My father was in the process of coaxing his family back and, hearing — no doubt from my mother — that I was writing ‘poems’, rang up Rosedale to say that a magazine called the Farmer and Grazier wished to publish my verse. As the Parent was, at this time, the advertising manager of his firm this was a very good move on the part of the editor. Several little pieces of my doggerel with the requested agricultural motif duly appeared in this worthy journal with a hideous photograph of me looking nervous in white socks. I was losing my front teeth at the time and had to have them pulled out under anaesthetic as the second teeth refused to come through while the first were hanging on grimly. ‘Kylie Tennant, age 11’ was written under the hideous photograph.
The Parent was able to boast to Uncle Stan. I detested writing this silly stuff and after three lots refused to do any more. I have always been able to judge mediocrity because it makes me sick on my stomach.
My mother cherished other ambitions for me. As a girl she had been a member of an amateur dramatic society and her fan dance — a swirling of long voluminous skirts such as I saw later in Chinese opera — was much admired. Her Aunt Nerida trained children to dance in pantomimes and sometimes gave us tickets. Mother took us to musical comedies which were the highest pitch of her taste in acting. Earlier on she had hoped Aunt Nerida would train me but I refused to learn the sample recitation Aunt Nerida thrust upon me. It was in broken English with an Italian accent, fake pathetic, about some emigrant who wanted to put red roses on his daughter’s grave. I had that warning pain in my stomach. At the time I had found a volume of Tennyson and was learning wads of it.
In second class at Brighton College I had been called in to the Big Girls Room and told I had been selected to play the part of Puck. I didn’t know who Puck was. I was also told I must write out my ‘cues’. I didn’t know what these were. I learnt the part faithfully and was a smash hit, turning somersaults all over the stage in a green satin costume with big green ear pieces made by Grandma. After that I was always in the school play and my mother and grandmother rejoiced in dressing me. Every year I acted in Shakespeare selections or some suitable romantic comedy. It was deplored that I was so small or the lead part would have been mine. Instead I played Maggie in What Every Woman Knows. When I attained the rank of prefect I went to a hairdresser and was clipped into the first Eton crop seen in those parts. My mother and grandma wailed aloud. Gone were the curls which I had cursed and from thenceforth the male lead was mine. I played François Villon, Malvolio, Captain Brown in Quality Street. I learned later that one of the juniors said to another, ‘My pin-up is John Barrymore.’
‘Oh no,’ the other replied. ‘Mine is Kylie Tennant.’
I was much detested by my age group for precision of diction but I was the pride of the English mistress.
The Parent never came to see me act. I was an affected child and I suppose he had had enough of my acting at home.
Our first English mistress, Miss Strachan, when I was in the first class of Upper School also taught at another, much bigger school. She commanded me to come there with her one afternoon because this school was putting on the same play as ours at the end of the year. I was mystified but accompanied her in mute terror. She left me in the front hall and a huge speciman of the genus Headmistress descended the stairs and asked what I was doing there. However, Miss Strachan rescued me and introduced me to her actors. ‘Show them how Nancy plays this part,’ she demanded. Nancy had the part of an alluring dame. She was much older than I was. I immediately became the fascinating Nancy. ‘Now,’ Miss Strachan said, ‘Show them how you would do it.’ I dropped the allure and became a distraught, passion-dominated woman. The girls gaped at me but Miss Strachan was very pleased.
Our school was migratory; just as we migrated at home from Rosedale when Grandpa built Hillside for us. Under Miss Allenby tall and ghostly in a boned lace collar — the school moved to the East Esplanade at Manly. I found it handy for dashing out and buying a threepenny pie, which was my lunch. When Miss Allenby retired it moved again to another tall house with rooms budding off everywhere like some stately fungus. Under Miss Musson it moved again round towards Fairlight. Miss Croker, our English mistress, later took over as headmistress after I left. I was invited back to the farewell prize-giving and was surprised to find out from Miss Croker that all my headmistresses had been very fond of me. No one regarded a headmistress as human. They were a kind of fabulous animal operating outside the law of nature.
At this farewell a voice hissed in my ear: ‘Come on, let’s get this thing off the ground.’ It was beginning to sound lugubrious. The hisser I remembered as a bright-faced junior when I was a prefect. She was now the famous aviatrix Nancy Bird. So we got it off the ground. We cut short the headmistress’s speech before she burst into tears and we went into an act. Between us we lifted it, made it memorable. We raised roars of laughter and cheers. If you can act you can do it anywhere.
But in primary school I had sat happily in the back seat and dreamed of the Gobi Desert. My mother’s desk in which she had cut the initials K.T. for Katherine Tolhurst still followed me about. The initials were very firm and deep, for mother was a dab at wood-carving. (‘Oh no, I didn’t do it, those aren’t my initials. They’re my mother’s.’)
I woke from my back-seat dream one day to hear the geography mistress saying in a tone of passionate reproach: ‘And think how low the standard of your work must have been if Kylie Tennant could come top. Girls, I am ashamed of you!’
What riled her was that my spelling and writing were atrocious and my ink-blots and inattention a reproach. Later she was to thrust a printed sheet before me and take out a stop watch. ‘Fill that in when I say Go — a dash in the oblongs and a tick in the squares.’ I filled it in frantically. ‘Um,’ she said, ‘So you can concentrate if you want to. My word! And how you can concentrate.’
My brains only lit up when I advanced to Upper School. I could mop up necessary facts and dates the night before the exam and forget them happily two days later. In third class we had started on Latin and algebra when we had never heard of them. I detested both. The mathematics teacher gave up on me when I was wending my erratic way through primary school. The headmistress always set us sums for detention. I got a psychic block when I was expected to calculate 14 pounds of potatoes at 2.10½ a pound. I had to be let go when darkness fell or I would have been there yet.
I was always brought forward to read aloud in sewing class. I had the same petticoat (unfinished) follow me from class to class like my mother’s desk. It had ancient bloodstains from needlepricks around the hem. I couldn’t draw — with the correct shading — left-handed again. Instead I made wicked little sketches. They were not appreciated. Years later I coached a red-headed boy in geometry and Latin. When he went back to school he was way ahead of the class. The geography mistress was right to suspect that I never learnt anything at all in a reasonable way. My husband, who had a first-class brain, retained everything he had ever learnt. He looked up facts in encyclopaedias and consulted dictionaries. I regarded him with admiration and pride. He courted me by drawing diagrams of syllogisms and logic in the dust when I took him for a picnic. He actually tutored me through first year logic at the university, and I passed. Imagine me passing in logic! He was first in the economics class. I was the bottom. I was supposed to take a deferred exam in economics but didn’t bother. Sydney University had as much charm for me as a hen coop. ‘You could be a teacher,’ Roddy suggested.
‘A teacher!’ I exclaimed in horror. ‘Good God!’ Since then I have not only lectured at sundry universities in most states but have taught children of all varied abilities. I am an inspiring, dashing and quite useless teacher. I even taught sewing and my mother-in-law taught me to sew right-handed over the Christmas holidays. The reason I did this was because the headmaster’s wife was paid to teach sewing and if she refused the teachers had to do it — unpaid.
I once achieved the distinction of having no marks at all for a psychol
ogy essay at Sydney University. It was on concepts. I set out to prove that there was no such thing as a concept — that you couldn’t talk about orangeness when every separate object was unique and distinct and that the colour orange, if you looked at it closely, was made up of varied lights, that the impression of orange could be broken down — but why go on? Of course I got no marks.
Above all I never did anything in the right way. This has always amazed people. ‘But you do things the hard way,’ they would exclaim. It had never occurred to me that there was an easier way of going about whatever I was engaged on. I fully expected to make a mess of it and was very surprised when, by a miracle, it proved a great success.
