The Missing Heir

by Kylie Tennant

  He also collected early Australiana and the works of Thomas Hardy. When we were moving from Coonabarabran, I left before the auction of our furniture. Some old tatty magazines the auctioneer sold in two-penny lots turned out to be some of his Australiana first editions. None of my domestic crimes were ever grieved over so loudly. Also I never had Roddy’s devotion to the works of Thomas Hardy. I accused Roddy of having a Jude the Obscure complex. Anything to do with woe, hangings, morbidity — he was in there admiring the literary quality.

  No one was more enthusiastic about my marriage than my father. ‘Do I know this guy?’ he kept asking. He didn’t really care. He had got his difficult daughter off his hands. He even made no murmur when my mother demanded money for clothes she intended to buy me. She sent me back to Coonabarabran with a wardrobe of garments suitable only for the city and a fur coat which followed me for years until she replaced it with yet another fur coat. I hated fur, which made my nose tickle, but I liked to give my mother pleasure.

  ‘How do you keep you coat in such splendid condition?’ a lady once asked.

  ‘It sleeps on the foot of the bed,’ I replied. Hers was all done up in plastic and mothballs. I gave the damn thing away to a friend who was going overseas and a succession of impoverished Australian girls wore it — one to Buckingham Palace (remodelled and cut down).

  Twenty years later it floated away in the Maitland flood, was returned, indestructible as ever, and became a car rug. Its remains ended up as a Davy Crockett hat for my small son Bim.

  Immediately after my marriage my father’s cup of happiness was filled to overflowing when a policeman appeared on the Hillside doorstep with the announcement that I had made out a false declaration in November that I was twenty-one when my twenty-first birthday was not until March.

  ‘Take her away to gaol, ‘my father commanded and the policeman began pleading with him. ‘Oh, but you wouldn’t do that, would you?’ This scene was ended by my mother. ‘That will be quite enough,’ she told them both.

  The Parent was even happier when, in the Christmas holidays while he was staying at Hillside, I decided to take my new husband to walk and sunbake in French’s Forest. We tramped through the water catchment for the Manly Reservoir which was one of my short-cuts.

  With us we had Grandma Tennant’s dog, Lubra, a black spaniel which the Parent was minding. Lubra sat down and refused to walk, being fat. I was carrying her in my arms, paws upward, when we encountered a ranger on a horse. He said unpleasantly: ‘By rights I could shoot that dog.’

  ‘Do that,’ I said, thankfully depositing the dog on the ground. ‘She doesn’t belong to me anyway.’

  The ranger was even more incensed at that. I explained that we were only taking a short-cut through his catchment area and we proceeded on our way after argument. Roddy and the dog presently refused to go any farther. We were happily sunning ourselves on a rock on the very edge of this unpleasant man’s territory when he caught up with us again and triumphantly handed us a prosecution for trespassing on the catchment, which I had been doing for years. It was my sunbaking place. It is now a park and I hear people go water-skiing on the old disused reservoir. Roddy merely hired a lawyer to appear and paid the fine. But the Parent didn’t have to pay. He loved Roddy from that hour. Wherever we were in the country the Parent would call in and stay and enjoy Roddy’s company. They got on so well together that they ganged up on me.

  If I thought six hundred miles was far enough away to escape the Parent I was mistaken. Not a month after my marriage he appeared at the Royal Hotel in Coonabarabran in the pouring rain. He had with him a lugubrious lady who was already disillusioned by the discovery that she had been brought along on this trip to dig the Parent out of bogs, provide a listening ear, make herself useful. I liked her very much but her failing was that she took the Parent seriously.

