The Missing Heir

by Kylie Tennant

  ‘I’ll be bringing my solicitor,’ I told the man on the phone. ‘How long will it take?’

  ‘Probably two minutes if you bring your solicitor,’ he said sadly. ‘And this charge of public mischief? I didn’t do your old gaol any harm.’

  ‘Well, you did eat their food.’

  ‘Yes, and what food!’

  Gilbert and I duly arrived in Clarence Street and at everything they asked me Gilbert would snap out: ‘Don’t answer that question.’ Finally the inquisitor said: ‘Miss Tennant, in that article you wrote you suggested that the police might have found the name Thelma Parker in your handbag.’

  ‘That was just to protect the police who ran me in. I didn’t want them to get into trouble.’

  The Monday after I had got out of the gaol and reception house I took my usual seat in Central Court. ‘Oh, you are a naughty girl,’ the matron said. An enormous policeman with ginger eyebrows came looming up to me. ‘I’m the one who ran you in,’ he announced proudly and beamed at me.

  ‘Are you?’ I looked upward where he towered over me. We walked companionably around to the front entrance.

  ‘I still don’t believe it. I thought you were one of our regular drunks like Mary Murphy.’

  I told him how, in the article Tom Gurr insisted I write, I had said the name Thelma Parker must have been in my handbag. ‘Tell the others they’re all covered,’ I mentioned. ‘They haven’t got a thing on any of you.’

  When we left the police headquarters in Clarence Street Gilbert Johnson said, referring to my remark that I had wanted to cover for the police because it wasn’t the cop’s fault: ‘You shouldn’t have told them that.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Never tell them anything.’

  Anyway nobody decided to prosecute me for public mischief. I always contended I was not a well-known novelist. I was a notorious novelist. Many people cannot remember anything about me except that I once spent a week in gaol. I always believe that innocent, middle-class people should go to gaol. They would tear the walls down. Now there are outcries that the conditions in gaol are too luxurious and lax and too many people are escaping. Don’t you believe it. Gaols are run by the worst crims and some of them are so savage that not only the warders but also their fellow criminals are afraid of them. Just the other day a man hanged himself in his cell and some of the men arrested with him, who had been held for many months without trial, were allowed to go out, under guard, to his funeral. I suppose they count that as a reform.

  * * *

  I was hardly out of the anaesthetic after Benison was born when Roddy was by my bedside with the news that I was being sued for libel by my ex-fiancé.

  Some years before, when we were living at Glebe and after I had finished Foveaux, I was trying to cheer Roddy out of one of his fits of gloom by describing — as farce — how the course of that previous affair never had run smooth. Roddy started laughing. I was in extremely bad taste to guy this exceptional male chauvinist I used to go about with. Comedy is seldom in good taste.

  ‘You must write it,’ Roddy exclaimed, enthusiastically.

  ‘Oh no,’ I objected, ‘you know how vindictive he is.’

  However, while we were at MacMahon’s Point, I did so. I had strained my heart swimming up and down the Olympic Pool to improve my stroke and found that I couldn’t get up a flight of steps without sitting down to pant. So I wrote the book while we were arranging to rent a cottage at Dulwich Hill closer to Roddy’s school. I was also lecturing groups on non-violent resistence. It was from this little cottage I went out to get the material for The Battlers and subsequently wrote the book. We were still distributing leaflets for some cause dear to the Christian Socialists. While we moved to Muswellbrook and finally to Laurieton the manuscript which became Time Enough Later was reposing in a desk drawer. After I completed Ride On Stranger and then Lost Haven (both of these were published in England by Macmillan) I had forgotten all about that manuscript. When a demand came for the next manuscript and I was occupied with gathering material for Tell Morning This the lighthearted and lightweight Time Enough Later was sent off to England. It had some success in that country and in America, whence two girls wrote to me to say they were sure they had met that man in New York. A playwright also wrote to me from that city to take an option on turning it into a stage play but he struck trouble with the third act and it never appeared.

