The Missing Heir

by Kylie Tennant

On the day the Company became the Commission, Uncle Stan came over to my desk very kindly and said in a cheerful shout: ‘Well, how is my protégée?’ This finished me with the office staff. By that time I had managed to get myself transferred to the publicity department by my own unaided efforts and had a rise to twenty-seven shillings and sixpence a week.

  Jimmy moved to Publicity too, under kindly Enid Blomberg who was willing to give us both a chance. The Commission was expanding like yeast and new desks crowded in, three in the space one had once occupied. The Commission had two floors above Her Majesty’s Theatre in Pitt Street and you entered by the stage door, taking a temperamental lift. The first floor was the office and on the top floor were two studios. Any worthwhile trade union would have brought everyone out on strike. The female office staff had nowhere to eat lunch save the wooden landing outside the lavatories. The incinerator smoke from the caretaker’s theatre bonfires in the yard impregnated the studio soundproofing. No windows were ever opened and there was no air-conditioning. For a claustrophobiac the place was a little hell. At lunchtime I would dash out and start breathing when I hit the street. But I never missed a day in almost two years that I worked there.

  In the morning Jimmy and I would be waiting on the top floor by the lift to interview the ‘artists’ — people who had a wedge of time allotted to their singing or talking or playing. It was our job to make these people sound as interesting as possible. ‘Swop you two organists and a soprano for one explorer,’ Jimmy would say. He was somewhat piqued when he found that I had two columns that week in the Guardian, because I had managed to make all my people sound so interesting. The Children’s Hour had also expanded, for the Commission now included another station, 2BL, which was more richly endowed with children’s announcers than 2FC with only its patriarchal Hello Man.

  I found myself answering the mail not only of the Hello Man but of Uncle Frank, the Farmyard Five (imitations), Uncle Jim (a ventriloquist), Aunt Willa and some little children (singers), also Auntie Goodie. There might have been more. They all had postcards to send their admirers. I did this and more than half the interviews for publications.

  Finally the manager of the station, Oscar Anderson, a kindly but temperamental man who was originally a song-writer, became suspicious that I was putting in too often for tea-money and overtime. He descended on me, grimly, and discovered my work-load. I liked working at night because it was quiet. There after I had an assistant — a toothy little shy girl. Imagine! She could type!

  While the Commission was still 2FC my mother kept complaining that I had not carried her greetings to Basil Kirk, who was the Great White Chief of all Great White Chiefs. I was too crushed and faint-hearted even to imagine myself speaking to him. However, on the eve of the great takeover, after the Hello Man had sent me out to buy him a pair of black socks at his old stamping-ground, Farmers, across the street, I summoned up enough courage to approach the distinguished grey-haired man who was advancing down the corridor. ‘Mr Kirk,’ I murmured, ‘my mother, who was Katherine Tolhurst, wanted to be remembered to you.’ He hugged me, he sat down on the stairs with me. They had grown up together. ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’ he demanded. ‘You’ve been here for months! And you’re Kathie Tolhurst’s daughter!’ He launched into reminiscence of what a beautiful girl she had been and how many young men had been in love with her. I was glad I had not spoken to him before because all this was terribly embarrassing. Reluctantly he let me go, with many messages, some of which I delivered to my mother. I was unhandy in social relationships.

  Later I was struck by the idea that an impecunious guitar player who hung around the studios looking for a job was half-starved; so I invited him home to dinner. We went across on the Manly boat that, unluckily, also bore my Uncle Stanley home to his mansion on the other side of Manly. He and my darling aunt and cousins Barry and Dal had always lived at Manly. Uncle Stan came swooping across the boat, his glasses gleaming with curiosity and amiability, to inspect my escort. I felt like a small insect under a microscope. Mother fed the young man — who ate like a wolf — and they played together joyfully. He dedicated two songs to me in purple ink and would, I think, have liked to have been invited again, for he wrote long letters to me every day in purple ink and left them on the switchboard. I could not take the ribald mirth of the office when those purple-ink letters were delivered ostentatiously by the switch girl. Later, this young man, when I was doing a stint on 2BL one night, complained to me against the Commission rule that all ‘artists’ must appear at the studio in evening dress. ‘If I get my evening dress out of pawn I have to put my guitar in.’ He later became so very prosperous writing songs for advertising that he rose far above any circles I ever moved in.

