The Missing Heir

by Kylie Tennant

  When I was an adolescent I had a peculiar dream which was influential in shaping the kind of person I would become. At adolescence your genes are fizzing around and the fifty per cent of male genes in me may have surfaced. Psychologists would undoubtedly dismiss this dream as masculine protest and say I was protesting against being a girl.

  If I said it was all right with me (being a girl) they would come back and say that was only consciously and that subconsciously I resented being a girl. They get you going and coming.

  Be that as it may — in this dream I was a young man, hot and dirty, thirsty, sweaty and very tired. We had marched over difficult country. I was standing in a dry stream bed with the other men, all armed with long spears, while the women and children went scrambling up the steep bank. We faced our pursuers. We were a small group of Jews, outnumbered. I reflected glumly that whoever had picked this place for an ambush was going to get us all killed.

  The cavalry came over the crest — back the way we had come — in a dust cloud with dim gleams of armour and weapons. They would have the impetus of the slope to ride us down. They were Romans. The dream continued in a very unpleasing way. I was tied to a column in the market-place by leather thongs and flogged. But in the dream I didn’t feel anything. I was sold as a slave. I became a gladiator. In the arena I had two friends, Gaius and Nicholas the Greek. Nicholas had a black beard and was a big man; Gaius was not so tall, joking, quick, clean-shaven. What I enjoyed was the sense of comradeship, protecting each other.

  We fought as a team. I could depend on them and they could depend on me because if you fought as a team you had a better chance of getting out alive. I glanced indifferently around at the spectators in this dream, accustomed to them because we were part of a travelling troupe. This time, I knew I wasn’t going to get out alive, but I didn’t feel upset. I was going to miss Gaius and Nicholas. I hefted my short sword and the dream cut out.

  This dream impressed me, more than any other I ever had. If it was an ancestral memory how did I dream I was a young man who hadn’t had any chance to engender children? He died before he could become an ancestor. I knew all about Gaius and Nicholas as you know about your friends without thinking. Somehow I gained the impression that if I was a woman now I had a chance to succeed as a woman and I’d better take it and make the most of it; that being a fighting man was nothing much. But somewhere in my personality for the rest of my life prowled the gladiator. It was a part of my persona.

  The dream had the unfortunate effect of splitting my personality. At a dance some young man with hot hands would try to do a bit of necking and I would think: ‘How absurd!’ seeing myself in the cut and thrust with the hot sun on my helmet a thousand years ago. ‘What would Gaius and Nicholas say to this? They would roar with laughter, especially Gaius.’ And I would chuckle to myself. So I would say politely to my escort that maybe we’d better go back to the dance. I couldn’t take young men seriously. What I wanted was not some moony youth but my comrades. What was I doing in this ridiculous dress? I was, however, attracted to Jewish men. I discovered that my great-grandmother — the pious one who wrote Christian hymns — was a Cohen before she married Great-grandfather Farr. One Jewish man I went around with would say, laughing: ‘If we ever marry and go to Israel you’d pass all right. No one would ever take you for a goy.’ I never told him about my dream. By that time my Semitic face, with the hooked nose which had so upset my mother when I was a child, my dark hair and skin, were something I accepted.

  I do not believe in reincarnation. However, you are set in the life you have now and should deal with it day by day, not drifting off to probe the past. You will find out, soon enough, when this changing queer city of cells and organs which you rule dissolves, protesting, into its diverse elements, with your nervous system fighting a rearguard action all the way, whether you must be forced to start from scratch again. I hope you don’t.

  I had another dream in which I was a Puritan woman trying with tears to convince four fair lommoxing nephews that they must not go off to fight because they would all be killed. They were very respectful and gentle with me because I was their dear Aunt Ruth. But of course they took no notice and I was in despair. I begged them but I wasted my pleading.

