As in every Australian household affected by the war, the arrival of the post was the highlight of the day. There was a strict Deloitte routine about mail. Outgoing letters were always placed on the hall table for Marmaduke to post. When the postman came, all letters received had to be taken to Emma, Beatrice’s Granny Deloitte. If she was out, they were put on the hall table to await her return. Her daughters were actually expected to read their letters aloud to their mother – even their personal ones. (Brenda got around this by having her sweetheart’s letters sent to a friend.)
Emily must have suffered agonies to see an envelope addressed to her ‘c/– Mrs Deloitte’ in Charles’s writing, knowing she wouldn’t be able to read it until her mother came home. But as the casualty lists grew longer, the mere sight of an envelope in Charles’s regular, looping hand was a great relief. Charles wrote to his wife regularly and sent weekly postcards to each of his children, which they proudly pasted into albums. For Beatrice’s eighth birthday in January 1917 he sent a dozen lace handkerchiefs from France. Emily had the children photographed professionally and Charles carried this photograph, as well as a rather severe portrait of Emily, in a soft leather wallet throughout the war.
He wrote from Armentières, Ploegsteert Wood, Passchendaele, Ypres, the Somme. He was afraid that Emily would worry herself sick – ‘you know what a worried little person you are’ – and took delight in his children’s progress, telling his wife that ‘Trixie thinks she writes better than Jack.’ He did not mention the relentless crump of the guns, or mud so deep that men, mules and packhorses stumbling into shell-holes sank and died of suffocation, or the bitter cold that within minutes turned a mug of hot tea into brown ice.
Most particularly he did not write about what he was doing: training eager, undisciplined young soldiers to be night commando raiders. It was one of the war’s most perilous and difficult jobs. Parties of 650 armed men, some carrying mats and portable bridges, would run in a kilometre-wide front, under incessant fire from German guns, rockets and shells, across No Man’s Land into the enemy trenches, where they fought hand to hand with grenades and rifle fire. The casualties were often appalling.
After masterminding an important and highly successful raid at Houplines, Charles Davis was awarded the Distinguished Service Order on 6 June 1917, the day before his forty-fifth birthday. (The DSO is given for sustained valour and leadership, not as the result of only one action.) He was also mentioned in dispatches three times. His letters home made light of this; recognition, though gratifying, meant little against what was happening to some of the men he had known in Bendigo. ‘Our men found the body of one of our officers,’ he wrote to Emily on 17 October 1917, after Passchendaele. ‘[Morrison] … must have wandered back and been killed by a shell. He leaves a young wife in Bendigo and a little child whom he has never seen.’
By the end of that dreadful year, Charles was bone weary of the mud, blood and slaughter. ‘My darling girl, I’m sick of the war, so deadly sick of it that I should give anything to have a good excuse to return,’ he wrote on 3 December. ‘But what can I do? … I must carry out my job as others are doing … How I miss the time I should have had with bubs [Del].’ He had gone to the front a robust man but now his health had deteriorated, his lungs damaged and weakened by mustard gas. ‘I think I’m getting too old for this game,’ he wrote to his wife. General Monash had recommended him as brigade commander, but nothing seemed to be happening. The war was not yet over, and like other Australian officers he was disheartened that the 1917 referendum had rejected conscription. ‘I suppose we must look forward to gradual extinction, one division after another,’ he wrote gloomily.
Promotion did come: in May 1918 Charles Davis was made colonel and sent to command the AIF base at Le Havre. He spent the closing months of the war as an administrator, and after the Armistice on 11 November took charge of the Australian General Base Depot, helping move the 100 000 Australian soldiers across the Channel to England for repatriation. ‘I have never felt that I will not return to you,’ he wrote to Emily, though this certainty must have faltered many times. Charles knew how lucky he was. He had survived for two years, even with gas-damaged lungs, when officers in the trenches often lasted only a matter of weeks. The war was officially over, leaving him free to consider what to do next. He longed for the security of Bendigo, where he and the family had been comfortable and happy; perhaps he would replant the wattle trees in the garden, which he was sure had been ruined by the tenants.
