by Martin Boyd
Arthur’s close life-long friendship with Alice began at this period, or at least became intensified. It is hard to know exactly the time of developments of this sort and in my eagerness to ‘get them across’ I may place them too soon. In spite of Arthur’s little lamp and the painting on glass, his friendship with Alice was not sentimental. It was founded on similarity of taste and interest, and particularly maybe on the fact that they had both had brief, intense, abortive attachments to the two Tunstalls. Alice may have hinted to him of the events in Rome. He knew that the prelude in G had powerful associations for her as he mentioned it to me. I may now say of Arthur ‘poor old boy’ for if he had known that one day I would have access to all the details of this affair, more than he knew himself, he would have exploded. His lighting the lamp every night may have been due as much to his love of ritual as to his affection for Alice, or it may have become so. When he was a young man in England he was very High Church, a ‘Puseyite,’ but after the death of Damaris he gave up all outward observance of religion. He believed that she had deliberately driven over the cliff and therefore according to the orthodox was a lost soul. He could not accept this and so felt that he could not consistently go to Church, a great sacrifice for him. He belonged to a generation that was very exact in its doctrine. Nowadays a young man in Arthur’s place would say: ‘Oh, no one could be hard on Damaris. God is too big for that’ and continue to walk in processions with candles and incense.
It would be interesting to know whether Alice told Austin about Aubrey Tunstall. One feels it would have been only fair. She does not mention having told him, and yet there appears to have been greater confidence between them after her return from England, and a general atmosphere of greater happiness in their lives. She was like someone who has believed herself to be in perfect health, but puzzled by an occasional weariness and dull pain in her side, and who then after the climax of an operation, realises what true health can be. Although she must always have felt the attraction of Europe she settled down contentedly to her Melbourne life. She may have felt that Europe, however attractive, was a place from which it was safer for her to stay away as both of her visits there had had unfortunate and nearly disastrous accompaniments, though she did not know that this sequence was to be repeated more than once again in her life. Her interest was fully occupied with her new house in Melbourne, a much larger and better equipped one than she had had before, and in her growing children who were very lively and full of high spirits and ‘Langton wit,’ except Mildy who remained under Sarah’s influence. A year after her return from England she had her last child, a girl who was christened Diana. This name was a departure from the Emmas and Hettys of Victorian tradition, and was considered by the relatives to be both pagan and affected. There can be no doubt that when Alice chose it she had in mind Damaris, Aubrey and Ariadne. She now had five children not counting a baby that died. They were in order of age, Steven who was my father, Margaret, who was called Maysie, Mildred, George and Diana. Steven, and George when he was old enough, went as day boys to the Melbourne Grammar School. Margaret and Mildred went to a school kept by a Madame Pfund, whose portrait by Longstaff hangs in the Melbourne National Gallery. They spent their holidays at Westhill, where they were nearly always joined by some of the Dells and the Bynghams.
I keep referring to the Bynghams, but I have given no account of them. Over the chimney piece in the little drawing-room at Westhill, where I began to write this book, there is a portrait ‘attributed’ to Kneller, which I have already mentioned, of a William Langton who was born in 1691. He wears a green velvet coat and riding breeches, while swathed around him, like ‘ectoplasm’ in a spiritualist photograph, is a gorgeous furbelow of cherry-coloured silk, which can hardly have been part of his costume as he went hunting round Waterpark. It was probably one of the artist’s ‘props’ as it appears also in a portrait of William’s wife. He wanted a patch of cherry-colour to contrast with the green coat but it was not essential to the portrait. In the same way the Bynghams appear in this story. They are a patch of colour, a broad influence rather than a clearly defined number of distinct individuals. I found it hard to distinguish between my many Byngham uncles. Except for John they come more to my mind as a species. They were important to us as they were the channel through which Teba blood might come in an unexpected spurt, to darken the nature of someone like Dominic or Julian. They were only transmitters, not containers, as the Bynghams were the most large round jovial horse-loving extroverts it is possible to imagine, although they were capable of scarlet rage when confronted with a dirty trick. This, combined with the fact that Captain Byngham would not for a moment tolerate any departure from the highest standard of courtesy and good manners gave them a reputation for chivalry. Amongst that horde of boys, my mother and her sister were the only girls.