  On another occasion I was strolling through Shakespeare’s London. I had just come down from Scotland and was a young man again. My companion was an older man in a long gown of brown stuff, some kind of steward. He was a great gossip. I was not paying much attention because we were strolling up a rise towards the city gate and I had always taken it for granted that the London gates were on level ground. He was telling me about the plain-looking daughters of Lord Stair who had come down from Scotland with King James. Lord Stair — I think it was — was very mean. ‘That terrible old moth-eaten fur cap of his!’ the man exclaimed. But I was still pondering why I had always taken it for granted that the gate to London was on flat ground when we were going towards it up a hill.

  I suppose we will discover that the past is a stream into which anyone can dip, into any life, without it being, necessarily, our own. This may be, to our descendants, an entertainment as ordinary as television is to us, when they can tune into scenes as far off in time as a broadcast is in space. Everyone will accept it.

  ‘Why is it,’ a psychiatrist once asked me at a party, ‘that when someone attacks you you just smile sweetly?’

  ‘I have a murderous temper,’ I replied. ‘I am afraid of losing it because of what I might do.’ One of my tasks in this life has been controlling my temper and my impatience.

  ‘Stop glaring at me,’ my grandmother would exclaim, through a mouthful of pins, ‘Kathie, that child is glaring at me.’

  ‘Don’t frown so, dear,’ my mother would protest. ‘It makes wrinkles in your forehead. You must remember you are just a little girl.’

  I was their doll, to be dressed in little pleated skirts. My hair was curled every night and the curl-rags hurt. My sallow skin was improved with rouge and lipstick, which I rubbed off when I had the chance. I was supposed to be ‘cute’. I was saved in my self-respect by learning to read at the age of four. I followed my grandmother around, reading aloud to her. I despised children’s books. At five I abandoned Dombey and Son when Florence grew up; I started on Alan Quartermain, a book by Rider Haggard, which won my approval because of all the fighting. Umslopagaas the Zulu was my favourite character. I liked pirates but anything with a great deal of bloodshed would do. For my Christmas present I demanded and received a bound Chums annual. Plenty of gore.

  Grandmother Tolhurst, my mother’s mother, was a Christian Scientist which made everybody else officially Christian Scientists. Nobody ever went against my grandmother’s fiat. Late in her life my mother became a Christian Science practitioner and a saint but I preferred her as a fallible frivolous gay young woman, wistful and pretty and quarrelling with my father. It toughens you to have fighting parents and I don’t know how people get on who haven’t been reared in a battling Australian family where the parents are incompatible.

  But the Tolhust menage was founded firmly on love — very firmly. There was a steely determination about the Christian Scientists I knew; and their love hit you like a brick. Anything that went wrong was ‘mortal error’ or ‘matter’. Which was a dirty word. The universe was run by Divine Love and all was peace, joy and harmony. How was it then, I demanded of my Sunday-school teacher, that there was so much pain and evil about? That, I was told, was mortal mind. We must deny the reality of anything unpleasant. Immediately. ‘Do not give evil power by letting it encroach on your mind or take over your thoughts.’

  As soon as I could talk I was taught the Scientific Statement of Being:

  ‘There is no life, truth, intelligence nor substance in matter.

  All is Infinite Mind and its Infinite manifestation, for God is all in All.

  Spirit is immortal Truth, matter is mortal error, Spirit is the real and eternal,

  Matter is the unreal and temporal.

&nb
sp; Spirit is God and man is His image and likeness, therefore man is not material, he is spiritual.’

  When I came to read about Pompeii (I must have been six) and the people found there in a thousand years of ashes, still with their winecups in their hands, I became convinced that the Pompeiians, with their fixed smiles of mortality and their winecups, were camped under my bed. I would leap into bed at night, mutter the Scientific Statement as some kind of protection, lean over and lift up the counterpane and carefully peer under the bed. Good. No Pompeiians lounging there with their winecups. But how did I know that they didn’t take up their positions when I wasn’t looking, and was asleep? I would doze off murmuring that there was no life, truth, intelligence nor substance in matter.

