In Tasmania

by Nicholas Shakespeare

  ‘Shit, yes,’ he said, batting away a mosquito.

  But I needed his help. How could someone who was 1/64 Aborigine – like, it appeared, most of the leaders in the Aboriginal community – choose this fraction of his ancestry over and above the rest?

  He took my pad and drew a family tree. He sketched a trunk, then a branch that veered left – his Aboriginal branch. He wrote down the names of his grandmother, her ancestor ‘Dolly’ Dalrymple Briggs and then her grandfather Mannalargenna (‘a fine man, a great warrior’).

  ‘What about this?’ and I pointed to the rest of the tree. ‘What about your German roots? What about your Irish roots?’

  ‘That’s mongrel,’ he said.

  I looked away, frustrated by my inability to understand.

  At the top of the field the community had planted saplings in plastic protective tubes. I pointed to an older, larger, dense-leaved conifer.

  ‘What do you see?’

  ‘A tree,’ he said.

  ‘Exactly. You don’t see just one branch. Aren’t we made up of all the leaves and branches?’

  He looked at me, and in his eyes was the expression of someone who doubted that I would ever understand.

  I felt out of my depth. I felt that Tasmanian Aboriginality had elements of a faith, and that facts counted less than feeling. It was hard to think it through: I had to imagine it through. But I felt chained by the Western, linear, rationalist tradition of my English culture, and in the end it was impossible to let this go.

  We saw that there was an impasse. He handed back my notebook, and we went on talking in an amicable way, one of us a white colonising bastard, the other an Aboriginal warrior from the Trawlulwuy nation, who had lived here for 2,000 generations. As Lehman had said in the debate: ‘Your 200 years of history are like yesterday for us.’

  We were walking back across the rivulet when I remembered that there was something I had been meaning to ask.

  He had mentioned that his Aboriginal grandmother came from North Motton and I asked if he knew a couple of old ladies there.

  ‘What’s their name?’

  I told him.

  He stopped and touched the ring in his ear. ‘I think I might be related to them. Why?’

  I said: ‘They’re cousins of mine.’

  Part III: Elysium

  ‘Apparently warm weather is coming. Here are some predictions that might happen and affect you in no particular order. Warm weather, sunburn, no seat-belt, Grand Final day, parties, good times, accidents, sunburn, no seat-belt on your kids, golf, mother-in-law comes to stay, drink-driving, parties, good times, accidents, drink-driving, no seat-belt, accidents, flashing lights, screaming people, ambulance, SES, police, knock on the door – and it’s not the mother-in-law. Do you want to take a chance on what comes next? Please consider others if not yourself. Your licence is not the only thing you should consider. Think ahead and make arrangements.’

  Sergeant Rob Reardon, Swansea newsletter, September 24, 2002.

  I

  WE WERE IN OUR SECOND YEAR ON DOLPHIN SANDS WHEN MY mother telephoned from England.

  ‘You may have other relatives in Tasmania.’

  ‘Are you sure?’ I said, warily.

  She had just discovered in her father’s autobiography a mysterious reference to a favourite uncle who had emigrated to Tasmania in 1900. He came from Devon and his name was Hordern. ‘He sounds extravagant,’ she said. It puzzled her that her father had never spoken of him.

  I looked up Hordern in the telephone book. There was one entry. I rang the number and found myself talking to Hordern’s granddaughter, Ivy. She lived with her sister Maud on the small-holding where they had been born, 80 years ago, in North Motton in the north-west of the island.

  Ivy declared herself in ‘a state of shock’. She had lost hope of tracking down any Hordern descendants in Britain after years of fruitless research. She had followed the lives of my mother and grandfather through my grandfather’s books, copies of which she owned.

  ‘Your grandfather was,’ she told me, ‘a very famous writer.’

  He was also partly to blame for my living in Tasmania.

  II

  HIS NAME WAS STUART PETRE BRODIE MAIS, BUT EVERYONE KNEW HIM by his initials. He was the first writer I ever met, and the reason why I never wanted to become a writer myself. The author of more than 200 books, he died in his ninetieth year, bankrupt and heartbroken, shortly after my grandmother ran off with a man who first proposed to her when she was 17. His sorrowful end has continued to haunt me.

  SPB Mais

  He was the only child of an impoverished Devonshire clergyman and a snobbish mother – ‘an abominably stupid woman’, he called her – who was more than 40 when he was born. Hannah Mais never wanted children, and since she was married to a man too poor to afford holidays she farmed SPB off to her brother, an enchanting but profligate Devon landowner, whose proudest boast was that he had played tennis with the Kaiser, and who rattled between his two estates in a dogcart. So North Devon became my grandfather’s preferred place in the world – the location of his ‘earliest and easily my most carefree memories’ – and Petre Hordern his ‘boyhood SPB Mais hero’. Hordern paid for SPB’s education and enabled him to go to Oxford. He wrote of Hordern: ‘I had a deep affection for him and he for me and I was very sorry when he disappeared from my life.’ This was how I felt about SPB.