Thus I will honour pious men whose virtue shines so bright
Though none are more amazed than I when I by chance do right.
And I will pity foolish men for woes their sins have bred
Though ninety-nine percent of mine I brought on my own head.
Rudyard Kipling’s Collected Verse,
‘A Pilgrim’s Way’
I had an encounter when I was in fifth class that I never forgot and which influenced my life. In Australia the coldest months of the year see the flowering of culture and the smell is of umbrellas in a frozen classroom. The local librarian or some other culture-lover hibernates in the summer but, as soon as you drag out the radiators from the cupboard, there she is with her galoshes, crying; ‘We must all get together and decide what course we will have this year.’ One year it will be drama and the next archaeology, pottery, Man’s Place in a Changing Universe, or International Affairs. It is all one to the librarian. The hound of hell is on culture’s traces.
When I was at school, so borne down by examinations that I could hardly lift my head — I must have been all of eleven years old — the local librarian, who sat majestically on a kind of dais, had three chins and doled out fiction as though it were a gift from the gods, convinced my mother that it would be good for me to attend a course of lectures on Ancient Greece. I knew The Golden Age of Myth and Legend almost by heart. I protested strongly. ‘But I’ve promised you’d go,’ my mother explained.
The first and only lecture I attended has remained one of the happiest memories of my life. It was on ‘Greek Culture: The Classic Concept’, and even before I arrived at the Council Chambers in the rain something told me that anyone who came to a meeting on a night like this was nuts. A set of intimidating elders had gathered in a small bare room under a dim electric light bulb. I was wearing a navy felt hat with its school badge. It was held on with elastic in a band under my chin. My skin had just broken out in a new set of spots and my expression was sullen and vacant, for I alternated between being too shy to speak and saying the wrong thing.
I crouched with my umbrella, squeezed in between a stout woman and a little old withered one. The lecturer sent by the august body from the city was, even as I surveyed the dreary gathering, stripping off his outer garments and shaking the wet from him in a vigorous and confident manner. He was a young man with curly black hair, a handsome profile and a way of speaking crisply to the secretary as she sent round the exercise book in which we all signed our names.
Just as the lecturer was shuffling his notes and about to begin, there was a disturbance near the door. Everyone glanced that way with annoyance because, to open the door, chairs had to be moved. A late-comer stumbled in — literally stumbled — and stood swaying and looking for somewhere to sit. The meeting was hostile to him for even to my eye the man was drunk. Nobody made room for him until the lecturer pointed out a seat in a far corner and he struggled towards it.
The man had a white moustache and his raincoat was old and stained. His hands had chipped nails, and with these hands, seamed and grained from hard work, he fumbled out some tobacco and was rolling himself a cigarette when one of the ladies snapped at him and pointed out the notice which forbade smoking.
In his confusion he dropped his tobacco on the floor and got down on his knees to grope for it. He apologised loudly. Then he dropped his hat. There was clucking and fluttering and settling down. A small flame of amusement began to burn behind my vacant look. This was going to be good.
The lecturer gave his class one compelling glance and, taking no notice of the Man with the Hands, swept into his theme. He was closely followed by the class who gave him looks of devotion and sat with poised pens. I looked to see what the woman next to me had written. She had headed it: ‘Greek Culture — Our Heritage from Ancient Athens’.
The latecomer was looking for his hat and muttering. People recoiled from him like a wave and said, ‘Shush!’ The lecturer was enthusiastic about ‘baccahnals’ who pranced about on hillsides, and what he called ‘sah-tars’. I had never heard the word pronounced that way before and had thought it was like ‘satire’.