  * * *

  When Captain Phillip led his tired ships into Sydney Harbour between North and South Head it was inevitable that he would follow the inside curve south into Sydney Cove. My ‘spirit place’ (as the Aborigines would say), the place of my blood and birth and nurture, is in the opposite direction, the way he did not go, past Manly, past Fairlight to North Harbour. Manly — what a pompous, patronising name given because a naked Aborigine threatened Captain Phillip with an inadequate spear! If he got himself speared there later it served him right for fastening such a name on the sandspit between the harbour and the surf. Manly was foreordained for a holiday resort, with trippers coming on the Manly boat across Sydney Harbour and businessmen going in every day to the city seven miles away. Carriages with teams of creamy ponies (and then trams) took them up the hills to their homes when they returned by boat in the evenings. At first only the rich lived so far from the city, then the grounds of big houses were cut up and sold after World War I into allotments of little houses. The city was like a tree growing ever-increasing rings of suburbs.

  ‘When I was a child this was all bush,’ I once wailed to my husband.

  ‘Don’t date yourself,’ he advised.

  No, it is not Manly to which I owe my earliest allegiance but North Harbour. Indeed Manly was a place of early confusion to me. My uncle Tum, living at Lauderdale, would be told off to take me with him on Sunday morning when he went to meet the girl he later married. They sat and listened to the band.

  On the harbour or Esplanade side of Manly there was a row of tall Norfolk Island pines — with a bandstand at its end. On the South Steyne or surf side there was a similar row of pines with a bandstand at its opposite end. Parallel and opposite back to front, going both ways, transposed. I, who never lost my way, was bewildered trying to puzzle out which side of Manly I was, while the girl who was to become my sternest aunt failed to persuade me to let her polish my nails. Were we on the surf side or the harbour side? There were men drawing in a net to the beach — was it the surf beach or the harbour beach? So, you may glance in your rear-vision mirror in the car and see an unfamiliar stretch of street behind you going the wrong way. Manly was a mirror image to me, deceptive and garish with strangers when I was one year old. I equated Manly with confusion.

  But North Harbour, that most tranquil of bays, on which my birth house looked from its steep hill, around whose hills I lived all my youth, that picnic place to which I was carried before I could walk and to which I carried my children in turn, North Harbour was freedom, adventure, a wonder, uniquely itself. You could smell gum-leaves burning from the fire they lit to boil the billy for tea.

  At low tide the two waterfalls at the head of the bay would be musical among their rocks and we must be going home before the tide came in to cut us off, swirling along the deeper channels.

  Low tide brought out on the sandflats armies of blue crabs, rustling like blown foam, thousands of ivory claws ceaselessly foraging, delicately sea-coloured, the tiny jaws and joints carved by a million years of the same purpose, rolling sand grains into fortresses, an incessant murmur of movement. And then came a murmur echoing the armies. Far out in the long inlet the tide moved. It came with the same purpose, as though it was eating sand, one wave, foam-tipped across the level, swirling through the frantically digging blue crabs, the little cohorts of life. Then followed ripples, ranks of water, inexorably pushing up towards the waterfalls, the caves, the dry sand, bringing the bream who would nuzzle to crunch those delicate blue-armoured morsels or tooth out oysters among the mangroves at the foot of the waterfall cliffs, toss over seaweed. The gum-leaf smoke was stilled with the sunset and the water glitter faded. But never for me, never, until I die! I am no patriot of vast places, of Australia, of resounding nationalisms. But I would fight to my last breath for North Harbour as it was when I was a child, for the two waterfalls, the secret stream and the pool where I saw the platypus play, for the grey tilted rock where the little children slid, the maidenhair fern in shade and the wild violets, for the pink and yellow lantana above the hot sand of afternoon, flowered with tiny nectar-stems that could be fitted into each other to make bracelets for a baby’s arm.

  As all men kill the thing they love so the place at North Harbour where Phillip’s men landed, to follow the Aboriginal track over French’s Forest to the Hawkesbury, was made by the Manly Council with much blasting — into a drainage outlet — with concrete pipes for storm-water. Half of North Harbour was filled in for playing fields where idle lads could kick a football; grass covered the sandflats of the delicate blue crabs. The deep channel where boats were built was a pipeline. A bowls club took over from the maidenhair fern and wild violets.