They had not, as much as the Langtons, taken on the colour of Australia, partly because there were so many of them that they made a community of themselves, and because of their father’s insistence on manners and their mother’s naive conviction of her superiority. She had a definitely Spanish appearance, and apart from her ancestry, did not look the kind of person with whom one would be flippant. But she was very kind to us children, and whenever we went to Kilawly gave us presents on a scale she could not then afford.
The Bynghams were supposed to be rich, and perhaps in the early days they were. Captain Byngham owned a large station in the Riverina, but it became increasingly mortgaged. To bring up eleven children, all with expensive tastes and a love of hospitality, must have put a strain on any reasonable income. Even if they had been paupers the young Bynghams would have been attractive to women, who could not resist their sanguine faces, their aplomb, their lively Irish eyes, their round noble voices, their excellent manners, the caressing charm which they turned on automatically for pretty girls, and the social position which they assumed so naturally that no one, least of all themselves, ever questioned it. Captain Byngham was intimate with governors like the Normanbys and the Hopetouns, and when in the eighties the Duke of York with his brother Clarence and one of the Battenbergs came out to Melbourne, my mother danced in the opening cotillon with the future king.
It was inevitable then that about half of the Bynghams should secure by their marriages financial lifebelts which kept them afloat in the deluge which followed their father’s death, though they certainly had not married for money. They were far too impulsive children of nature for that. And yet as I write this chronicle I cannot help being a little startled at the number of my relatives who have lived on their wives. Even this shocking custom had its merits, for however greedy they may have been about money they did not regard it as sacred. They grabbed at the golden calf but they did not worship it, like the bourgeois who sees in cash the condensed holiness of his labour. They were possibly parasites, but not idolators. Austin did not merely live on his wife. He allowed half his children to be clothed, fed and educated at the expense of his mistress’s husband, though he did give them holidays in the country. This was not so unjust as it appears, as in return Percy Dell had the satisfaction of boasting about his sons, which he could never have done if himself had been their father.
To return to the Bynghams. I only just remember Kilawly, that is the interior, and not with any accuracy, but I imagine it as a place where there was always some form of hospitality in evidence, where on Sunday mornings after Church my grandfather sat on the Gothic verandah sampling sherry, where young people carrying tennis racquets and croquet mallets streamed in and out of the French windows, where at night the long dinner table, often with twenty-four guests, was like an illustration from Mrs Beeton, and where later in the drawing-room my grandmother dispensed tea from that colossal florid pot, while from the wall above her the full length portrait of the sinister duque de Teba, a little bewildered at finding himself in an Australian colony, stared gloomily down on the festive scene, and possibly with envy of the apple cheeks of his great-great-grandsons. That portrait came to my mother
and was at Westhill, but once when we were in England, a lamp fell over beneath it, and the flames blistered it out of recognition. Cousin Sarah was in charge of the house, and no one believed it was an accident. It was the frame of this picture that I found in the stables, and used for Dominic’s ‘Crucifixion’.
When my grandfather Byngham died, those of his sons who had not secured lifebelts in marriage, found themselves with no means of keeping afloat in the society of which they had been unconsciously brought up to regard themselves as the cream. I remember some elderly relative, perhaps Arthur, warning Dominic that when a gentleman sank socially he did not just stop comfortably at a middle-class level, but went plumb to the bottom. It might be said that we belonged absolutely to the middle-class. I also remember hearing a duke’s daughter who had married a baronet say ‘we middle-class people.’ This of course was a silly affectation, but she meant that she was not, like her mother, Mistress of the Robes, and did not, like her father, own four castles. All the same I do not think it is accurate to call the landed gentry middle-class, even if they have small incomes, as the middle-classes are essentially of the towns, burgesses, bourgeois. Recently some Left critic described Jane Austen as the great novelist of the middle-classes in her period. It is doubtful if she ever heard that label, and it is a quite inaccurate description of the people with entailed estates of whom she writes. The idea is to blot out the memory of these people, and to make the far less admirable bourgeois capitalist the opponent of the Communist revolution. It is an intentional falsification of history, and as a certain amount of social history, and possibly its falsification, is inevitable in this story, these remarks are not irrelevant.
