The Missing Heir

by Kylie Tennant

  The sons of Mary seldom bother …

  They sit at the Feet, they hear the Word, they see how truly the promise runs.

  They have cast their burden upon the Lord, and the Lord he lays it on Martha’s Sons.

  He gave me my admiration for those who worked with their hands. If my splendid grandfather did so, then this was a high calling.

  My grandmother, who had been Alice Farr, had been brought up to the Australian idea of gentility. Her girlhood had been spent in a large house with orchards and gardens — even a lake with an island (possibly a dam), with a coachman, Mike, and a carriage and all those brothers and sisters. When you went calling the horses must not be kept waiting. One did not, in a colony where those you met might be of convict descent, mix with ‘common’ people. When tradesmen called for orders they stood at the back door. Grandma stood well away from them inside the kitchen door and called her list from a distance. She did not go out save to church occasionally. She quarrelled with almost everyone, particularly neighbours. I think the ‘error’ she was battling was some hysterical shrinking from strangers. Yet when the picture show came to Manly she would venture out with Grandpa to walk in the dark from Lauderdale to Manly to see The Clutching Hand with Lillian Gish or The Perils of Pauline.

  Because Grandma never went out, my mother was condemned to visit her daily and my aunt Beryl, when she married, rebelled against this servitude. Yet they remained living within walking distance of Grandma all their married lives, in orbit about her. Her two sons-in-law regarded her with dread and never visited her if they could help it. My father she particularly hated. After any rather dreadful row we fled to Grandma’s house and our childhood was such that sometimes we did not know where we were living — at Grandma’s place or in one of the mean rented cottages which my father provided.

  ‘Tell us about when you were a little girl, Grandma,’ we would demand at bedtime and Grandma would tell us of the orchard at her old home, the lake at the end of the garden with an island in the middle of it, the coachman Mike — a tyrant on whose goodwill the women had to depend because the only way of leaving home was the carriage.

  The Farr family consisted of Alice, Ernest, Bertie, Lottie, Jessie, Myra, Ada, Connie, Ted and so on down the ringing succession of names to a total of thirteen. My grandmother was the eldest. They were all great talkers of trivia — they babbled. This constant deafening stream of conversation was what I most remember about my great-aunts — that and the net veils over their ever-working jaws. To the occupation of talking they brought the activity of an ant bringing home some worthless but weighty object. As in all big families they talked about each other. As soon as they met — and they would travel long distances with this end in view they would launch out into an account of what had happened to Florrie, Jessie, Lottie, Ada, and Nerida — yes, it is coming back to me. Plenty was always happening to Nerrie who had married a husband younger than herself who once smashed up the furniture in their flat. Plenty happened to Uncle Ted — who was tin-mining in Malaya and had married a Roman Catholic which, to the Farr family, was worse than marrying a Chinese or a Negro.

  The horror of Roman Catholics was something passed down in Protestant families. It froze their blood to know that Roman Catholics existed. But Ted had married one and part of their ceaseless discussion was censure passed on her strange ways. She sent their son to a Catholic college and once when we called at the weekend to take him for a picnic we were told he was ‘in retreat’ and could not come. We all drove away silent and disturbed. Could this be some secret cell in which the boys were locked? Mysterious stone walls and black distant figures. How could such beings be allowed in this free country?

  Apart from bigotry, vanity, ceaseless gabbling and shallowness of mind there was nothing wrong with the aunts — all over the country there were thousands just like them. They had been brought up like hens in a pen and they gabbled like them. But just as hens and all living creatures must be given respect, one must respect the instincts of the aunts. They had a beady round eye for small objects. Their houses were cluttered. They liked ‘things’ — nice things. It was their ambition to have them and each sister’s worth was judged by how many nice things she had.

  ‘She’s got all new furniture’ was a points score. ‘Her husband gives her everything.’ ‘They’ve got a new car.’

  I was only taken to see Great-grandfather Farr once when he was over ninety in a house cluttered with furniture and women. He sat, majestic, under a rug on a verandah floored with black and white marble squares. My mother was fond of telling me about his notable impatience which she claimed I inherited. He would, when younger, pace up and down, watch in hand, declaiming against the chattering and giggling and primping daughters. But they had all married before I was aware of them. Marriage was the great career for women and they succeeded in it, having energy and vivacity.

