Careful, He Might Hear You

by Sumner Locke Elliott

  SUMNER LOCKE ELLIOTT was born in Sydney on 17 October 1917. His mother was the writer Helena Sumner Locke. She died of eclampsia the day after his birth, and the boy was raised by his aunts.

  Elliott wrote his first play when he was twelve, and while he was still at school joined Sydney’s Independent Theatre. In 1942 he was drafted and served out much of the war as a typist in remote parts of Australia. But he was besotted with the theatre and with play writing. He found success after the war with plays including Rusty Bugles and Invisible Circus.

  Elliott went to the United States in 1948. Three years later his play Buy Me Blue Ribbons premiered on Broadway. He launched a prominent career writing plays for the television networks, and based himself in New York. He became an American citizen in 1955 and did not visit Australia again until 1974.

  Careful, He Might Hear You was Elliott’s debut novel. It won the Miles Franklin Award in 1963, was translated into a number of languages and became an international bestseller. In 1983 it was made into an outstanding film directed by Carl Schultz, starring Wendy Hughes, Robyn Nevin and Nicholas Gledhill.

  Elliott wrote ten novels in all. He won the Patrick White Award in 1977. After a lifetime of concealing his homosexuality, he spent his final years living with his partner, Whitfield Cook. Sumner Locke Elliott died in New York City in 1991.

  ROBYN NEVIN AM has been a leading Australian actress for over fifty years and has directed for more than twenty-five years, directing for all state theatre companies. Robyn held the position of Associate Director with the Sydney and Melbourne theatre companies before being appointed Artistic Director of the Queensland Theatre Company.

  Robyn was Artistic Director and CEO of the Sydney Theatre Company from 1999 to 2007.

  Robyn played Shasta in the TV mini-series based on Sumner Locke Elliott’s novel Water Under the Bridge and Lila in the film adaptation of Careful, He Might Hear You.

  ALSO BY SUMNER LOCKE ELLIOTT

  Some Doves and Pythons

  Edens Lost

  The Man Who Got Away

  Going

  Water Under the Bridge

  Rusty Bugles

  Signs of Life

  About Tilly Beamis

  Waiting for Childhood

  Fairyland

  Proudly supported by Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund.

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  Copyright © Sumner Locke Elliott 1963

  Introduction copyright © Robyn Nevin 2012

  Every effort has been made to trace copyright holders and obtain permission for the use of copyright material. The publisher apologises for any errors or omissions and would be grateful if notified of any corrections that should be incorporated in future reprints or editions of this book.

  All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright above, no part of this publication shall be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.

  First published by Victor Gollancz Limited 1963

  This edition published by The Text Publishing Company 2012

  Cover design by WH Chong

  Page design by WH Chong & Susan Miller

  Typeset by Midland Typesetters

  Primary print ISBN: 9781921922244

  Ebook ISBN: 9781921921841

  Ebook Production by Midland Typesetters Australia

  CONTENTS

  INTRODUCTION

  Between Two Aunts by Robyn Nevin

  Careful, He Might Hear You

  Not long ago I saw a small boy walking in the city with a couple I imagined were his grandparents. He seemed absorbed in his thoughts; he was gazing at the river under the bridge he was crossing. His grandparents called and without looking at them he dutifully, solemnly caught up. I wondered what he was thinking about.

  The central character in Sumner Locke Elliott’s great Australian novel of childhood, Careful, He Might Hear You, is a six-year-old boy named PS. And the difference between him and my boy on the bridge is that we can eavesdrop on PS’s thoughts: we are privy to his interpretations of adult conversations, the misunderstandings that lead to doubt and disbelief, the way his imagination creates exotic meanings out of the mundane. As his two aunts, sisters to the dead mother he never knew, struggle to take control of his life, we witness his increasing confusion and fear. We worry for him as his certainties are irrevocably fractured. Vanessa, his rich aunt, woos him with gifts and privilege and dinner at eight o’clock at Point Piper, but he longs for the comfort and predictability of ‘tea’ at six in his suburban home with Aunt Lila and Uncle George. We want for him what he wants for himself; and we know what he wants because we are inside his head.

