities my father shone.

  My distaste for masculine violence spread to a wider social field when as a half-grown girl I made the acquaintance of a certain Major Jacobs who lived next to my grandmother Tennant at Artarmon.

  ‘You ought to go and have a yarn with Jacobs,’ the Parent advised, ‘Went all through the Gallipoli campaign. I think he’s a bit cracked about it. Never stops talking.’ On one of the family’s rare visits to Grandma Tennant I was reaching for one of the half-wild lemons with thick skins which grew along her fence when I made the acquaintance of the famous major. I mentioned politely that my father told me he had fought at Gallipoli. I was invited through the crack in the fence and the major — a thin dark man — brought out album after album of scenes in the trenches and launched out on a description of what had happened from the landing on the beach until the survivors were evacuated. I hope those albums are now somewhere in the War Memorial at Canberra and that no busy relative loaded them on to a bonfire. I listened to the major for several hours — until, in fact, my mother, with her sweetest falsest smile came peering at the fence to ask whether I shouldn’t come inside as the major must be very tired of talking to me. The major relinquished me — wistfully. He would seldom have found a better listener. I should, when I grew older, have gone back to take notes but by that time the major had died.

  To say that he made an impression would be an understatement. He was recounting the period of life when he had lived at peak but to a stern-faced little girl his narrative reinforced my lurking suspicion that there was something very wrong with the society into which I was born. I resolved that I would not only never do anything to assist any war effort whatever but I would do everything within my weak power to oppose, resist, defeat, thwart, any of the glory boys, the diplomats, the rich, the army heads who sent men to become lumps of mud and blood in some far corner of the world. I knew about the splendid horses sent to Flanders because the old men s
till thought World War I would be won by cavalry charges. The horses died of pneumonia and poor feeding, standing in the rain behind the front lines. The Australians who went with them and loved those horses also died of pneumonia — some of them — waiting hour after hour and day after day in the lashing downpour while officers conferred about more important matters.

  The Turks and the Australians at Gallipoli had no particular quarrel but they killed each other on orders from England in the biggest fiasco of a long line of military fiascos. And in Australia on Anzac Day people marched with bands to war memorials to celebrate a hopeless defeat. It didn’t make sense. Many years later when I was on some panel on the radio I was asked: ‘What are your views on Anzac Day?’ ‘It is on a level with the Japanese shinto — the worship of the ancestors —’ I responded. ‘It should be abolished.’ Naturally, I was never again asked to speak on that program.

  ‘Lord Glenconner,’ a friend of mine once mused. ‘If they were out here they’d be the Conners of Conners Gully. A glen is a kind of gully.’

  The Tennant Clan, the Glenconners, were the curse of my childhood: rich, aristocratic, owning a castle and various mansions, they led the Parent to contrast his own circumstances of suburban anonymity in a second-class country on the backside of the world. ‘You have to have influence,’ he would repeat. ‘If you don’t know the score where are you?’ Underneath this not unusual layer of discontent he was an average Australian with the Australian’s naive generosity, curiosity and interest in everything whether it concerned him or not. He had a capacity for enjoyment and good fellowship; he made friends easily and busied himself with his friends’ affairs. He had an extraordinary charm when he cared to exercise it. If there was a scheme for money-making, however fantastic, he was into it. He had money in shares. At one time he even owned the fourth part of a race horse but it never won when the owners were told it would. ‘My leg must have been the one that wasn’t running,’ the Parent said.

  ‘I wish I had all the money your father has sunk in gold mines,’ my mother would say. ‘And inventions.’

  ‘What is the use in being the only black steel expert,’ he demanded of heaven, ‘when there isn’t a rival company to sell out to?’

  When I was working as a reader for Macmillan in the early 1970s, they published a book called Tennant’s Stalk. Two copies of this interesting work reached Australia and I bought both of them, giving one to the Parent and the other to my favourite aunt Emily, his sister. I read the Parent’s copy and exclaimed joyfully: ‘Parent, I have news for you. We are descended from a long line of bastards!’ The Parent, who had suffered for years from my evil sense of humour, merely grunted dubiously.

  The Tennants had, for centuries, existed in circumstances of extreme poverty, hardship, mud and Scottish mist in the wilds of Ayrshire on an obscure oat patch. One ancestress was the last witch burnt in Scotland. The stroke of fortune which raised the Tennants to the first step of the social ladder was when an adventurer, returned from India, bought a Scottish lordship and married the maid from the Tennant farm. When she became a widow she called on her old friend Glenconner to become her factor and run her affairs. His sons went to school and it must have been an interesting school. A neighbour’s son, Robert Burns, was a fellow pupil. The teacher seems to have been a young radical at a time — remember the French Revolution? — when radical ideas were tantamount to treason and the smouldering resentment of the Scots against the English rulers inclined them to their centuries-old accord with the French.