  Great-grandmother Farr, even when I was half-grown, would come visiting her daughter Alice. ‘Lor, there’s Ma,’ Grandma would say in a tone reserved for cyclones and hailstorms. Great-grandma — at eighty-nine — had shiny black hair under a black bonnet with a black ostrich plume. It had jet beads on it and she wore a black feather boa. Her black boots twinkled, her black bag had a steel clasp. Nothing hurried her or ruffled her immense good humour. She walked with my mother and me down to North Harbour when she came visiting and insisted on walking out on the rocks to lave her face with salt water, using a spotless white handkerchief. First she peeled off her black silk gloves. ‘The Queen of Sheba,’ she announced, ‘always washed her face in salt water. It is an unfailing beauty remedy.’ I gazed at Great-grandma admiringly. Apes and peacocks, I thought. Slaves with no clothes on. They waved big fans. There was a picture in the Art Gallery. The Queen of Sheba walked slowly dragging her train like a peacock towards Solomon.

  ‘Queen,’ Solomon said respectfully, ‘how do you manage to have such a pretty skin?’

  ‘I wash it in salt water, Solomon,’ the Queen responded. ‘Don’t tell anyone, will you? It’s a secret.’

  ‘I certainly won’t,’ Solomon promised. But maybe one of the slaves had told Grandma’s Grandma.

  ‘It is the first duty of a woman to be attractive,’ Great-grandma said. ‘There is nothing more attractive than a charming skin.’

  ‘And then you marry and it’s the end of you,’ my mother said glumly. ‘Meals and children and washing-up.’

  ‘I have always,’ Great-grandma maintained, ‘derived the greatest enjoyment from life.’ And the Queen of Sheba had had fun too.

  ‘You should do the same, Kathie,’ Great-grandma said, returning from her wash. ‘Most refreshing.’

  ‘Great-grandma,’ I began, ‘are there any marriages in Heaven and do angels have children?’

  ‘I must ask Mrs Trevor,’ Great-grandma said interestedly. Mrs Trevor was a medium Great-grandma visited. It was not in her nature to relinquish any of her relations and she continued to gather and dispense news of them by means of knocks on a table.

  I was enchanted by Great-grandma. I would be like her and the Queen of Sheba. At that time I was a freckled, skinny little kid with straight hair off which bows slid or came untied, with scratched legs and bruised knees from active climbing. I went off to wash my face with salt water and become beautiful but managed to slip and fall in. I had to run all the way home.

  * * *

  The first terrace house we lived in was on the edge of the bush — of course within walking distance of Grandma’s Lauderdale. My father walked me there to be minded, on his way to the Manly boat and the city in the morning. I followed Grandma around the house and garden, copying her precise diction. My other grandmother dropped her aitches (being deaf) and later my mother-in-law did the same (being English). I was taught never to do this. I associated Grandma with rigid corsets, boned lace collars, high-piled hair, steel curlpins in the early morning and an elaborate toilet later in the day. She had made the clothes of a dozen brothers and sisters before she married and now
made mine and my sister’s. (‘Kathie, that child is glaring at me. Stand still or this pin will go into you.’ ‘Don’t frown so, dear. You should be grateful to your grandmother.’)

  I worshipped Dorothy Bray, who made a pet of me and lived opposite us. She had long dark curls and worked in the steam laundry at the top of the street where the trams went past. I would lean on her ironing table where the mulberry tree threw green shadows from the window and admire her. There was to be a carnival — the Manly carnival — and Dorothy Bray was to be a mermaid. All the girls from the steam laundry would go in the laundry van with green mosquito net over it. They would all be mermaids with scales and a long tail.

  I did not think the laundry man would let the fish ladies ride in his truck if they were real but perhaps they turned into mermaids after dark. Or only at the carnival, whatever that was.

  I was sitting on the front doorstep of our house pondering this in my singlet one evening while mother bathed the baby.

  ‘Mother,’ I said, ‘there is Venus.’