  The Parent, this lady and Don McIntyre had clubbed together to buy part of a little valley in the Blue Mountains at Warrimoo and, in the holidays, Roddy and I would go up there and drag down sacks of cement, repair the swimming pool and beat off the wallabies from the lemon trees. The wallabies always won. I was up there by myself typing one night when I became convinced that something or someone was creeping round the house. I went out with a lantern and there were wallabies fleeing in every direction. They had crept up and were observing me through a window opening. They were also eating a patch of peas. The Parent, over the years, lost interest in Warrimoo and removed to Patonga Beach. Roddy, who liked the Blue Mountains, regretted this but he liked Patonga. My mother had, of course, no intention of ever residing in a hut in the Blue Mountains. When the Parent betook himself to Patonga Beach she refused to live there. ‘All that sand! You would never be able to wash the salt out of your hair.’ When my grandmother died and the menage at Rosedale broke up, my grandfather came to live with my mother at Hillside.

  Roddy was one of those walkers who head for the nearest hotel and put up there. I took him down the Cox our first Christmas for some camping and he got a splinter in his foot which festered. We ended up in a sumptuous hotel at Blackheath.

  I took him later for a walk for a few hundred miles down the South Coast and he firmly said he was tired of being a damned snail with a pack on his back. It was raining at the time and he kept looking for a hotel that had hot rum. He found it and refused to budge. Thereafter he always found some excuse. When a group of friends were going down the Grose River, Roddy said he had to stay home and take his mother to church as it was Easter. He howled with unfeeling laughter when a friend called Sutton and I staggered home. Sutt’s alpine pack had cut a deep groove in his spine.

  Roddy once came camping at Era Beach down the South Coast when it rained and we kept climbing up and down the cliffs to get supplies. The men shared a tent and the women shared a tent. Or in Canowindra we would go off camping, a couple of carloads of young schoolteachers.

  Sutton said that another schoolteacher friend, Woody, had pushed him out of the hip hole he had dug in the sand and slept in it himself, waiting craftily until Sutton was peacefully asleep.

  ‘That boy will go far,’ he prophesied. Woody ended up a vice-chancellor of a teachers’ college.

  We were the only ones who were married on the school staff at Canowindra where he taught after Coonabarabran. We explained to Roddy that he was supposed to come camping because he and I were the chaperones. There would be a long row of decorous forms sleeping under a tarpaulin, Roddy and I in the middle, men one side of Roddy, women the other side of me. The number of excuses Roddy thought up for not camping, or not being chaperone, when he had to sleep on a riverbank, possibly in the rain, were manifold and devious. He would plot out the route and, at the last moment, find some way of staying home. He was perfectly happy for me to go. I think it was more restful without me; in fact, I am sure it was.

  He also, all our married life, objected to my friends coming and living with us. While we were living in a hotel at Coonabarabran it was difficult for my friends, but as soon as we had a house they would come to visit. He would head them off at the pass. Once, years later, I said we would go to our hut at Diamond Head all by ourselves. ‘I don’t believe it,’ Roddy exclaimed. ‘We wouldn’t be there three days before your friends would be camping around you like a tribe of Aborigines.’ I thought this unkind as I never objected to any of his friends. I must admit that we knew so many people that one group had only just gone home when the next arrived. If Roddy was home by himself nobody came. If I was there, there were throngs, some we didn’t even know before who had just called in.

  I attributed Roddy’s lack of pleasure in people staying with us to his early training. As a child, he shinned over the back fence if there were visitors. His Aunt Emma, whom I dearly loved, told me that Roddy’s mother would meet her sister on the doorstep, saying: ‘You can’t come in, there’s nothing in the house.’ Aunt Emma countered this ploy by always arriving laden with food. My family was incurably hospitable; Roddy’s family never let anyone in the
front door if they could help it. They were darlings — his mother and brother John — and I loved them dearly, but they were very self-contained. They became resigned to me in time.

  Roddy’s mother, who was absolutely fearless, liked me driving her about when I later bought a car. Nothing ruffled her and I taught my brother-in-law to drive. This meant his mother got out of the house. Before I burst on the scene her life was much duller.

  I was perfectly happy to go into Christ Church St Laurence with Roddy’s family, setting out decorously, all dressed up. I had never before been in a church that had incense, stations of the cross, robes, confession. I once tried to stay behind for confession. Roddy was against it: ‘Don’t want the poor man to be kept here all night.’ His great friend John Hope, whose biography Roddy wrote later, was the commander of that garrison of ritualists in a Low Evangelical dioscese. Roddy’s book was published as John Hope of Christ Church St Laurence. Naturally I heard a good deal about the deadly war between the Low Evangelicals and the High Church. I had never known all this was going on. It intrigued me.

  While we were in Coonabarabran I decided to join the Church of England and was confirmed by Good Ole Bill who had married us. At this confirmation, as I sat among the young girls in the front row (all us confirmees were wearing white pillowslips round our heads), I noticed Bill, behind the Bishop’s back, fixing me with his eye and tapping his forehead. ‘How right he is,’ I sighed. ‘He thinks I’m crazy.’ He was only trying to indicate that the white pillowslip had become detached from its moorings and was shifting off my forehead to the back of my neck. I hastily readjusted it. I had no intention of separating Roddy from his church, which was an important art form to him as well as a religion.

  One Sunday night, after Bill’s tiny procession of choristers and servers had squeezed past the back pews and done an about turn at the font, Bill, swishing past in his robes, pressed a note into Roddy’s hand. It read: ‘See me after Church. Re Elah.’

  Great-grandfather Farr

  Great-grandmother Farr

  Grandmother Tolhurst

  Grandfather Tennant

  Grandfather Tolhurst (centre, with a hat on his lap) with a group of building workers around 1922

  Lauderdale, the Tolhursts’ house in Manly

  Narbethong, the house Grandfather Tolhurst built behind Lauderdale for Kylie’s parents

  The Parent with his sisters Flo (right) and Emily (left), around 1909

  The Parent in his late twenties

  Katherine Tennant aged twenty-one with her baby daughter Kylie

  Kylie aged two

  Kylie aged three

  Jean Smith (left) and Kylie Tennant in costume for the Brighton College play, The Beloved Vagabond

  The prefects of Brighton college. Kylie Tennant is in the middle of the back row

  Roddy around 1930

  Kylie’s mother-in-law, Lilian Rodd, wearing the fox-fur Kylie and Roddy sent her from Coonabarabran

  One of the weekend camping trips with a group of schoolteachers from Canowindra in 1935

  The Christian Socialist Conference of 1937. Roddy and Kylie are at the far right

  An Eight-Hour Day march. Kylie Tennant is holding the ‘Collective Action’ placard

  A demonstration by the Peace Pledge Union. Roddy was riding on a truck out of the picture

  The cart Kylie drove from Sydney to Leeton researching The Battlers

  We thought this was some greeting in Greek.

  Over a cup of tea at the rectory Bill explained that Elah was the farthest outlying small church in his charge and he wanted to appoint Roddy as lay reader there. So, every second Sunday, a parishioner picked us up in his car and drove along a faint set of wheel-marks over open country and through dry creeks. Elah wasn’t a town, just a church no bigger than a barn with pointed windows, standing by itself in a grove of trees with sheep grazing around it. The farmers would be waiting in the shade by their cars.

  When they saw us coming they would all file into the church. Roddy would conduct the service over the sounds of sheep bleating, kookaburras gurgling sardonically and the wild cries of crows. We naturally prayed for rain or harvests.

  Those farmers did not come, as meaner people would have you believe, out of respectability or conformity. After a week of worry and hard work it was salve on a sore place to think that something beside the government might be in ultimate charge.