  My first recollection of him. I’m nine, recently arrived from Singapore, and in my first term at my prep school in Oxford. I sit on top of a red letter-box in the Bardwell Road, waiting for my grandparents to take me out for Sunday lunch. I am eager to see them. My parents have dropped me off here and immediately boarded a ship to a new home in Rio de Janeiro.

  SPB arrives sooner than expected, in a deer-stalker hat with a number of scarves draped around his neck, each a different colour. (‘He was fanatical about time,’ my mother said.) All the way up both arms he wears a number of Rolexes, which he later pawns, and a billowing black coat, which anon I inherit, and he seems to be gruff, intolerant and rather terrifying.

  My grandmother was a former model who would never leave her bedroom without make-up on. Already immaculate, she spends a lot of the meal vetting her perfection in a tiny mirror. When she tucks her compact into a bag, I cannot help noticing that the bag contains two wrapped gifts. For me, I hope.

  Some days later, my grandfather writes me a letter. The handwriting is so minuscule and untidy that I cannot decipher a word.

  His handwriting was the only small thing about him. He filled the room, as if he had rambled in not from the bus station – he never drove – but from the pages of the stories I was then reading: Greenmantle, Mistress Masham’s Repose, The Prisoner of Zenda. It didn’t surprise me to discover that after coming down from Christ Church, he claimed to have received ‘an offer from Sir Eyres Mansell, who wanted me to become King of Albania. I should have liked that, but my mother, in spite of her snobbishness, could not bear the thought of my going so far away.’

  Instead of a Balkan king – a role which would have suited him since he was emotional, driven and excitable – he became a schoolmaster, teaching English literature by turns at Rossall, Tonbridge and Sherborne. He was by all accounts a remarkable teacher, already practising in 1913 a student-based philosophy that did not become common till the 1960s. He flung the set texts out of the window and divided his class into teams to debate the merits of Wordsworth, say, over Byron. At Sherborne, he became mentor to Alec Waugh and encouraged him to publish The Loom of Youth – a novel that Waugh wrote after his expulsion and in which SPB is caricatured as always rushing about with an armful of books.

  In 1917 – ‘to my great surprise and dismay’ – SPB himself was sacked from Sherborne after Chapman & Hall, the firm managed by Waugh’s father, published his novel Interlude, about a married schoolmaster who elopes with a shop-girl. He fell back on his pen. He went to work for the Daily Express and then as fiction reviewer for the Daily Telegraph, also c
ontributing regular broadcasts to the BBC. He had a rich, irate voice and was renowned as an unrepentant Englishman: in 1940 he received up to 500 fan letters a day. Winston Churchill said of him: ‘That man Mais makes me feel tired.’

  As his fame grew so did the procession of visitors to his home in Sussex. My mother remembers George Bernard Shaw, J.M. Barrie, H.G. Wells, John Betjeman (he gave the speech at her wedding) and Henry Williamson (he slept on the floor). I used to wonder if my mother was not guilty of inflating SPB’s reputation, but then I read Julie Burchill enthusiastically quoting him in the Guardian (‘Anyone who does not live in Brighton must be mad and should be locked up’). Graham Greene and Anthony Burgess told me that they had made the pilgrimage to Hove. A scourge of old fogies, he had been kind to them when they were young writers and they felt genuine gratitude – which Greene subtly acknowledged by using his name for a character in Brighton Rock: ‘See that man going to the Gents’? That’s Mais. The brewer. He’s worth a hundred thousand nicker.’

  SPB was, on the contrary, famously worth nothing of the sort. His personal life came to replicate certain passages of his risqué novel Interlude. In 1913 he married Maud Snow, a girl with a taste for schnauzers, sweet biscuits and dry gin. He threatened to kill himself when she wanted to cancel the wedding, and on their honeymoon he took her to his uncle’s haunts – and ‘on foot almost every day’ compelled her to follow the Devon and Somerset stag-hounds. Neither had a clue about sex. After two years he sought enlightenment from a doctor and then Maud ran off to Paris with a gossip columnist.

  Meanwhile, on a catwalk at the Savoy, SPB had met a beautiful 17-year-old Irish model, Gillian Doughty. An enthusiastic rambler, he invited her – over a lunchtime grapefruit in the Savoy Grill – to see the total solar eclipse on top of Mount Snowdon. She was my grandmother.

  Nowadays, his might seem a desirable way of life, but in the 1930s he was paid a pittance by his newspapers and the BBC, and for the next 51 years he struggled to ward off penury and bailiffs. He supplemented his efforts to support his new family by writing books, sometimes six a year.

  I remember the surprise with which I stumbled on one of them, in a second-hand bookshop in Abergavenny. It was entitled Some Books I Like. This seemed self-indulgent until a yard along the shelf devoted to his works I discovered its sequel: More Books I Like (total sales: 696).

  Apart from books on books he liked, my grandfather wrote novels, children’s stories, school texts. Not one of his novels sold more than 5,000 copies. His most successful book, An English Course for Schools, sold 21,000. The most he earned from any book was £850 – for I return to Scotland.