  The only person who did not see it as a humorous book was my ex-fiancé, who had never ceased to lament that I had deserted him and to pass round my letters among his acquaintances. His egotism now prompted him to ask the Legal Assistance Bureau to back him in suing me for libel. The Legal Assistance Bureau had never had a demand of this nature and were delighted. This meant that I had to rise from my hospital bed and carry my child around lawyers’ offices. They couldn’t contain their laughter. Finally the Legal Assistance Bureau was persuaded that their brief did not extend to private vendettas and the matter lapsed.

  The only other time I was ever sued for libel was over Ride On Stranger which was published by Angus & Robertson. There was always a time pause before books published overseas drifted to Australia and Roddy was very irritated by this; also they did not come in large quantitites. So he moved his horse to a new stable. I was quite indifferent where or when my books were published or, indeed, if they were published at all. I wrote them to please Roddy, who derived great entertainment from managing their typing and publication. He was in the position where he felt that, owning a dog himself, he did not need to do his own barking. He earned the money that supported us by being a headmaster of the Laurieton Public School. It was my job to go out and assemble the books I wrote and it was to be many years — when we were in Hunters Hill — before he announced thoughtfully that I was now earning more than he was.

  ‘Am I, Roddy?’ I asked, very pleased. I never knew what money was coming in as it was put into a joint account. I would never have found out if he hadn’t told me, as I have a hollow where there should have been a bump of mathematical knowledge. I could be seen in Laurieton wheeling the baby’s pram over to the newsagent’s shop with the copies of Lost Haven perched in with the baby. They got them at a discount through me. I was entitled to so many copies at a discount in those days and dear little Laurieton was very proud to be written about.

  Concerning this second libel action; it was my own carelessness that was responsible. In my notebook of conversations with a man from Melbourne I had a note of a Communist Party member known as Leslie Charteris. ‘It was his Party name, of course,’ my informant said. ‘God knows what his right name was.’ Communist Party members adopted false names very often when they joined this organisation. I felt I could not invent a better name and carelessly put it in. Thereafter I received a drunken and incoherent letter from the owner of the false name demanding financial satisfaction. He was also writing to the publishers demanding the book be withdrawn. I descended on the publishers, advising them that I was willing to settle all costs personally if they let the matter come to court. Instead, to my disgust, they withdrew the edition of Ride On Stranger and paid this insolent claimant two hundred and fifty pounds. I was very angry. ‘But it was a false name,’ I kept insisting. ‘It wasn’t his real name at all.’ My wrath fell on deaf ears. In Ma Jones and the Little White Cannibals you may find a short story which deals with this extreme horror publishers have of appearing in court. It would never have bothered me — win, lose or draw.

  During our last years in Laurieton I was occupied in collecting material for The Honey Flow and as our old truck, ‘The Roaring Ruin’, had failed to limp home after one expedition I petitioned the Literary Fund for money to buy a new truck. The money was duly granted and we bought the truck. A right-wing member arose in Parliament and announced that I was a Communist and the Literary Fund was supporting the Communist Party through me. Considering my animus towards the Communist Party and its animus to myself, revealed in the review in their official paper of Ride On Stranger, this had
its comic side.

  ‘Let’s give them their damned money back,’ I said to Roddy. Roddy calculated our meagre funds. ‘If we borrow from John we can do it,’ he decided. So we sent the cheque back. We did not realise that nobody, before or since, had ever sent back a grant from the Literary Fund or, if they did, I haven’t heard of it and I later served on the Literary Fund for many years. After sending back the cheque I was plagued by long-distance calls from newspapers and received a letter from the Prime Minister, Mr Menzies, asking me to reconsider. I saw that the affair was being blown out of all proportion. I wrote to Mr Menzies, acceding to his request. ‘He who clothes himself in honour,’ I quoted from Kai Lung, ‘presently finds himself with no other garment.’ A newspaper rang up demanding to know. ‘Miss Tennant,’ the reporter wrote, ‘sobbed into the telephone.’ Miss Tennant was not sobbing — she was laughing. The uproar died down and I returned to gathering material about migratory apiarists. This was interrupted by the birth of my son, John Laurence. I had just been down on a hard trip to Melbourne because I was also writing a play, Tether a Dragon, about Prime Minister Deakin and the struggle for the federation of the states. It subsequently won the Jubilee Award for a prize play.