But this was mere nostalgia, for Charles did not believe he could ever settle in Bendigo again. Too much had been changed by the war: so many men he had trained, some he had known all his life, were never coming back. Perhaps he could try a new career, even at his age; being a solicitor in a country town seemed so restricting in the new world that was surely coming. He considered finding a partner to run his law practice, moving to Melbourne and going into business with his adjutant, a man named Marks. Meanwhile Emily was naturally longing to see him again. In January 1919, almost as soon as the seas had been declared safe, she took ship for London, leaving the children behind in the care of their grandparents.
Grandpa and Granny Deloitte were the nominal rulers of ‘Lynton’, but Enid ran the house. Having spent her life at home since her education finished at fourteen, she looked after the accounts, did most of the shopping and cooking, organised family events and parties (her twin Brenda was seriously pursuing a musical career). A bundle of practical energy, she had wanted to be a nurse, an idea that horrified Marmaduke. ‘You have a father to keep you,’ he said. However, though she lacked the fine-boned beauty of her sisters and had the disadvantage of being almost completely deaf, Enid was hardly the stereotypical down-trodden spinster aunt. With very little to spend on clothes or luxuries, she always managed to look elegant and stylish – and her deafness had never prevented her from studying music, which she loved.
It was Enid, in her mid-twenties when Beatrice first knew her, who gave her niece and nephews the bread-and-butter mothering that all children need and that Emily had never really given. From her Aunt Enid, her surrogate mother, Beatrice learned valuable lessons in the feminine arts: how to cook, the rudiments of dressmaking, the art of dressing with elegance and style on little money. Aunt and niece formed a bond that remained strong for the rest of their lives.
Charles and Emily Davis returned to Australia in October 1919. As an honoured and decorated soldier – the king had conferred the CBE on him earlier that year – Charles was given an official welcome to Sydney. After more than three years without her father, the ten-year-old Beatrice was thrilled to see him again. In his homecoming photograph she stands very straight and proud, holding his arm pro-prietorially. Charles Davis looks old enough to be her grandfather.
The family moved from ‘Lynton’ to ‘Noailles’, a small house at 29 Yeo Street, still within walking distance of Neutral Bay primary school. Now Charles had to make up his mind about his future career. He allowed himself to abandon the idea of moving to Melbourne, probably dissuaded by Emily and her parents on the grounds that all her friends and family were in Sydney and the children were happily settled at school. He was already being considered for the position of Victoria’s police commissioner, which the Deloittes did not consider a suitable job.
So Charles, tired and ill, in his late forties and with a growing family, had to make a new beginning in a city whose business net-works were unfamiliar to him. He did throw in his lot with his former adjutant and became the Sydney representative of Marks & Co., selling luxury goods, including perfume, probably on a retainer or commission basis. The decision was an unhappy one. Charles no longer had the two institutions that had always sustained him – the law and the army. At first he must have welcomed the change in career, especially after the horrors of the war, but the life of a salesman was awkward and disappointing for a man whose professional life had always been bound and defined by rules and procedures. Charles did not enjoy having to convince largely indif
ferent strangers that they needed the goods he had to sell, becoming in some measure a supplicant instead of a figure of authority whose judgement was respected.
He found solace in his wife and children, and was particularly close to his daughter. Beatrice was now a dark-haired and fine-boned girl, quick-minded and clever. She had discovered books, but as her mother and brother John were not great readers, she discussed her reading mainly with her father. A few months after her eleventh birthday Charles gave her a copy of The 38th Battalion by Eric Fairey, published by the Bendigo Advertiser. Most returned soldiers were very reluctant to tell their families about what they had endured, so this gift from a father to his young daughter is an intriguing one, which must have strengthened the bond between them. (If he gave copies to his sons too, the books have not survived.)
In 1921, when she was twelve, Beatrice started at North Sydney Girls’ High. She quickly moved to the top classes, where she remained throughout her school career. High-school education at the time was heavily dependent on lists and rote learning: the rivers of New South Wales, Latin and French irregular verbs, the rules of English grammar, formulas in chemistry, tables, large slabs of Shakespeare and poetry, mainly from the nineteenth century. English, maths and French were compulsory, history was the story of the kings and queens of England. What had happened in Australia – wool, wheat, sheep, the dotted-line outback journeys of explorers – was considered second-rate and dull.