  We worry for him as his certainties are irrevocably fractured. Vanessa, his rich aunt, woos him with gifts and privilege and dinner at eight o’clock at Point Piper, but he longs for the comfort and predictability of ‘tea’ at six in his suburban home with Aunt Lila and Uncle George. We want for him what he wants for himself; and we know what he wants because we are inside his head.

  Sumner Locke Elliott left Sydney for New York in 1948 and published Careful, He Might Hear You fifteen years later. It was his first novel after many years of writing for theatre, radio and television. He had long lamented Australia’s rejection of its own writers. Indeed it was the lack of opportunities for this young, prolific and gifted writer that persuaded him to try America. It was a familiar story: so many of our talented writers and actors believed an overseas career might launch them in their own backyard; they sought opportunities abroad to achieve acceptance at home. Sumner Locke Elliott was one of those who never came back. I recall Patrick White’s words of advice to me to stay and ‘paint one’s own landscape’. Perhaps Sumner needed the geographical and emotional distance. He wrote with clarity about the painful struggles of PS because PS is based on his own experiences in childhood after his mother died giving birth to him.

  The story of Careful, He Might Hear You is a simple one. PS’s mother, Sinden, a successful writer, has before the novel opens met and married Logan, a charismatic dreamer, all in one gloriously hazy week of love and romance. He goes off to war, leaving her pregnant. She dies giving life to PS. The boy is burdened forever by his name, which suggests—as Sinden declared—that he is a postscript to her ‘ridiculous’ life. And he must carry her legacy of fame. In Lila’s care he comes to know the community of writers who peopled his mother’s world. These wonderfully drawn eccentrics—failed, drunk, deluded, political and passionate souls—sentimentalise her and expect PS to prove worthy of her weighty legacy.

  Before her labour Sin wrote separately to Lila and Vanessa, suggesting that both of them were capable of caring for her child should ‘anything happen’ to her. PS has been raised by Lila, but now Vanessa returns from London to claim him. Long ago Vanessa too was in love with Logan. In her loneliness she reaches out to the small boy seeking the love she longed for from his father, and employs increasingly manipulative strategies to secure him for herself.

  The crunch comes when Vanessa takes Lila to court for custody of PS. In a tense and moving scene the judge interviews him in his chambers. Lila has insisted to PS that he tell the truth. In responding honestly to a question that is too nuanced for him to interpret, the

  boy makes a ‘wrong’
answer and in turn the judge makes a ‘wrong’ decision. Our hearts begin to crack…and so the story reaches a dramatic and satisfying climax.

  Careful, He Might Hear You had immediate commercial success in Europe and America. It sold less well in Australia but earned the praise of Patrick White and Christina Stead, and won the Miles Franklin Award in 1963. By 1974 the worldwide sales of the book were around ten million copies. The movie rights were sold to Hollywood’s Joshua Logan (Vivien Leigh was considered for Vanessa) but nothing happened. Twenty years after the book was published—by which time Sumner had written a number of novels, the most successful of them set in Australia—Jill Robb (who had already, with John McRae, co-produced the TV mini-series based on Water Under the Bridge) acquired the rights and made the film that Sumner loved and which put his novel on the Australian map.

  I had met Sumner Locke Elliott during the filming

  of Water Under the Bridge. I loved that novel and carried it around with me on the set. I played Shasta, a vaudeville actress who adopts a small boy after his mother’s death, a character whom Sumner had modelled on his adored Aunt Blanche. Shasta remains one of my favourite roles. Sumner loved my performance and I responded immediately to his warmth and wit.

  In the film of Careful, He Might Hear You I played Lila, and Wendy Hughes played Vanessa. Again I carried the novel that had inspired the film around with me while we worked, and, after playing two of his favourite aunts, I began to feel very familiar with Sumner’s personal world.