  The Parent had not been very helpful over the uproar in Parliament. ‘But he’s a friend of mine,’ he said plaintively of my attacker. ‘Last time I was in Canberra I took his daughters to the pictures.’ I found this no contribution.

  I was extremely surprised to be told by a doctor in Maitland on my way home from Melbourne that I was five months pregnant. I had left Benison with my mother in Sydney and it was lucky I did as I found in Melbourne my hotel booking had not been accepted and I had to sleep on the sofa of a friend. Melbourne was full up with visitors to its Jubilee celebrations, and was as ghastly as usual. That city always lies in wait for me with extremely cold and rainy weather. When there I am also shown extreme kindness and hospitality. I have never been there without being befriended by complete strangers as well as the wide literary circles Melbourne can justly boast. The charm of the place is evident. It is a beautiful city but I go there with my fingers crossed because of all the queer things that have happened to me there. I approach it with trepidation and leave with relief.

  When I returned to Laurieton I set about writing the play, Tether a Dragon, and getting it off, then proceeded to Maitland where I stayed with my good friend Mavis Cribb who was chief librarian of Maitland. I took Benison with me and occupied my time cutting down Tell Morning This to a shorter version which was published by Macmillan as The Joyful Condemned. Roddy favoured the cut version. It was his creed that anything which could be cut should be cut.

  Benison caught bronchitis just before John Laurence Rodd, known as Bim, was born and nursing her I caught it myself. I arrived at the hospital full of antibiotics and asked the nurse if I could take my detective story into the labour room. ‘I’ve heard of people taking things in their stride,’ the nurse muttered, ‘but this beats everything.’ So she went off and Bim was nearly born without anyone being present. The nurse strolled in, gave a scream and clapped an anaesthetic mask on me so that the doctor could be summoned. I was very annoyed as I was doing quite nicely by myself. When Roddy came down and saw me he burst into tears. I was making dolls’ clothes for Benison’s doll and coughing so loudly that I had been moved out of the ward on to the verandah so that I should not disturb the other patients. He refused to let me come home until I was stronger and had to make another trip for Bim’s christening. Mavis was godmother. He also insisted on driving us all home which was very harrowing. The truck collapsed at the back gate. Roddy, even later among the eccentric drivers of Hunters Hill, was known as nobody’s gift to the road. My friend Peg Slocombe had taught him to drive the Roaring Ruin for we had sold our horses when Benison’s birth was forecast. Roddy hit the gatepost on the way home from getting his licence from a trusting young policeman, believing his tale that he had to drive his pregnant wife.

  After our return to Laurieton with Bim, a placid gentle, healthy child, the Parents and Citizens Association celebrated. They presented a little christening mug at a ceremony Roddy refused to attend. I suggested to the parents that Roddy should have a cup as stud of the year. This was received with acclaim by the parents, whose sense of humour was as coarse as mine, but not by Roddy. He had had a tooth extraction which turned to blood poisoning and he was removed to hospital. I had to drive thirty-five miles to see him with Bim beside me in a carrying basket. Roddy seemed no better when he came out of hospital and I resolved to get out of Laurieton. I was pregnant again and something had gone very wrong. I thought it would be better for the children to be closer to their grandmother in case I died.

  So I left Roddy to superintend the move to Hunters Hill and retired into hospital in Sydney where kindly doctors, friends of mine, acquainted with my history of miscarriages and haemorrhages, thoughtfully viewed my inside and tied my cords so that I should have no more children. I was annoyed about this. Now that I had embarked on a course of child-bearing I could have possibly rivalled my grandmother who had thirteen children. But I should have started when I was younger. Think of all the children I could have had if I had not diverted my fertility into books!