  ‘Come inside or Venus will come down and bite you on the bottom if you don’t put your pants on.’ You could never believe anything people told you. How could Venus in the sky — a particular friend of mine — come down and bite me? My sign was the star over the crescent Moon. (When my first book won a prize it was there in the sky. I was wearing a ring Roddy’s elder brother had taken from a dead Turk. My mother-in-law had lent it to me. But she took it back later, because her son had given it to her.)

  My mother knew I couldn’t put my pants on by myself. They were the bane of my life and had three buttons at the back which also buttoned on to a linen bodice — Grandma again! Elastic was obtainable but for very small children it was buttons.

  My impatience with my mother overwhelmed me when I waited one morning to walk with her to Grandma’s beside the baby’s pram. I decided to go on ahead and struck out for Lauderdale over the big hill instead of taking the road. I cut through the bush, toiled along a sparkling little stream with red and white flowers overhanging it. I drank some of the water. Then, triumphant, I came out at the back of Narbethong, climbed down the steep steps to Lauderdale’s back gate and presented myself to my astonished grandmother. I was told if I ever did such a thing again an old man would put me in a sack. But thereafter when my mother ran out of something needed for breakfast I was allowed to go up to the shops and wait until they opened, clutching a florin in my hand.

  The night of the carnival duly arrived and Dorothy did not turn into a real mermaid. I was disappointed. There were crowds on the Corso, a broad asphalt-paved street which replaced the sand and the little creek of which my grandfather had told me. The broad street had lights and an ornamental grotto with ferns and goldfish. This did not last long as people threw tins into the pools and stole the goldfish but it was being admired at that carnival. Also my uncle had a boat with Japanese lanterns in which we were rowed but it did not win a prize. Then we all came ashore because there was a cry: ‘They’re going to burn King Carnival!’

  ‘Where are they going to burn him?’ I enquired.

  ‘On the wharf.’ I could only see a gilded and pasteboard figure so I deduced the man must be inside.

  ‘They are burning him in effigy,’ my mother explained. I asked if they were going to eat him.

  ‘Of course not. It isn’t a real king.’ I had not thought it was. A not-wanted-man would be substituted for the real king who was in England. It’s an old custom.’ I thought the custom very cruel but there was nothing I could do about it. So must have thought little Celtic girls who saw men burnt in wickerwork, or those who attended the burning of my ancestress the witch.

  My mother did not want to wait for the fireworks but my father insisted. The crowds crammed into the tram and my father held me over his shoulder head downwards. Fireworks look strange seen upside down. I fell asleep in that position thinking of the man burnt on the Manly wharf.

  Soon after that we moved to the next street where we had a bigger house and my mother could make a garden. Any house we moved to she told off my father to dig. He was talking to a neighbour over the fence when he dropped the spade on my nose and accidentally broke it but no one found out until I grew up. My sister, who was toddling, pulled over a boiling pot of porridge on her shoulder and had to go to hospital. She had already been there to have her lip operated on for a blue vein but the operation was not a success and she retained the blue vein. I always thought it rather distinctive, like a tattoo. But my mother lied to her and said she was going for a swim when she was really going to hospital. People would tell you anything. My mother began to dislike that house and prepared to move again.

  At the risk of sounding like Aunt Ada Doom of Cold Comfort Farm who saw something nasty in the woodshed I will now relate the unsavoury episode of how I was sexually molested at the age of four. (A novelist friend and I ring each other up and put on a Cold Comfort Farm act: ‘How is’t with thee and thine?’ she will demand. ‘Eh, we’re still crouched under the shadow of Mockuncle Hill but the sukebind is in flower.’) On this occasion I had not roved off into some intriguing gully but was playing in a cleared allotment one afternoon with a group of other little children opposite my front gate. A big freckled boy who said he was ten came and played with us. He was like a shark in a shoal of minnows. Seizing my hand he led me away to a clump of trees promising to find a bunch of gum tips to give my mother. While I was pondering this he undid all six buttons of my pants — the front ones as well as the back, flung me down on the ground and lay on top of me, placing that peculiar hosepipe with which boys were unaccountably fitted between my legs. I thought he was urinating on me and was disgusted. He was twice my size so there was nothing I could do. He then said he was sorry he could not help me do up my pant buttons as it was getting late. I watched him retreat through the gate in the back fence of his house. The fence was covered with morning glories. Fumbling with the accursed pant buttons I crossed the road howling. My mother was perplexed as I seldom cried. I refused to tell her what had happened. She decided not to tell Grandma (she always told Grandma everything) so I suppose she just thought the right thought, not giving evil power.