  The film was released in Australia in September 1983, and did very well, going on to win eight AFI awards. Just before it was to open in New York City in mid-1984 I was due to appear in David Williamson’s play The Perfectionist at the Spoleto Festival in Charleston. I agreed to go to New York before the premiere and to do some publicity. Agreed? I was thrilled to be invited. Imagine! What a way to visit New York for the first time, as an actress with a leading role in a movie! And I was looking forward to seeing Sumner again, in the city he had made his own.

  At Kennedy Airport I was met by a car and driver, a good beginning. My schedule had been organised by Sumner’s agent and friend, a memorable character named Gloria Safire. She was short, square, loud and lovely. I instantly warmed to her, and felt blessed to be introduced to New York by her. I stayed in a modest room at the great Plaza Hotel (shabby chic before shabby became chic), across the road from the Paris Theater where the film was to screen.

  To my relief Sumner loved the film and my performance. He was affectionate to me, and openly expressed his emotions. I am sure that seeing his childhood on screen was an overwhelming experience for him. It is always a privilege for me, as an actress, to portray a life; I felt this keenly in relation to Sumner’s aunts, and returned his affection, with great respect.

  We did an interview together at the Algonquin Hotel, a haunt of Sumner’s that had been immortalised by Dorothy Parker’s and Robert Benchley’s Round Table luncheons. It was during this interview that I began to understand the extent of his fame in America as one of the fabled Golden Seven who wrote weekly live television dramas. Virtually unknown in Australia, he was a writer with a major reputation in New York.

  We attended the first screening at the Paris Theater, and afterwards did a Q&A session. The film was very well received and I relished the sight, in the following days, as did Sumner, of long queues outside the Paris where it had an impressive run of thirteen weeks.

  What do we make of Careful, He Might Hear You almost fifty years after Sumner Locke Elliott wrote it? He created a cast of marvellous characters who inhabit the various worlds through which PS moves: adorable Aunt Vere, for example, with her bright, impoverished life in her bohemian bedsit in Kings Cross; or Winnie from next door, a plain bossy little know-it-all who enjoys breaking the news to PS that his life is about to change: ‘She chanted in a singsong voice, “PS is going awa-ay. PS is going awa-ay”.’ There’s the new school, attended by the children of the rich and snooty, where Vanessa sends PS, or the frightful mourning picnic turned on by the ‘scribes and daubers’. Sumner had perfect recall of the Australian suburban speech of the period, between the wars.

  There was a tap at the door and Vere’s friend, Opal, came in. Opal was the most beautiful girl in the world and wore soft, shining dresses; always a new one every time he saw her, always pretty shoes to match, always great big hats piled with roses.

  Opal said, ‘And who is this handsome man?’ bending to kiss him and smelling of honeysuckle.

  Vere said, ‘Girl, how are you?’

  Opal said, ‘Girl, I’m thwarted.’

  She pronounced it to rhyme with ‘carted’.

  Vere said, ‘We’re all thwarted.’ It was always a ‘thwart’, never a ‘thwort’. ‘Thworted’ meant having warts.

  Vere said, ‘I thought you were going to the races with Archie.’

  ‘His wife’s in town.’

  ‘Wouldn’t that thwart you!’

  ‘It’s the supreme thwart. So is she. He’s lashed to the mast for days now.’

  ‘How sick-making, girl.’

  ‘Girl, it’s gall and wormwood. I am undone.

  ‘Has he told her about you yet?’

  ‘Says he can’t until she’s in a less thwarting mood.’

  ‘Which means never.’

  ‘Girl, you are probably right about him. I always pick the ones with no guts. The whole thing undoes me to the point of stupor, but I am lashed to him, as to a mast. I must have a drink, pront.’

  And there is the sensory experience Careful, He Might Hear You offers of a Sydney summer; the heat and humidity; sultry days broken by electrical storms in the late afternoon; the sights, sounds, colours and smells of trees, flowers, birds, sky, water and the Harbour.