  So many people were young and poor when I was — artists, musicians, writers, actors — that they wouldn’t like to be reminded of it now.

  It was the Parent, of course, who, with a flourish of trumpets, announced that Goodie Reeve was coming to work at the Australian Broadcasting Commission. With his aptitude for meeting anyone of consequence, he gave me such an account of this fascinating stranger that I did my best to avoid her. ‘Her mother, Ada Reeve, was a great star of the London stage. She’s just taken a job as Auntie Goodie on the air.’ The Parent made this sound as though he, personally, had arranged this with a wave of his hand.

  Ever since I had found out that by staying out late I could drive the Parent into a frenzy I had had great fun. I stayed out late with my athlete, his brother and others, probably playing a harmless game of poker. The Parent had too much imagination. In the hiatus before I settled into the ABC I was roving and exploring. So he decided on a policy of conciliation. He would be a friend and companion to me. I announced that I was going camping down Burragorang with a girlfriend of mine — we had a whale of a time. The Parent announced he would take me camping and it was a dismal failure. He was bored and I was bored. He decided he would take me with him to Newcastle where he had business at the Works. I was shown all over the steel works and was fascinated. Indeed I wrote a set of blank verse about those works which was recited later with much atmosphere of clanking chains by a young man at a radical workers’ club. Luckily I lost my only copy.

  We were to stay overnight at a hotel in Newcastle and I decided to go back and have another look at the Works, by night. A young draftsman and his girl were told off to accompany me while the Parent settled down to an evening of discussion and drinking. The Works were all I had hoped for by night with smoky flares and men shifting great loads of red-hot steel. I decided to ride on the overhead crane which sailed high above the scene of activity.

  ‘Could I ride on that crane?’ I asked one of the toilers.

  ‘Only if the foreman gave you permission, miss.’

  I went off to interview the foreman who, as I suspected, looked like a church elder and was horrified. I returned to my first acquaintance.

  ‘Bring ’er down,’ I ordered.

  I climbed on to the crane and the men swept me on it, high in the air from one end of the huge establishment to the other, followed by the cheers of the work force. When I returned to my starting point the foreman was standing there looking grim. I hugged him and kissed him on both cheeks. The work force cheered again and even the foreman grinned.

  A couple of men who were shunting loads on the Works railway asked if I would like to ride on their engine. Would I? So we set off and shunted. When I got back the young draftsman and his girl were looking even grimmer than the foreman. Of course, they told the Parent who burst into one of his more eloquent denunciations. When we drove out to the Works in the morning, we came over the crest of a little hill and there was a railway engine lying on its side with its wheels in the air. ‘Now look what you’ve done!’ the Parent cried. It was no use pointing out that I hadn’t pushed the engine over. I was told to sit in the car and not get out of it.

  While I was sitting in the car up rolled Parry-Oakden, the Parent’s immediate boss, who wanted to know what I was doin
g sitting in the car. I told him and he roared with laughter, dragged me out of the car into his office and congratulated me on breaking practically every by-law in the place. When the Parent came back and found the empty car he nearly fainted but he couldn’t say anything to Parry-Oakden who was one of those insolent Englishmen who played cards at Government House, arriving with only his taxi fare and winning consistently all the evening. He claimed that I must be illegitimate because he couldn’t imagine me being the Parent’s daughter. The Parent returned to Sydney in a fume.

  So if Auntie Goodie, one of the detestable tribe of children’s broadcasters, was a friend of his, I was not going to make friends with her; strictly official and noncommital I would be.

  The lift clashed open and Goodie entered with her entourage. She always had an entourage to hold papers, parcels, or oddments. She swooped on me and swept me up like a piece of tissue in a high wind. She was my friend for the rest of my life and it is not many years ago that I was the only one of her friends beside her deathbed. When she sank into a coma I took a large bottle of her favourite scent and splashed some of it on her. She smiled. What a smile Goodie had! She was all fire and air and blazing green eyes. Not light green like the Parent’s or deep green like mine but a blaze of mischief, charisma, wickedness and fun. She transformed my gloomy life. Before I knew it I had been persuaded to write her a play a week for her ghastly session and I faithfully added this to my already heavy workload. She charmed Neville Amadio to play his flute as the Prince in this farrago of nonsense. He had to slip out of the orchestra to do it. Goodie could charm the birds off a bough. She had a wicked sense of humour and the wild idea came to me that I — even I — might have one too.