  As soon as the church elders found out about their brilliant young school master’s radical ideas, they threw him out, but not before he had infected the Tennant boys and Robert Burns with his own radicalism. One of the Tennant boys, Willie the weaver, set up as a linen bleacher and made a fortune out of the chemical process which replaced the old idea of simply spreading the flax on the grass. The Tennants of Willie’s generation — and later — built a huge chemical works with the proud high chimney in Glasgow and poisoned the air for ten miles around. Today they would have had environmentalists picketing them but in those days the slums for the workers coughing out their lungs in the polluted air were taken for granted. This was progress. The head of the firm refused a knighthood more than once. They had this queer streak of despising English or Scottish conformity. The Parent’s great-grandfather was one of three generations of Tennants who marched at the head of the procession in 1832 to protest in favour of the Reform Bill. As a boy the later financier and millionaire Charles Tennant was marching in that procession with his relatives. The Parent’s grandfather, William, set up house with a pretty girl — naturally of low degree — by whom he had six children. Although he was the head of the firm his family never spoke to him again. He didn’t seem to mind.

  An anecdote in this invaluable Tennant’s Stalk recalls how a friend bet five pounds William couldn’t say the Lord’s Prayer.

  ‘The Lord is my shepherd,’ he began, ‘I shall not want.’ The friend handed over the five pounds. ‘I would hae sworn ye couldnae recall it,’ he said ruefully.

  His son Charles left Glasgow for London and by audacity and energy built up a financial empire. You could see the craggy Glenconner features gradually softening into Englishry as the Tennants intermarried with the southerners. Sir Charles became Lord Glenconner and produced in all sixteen children by two wives. They always remained Liberals and supporters of their friend Mr Gladstone; they were cursed by tuberculosis and the girls were considered very daring, particularly that Margot Asquith whom the Parent claimed as a cousin.

  There came into the Parent’s possession a handwritten book of poems by that ancestor who had been a friend of Robert Burns. When he went off to England later he took this manuscript book with him and presented it to Sir Ernest who had written a book of his own. It was joyfully received and destroyed later in the Blitz. In all the Parent made three or four visits to England and on his last he didn’t even trouble to look the Tennants up. On one of these jaunts he was entertained at their house at Ugley where a female cousin of splendid manners was told off to entertain him and it was possible to lose an Australian in some far suite. Luckily for the Tennants business called the Parent away. Not so a friend of his who later camped in the Ugley mansion for months. They probably said: ‘Who’s that feller in the haunted wing?’

  ‘Don’t know. Some friend of Tommy’s who came with an introduction. You remember Tommy. Entertaining feller. But like all Australians…’ (commiserating glances).

  ‘Well, when’s this bird leaving?’

  ‘Dunno, haven’t liked to ask him.’

  The Parent told this story gleefully. ‘Don’t know how he ever got away,’ he said. ‘They were so polite and he couldn’t just sneak out. He didn’t know how to go and they didn’t know how to kick him out.’ The Parent enjoyed this.

  Another of his stories concerned the round of entertainments to which he was invited among the noble and great. On this particular occasion he was drinking hearty and Sir Somebody asked him what was the difference between Lysaghts Blue Orb and Red Orb which the Parent had developed. In many Australian country towns there are dusty stretches of grass surrounded by corrugated iron fences as sportsfields. One brand was softer than the other. The Parent greatly enjoyed going out and selling this iron. He explained at the banquet in England that one of its uses was for fences. And in country towns one of the uses of fences was for sexual intercourse. ‘If you have Blue Orb the iron is imprinted on the girl but with the Red Orb the girl is imprinted on the iron.’ There was an icy silence. And then Sir Somebody broke out into a roar of applauding laughter. The rest of the company then felt free to laugh also. These Australians — never know what they’ll come out with! The Parent didn’t care. He had quite got over his earlier humility. He had a great success being an Australian and not bothering to be anything else. He rather overplayed it — hammed the part.

  The elderly nobleman who headed the firm of Lysaght came out to Australia, throwing the head offic
e into a flurry at a time when the Parent was preparing to go down to Canberra to negotiate a change in import duties that would save the firm some millions — that was if the new machinery for the rolling mills at Woolongong could come in under Schedule B instead of Clause 42A. He usually arrived in Canberra with a case of whisky under his arm. Chifley, the Prime Minister of the time, had a wry affection for the Parent and called him ‘Sir Thomas’. ‘I used to put on his racing bets for him,’ the Parent stated.

  The men in Lysaghts head office in Sydney were drawn up much in the way that the hospital staff had drawn up for old Dr Tennant when the Parent was a boy.

  ‘Where is Tom Tennant?’ the old man enquired. There was an immediate rush to find out the Parent’s whereabouts and report that he had left for Canberra.

  ‘Did you want to see him about something important?’ they asked anxiously. The Parent had refused promotion so often that now he did exactly as he pleased.

  ‘No,’ the old man said wistfully. ‘He always used to meet me at the ship. First he was the office boy, then he was custom’s clerk — of course that was many years ago. But he always met me. I miss him, you see.’

  2. ‘God Sends the Wind’

  I asked the Parent — when he was ninety-three — what kind of a child I had been. He considered this cautiously.

  ‘You were a quiet child. You didn’t seek affection. Now your little sister Doffie was an affectionate child. A nice soft little thing who liked to be cuddled. I used to nurse her. But you just stood off—quiet.’

  This sounded like a politician trying to cover up a mistake of a billion or so in the budget.

  ‘What! I thought I was a poisonous little screamer with the manners of a meat ant. I was a show-off, clamouring for attention.’ I contradicted him from force of habit. I was a great boaster — I pointed out — a child of inordinate ego. How the Parent and my sainted mother had put up with me I could never understand. I had deserved to be the victim of two outraged child-bashers. Instead I demanded, and received, inordinate admiration.