  I grew up a voracious reader of English fiction and, like Sumner Locke Elliott, I watched American films from an early age. What a surprise, a delight, to recognise my own world, the vivid textures and sounds of my own country, in his novels. It took an expatriate—a man forced from his own landscape to earn a living as a writer, to be published and performed as a writer, and ultimately to become famous as a writer—to bring that period of Australia to life for me. This beautiful story, told with wit, warmth and irony, is one of the most moving and evocative books about childhood I know. Careful, He Might Hear You remains, in my view, among the greatest of our Australian novels.

  For H. S. L.

  ‘P S,’ THEY SAID.

  And ‘Vanessa’.

  Or sometimes ‘Ness’.

  PS. PS. PS. PS. Ness. Ness. Ness.

  It sounded through his half sleep like surreptitious mice foraging through tissue paper. It was as mysterious as the lateness of the hour—after nine o’clock—and only as far away as the kitchen door, ajar so as to hear him if he should call to them or have a nightmare.

  He turned in bed, listening to the whispering undertones, as steady and continuous as a tap left running and broken only by a cough or sometimes a chair scraping back on the linoleum; then a dish being taken from a cupboard and now and then a voice would catch on fire and break adrift from the murmuring, but always with the same word, Vanessa, said sharply like hitting a brass gong at dead of night and then someone would say, ‘Shhh, was that him? Did he call out?’ and tiptoeing would startle the old floorboards while a shadow grew larger and larger on his wall; bent to hear if he was stirring and so, annoyed with their secrets, he would feign sleep until whoever it was retreated to the kitchen and the whispering hissed up again like damp green eucalyptus logs burning.

  They were talking secrets to Mrs Grindel from next door. He had heard the front gate squeak and her loud voice quickly shushed; then something about scones. His Aunt Lila had whispered, ‘Not scones in January!’

  After that had come the familiar summer night sounds of the opening and closing of the ice chest and the fizzing of ginger beer bottles being opened by his uncle, George. He had been about to call out that the pillow was hot and perhaps be given
a tin mug of cool ginger beer when the Vanessas had started. It was a brand-new word and it must be a terrible one because when they said it in front of him they often looked down quickly to see if he had heard, then warningly at each other; winked and shook their heads just a little, which meant ‘not in front of you-know-who’ and then began the spelling out of simple words. Vanessa had something to do with the Letter. They were always talking now about the Letter and taking it out of the dresser drawer with its pages and pages of pale-blue paper and very thin, stiff writing. It seemed to him a long time since ‘Postie’ had brought the Letter. They had heard the whistle one scorching morning just before Christmas and Lila, looking as damp as one of her own wet mops, had appeared out of a cloud of steam from the laundry and said, ‘Go and see what Postie has brought, PS,’ so he had run down the cracked path through the dandelions and shivery grass to the front gate and held up his hand for the Letter. He had followed Lila back into the white steam cloud while she wiped her misty glasses and opened the envelope. She had read a few lines and then, it had seemed to him, had grown smaller, sagged, leaned on the hot copper tub, burned her elbow, said ‘Ouch’, then sat down heavily, leaving the washing and wooden pole to sink in the suds while she read the Letter very slowly, turning the pages over shakily and working her mouth the way she did when she added up the grocery bill. Then she had gone into the house to telephone to his Aunt Vere, all the way across the harbour in Kings’ Cross.

  ‘Vanessa,’ she had said, ‘is coming.’

  Right then, talking to Vere, the spelling-out had begun and by the time George came home from work at the Trades Hall, Lila had begun the purring sounds in her chest and was breathing through her atomiser, which meant that the house was full of trouble.

  George had read the Letter while unlacing his boots, had kicked one of his boots right across the kitchen floor, then had laughed and said that the Assyrian was coming down on the fold. ‘Who?’ he had asked George.

  But Lila was cross and said it was no joke. ‘Don’t joke,’ Lila told George, pointing to lines on the Letter and spelling them out and breathing in all the time through her atomiser, and George finally said, ‘Now and then won’t hurt.’ Then seeing his upturned face over the edge of the kitchen table they looked down at him with put-on, birthday-treat smiles and said, overlapping each other to be the first to tell him: