A Paper Inheritance

by Dymphna Stella Rees

The colour experiences were among the most beautiful and unusual impressions left upon me by the Canal. The way the whole colour of the water varied from bright turquoise blue to equally bright and clear Nile green – the variation was graded of course and not sudden and depended on the angle from which one looked. In contrast to this were always the desert banks of the Canal – now cream in tone, now mud brown, now faint pink, now with soft purple and blue shadows on their distant ridges.

  The ship docked in Port Said late in the day and after dinner Coralie went ashore with Ric to explore. He first took her to an enormous store – a cave of local artefacts: carved ivory, leather work, wood and silk. And perfume. Of course, he bought some for her. Then it was off to the Casino Palace Hotel for ‘a marvellous evening’.

  Coralie had never seen anything like it. She was stunned by the excesses of the décor. Ric told her there were many hotels like that in Europe but, as she wrote to her family, ‘with my bankrupt Les’ she doubted she would ever have the chance to see them.

  The dancing floor was hung from the ceiling with cascades of gold lotus flowers. We took a table and drank champagne and danced and at intervals watched the beautiful marvellously dressed aristocratic women of Port Said.

  Her Italian doctor friend left the ship at Naples, although she managed to see Pompeii – with or without him is not recorded. When the ship berthed at the Mediterranean port of Toulon, Coralie walked the town in the company of ‘a young Russian doctor from the ship – an extremely model gentleman, brought up all his life in London’. They took a taxi together to explore the town.

  It is one nestling mass of cream, pink and grey stone buildings, all rather weatherbeaten, built in high stories and so close together […] They all have flat faces and shutters, sometimes coloured green or blue and little balconies from which the mats are beaten and the washing hung.

  Back at the waterfront they met up with ‘another man friend from the ship’ and the three of them sat at a little café, ‘watching Toulonese life go by and sipping French wines, Dubonnet and Roussi’. She described the port city as ‘a place of sunshine on cream stone, and grey shadows which are the narrow streets’.

  Their last port of call was Gibraltar. Coralie wrote: ‘I went ashore with a man who has wanted to spend rather a lot of time with me since Ric left the ship. He’s a typical fresh-complexioned fair-haired Oxford-accented young Englishman with light horn-rimmed spectacles.’ They took horse-drawn hackneys to drive around the town, which was blatantly a military stronghold – soldiers everywhere.

  But the attentions of this man were not entirely welcomed. Coral sometimes needed to avoid him so she could find time in her cabin to write more of the play she had started. The end of the journey was near. Soon she’d be reunited with Les. She started to think about the reality of her future life, their lack of money, the challenges ahead. ‘I’m afraid, by what Les says, this will be my last bit of luxury and comfort for a long time. Well, no-one can say I haven’t appreciated every moment. I’ve fairly revelled and even if it’s only been for a month, I’m very grateful for it.’

  Although this would be the first of a lifetime of journeys for Coral, she would never again experience such luxury – or such freedom. From now on, travel would be second class or even less – a tent, even a swag under the stars.

  When I read her letters of this first adventure on her own, all excitedly typed single-space on small frail pages and rich with descriptions, I am struck by the fact that, even though she is writing to her family and sending a carbon to her closest friend, Dorothy, she seems at pains to mask her naivety, to quickly smother any suggestions of vulnerability. In narrating her experiences, she is already creating a literary persona, one she would extend and reinforce as her writing career took shape.

  Only as the journey was coming to an end – a fantasy of being squired around by charming sophisticated European men in exotic places she never even knew existed – could she be herself, a twenty-one-year-old girl who grew up in one of the most isolated cities in the world, cosseted by the security of a devoted family.

  I think of you often, my dear ones, and at some moments feel very alone in the world and very far away from anybody who really cares about me. But that’s no use so I furbish up the old pecker and try to look hardened again.

  I also need to meditate on my rapid approach to dear old Les. I’ll be with him in two days’ time. Incredible! He seems to be something to which I’ll always look forward but never quite reach, and he says he feels the same about me.

  Coral arrived in London on 3 July 1930.

  When I stepped from the boat train at St Pancras amid a welter of luggage and porters and passengers greeting their friends, an enthusiastic figure came running towards me, teeth gleaming and his old Australian felt hat held high in one hand. London was obliterated. Then he said: ‘Why did you bring so much gear? I told you not to bother about things like tennis rackets!’ thus foreshadowing in that moment of ecstatic reunion the beginning of our 30-years’ war over luggage.

  My father remembered this occasion quite differently. It must have made a lifelong impression because, when he recounted it to me forty years later, tinges of his dismay were still palpable.

  ‘When your mother stepped off the train after we hadn’t seen each other for eight months, I greeted her with a jubilant, “Here’s my girl!” To which she replied, “I’m not your girl. I’m Coralie’s girl.”’

  11

  Seven and Sevenpence, Please

  Within fifteen months of Coralie’s arrival in London, she and Leslie had fulfilled the study conditions of their Orient scholarships and Coralie had kept her promise to Professor Murdoch. They were free to marry and with some relief could now live publicly in coupledom. The following four and a half years spent in England were to prove critical to their careers and to their story. They milked these experiences again and again, recounting them in articles, talks, broadcasts, books and interviews. As writers, they had quite separate and distinctive styles so in the book they wrote together about this period of their lives they developed a technique that would allow each to express their individuality and authentic voice, even when collaborating: they decided on alternating chapters, each identified by their initials. It was a technique they would also use, to great success, in their series of travel books.

  The following four segments are taken from a full-length memoir – a ‘co-autobiography’ – they called Seven and Sevenpence, Please. It took its title from the cost of their marriage certificate that was handed over right on closing time by a crusty bureaucrat at St Pancras Registry Office in London on 19 September 1931.

  For reasons unknown to me, the publication of this work was halted before it saw the light of day as a book. Undaunted, my parents turned their text into a series of radio programs that were broadcast on the ABC in 1968 with each of them reading their own narratives.

  It would be downright impudent of me, as a fellow writer, to paraphrase my parents’ account of London life when they wrote it first – and they wrote it better. So I’ve transcribed these chapters from the fragile yellowing typescript loitering in my paper inheritance. Now, with their own voices, once again Coral and Les can present their authentic selves, their unvarnished truth.

  1. An Impecunious Student – CCR

  When I arrived in London, I needed accommodation. The second-floor bed-sit that Les had booked for me was in Torrington Square at the back of the British Museum. It was clean but cheerless with Victorian-era sepia framed prints which we rapidly removed to the top of the wardrobe and put up Gauguin postcards instead. The landlady was Flemish and full of outward politesse and inner money-grubbing. She had trim feet and ankles, wore jet earrings and what was called ‘a transformation’ – a wig. She used to intone after me in her high-pitched sing-song: ‘Yees, mademoiselle, no mademoiselle. Certainlee Mees Clarke, bath are fourpence the each.’

  My next-door neighbou
r, a gentleman called Mr George, had a bath every Sunday morning. I couldn’t help knowing all about it because the maid would knock at his door and call: ‘I’m now going to put on your bath, Mr George.’ Presently she would return and say: ‘Your bath is on, Mr George,’ and five minutes later ‘Your bath is now ready, Mr George.’ All that ceremony for fourpence! I objected to paying 2/4 per week for the daily privilege of soaking off London’s soot as I also objected to my ablutions being turned into a public festival. I began to achieve astonishing feats with a cloth and jug of hot water which the maid left at my door every morning.

  The twenty-five shillings a week rent did not include breakfast so I concocted and heated meals on the gas ring in my room. Breakfast was usually bread and ‘lower fruit standard strawberry’ jam which was actually cabbage pulp, sugar and red food colouring, fourpence ha’penny a jar. Les’s room was close by, a much smaller dog box for eighteen shillings a week so no ‘facilities’ – i.e. gas ring. We shared the cost of food bought at a local market and cooked up cheap meals in my bed-sit. It was the first time I had batched or lived away from the family hearth. The freedom and independence of it was intoxicating.