  I must admit I made a poor Anglican. When I had told Good Ole Bill I wished to join his church he said incredulously: ‘Are you sure?’ But I had been through the book of words and adjusted to their interpretations. Kneeling I considered an Oriental posture rightly rejected by my Scottish ancestors. I agreed with the man who said that instead of praising the Lord we should be offering him sympathy. Roddy’s Christ Church St Laurence reminded me of the saying that ‘the Roman Catholics can go through a whole Mass while the High Church of England is changing its robes’. I had to keep reminding myself that tolerance is the most necessary of all religious qualities. I never got the hang of the High Church liturgy and I crossed myself politely when everyone else did.

  I am an inveterate sleeper-through-sermons, sitting erect, eyes shut, a pious expression from ear to ear, waking as soon as the preacher says: ‘And lastly …’. I became a suburban Christian out of solidarity with the human race, thousands of years of it. I used to tell people I was a Communist and they would flinch. Now I say I am a suburban Christian and they flinch. Fun!

  What had endeared Roddy to me on committees was that he was such a cool strategist. He moulded the bullets and I fired them. He had been one of Lang’s followers when that Premier was looking like defying Otto Niemeyer. He showed me the letters he had written and had published in the Labor Daily in support of Lang and I found them almost unintelligible. His style improved later when he was writing in the Church Standard during Stuart Watt’s time as editor.

  I must confess I took only a tepid interest in points of doctrinal difference nor was I fervent about the tactics of Roddy, Sam Lewis, Harry Norrington and Matt Kennett in Teachers’ Federation conferences. They would plan out their strategy — which supporter proposed which motion — and count heads to see it got through. Every Christmas holiday was arranged so that Roddy could attend the Teachers’ Federation annual conference. This was very important to him.

  We stayed part of the holidays with his mother and brother John in a tall terrace house in Windsor Street, Paddington, and John and Roddy would walk me in on Sunday afternoons to hear the speakers in the Domain. I endeared myself to his mother by my house-cleaning. I was a vigorous polisher and she was a tiny little woman who didn’t have the strength for heavy cleaning. At sea it was the steward’s job to cook and clean and she had spent many years at sea as the captain’s wife. Roddy’s mother asked me nervous questions about his health.

  ‘How was his asthma?’

  ‘What asthma?’ I asked. Before he was married he had had nightmares and walked in his sleep. He had asthma, bronchitis and trouble with his ears. ‘We never thought we’d raise him when he was little,’ his mother said with sad unction.

  I suspected that Roddy’s asthma was a sensitivity to house dust. So wherever we were I saw to it that there was no dust and no asthma. With me he sunbaked in the open air and relaxed. Getting Roddy to relax was always a major task. If he overstrained he fell ill. If he had a scratch it would become infected. If something bit him he swelled up. I was amazed at the number of ailments he could contract and the nursing he needed. If I went away I would find him ill on my return as like as not. He was allergic and accident-prone.

  Our first Christmas, as Roddy was recuperating at the hotel in Blackheath from our walk down the Cox when he got a splinter in his foot, there came a telegram from Sam Lewis, the head of the little group of firebrand teachers in the Federation: ‘Beatrice Taylor Defence Committee formed.’ Roddy was needed in Sydney. Roddy’s left political friends thought it was a pity he had married. I had met them all on committees and
they thought I was pretty but dumb. I didn’t think I was pretty and I wasn’t dumb; I learnt the rules of debate. But committees bored me. I was handy for seconding a motion.

  Roddy had been the prime mover in raising the money for Beatrice Taylor, then headmistress of an infants’ school, to make a trip to Russia and report back on their educational system. He put all his savings into a loan to cover her fare. She gave a very favourable report at that time.

  Some years later I argued in public meetings that the Soviet system had become too militaristic and quoted chapter and verse to prove it. A delegation from the Christian Socialists were earning the enmity of the Communists at that conference.

  I met Miles Franklin. ‘You interest me,’ the little bird-like lady in a large hat told me. She had big flashing brown eyes. We met from time to time when we were researching, each our own subjects, at the Mitchell Library and went out together to lunch after Roddy and I moved to Sydney. She always wrote to congratulate me when one of my books came out.