The fact that the Bynghams did not come at all from the middle-class—the Langtons were much more mixed up with them—explains, I think, why those of them who had no money did not just descend a little way. It was as if they were in a runaway lift which would not release them until they reached the bottom and walked out amongst the tobacconists and fishermen. I am sure that even Arthur, if he had not had a lifebelt from Damaris, would have sold hyacinths and narcissi at the street corner, before he would have gone into a bank.
I do not think this tendency when sinking socially to bypass the middle-classes is peculiar to my relatives. One finds very few of the aristocracy in middle-class professions. Peers’ daughters may keep shops, but one seldom if ever hears of them as Newnham dons. They cannot either become that refined upper-middle-class which is met in the pages of E. M. Forster and Virginia Woolf. These people are distilled from several generations of Quaker merchants. At first they seem far nicer, far more interesting and intelligent than the landed gentry as they sparkle round Cambridge and Bloomsbury, but then one finds that they are all suffering from spiritual pernicious anaemia. The aristocracy lives from the land, the peasant lives from the land—they are akin. Their blood is nourished red from nature, and the flesh and the spirit are one.
The above may be largely quartz, but it contains enough golden truth to explain why my uncle John, finding himself at twenty-two cast on the world with three thousand pounds, and having no envy of the social position he would have had in a bank (and anyhow he could not add up) went straight off to Mallacoota and bought a fishing boat, and there he lived all his life, healthy and happy and free, sailing and selling fish. We loved going down to see him, and he always gave us half-a-crown each, with a most endearing shame-faced gesture because it was not a guinea. We were very proud of our uncle who was a fisherman. We were also very amused though not so proud at the idea of our uncle Algernon Byngham who also had gone down the social lift, bump to the bottom. He went as a jackeroo in Queensland, but he was thrown from a buckjumper and broke his leg in a way that made it impossible for him to ride again, so he spent some of his three thousand pounds in buying a tobacconist’s shop in the local town. He married a very kind barmaid who put on his trousers for him every morning because of his gammy leg, but mercifully, from the snob point of view, they had no children. The only person of that generation who deplored these occupations was Horace Dell, who after he had passed through Mallacoota said: ‘I saw John Byngham but thought it wiser not to speak to him in case he should claim relationship.’ The others, the Bynghams and Langtons were like myself and my brothers rather amused, and the former referred almost more than was necessary to ‘my brother the fisherman at Mallacoota’ and ‘my brother the tobacconist at Bungaroo.’ This was a sign that Australia had already begun to affect them. English people are more reticent about relatives in humble positions, as also are Australians on the upgrade. It is only English gentry in Australia who, at first secure in their position, imagine that they need take no precautions to sustain it. The Langtons possessed by an endemic levity, threw away their advantages almost with hilarity. They could not resist provoking the shocked expression of a parvenue when they told her about Uncle John. They would not have done this in England, because there they took the social hierarchy quite seriously.
This was all far ahead of the period I am treating, that following Alice’s second return from Europe. Then there was no sign of the Byngham decline. It is hard to imagine these nine uncles of mine as boys, perhaps because they were always boys, little different at sixteen from what they were at sixty. Their vitality must have been overpowering. Their boyishness made them choose occupations like a tobacconist’s and a fisherman’s. If their parents had returned to Ireland they would like most of their relatives have been sent automatically into the army, which is above all things a boy’s profession. At home was the machinery, apart from matrimonial lifebelts, to keep them afloat. Their cousins in Co. Sligo still miraculously go to Eton and have commissions in the Irish Guards. Again their boyishness was what made them so attractive to women, who love the idea of mothering a boyish husband, not boyish in physique but in simplicity of mind. How Aunt Mildy would have loved one! There they were, only a mile away, nine of them, the closest friends of her brothers, always in and out of the house, but she could not secure one even, as Arthur said, for ready money. Badly as they were in need of lifebelts, they would not use her girdle of chastity.