  But I was there to study. Now I had to call on Allardyce Nicoll, Professor of Dramatic Literature at East London College of London University. He was the only professor of his subject in England and said to be a world authority. So that was the first of many fivepenny bus rides from Holborn out to Mile End Road, Stepney Green where the college was housed in the former People’s Palace building. Past Chancery Lane and the black and white Tudor houses at the foot of Gray’s Inn Road, past the Old Bailey and the huge GPO. Down Cheapside, past Milk Street and Bread Street and so to Bank. There was something so fundamental, self-assured and impregnable about the Bank of England, symbol of security throughout the yet unshaken British Empire. Bank, not Westminster, became for me the hub of the universe as I looked down from the bus on the Underground exits, belching up swarms of ants in their city clothes – cheap morning trousers and bowler hats – from the miles of intestinal railway below. On past Gresham’s Royal Exchange, down Cornhill, Leadenhall Street and so into High Street Whitechapel where soot-streaked office blocks gave way to terraces of grubby-faced small shops: shops selling unnaturally red meat and shoddy clothes strung up on lines above the pavement. East End was East and West End was West and I could ride from one to the other over the high-pressure heart of the Empire’s commerce for fivepence.

  I found Professor Nicoll a spindly boyish-cheeked man of about forty with dancing brown eyes and a shy embarrassed smile: a don who wore his shabby gown as if it sprouted from his shoulders like wings. He was warm and courteous to me, partly because it was his nature and partly because I fancy he liked having a student sent to him from one of the remoter parts of the Antipodes. We planned the lectures I was to take; he mapped out a wide course of reading for me to do in the British Museum, advised me to take my notes on cards for easier indexing, requested my attendance at his evening seminars and set me essays to prepare.

  From now on, during my student days in London, the British Museum Reading Room became my chief spiritual and physical home. Nearly every day I claimed sanctuary in that great domed chamber, ringed with names of celebrated writers and thinkers. Immediately you showed your ticket to moustachioed uniformed attendants and passed through the imposing doors marked ‘Readers Only’, a sense of privilege settled on you. Admission tickets were free, provided you were properly recommended and could vouch that you had a bona fide purpose. We got the Agent General for Western Australia to back our applications and what a key to incalculable riches they provided. For even then the BM was claimed to have a copy of almost every book published in England and the best selection of books in any foreign language as well.

  Les often joined me and used to take lush delight in having his desk piled with twenty reference books at a time. He’d fly from one to another like a bee visiting flowers. He was fulfilling obligations in return for his free passage by taking a course of lectures on the history of art at the Slade School. Very dull they were, so he assured me. William Dobell was a fellow student, not that we met him till later. I hadn’t the same itch for quantity though I loved to be able to ask for a Beaumont and Fletcher first edition with the same ease as the minor works of the social dramatist I was studying – the Norwegian Henrik Ibsen.

  I doubt if we would have appreciated the books so much if the Reading Room had not been so handsomely if dowdily upholstered with creature comforts. The chairs, if you arrived early enough to secure one in the original spokes-of-a-wheel plan, were pneumatically inviting. Each place was supplied with a blotting pad, inkwell, pen, paper-knife, green-shaded reading lamp, footstool, hat peg and adjustable book-rest. How few of the penurious scholars working there could afford such equipment in a private study! And later, when winter came, there was central heating, free warmth not only on your shins but all around you – a luxury above price.

  There were disadvantages, of course, in this haven of research and the main one was that it took almost an hour for an attendant to bring you the book or books you ordered – so complex was the organisation and so vast the mileage of books housed behind those swing doors, in the dome balcony and in catacombs below. Forty-six miles of books. Four million of them.