  Goodie attempted to improve me. ‘Don’t stride like that,’ she persuaded. She tried to coach me in how to walk like a model. ‘Men are only men, dear,’ she murmured, unbuttoning my tootight cardigan. She refused to have me clip my hair so close. Her ambition, I fear, was to turn me into a houri. Naturally she did not succeed. ‘The horse is a noble animal,’ she wrote in the front of Maupassant’s short stories, which she gave me. The Parent came to regard Goodie as a bad influence because I stayed out later than ever. Goodie loved parties.

  ‘She’s one of these Gimme Girls,’ he said bitterly. I suppose Goodie had borrowed money from him — a marvel! She was always broke in an elegant and costly way. She came back to her flat one evening to find all the furniture had vanished because she had forgotten to pay the instalments on it. ‘You’d better come home with me,’ I suggested and Goodie came home to my hospitable mother until her affairs straightened out. Her small daughter, Yuki, we bedded down at Rosedale. The Parent kept a low profile over this time. Goodie always scrambled out of her pecuniary troubles; she had a host of well-wishers. He didn’t want to be one of them, because he had discovered Goodie was so expensive.

  Goodie’s father, Bert Gilbert, had also come to Australia and was doing a session at the ABC. He had been a famous clown, with the broad clown’s face and turned-up nose that Goodie inherited.

  I filled in, one evening, as a small boy, in a sketch he had written and I still use the gag line: ‘Let’s get on with building the chicken-house!’ when disaster strikes. Bert was a quiet man and unlucky: Goodie was very incensed once when I wrote an article about her and said that when she stepped forward to take a bow the curtain came down and hit her on the head. But I have seen this happen so often to Goodie. She went off for a holiday cruise in the Pacific once and, while her friends were farewelling her from the wharf, she stepped back, tripped over a bollard and spent the cruise in plaster, being carried ashore on a stretcher by admirers.

  She came out from London because a famous entrepreneur had fallen in love with her. Here she played ingénue parts. She had a light soprano and was singing in musical comedy. She hated it.

  ‘Imagine me. I was so innocent, so silly, and at rehearsals I had to step forward and the orchestra leader — a dreadful man — would pretend he didn’t know what my song was. I would say: “Fizz, frolic and fun”, and he would cup his hand to his ear and pretend he couldn’t hear me. “Fizz, frolic and fun”, I would yell, and he would turn to the orchestra and shout: “Come on, boys: Bums, bellies, and tits!”’

  She married a young doctor from a famous Melbourne medical family and went with him to Cunnamulla where it was so hot that once they put an egg on the footpath to see how long it took to fry. But a goat ate the egg while they were inside still timing it. Her young husband died of the tuberculosis which had sent him to the dry heat of Queensland, leaving Goodie with the baby Yuki. While she was in Melbourne with the baby endeavouring to extract some money from her late husband’s very rich family she found another devoted admirer in Hurtle Bracey Croft who was so small he was practically a dwarf. He was dog’s-bodying for her father-in-law. Crofty, whom I met in Sydney, also became a friend of mine. I announced to him my intention of running away from home — and soon. My father was always proclaiming that I couldn’t leave home until I was eighteen and he had put the idea into my head. If I left it much later I wouldn’t need to run, I considered, I would only have to walk. ‘Well, if you run, Mike,’ Crofty told me, ‘run south.’ So I did.