The lives of these young people were probably much the same as our own a generation later. At Westhill in the holidays they went for picnics, they ate a great deal of fruit, they killed an occasional snake, they bathed in the dam, they twice fought small local bushfires, the girls bringing buckets of cold tea to the sweating, blinded boys who were beating out the flames, and they spent half their waking days on horseback. A being arriving at Westhill from another planet would not have known which species owned the place, the humans or the horses. There is a long passage which leads from the lobby where now hang the portraits of Alice and Austin, round a corner to the entrance hall. When the cavalcade of carriages, carts and assorted escort arrived back from a picnic, the younger children rode their ponies in at the front door and down, out through the lobby, into the stable yard. There were domestic protests against this custom, but it was amusing, and no Langton could resist anything that made him laugh. Ultimately it made them weep, and if it had not been allowed the fate of our family might have been very different.
Austin was always surrounded by half-a-dozen young people, either Bynghams or his own children, Langtons and so-called Dells. They helped him harness horses in odd formations. Sometimes he put the boys up as postillions and they drove round the countryside, blowing the coaching-horn. He had a hobby of learning to play odd musical instruments, and in that room at Westhill, where Aunt Mildy was born amongst the blowflies, and which is now the chapel, he kept an assortment of bassoons and shawms. One day the boys concealed a number of brass instruments under the seats of the drag. When they set out with six horses and Austin blew his coaching-horn, they produced these trumpets and responded with hideous groans and blasts, and the horses bolted. Happenings of this kind seem to have been frequent and to have added considerably to the gaiety of their lives.
From Arthur I only heard justifications of Austin, and Alice’s diarie
s only mention his activities and not his character. He was a very simple man and a very unhappy one, though he gave the appearance of being neither of these things. His simplicity led him into his relationship with Hetty—the mere gratification of an appetite. It also prevented him from extricating himself. In fact it was the whole basis of his character. It made him long for the happiness which he would readily have found in an uncomplicated married life. It made him prefer the society of children and seek that happiness in playing horses with the boys. He found a good deal of it there, but when they played their occasional tricks on him, like blowing trumpets in the drag, although he cursed them in outrageous language, he was nearly on the verge of tears. He was always wondering who knew about himself and Hetty. He thought he must have many enemies, and so became suspicious. If he thought anyone was an enemy the things he said to and about him were appalling.
A self-important woman was brought by a neighbour to luncheon at Westhill, where life, owing to outdoor preoccupations and Cousin Sarah’s management was always something of a picnic. However on this occasion Alice had bestirred herself to see that there was very good food with civilised accessories. The guest thought she would indulge le plaisir aristocratique de déplaire, and ignoring the flounder cooked in cream and the quail, she said: ‘What delicious bread you have!’ Austin told the servant to take away her plate and to give her bread, and for the rest of the meal would not allow her to be offered anything else. The rude lady had tried to play the game with an expert. Austin understood much better le plaisir aristocratique which consists not as his guest had imagined in rudeness to someone whom it is safe to snub, but in a confidence so complete in one’s own values that one affirms them clearly, indifferent to the fact that they are incompatible with the ideas of a bourgeois society, and the pleasure consists in seeing the bewilderment of a conventional mind, when faced with an idea too generous, or a taste too eclectic or even an honesty too obvious for its comprehension. The Bynghams felt this pleasure when they talked about their brother the fisherman at Mallacoota. It is the pleasure of the enfant terrible raised to the highest level, not that Austin’s level was always very high, especially when he was displeasing Cousin Sarah.