  My father and husband were extremely relieved. They each believed they owned the horse. It was there to win more races. I remembered them saying to each other before Benison was born: ‘Do you think she’ll ever be any good again?’ Dimly I resented this attitude.

  Roddy recovered after we left Laurieton and took great delight in his nineteenth-century gothic school in Hunters Hill. He had settled us in a new bungalow of hot red brick, with pink petunias growing in the front garden. Hunters Hill was a delightful mixture of old stone houses which you could buy for a song but I felt Roddy should be allowed to choose. The house came with a substantial mortgage and henceforth it was my aim to pay off the interest on that mortgage as I had an extreme horror of debt. I slaved at every hack job that came my way, writing anything from a libretto for a musical comedy to a book made out of a film. I continued writing little plays for Roddy’s school, articles for the school magazine, radio talks. I made enough to pay my fares to the mission station where Alf had set up the first Aboriginal co-op and write a book about it. Gollancz published Speak You So Gently. All the Proud Tribesmen was published by Macmillan. I made the money for the second trip to Cape York Peninsula for these books with £500 I was paid for the musical comedy libretto by my good friend Peter Scriven. However, while I was away he engaged other writers to go over the material and I hardly recognised it when I came back from the trip to Moa Island. Then I set off in the truck for the Queensland border, with the children and my friend Doris Chadwick, the editor of the school magazine, to collect the rest of the material for The Honey Flow. In between I helped with the school, if Roddy fell ill, ran the house, provided meals and was a worthy suburban matron. Of course I could not attend morning teas or charity functions but I was popular because I was the only woman with a truck which could be requisitioned for Meals on Wheels or carting turf to make a lawn somewhere.

  Over the years I became more and more tired. Every night the children demanded a story and I supplied it before they went to sleep, every day I got them off to school with their father and then — I ran. I had so much to do. I wrote while they were at school.

  ‘What was the colour of your hair before it was grey?’ Bim asked.

  ‘I really don’t remember, darling,’ I replied. ‘A sort of mouse, I think.’

  This was, then, the settled end of my endeavours: I was a hard-working journalist paying off a mortgage on a suburban house with two children and a garage. My mother, I reflected, had fared better. She didn’t have to write books.

  It was my great privilege to have my mother with me for twelve months when she was dying of lung cancer. She was a radiant personality and the children loved her. They would dash past me to her bedside to tell her all that had happened. They had cats and a dog. The possum came in to
be fed from its tree. The house was now flaring with flowers and trees. I had chooks and ducks and a vegetable garden.

  ‘All day long,’ my mother said, smiling, ‘I hear your feet pattering up and down the hall. You move very quickly, almost running. You always moved so quickly, darling.’

  I no longer went on any expeditions to get material for books. I had my mother in one room; Roddy had a bedroom to himself because he was far from well; and the two children and I shared the third bedroom. We liked sharing. It was no hardship. I grieved when my mother was removed to hospital. She was a blessing, not a burden.

  The Parent went off for a trip to Europe while she was in hospital dying. ‘You know I’m no good with people when they’re sick,’ he complained. ‘Besides, I’d made all the arrangements and booked the tickets.’

  When he came back after her funeral he was loud in his demands for sympathy. ‘I had a terrible trip,’ he moaned, ‘really terrible.’

  My mother’s bequest freed me from the mortgage on the house. We were now out of debt and I found I could make more money by writing book reviews than by writing books. But as the children grew their needs grew with them.

  I have never believed that authors have a right to a private life. But I would not have told even my husband of my secret life. I have always been an earthy person paying attention to the immediate demands of the moment, my immediate jobs of work. I have written this account with the idea that it may help someone some time in a comparison of their life with mine. I find it painful to look over my shoulder because it gives me a spiritual crick in the neck. I have always managed to muddle through somehow, nursing illnesses, writing books, managing my house, rearing the children — and they always had priority — with animals, birds, gardens, friends. It has always been my good fortune to live in beautiful places and have hosts of good friends. I have had a very fortunate life. All my misfortunes have been of my own making and next I will tell you how, by extreme stupidity, I came to make a very bad mistake.