The Missing Heir

by Kylie Tennant

  As you can imagine a sense of humour was not much encouraged at Brighton College — nor in my home. I had first encountered this curious brilliant byway from the path of good sense in Goodie, who could make all catastrophic events with herself as hapless victim into a dirge that could lay her hearers on the carpet in fits of mirth. It was a matter of subtle timing and a tone of voice. She had not been born a comedian but her father Bert Gilbert was one of the greatest comedians of the London stage. She learnt from him the negative egotism which centres attention on the fool — yourself — in a whirl of accidents. Give Goodie an audience and she would launch out into an acccount of some incident using a technique of fausse-naïve and running gag that was very professional.

  Crofty, my new boss, was also a brilliant raconteur. At his best he could eclipse Goodie because his stories were a collection of the best encounters by other people while Goodie’s centred on herself. I was not the only one who lougned against Crofty’s kiosk on Kew railway station for the pleasure of hearing him talk.

  Not only Crofty. I remember one night a lad with the brokennosed face of a professional boxer arriving to tell the little crowd of his trip to Tasmania to dig potatoes. His description of the mud, the rain, the wet sacks, the bankrupt farm, the awful food! He piled each in a pyramid of humour. He had told it in the vein that is native to the best Australian yarn-spinning. I began to pick it up. I really began to understand the genre of the Australian yarn and what made it work.

  While a stream of would-be rescuers from my native place came lamenting how wrong I had been and how I must go back on my tracks I was receiving just the education I needed as a writer. My ignorance was painful — as Crofty often pointed out badtemperedly — but I learnt, as it were, sideways. I discarded much that Crofty admired — for instance his affection for a poet known as Frothblower Murphy. When I hinted that I was not an admirer of sentimental or lugubrious thoughts, Crofty admitted: ‘Ah yes, Mike. I often don’t know whether it is Frothblower Murphy or the beer that is speaking.’ And in Australian writing it is well to avoid, even in Henry Lawson, the undercurrent of Frothblower Murphy. This sentimentality on one side of the literary coin matches the brutality on the other. This brutality has been made into an ethic: ‘You got to be able to take it.’ Whatever happens you take it and if you are bleeding you never let on. You admit to life: ‘Well, it’s your round.’ But you come up for the next, beaten but still in the ring. And you learn to laugh.

  Hurtle Bracey Croft was the elder son of a Western Australian politician from whom he must have inherited his extreme fluency. Crofty’s younger brother Roy was twice his size and acted as bodyguard to his mercurial, tiny elder brother. Roy had the better temper of the two but half the force. When I married Roddy he soon put a stop to Crofty writing me eight pages of injunctions, advice and criticism. I could have told him I didn’t take any notice. Crofty was maddened by my adolescent gift for not taking any notice of anyone. If I wanted to acquire knowledge I absorbed it through the pores of my skin rather than by mental effort.

  When I arrived Crofty promptly found me lodging in deepest suburbia near the kiosk he ran on Kew station. He had another railway kiosk at Barker and the lease of the shop at the ice-skating rink in Melbourne. He claimed my coming brought him luck as the ice-skating authorities renewed his lease.

  I enquired of my landlady — a tolerant woman, because my first act was to stroll out leaving a red-hot iron to burn a neat hole through her table — what was the most interesting feature of Kew. She said, ‘The cemetery.’ I made my way to the cemetery on Sunday afternoon and if I had been an artist I could have painted a magnificent black and white. People in black walking among white tombstones. I was aghast but fascinated by the epitome of all that I had fled in my life. Fortunately I also found my way without direction but by some instinct to Studley Park which had a deep cleft in it through which the Yarra ran. It was quite wild in those days. I found where you could hire boats and set out to explore the Yarra. There were also the grounds of the lunatic asylum which made a fitting setting for my wanderings. The city of Melbourne, which revealed its charms to me only little by little, greeted me with cold gusts of rain which vindictively played on the great open chessboard of its four-square architecture. I have been back to Melbourne on a number of occasions. I was met once by a Commonwealth driver because I was on some lecture tour. ‘How has the weather been? I asked. ‘Beautiful,’ he replied, ‘couldn’t be better.’