  The hills mottled with houses now bear my tracks where once I roved from Forty Baskets to Clontarf to the Bomborah, or over French’s Forest towards Cowan. My wraith will haunt there if it haunts anywhere; a trudging child slipping through the warm red of gum-tree trunks, a blue wraith in the sunlight like gum-tree smoke, making off purposeful, alone, for what it has not yet found over an unknown hill.

  From Rosedale, the house my grandfather built after Lauderdale, you could gaze across North Harbour to Forty Baskets beach over that luring green water. There was just the one house at Forty Baskets and I wondered who lived there and came by boat to Manly and if there were children who must come that way and what they did in stormy weather. It was an enchanted house to me. Many years later I saw a fairy penguin swimming below its wharf.

  It was on Forty Baskets beach long after I had married that I learnt dogs could count. I had taken my two children for a swim there and a big spotty Dalmatian came up, sat down and made friends with me. She indicated her two spotty little pups then, with a huge smile, my two children. She deplored the lack of telepathy in humans. What a conversation we could have had if I could talk to her. I had two pups, she had two. Splendid!

  Not only do birds and spiders and all animals talk but the trees also. Once in a noisy supermarket I paused because something was in pain. Searching around the nearest counter I found a little eucalypt in a pot. It had been crammed in on a lower shelf so that its growing tip was bent over by the glass shelf above. Naturally I bought it and planted it where its bent tip could straighten out. Many a time I have reproached myself that I have been heedless of appeals which I should have heard from animals and plants, that I have been in haste and not realised until later what they were asking of me.

  I suppose it was inevitable that someone like my grandfather, Frank Tolhurst, should come to Manly to transform all that beauty into solidly built two-storey houses of plum-coloured brick with tiled roofs and white verandah rails. I must confess that I loved the smell of sawn timber and plaster, loved beams and joists and lime and mortar on Grandpa’s ‘jobs’. I think that Grandma always felt there was something ‘common’ in the way Grandpa worked with his men, getting his clothes so dirty. He would sit at the cedar roll-topped desk he had made for himself and which I now own, figuring costs in his splendid mathematical head and making neat delicate plans for new houses. I would sooner have inherited his mathematical ability than his desk for I have a block of invincible ignorance where figures are involved.

  He told me that when he came to Manly — as a young workman, an emigrant
from London (‘I can still lay bricks faster than any man’) — there was stream running through the sandspit lying between the surf at South Steyne and Sydney Harbour. North Head would have been an island then. He could throw a fishing line in anywhere in those days and have fish for breakfast. He shot native cats which ate his chickens. He dearly loved fishing and he also loved and tended gardens, going miles for the cutting of some rare plant.

  He loved the moist leaf-mould of the hot-houses for ferns that he built wherever he lived. That smell of heat and moisture and leaf-mould from his glass house — off the music room of Lauderdale — was a pleasure of my infancy. Music and flowers and laughter, sunlight, lawns and the splash of water — I played with tiles left over from some ‘job’ against an upturned rowing boat at the bottom of the garden.

  Grandpa Tolhurst, whom I dearly loved, I associated with clean new shavings of wood. He gave me my first book when I was two in 1914. It must have been the first book that May Gibbs ever wrote. He had a white cockatoo which, when he sat in the garden, walked all over him saying ‘Kiss Cocky’. Its name was Lido and I gave it a wide berth having been bitten by another cocky of Grandpa’s called Barney who cracked my finger-nail like a nut when I put it through the bars of his cage. Lido could break out of any cage with his wicked hooked beak. He lived till over seventy and was my childhood nightmare. We had an outside lavatory and he would make me prisoner, walking to and fro outside the shut door, dancing and talking to himself, until someone heard my yells and came to rescue me. I was afraid of Cocky Lido but of nothing else.

  My grandfather never spoke of his forebears. He had cut himself off when he came to Australia. He once mentioned he was born in London and skated on ice-bound ponds when a boy; that his step-father was a taxidermist. Grandpa had shed his former life like a lizard skin. He was a Mason and twice grandmaster of Grand Lodge. Otherwise he too was a Christian Scientist. He recited to me Kipling’s poem about Martha’s sons.