A cool, quiet and self-contained girl, apparently free of the need to be liked by everybody, Beatrice was never one of the most popular in her class, and her friends remained a small and carefully chosen group. A close friend was Heather Sherrie, later assistant librarian at Sydney’s Mitchell Library: it was partly because of Heather and her father, a journalist, that Beatrice developed her interest in literature. She read the usual English classic writers – Austen, Dickens, Hardy, Wordsworth, Browning, Keats, Tennyson – but Mr Sherrie liked ‘modern writers’ at a time when Eliot usually meant George, not T.S. He and his daughter probably introduced Beatrice to Yeats, Forster, perhaps even Virginia Woolf, a writer Beatrice admired all her life. English and literature were synonymous: books by contemporary Australian authors such as A.B. Paterson, Henry Lawson, Steele Rudd, C.J. Dennis, Norman Lindsay – most of them published or sold by an eager, black-bearded Scotsman named George Robertson from his city bookshop at 89 Castlereagh Street – were scarcely taken seriously. The idea that anything written by Australians might be worthy of academic study, capable of being ranged with the English poets, seemed absurd.
Beatrice was also continuing her musical education, studying piano and violin at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music, as her Aunt Brenda had done. At one stage, possibly to emulate her father, she wanted to write music, though she kept this ambition to herself. Women just weren’t composers in those days.
Then, shortly before she turned fourteen, in December 1922, her father became ill with headaches and fever. He gradually grew worse and when he began to bleed from the gums, a sign of acute typhoid fever, a frightened Emily had him admitted to North Shore Hospital. Typhoid was serious but curable; however, Charles’s illness seems to have been wrongly diagnosed and treated. He improved briefly, but he knew he was dying. On 11 January 1923 he was dead, at the age of fifty.
It had all happened so quickly and the family was devastated. Emily, shocked, became more remote than ever, unable to console herself, let alone her children. For Beatrice, the death of her adored father was a loss beyond words. This first grief of her life drove the highly intelligent, self-possessed young girl further within herself. Deloitte good manners dictated that grief should be private, to be battled alone, and it was probably from this point in her life that Beatrice learned to present a stoic front to the world.
Children who keep their feelings to themselves are often better able to help other people than to confide their own problems: maybe Beatrice found some relief in looking after John, Del and her mother. Perhaps not. Her relationship with her mother, which had never been close – possibly because of competition for her father’s affection – grew worse after Charles’s death. Beatrice never thought her mother did her duty as a soldier’s wife; during the war, she said, Emily should have stayed in Bendigo, comforting the families of Charles’s men, not running home to her own family at the first opportunity.
Her father’s death had one other significant effect on Beatrice. From her mid-twenties she was attracted to men who were much older than she. The last lover of her life was a lawyer/soldier who, in World War II, had been awarded the same military medals as Charles Davis.
The Family Intellectual Becomes an Editor
Beatrice never intended to follow the example of the Deloitte women, finishing her education early, studying music and looking after her mother while she waited for a husband. Even if she had wanted to do such a thing, the family couldn’t afford it. Besides, this was the 1920s, not the 1890s, and bright girls were being educated to have jobs. In 1925 Beatrice sat for the Leaving Certificate and did well: honours in chemistry, As in English and maths I, and Bs in Latin, French, history and maths II. The first woman in her family to be eligible for university, she decided to study Arts.
However, Emily had only Charles’s army pension, the invested capital from the sale of the Bendigo house, and some money from the estate of her father Marmaduke (who had died in 1923, the same year as Charles). With three students to support – John was studying at Hawkesbury Agricultural College, Del was about to go to secondary school – she had to live frugally, and she could not afford to send her daughter to university. For this reason alone Beatrice applied for a teachers’ college scholarship, which paid fees and a small living allowance. She would study for her Diploma of Education after finishing her Arts degree, and would then become a secondary-school teacher.