  ‘Well, by tomorrow it will be raining,’ I told him. ‘I am here.’

  Next day it was raining. Melbourne is my jinx city. Everyone has one and I do not wish to be unkind about Melbourne because I have friends there and it has a charm all its own. But queer things happen to me there and I go with my fingers crossed.

  When I went to Melbourne first I thought I might become a journalist to present facts of corruption and misuse of power.

  I came later to despise the standard of journalism and discard the idea that a small female person could do much by writing articles of fact. Female journalists were relegated to the Woman’s Page and any investigative journalism was a deep shade of yellow. I built up, as others did elsewhere, a technique of using fact as a foundation for a broadly comic fiction which people would read drowsily for entertainment without realising that my stories were penetrating the subsoil of their minds and presenting a picture of their society. Nowadays, I am rejoiced to see, since the advent of television that my old ambition of presenting facts has been attained and that people will look at the rest of the world and its dilemmas very judgingly and accept the evidence of their eyes. The idea of a World Federation of Republics, in a shrinking global village, has advanced at least a millimetre. For instance, I do not wish to get rid of the English Royal Family. Let them give harmless pleasure to fond dear people. I would no more remove them than I would destroy ancient historical monuments. But the terrible class system which oppressed English mores has already gone and this idea that an elite could rule by divine right was, and always will be, Voltaire’s infame to be destroyed — any elite, anywhere.

  I made the rounds of newspapers and radio stations in Melbourne without landing a job. The Depression was tightening its grip and I was not any help to myself. For instance, an American advertising manager was vastly taken by me and asked me to fill in an enormous form. ‘Does this guarantee me employment?’ I asked. ‘Why no,’ he replied. ‘It’s just a form that everyone fills in.’ One of the items was: ‘Give your life history in five thousand words.’

  ‘Well, I intend to be a writer and I don’t see why I should present you with all this information for free. If it was useful I would do it. No, I won’t fill in all this nonsense.’ He was amazed. Naturally that firm did not employ me. Later a Sydney advertising firm employed me without asking me to fill in any forms. They just looked at some newspaper articles I had written and told me to start on Monday.

  I fine-toothed Melbourne looking for work and then settled down in Crofty’s other kiosk outside Barker railway station where a stout old party had just left. ‘If you take it, Mike, the condition is that you stay all winter.’ I promised to do this, never having experienced a Melbourne winter. It wasn’t a hard job but then I wasn’t a very efficient employee. I worked usually from eight to eight, with Sunday off. Two mornings I started at six. After I had paid board I had five shillings a week left for revelry or train fares to town. My board included breakfast and tea when I got home and I had a cut lunch. Naturally, sitting in a kiosk all day I put on weight so at night I went running or walking. I was close to Studley Park which became my favoured stamping-ground but I am not built for running. Long distance walking was my favoured mode of observing. In a car you don’t see anything but scenery. When you walk you see everything at the pace your eyes were built to take in detail.

  As I have always been horrified by constraint or constriction, being cooped up in a little box all through a Melbourne winter out in the open was excellent discipline. I became expert at mendi
ng the radiator.

  At night I was expected to lock the kiosk and turn off the power switch in the dark, at a box on the back outside wall. Crofty showed me how I should turn the switch to the right. ‘What happens if I turn it the other way?’ ‘If you turn it the other way you’ll get an electric shock,’ he advised. ‘You’ll only do it once.’ I turned it the wrong way once but never again.

  I read all the newspapers and magazines, thieved the chocolates until I got sick of chocolate. (‘I always deduct twenty-five per cent for theft,’ Crofty told me glumly.) I didn’t dust the shelves properly. But I changed the bill-boards for the newspapers, sold ice cream to schoolchildren, sweets, magazines, tobacco; I was slow and inept. There were complaints when I made mistakes in the tobacco prices. No, I was not an ideal saleswoman, but I stuck it out.