  While you were waiting, however, the Reading Room was second to none as a place to cope with your private correspondence. I wasn’t the only one to recognise this, judging from the assorted scribbling into assorted writing pads that went on about me in the interstices of serious reading. I remember overlooking by accident a letter that was lying on the desk next to me and being shocked to read that ‘by the time you receive this I shall be well out of this damn cold jobless world and you’ll find my head, if you’re still interested in it, in the gas oven.’ I looked anxiously about for the occupant of the desk but he was nowhere to be seen. I remembered that his clothes had been thin and ragged and that he’d had a disturbing cough. There were several depressed-looking men wandering among the catalogues. The owner of the letter did not return to his desk all that afternoon. Perhaps I was already too late.

  The readers in the British Museum presented a cosmopolitan and varied cross-section of humanity. I often used to wish it was required to wear name tags on the lapel, as one does at conferences. Fame jostled obscurity, shoulder to shoulder. There were aged men with respiratory difficulties such as haunt every public library I have ever been in. They would wade through enormous tomes with magnifying glasses and then fall asleep with little sniffling snores. But despite these somnolent characters and their eccentricities, the Reading Room had an aura of thinking, striving and knowing that lingered from the past.

  The oldest book in the library at that time was perhaps the fifth century manuscript of The Bible, the Codex Alexandrinus. The two original copies of the Magna Carta (1215) were there. In that room knowledge was piled high in a great impersonal tower, high above individual human life and individual human endeavour. Macauley, Dickens, Carlyle, George Eliot, Ruskin, Samuel Butler, Swinburne and Gandhi had all been regular readers there. So too had Karl Marx, perhaps in the seat I was now occupying. Ironical that Marx, a permanent expatriate from Germany and living with his wife and four children in poverty, would perhaps not have been able to do the research and writing for Das Kapital if it hadn’t been for the amenities provided by a major capitalist country. For years he had sat there from nine till six collecting economic and historical material to illustrate his doctrines, his stomach rumbling from lack of food. Lenin, too, had been a daily reader though he was forced to give a false name (Richter) to get a reader’s ticket. It was one of the periods when he was in political exile after subterranean conspiracy in Russia.

  Sometimes to stretch our legs in the middle of reading, Les and I would stroll out into the main body of the Museum, take a turn among the Elgin Marbles, view the Portland Vase or the galleries of Italian majolica. When the Museum closed at six we
would buy two fourpenny chops, a pound of potatoes, a cabbage and perhaps a small tin of soup. Back in my room we would cook everything on the one gas jet, heating the soup, then boiling the vegetables in one saucepan then frying the chops. We reckoned our meals cost about ninepence ha’penny on average and better value by far than a ‘Lyons Ordinary’ teashop. After hastily clearing away the newspaper tablecloth, we’d bolt to Shaftesbury Avenue to take our place in yet another Gallery queue at one of the many theatres.

  2. Storming Fleet Street – LR

  The air in the crowded room was heaving with the stench of old damp unwashed clothes and unwashed bodies. In the middle were set out on vertical stands that day’s issue of six or seven London newspapers. With pencil and paper in hand I queued behind scores of unemployed men for a swift glance down the Positions Vacant column of each paper. Every morning during the early springtime I had made for this reading room attached to the local municipal library. Many of the men here had slept the previous night on seats in parks or gardens. Now they were wordlessly, patiently scrutinising the newspaper columns for a suitable job – any job at all. It was for most of them a mockery, fruitless, sickening. The number of jobs was decreasing every week. By the time the reading room was open and the men could edge up to the newspapers in turn, many of the jobs would be filled.

  As for me, I would scribble out the details of any opening connected with writing or office work, then scuttle back to my room, seize the typewriter and get my application in to the post by noon.

  If I wanted to stay on in London with Coral, who was still in the midst of her post-graduate course, I would have to find a job. And quickly. No more glorious days of freedom. In the bank I had about £12.00. Not yet destitute but I had often observed that it is not complete lack of funds which causes panic in the human breast. No doubt most people in jobs haven’t more than five bob in the world the night before payday. It’s the certainty of receiving another pay envelope that allows them to sleep soundly. With no hope of new income I had the feeling that within another four weeks I’d be on the streets. And Coral had practically nothing to lend me. Hunger marches were going on in Hyde Park. I was on the brink of joining them but typed out one more application instead.