Those satyrs frisked their little goat hooves through the discourse. The Gods of Greece, the lecturer said, had inspired the best and most intelligent of artists and writers. They had given literature a stamp which it had never lost. There was a smell of ink as the fountain pens took down these sentiments. Even in ‘this ruder scene’, the lecturer stated, there were Australians, literary men of eminence, who detected the frisking satyrs among the gum-trees, and had sought to introduce the Concepts of Antiquity among us.
‘ ’Scuse me.’ The man with the white moustache swayed amiably to his feet. The raincoats rippled with consternation and fierce eye-glasses flashed at him. ‘ ’Scuse me.’
‘What is it?’ The lecturer knew he had better give the drunk a chance or he would never get any further. He was indulgent towards the man. ‘There’ll be a question time at the end of the talk. Couldn’t you wait till then?’
‘I jus’ wanta say,’ the man stated. ‘that I come here tonight to hear about the Ancient Greeks — not these sarters.’
Someone called, ‘Turn him out.’
‘I come here because these Greeks, living beside the sea, must have et a lot of fish. I keep a fish-shop myself. Lots of chaps I know in the trade are Greeks. What I want to hear about is their fish-shops. Not much to ask, is it?’
The lecturer gave him a glance of dislike. He wearily passed his hand across his brow. Then he decided to be noble and he quelled his snarling audience with an uplifted hand.
The fish-shops of Ancient Greece,’ he said, rising to the challenge, ‘were much like those we have today. There were worn slabs on which the fish were scaled and counters over which they were sold and — er — so forth. The fish was brought in on fishing boats in the usual manner —’ His boredom got the better of him. ‘And in the usual manner slaves and people like that came and bought it.’
There was a muffled roar from the fish-shop man. ‘To hell with that!’ he said loudly and shockingly. ‘I want to hear about their marketing arrangements. Who got the cut? How did they ice it?’
The lecturer lost patience and flashed his eyes for support, and the assembled spectacles flashed back.
‘Now I,’ the fish-shop man was continuing, ‘am an anarchist. I’m not asking to hear about Greek anarchists, but I guess there must have been some. What I am asking is the freedom to find out about men like me. And I guess you just don’t know what they were doing then.’
Several ladies were waving their umbrellas.
‘Rich stuff,’ I thought. I was the only one backing the fish-shop man.
There were murmurings of ‘Order, order!’ but now the lecturer waded into battle, trying to snatch back his lecture. ‘What you are asking has nothing to do with Ancient Greek civilisation and culture.’
‘The hell it hasn’t!’ the fish-shop man snapped back. ‘If there’s any literature and culture in this country I’m it.’
I did not realise that I had given a yelp of joyful encouragement until the class turned its awful gaze on me. I pretended it was a hiccup and that my dinner was causing discomfort.
The lecturer was now on top of the fish-shop man and was beating out his brains. ‘You are taking up,’ he said magisteri
ally, ‘the attitude of the Early Christian Church.’ Murmurs of agreement from the class. ‘And of the barbarians who smashed with rocks the magnificent statues of Greece and Rome, the statues of the gods. All through the ages there has been this Revolt against the Values embodied in the Gods of Greece.’
‘Give us a bit about fish-shops and I’ll shut up.’
People thumped with their umbrellas. I was overjoyed and decided that if groups studying Culture were like this, nothing would keep me from them. Unfortunately, the fish-shop man was made to leave. I gave him a silent cheer as he staggered to the door.
At the end of the evening the secretary sweetly indicated to me that I was a little young for Greek Culture and had better not come again.
I went home and told everyone the lecture was wonderful. As I fell asleep I vowed a great oath that if ever I caught sight of a satyr skipping among the gum-tress, I would bung a rock at that satyr and make him wish he had stayed away. I would use traps and poison bait. It was a vow I have kept ever since. And I swore another great oath always to be an anarchist like the fish-shop man.
If I have not kept that oath I have always been faithful, in all my books, to the fish-shop man. This has been appreciated for I have discovered people who have never read a book have asked for mine. There is never anything approaching culture in them.
The Missing Heir Page 7