  The Parent was the lever hoisting me out of the ABC just as he hoisted me in. He decided I should come with him on a tour of the North Coast and as I hadn’t had a holiday for two years the ABC reluctantly hired a girl to take my place for the time I was away. I quite enjoyed the trip on a little steamer to Byron Bay, and set off, when we came ashore, to climb the cliff below the lighthouse. The lighthouse-keeper was very surprised to see me when I reached the top and showed me all over the lighthouse. He had never heard of anything coming up the cliff but stray goats. The Parent began again to be disillusioned by my company when I wanted to travel down-river from Casino on the river boats. He hastily shipped me back, the captain of the little coastal ship depositing me carefully in the only stateroom. He went into a panic when he found me playing cards late at night in the officers’ mess. I made friends with a wild Scotsman, who remained my friend for some years.

  Back at the ABC I found that the pretty girl the ABC had hired to take over my job had settled in so well that they decided to sack me. That was fine with me. I insisted on resigning instead. I was told by the ABC’s lawyer that I could have my job back if I wanted it. I knew why. His son, whom I treated very badly for all his devotion, didn’t want me to leave Sydney. But I thanked this nice man and said I had had the ABC. Everyone there had a dagger in his sock and was waiting to dispose of anybody in the way of his advancement. Office intrigues were always poison to me and I don’t suppose the ABC has changed much in all these years. I have made enquiries.

  My friend, the Scotsman I met on the boat, after promising to escort me to the train, sneaked to my father, who came pouncing down and hauled me home in a taxi. Next morning I dropped my suitcase over the front verandah and jumped after it. It was my eighteenth birthday.

  I had left Goodie and her plays in a terrible mess. I had left the gaggle of Uncle Frank, the Hello Man, Aunt Willa, the Farmyard Five, Uncle Ted and Sandy. Shortly after my exit the ABC sacked the lot of them and Goodie returned to journalism. She was to follow that career for the rest of her life, marrying twice again, once to a rich man — and this episode ended in divorce as she found she couldn’t bear him. ‘Imagine! We had this party on the ship after the wedding and when we set sail I turned to him, expecting him to say: “Alone at last, darling” or something like that, and all he said was: “Well, that mob seem to have cleaned up all the champagne.”’ He was a practical man and prosaic. I got on well with him but he had just worn Goodie down into marrying him. The third man she married was a darling. He was in the Army, a simple, kind big man, who loved Goodie dearly. He died. No, Goodie didn’t have much luck but she was a brave, a gallant girl. Any civilisation worth its salt would have paid her just to enhance the quality of life instead of having her toil all her life to support herself and Yuki.


  She had none of my savagery and was religious, a Catholic in a richly sentimental and colourful fashion, very superstitious. When she went on a trip to the east once, she had, after a party, driven up to some peak in Singapore where her escort had become too pressing. ‘I got out of the car, very indignant, and announced that I was walking home. Just as I was telling him off there was a kind of noise. “What is that?” I said. “That is a tiger,” he said.’

  ‘What did you do?’ I asked.

  ‘Climbed back into the car,’ said Goodie.

  On the same trip she was shown over a mosque where there was a copy of the Koran, so Goodie tore a page out as a souvenir. ‘I don’t seem to have had much luck since then and I am wondering … Well, suppose I just wrote an apologetic little note and mailed it back …?’

  I said I didn’t think it would make much difference.

  Goodie once told me how, on one of her trips to Hollywood, she had a reunion with a film star famed for his virility and good looks. She left hastily after one night. It should have been a romantic episode but Goodie shook her head dubiously: ‘Ever been kicked by a stallion?’ she asked.

  * * *

  There is a consensus of opinion among my friends that Kylie — while a dear girl, of course — has not enough nous to come in out of the wet. Or, as one said, ‘Too damn green to burn.’ With this opinion I am at times inclined to agree. It is nevertheless irritating that throughout my life I no sooner escape from whoever owns me than some other proprietor pops up to tell me what to do. Not that I take any notice; but my life has this background of admonition, criticism (often affectionate), orders (disregarded) and helpful suggestions for my improvement.

  To this chorus I have managed to raise a family, nurse people through illnesses, undertake journeys, write books, run houses and try to be in two places at once.

  Nobody save an idiot, these helpful persons point out, would desert a good job to journey to Melbourne, a city they had never seen, with their poor meagre savings, in what was to be the darkest days of the financial Depression. It may have been fugue, it may have been crazy, but there was an excellent outcome to this flight into what could have been disaster: I developed my sense of humour.