  Soon after that we moved to a house above North Harbour in Condamine Street, another terrace house, and had to sleep on the floor because the furniture had not been delivered and the gas, water and electricity were still not on. Mother made a new garden and there was a pine tree at the end of the yard which smelt of hot pine needles. Our bantams perched in it. In the allotment behind our fence I found an old cutlass with a basket handle, which must have marked this as part of the old Aboriginal track. In an impulse of mistaken remorse I gave the cutlass to my cousin Brian who had thrown a hammer at me when he was in his cradle while he was busily hammering nails into his cot. Thereafter we fought all our lives because he replaced me as Grandma’s pet and I can still remember the horror of our relatives when Brian threw Science and Health at my head and I hit him with the Bible which was heavier. How did it come about that children reared to reflect peace, love and harmony should be trying to bite each other on the throat?

  Psychologists will probably say that I am a splendid case of penis envy but I did not envy little boys their peculiar equipment. Indeed I pitied them that they were not neat and smooth in front like little girls. I thought it must be very uncomfortable to be attached to a small hosepipe. I also thought the episode with my ravisher very squalid and his actions coarse.

  I was much more shocked at adolescence when I was having a bath one night and found I was bleeding internally. I called my mother who said hurriedly that it happened to all girls and would recur once a month. She provided me with a peculiar bandage and edged out of the bathroom. That was all the sex education I ever had. As I was to take part in the school play — Shakespeare — next night I used some words I had heard my father say. So all women were invalids! What a hell of a thing! Unfair. And males, protected by their peculiar hosepipe, were immune. Unfair. No wonder clothes were i
nvented to cover up Nature’s mistakes in planning. Breasts I could understand because they served a useful function. I decided that henceforth I would meet this challenge and never alter a hairsbreadth from any course of action even if I had blood running into my boots like Drake at Panama. Never had I acted better than I did the following night.

  When later people told me I would be raped and murdered if I persisted in going on lonely tramps by myself, I thought, ‘Why, dammit, I’ve been raped already.’ But I didn’t tell anyone because they might be sorry for me and my main object in life was not to be in a position where anyone could be sorry for me.

  * * *

  There was a confused period when my mother, Doffie and I were living at Lauderdale before some row was made up and we moved to Condamine Street. I associate this last period at Lauderdale with starvation.

  Some people associate Sunday with religion and the others with the ceremonious Sunday dinner. All the morning is taken up cooking the dinner. Then later there is washing-up and sleeping off the dinner like a set of boa constrictors. Grandma’s Sunday dinner was roast potatoes in crisp autumn tints of brown and bronze, tender green beans, cauliflower in white sauce, perhaps a tomato pie, thick rich gravy and a roast that responded to carving with a delicious juice and a poetic tender curve of fat and lean. Then, say, plum pudding and custard to follow or stewed fruit and custard. Grandma liked to exercise her talent and Sunday dinner midday was the gastronomic feat of the week.

  Not that we forgot the religious side. We bellowed hymns cheerfully at the piano in the evening and during the week we were always being hauled up to recite chunks of psalms and other religious learning. But our family belonged to a church that was of different emphasis to other churches. We regarded the Baptists, the Methodists and the C. of E. with the mild tolerant pity of a man travelling in a limousine who sees his brothers trudging in the dust. If they realised, they could be as we were. It was their own fault if they clung to mortal beliefs and refused the great truth that was free to them. We could only be sorry. When we heard that a branch of our church was to be opened in the city there was no question of our not attending, But how was Sunday dinner to be cooked? If we all got up extra early on Sunday morning and got everything ready we could ‘pop the dinner in the oven’ when we reached home. By the time we were out of our best clothes the dinner would be cooked. We had always had Sunday dinner and we always would if Grandma had her way.