The University of Sydney, founded in 1850 and the oldest in Australia, saw itself as the Antipodean Oxbridge. Even its motto, Sidere mens eadem mutato (‘the same spirit under changed stars’), was a reassuring sign that, even though the place was at the bottom of the known world, British intellectual traditions would be maintained. One of these, fortunately changing, was that higher education was the province of men. During the war Sir Mungo MacCallum, professor of English literature, had begun his lectures with the word ‘Gentlemen’, while he glared at the small number of women present. When Beatrice started, only about 15 per cent of the student body consisted of women, most of whom, like Beatrice, were studying Arts.
Beatrice was far too adventurous to stay behind female barriers. At seventeen she was developing her own style, making and wearing classic jackets and fitted coats and skirts that showed off her neat ‘pocket Venus’ figure. She put on her new clothes, swept her dark hair up into a knot at the back of her head and made sure she was noticed by the men in law and medicine. Most of them found irresistible her combination of elegance, prettiness, cool self-possession, intelligence and wit, and she was considered great fun. While she was at university she was engaged three times. Why these engagements came to nothing is unknown, but nobody’s heart seems to have been broken. Certainly Beatrice’s was not. She was having the time of her life.
Emily viewed her daughter’s free and easy behaviour with suspicion. The Deloitte family followed Victorian rules of behaviour: even after the war Granny Deloitte had insisted on chaperoning Brenda and Enid to dances, despite their horrified pleas. In the same spirit, Emily once accompanied Beatrice and her current beau to an art exhibition. Beatrice told her mother exactly what she thought about this – she was probably supported by her aunts – and Emily never did it again. Beatrice continued to juggle concerts and parties and sport (she played university hockey) with the occasional lecture, as well as piano lessons at the conservatorium with the eminent teacher Winifred Burstyn. She had given up the idea of being a composer, but still thought of a career as a concert pianist.
With all this activity, as well as being the belle of the university, Beatrice could be
rather full of herself. Once fourteen-year-old Del encountered her at a bus stop chatting vivaciously in French to a young man who was evidently a lecturer. ‘Ah,’ said Beatrice to her companion in her best patronising Parisian accent, ‘je vous présente mon petit frère, Charles.’ Del bowed gravely, clicked his heels together and said, ‘Pomme de terre.’
Beatrice did manage to do some study. At the end of her first year she passed in English, French and Latin, with a distinction in chemistry. Her second year was less successful. She passed in English, philosophy and chemistry but failed French and had to sit for the exam again. She passed her final exams, majoring in English and French and gaining her Bachelor of Arts degree in 1928.
Having taken the teachers’ college shilling, Beatrice was now expected to do her diploma and become a teacher. But after some practice teaching she had discovered she loathed classrooms and children, and pleaded with the university registrar to release her from her contract. He agreed on condition that she repaid three years’ worth of tuition fees, amounting to several hundred pounds.
This was awkward, and both sides of Beatrice’s family had quite a lot to say about it. Her Davis aunts could not understand why Beatrice was turning her back on one of women’s few respectable career opportunities.1 Emily’s view was more basic: here was her ungrateful daughter not only turning down a steady and secure job and refusing to help with the family finances, but selfishly saddling them with a huge debt. How could she?
Beatrice and her mother argued bitterly for weeks. A less determined young woman might have given in to family pressure, but not Beatrice. Her resolve was the more remarkable because she had no idea what she was going to do. Already she realised she was not quite good enough to be a professional musician, and the idea of teaching music horrified her. That left librarianship, the other major career possibility for female Arts graduates, which did not appeal either. In the end, Beatrice wore the family down and was allowed to have her way. The money was found somehow, the Education Department eventually repaid. It was now 1929 and Beatrice was twenty, with a new Bachelor of Arts degree and no marketable skills. There was only one acceptable way for her to earn a living: as a secretary. Miss Hale’s Business College in Margaret Street in the city offered a full course in typing, shorthand, bookkeeping and business principles. As it was beyond the family’s means, Beatrice enrolled to study only basic typing and shorthand.
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