  The kiosk smelt of newsprint, stale chocolate and Melbourne suburbia. Trains came in and out, my trade was either a little rush or a tramp of footsteps. I made friends with regular customers. If I had been mentally handicapped it would have been an ideal job and I could have taken pride in my work. Instead I began planning, when my time was up, to walk back to Sydney from Melbourne. I bought a dog from the Lost Dogs Home which died of distemper — I will not go into that tragedy. I bought another dog but it ran away as soon as I let it loose. So I decided just to buy a knapsack and walk — and walk.

  I had thought Melbourne would be far distant. Instead there was this stream of persons from Sydney stepping down at my railway station imploring me to come home. Extraordinary! They did not seem to realise I was learning very valuable lessons in public relations. How to talk to people, how to listen to their life stories. How to find out people just by looking at them. How to gain their confidence or repel attempts to seduce me. Some years later I had a good ploy: if a man asked me to sleep with him I would say sorrowfully that I was a lesbian. I figured out it would not destroy his self-respect to be rejected pleasantly by a lesbian. I discarded this when so many men wanted to know what lesbians did. I didn’t know either.

  ‘What is a queen, Crofty?’ I asked casually, leaning against Crofty’s counter one night. The coterie of men who gathered there lapsed into silence and looked wooden. ‘I’ll tell you later, Mike,’ Crofty answered austerely. Not that I gained much from his explanation. I was not really interested. The mating rituals of human beings and their deviations struck me as boring. I had, anyway, a surfeit of young men all wanting to proposition me because they thought I was soft or easy. I hadn’t any compassion when I was young and I was harsh to them. But I learnt by experience that you couldn’t be friends with men. They immediately thought you might go to bed with them. A pity! ‘You are gregarious but not social,’ a psychiatrist of my acquaintance decided later. I still don’t know what he meant by that. But in my imprisoning kiosk, as in my scouting around Melbourne, I was like a cat. The ginger-striped cat, McGregor, which I have now, will be very friendly until you try to pick him up or cuddle him. Then he is all claws. And as a young girl I was the same. I was a hunting cat, not a tame cat. Any young girl with a trace of compassion finds herself pregnant.

  Crofty and Roy spoiled my fine plans for walking home by appearing suddenly at my kiosk with a telegram saying my mother was ill. I looked at it with suspicion: ‘This is probably a put-up job,’ I told them. ‘But I can’t risk it.’ They had booked me on the Westralia sailing the same morning and would not even let me go back to my lodgings to pack. I found myself aboard this ship with the watchful pair on the wharf below. By me, in the scuppers, was a basketful of onions. I flung them at Crofty and Roy instead of streamers but my aim was not good. They bounced resoundingly on the tin roof of the wharf and fell at the feet of my erstwhile mentors. So as the ship went out I strolled off and made friends with a jockey’s wife and an elderly actress.

  At Sydney I slipped ashore and went home, not dreaming that my poor family had come to meet me in force, at the wharf. My mother looked terrible and I realised with compunction that I had indeed destroyed her peace of mind and must reform. She revived with my return and I was soon causing trouble again. I had not forgotten my decision to walk some six hundred miles. I just deferred it.

  I walked from Sydney to Coonabarabran — with lifts — six hundred miles. Later I walked from Coonabarabran to Brisbane — six hundred miles. I did a few side trips of a hundred miles or so here and there — but that was to come.

  5. The Firebrands

  My poor father was in a subdued mood — for him — when I returned. He had come trumpeting down to Melbourne like a mad bull elephant and, with his conviction that one must go to the top and use influence, he had an introduction to the Commissioner of Police and demanded that I be taken into custody and deposited in a home for delinquents. The Commissioner, a temperate man, considered the letter that I had written home which he said showed that I was ‘very level-headed’. I had a job. I was supporting myself. I had a place where I boarded in a sedate suburb — namely Kew — and he didn’t see any way he could make a charge of vagrancy stick. It was a great blow to the Parent. He stormed out to clamour his woes at Crofty, demanded that I go to a doctor to see if I was still a virgin and was met with only my wry grin. He became rather shamefaced.

  ‘Look,’ he wailed, ‘look at my eye.’ He pulled down the bloodshot lower lid. ‘I’ve got a blood clot in my eye. I’m getting apoplexy.’

  This raised no sympathy and he reverted to rage, smiting the glass case on the counter of the kiosk so that it shattered over a box of lamingtons encased in chocolate and coconut which was one of Crofty’s specials. He then retired back to N.S. Wales. My mother sent long letters and parcels of clothes.

  ‘I notice he didn’t offer to pay for the glass he smashed,’ Crofty observed. He had, until he met him, been prepared to find my few laconic observations about my father a mere adolescent grouch.

  The Parent had boasted to him about his new job, going down to Canberra to threaten the Government that, if he didn’t get all he wanted in the way of bounties and tariffs, thousands of men would be thrown out of work. He found capitalists could always get more from a Labor government by this means than they could from a conservative government which was not so concerned about unemployment.

  ‘He’s nothing but a lobby man,’ Crofty said contemptuously. The Parent had found himself a roving commission with a big car. If there was a strike at the Newcastle works he was up there, complaining that he couldn’t find any place to park because the strikers’ cars were lining the streets. If there was some trouble about distribution in the far west he was out there getting stuck in creeks. He didn’t need to sell anything. He just investigated why it wasn’t being sold. This kept him away from home and office, to the relief of all.

  While I was in Melbourne I had, before I settled down in my kiosk to selling newspapers, lamingtons and lemonade, investigated many queer corners of that great city in my job-seeking. I found I could penetrate any barrier, interview anyone I decided to see. I had developed a thick skin. On my return I decided to see Professor Martin and just walked in, asking: ‘How do you become a psychiatrist?’ ‘You don’t,’ he growled. ‘The BMA stops you.’ We settled down to talk. I had, I said, decided that as I could not ever be an archeologist I would, instead, dig into people. So many people seemed to make themselves ill that it would be a useful deed to make them well. The Australian society, with its conservative drab and conformity, was a great breeder of anxiety. Professor Martin became — kindly man that he was — quite taken by either my cheek or cheerfulness.

  ‘Well,’ he advised, ‘get your BA here and that will give you an entrance to Harvard.’ He himself had gone to Harvard and he obviously considered that my enterprise was more suited to America.

  So I announced to my long-suffering family that I was going to the university to get my BA. They seemed relieved. My Tennant grandmother announced that she would pay my fees for the first term. My old headmistress offered me a place, free, to study for the matric. I had three months to prepare fo
r matriculation and do a year’s work. I did it. My mother, on the last lap, decided that I should have a coach and dug up a funny little man from a local coaching college who fitted in to the maxim of my current suitor that whenever I appeared ‘strange characters popped up out of the woodwork’. The suitor attributed this to a strain of insanity in myself. This coach of mine was later arrested for impersonating a young woman in an exam. Having decided she wouldn’t get through, he handsomely offered to do the exam for her.

  I passed even Latin and mathematics myself. My old maths teacher couldn’t believe it. She said she thought it must be a mistake when she saw the results in the paper.

  I had got myself a part-time job selling typewriters as a result of entering a literary competition the typewriting firm was running. I didn’t sell too many typewriters but used the sample typewriter for my old ploy of penetrating any place I thought looked interesting. I was doing honours psychology and because I started late I needed a partner for experiments. I informed Professor Martin that a student who was doing Psychology II had offered to drop this to become my partner in Honours I. ‘Well, bring your boyfriend along,’ Professor Martin grinned, ‘and let me have a look at him.’

  ‘He isn’t my boy friend,’ I snapped. ‘He just wants to do Honours I.’

  Lewis Charles Rodd was graciously allowed to become my partner and I discovered in the experiments on hearing that he had a hearing deficiency in his right ear. His eyesight — he wore glasses — was not as good as mine either. He got top marks in everything he attempted. I was near the bottom. I had only taken economics because he advised it and it was a mistake. Economics and myself were incompatible.