  He lectured widely, especially on books about the English countryside. My grandmother liked to tell of the occasion when he was invited to give a talk at Lewes Prison. He became so excited and enthusiastic about the South Downs in Sussex that he found himself telling the inmates that they must get out more, see it for themselves.

  By the time I came to know SPB, his rambling days were over and his income derived chiefly from leisurely travel books. Every summer his publisher Alvin Redman dispatched him on a different cruise. The result was a series with titles such as Mediterranean Cruise Holiday, South African Cruise Holiday, South American Cruise Holiday. These cruise books never made him much money (about £100 each), but they made him all he had to live on. This, I suppose, was the reason I was put off by his profession.

  My last image of SPB. It is the school holiday and I am visiting him in Bliss House, Lindfield, where the Samaritan Housing Association had offered him a tiny first-floor flat for £4 a week. The man who could have been King of Albania sleeps below my grandmother in a bunk bed. There is room in the kitchen for only one of them at a time. Furniture is stacked on top of the fridge, including a trolley and a child’s chair for me.

  A description that he wrote in the Guardian tallies with my recollection: ‘The living room measures 12 foot by 14 foot plus a small alcove, and this room contains three desks (two of them mine), a large inherited chest of drawers which holds my sweaters, socks and underclothes, a glass-fronted bookcase containing my remaining first editions, some glasses and decanters … Add to this our beloved miniature dachshund and painfully thin walls so that the widow below bangs with a stick every time he dares to play with his tennis ball and the fact that I do not sleep very well.’ The article concludes: ‘Do you wonder that we get on one another’s nerves?’

  I could not wait to leave. Nor, it turned out, could my grandmother.

  When it first happened he went roaring through the village: ‘My wife has left me for another man.’

  In 1974, their mutual friend Dudley Carew had knocked on the door. His second wife had died and he was depressed. His doctor had told him to get out, meet friends. He thought: ‘Petre and Gillian, I’ll go and see them.’ Whereupon he and Gillian fell for each other and Carew, under the impression that he was rescuing my grandmother from a very unhappy relationship, proposed. She was almost 70.

  They married and Carew bought a house nearby. A year later SPB died of a shattered heart, still in love.

  My mother never liked to read her father’s books. It was her sister who had alerted her to the reference to Tasmania. I too had avoided them, until, on a subsequent visit to Kempton, I stopped at a second-hand bookshop in a field, and there on a shelf at the back I found a book that SPB had published in 1965, and dedicated to his grandchildren. On discovering with a jolt that Round the World Cruise Holiday was written for Nicholas ‘who will one day, we hope, follow in our footsteps round the world’, I bought it.

  It occurred to me that my grandfather’s wish had come true. My father being a diplomat, I had been brought up in France, Cambodia, Brazil, Argentina, Portugal, Peru and Morocco. There was a further coincidence: I, too, had married a girl called Gillian. And I began to wonder if perhaps some of the reasons that decided me to settle in Tasmania had to do with not wanting to follow too closely in the footsteps of SPB. Directly facing the South Pole, and 13,000 miles from England, our house was as far away as I could travel from Bliss House, Lindfield.

  Except, of course, that it was not.

  III

  I OPENED Round the World Cruise Holiday AS SOON AS I GOT BACK to Dolphin Sands. I had only read a few pages when I felt my heart drumming.

  Round the World Cruise Holiday was co-written by my grandmother Gillian, who had embarked on the cruise on the Southern Cross without her husband. SPB explained his absence in a short preface: ‘On this occasion owing to heart trouble I had to stay behind and while she wrote the story of her very exciting voyage I wrote notes on the historical background of the places she visited.’

  Gillian was nervous travelling on her own: ‘For so long now, 41 years to be precise, Petre has been my guide, philosopher and friend, in fact my all, and we have never been separated for more than a week …’ Among the items she took with her to keep her company for the next three months was a photograph of her eldest grandson that she pegged to a board in her cabin beneath a brass dolphin.

  It was amusing to read how much of my grandmother’s time in Australia had been taken up looking for a suitable present to bring back for me. In Melbourne, she fingered a boomerang. But after feeling its hard edges, she decided that I might do untold damage to my sister. (The Aboriginal owner gave a demonstration, throwing it across the road. It dropped short on the return and a car deliberately ‘swerved to run over it and break it in half’.) In the Barossa Valley, she gripped an Aboriginal spear that was intended to pass through the body with a single thrust. ‘I was more sure than ever after handling these weapons that Nicholas should not have one.’ When I read what present she did buy me, a memory came spinning back. A strange boarding house in Oxford. My grandfather impatient to get to the bus station. My grandmother plucking two packages from her bag: a curved piece of wood with odd-looking scribbles burned into it, and a peculiar animal, flat-nosed with claws, which the boys in my dormitory would take fantastic pleasure wedging between the
roof beams.

  The boomerang and the toy koala helped to staunch my peculiar form of homesickness, which could not be truly described as homesickness since I had no home. They were also, as I understood, nearly 40 years on, my first contact with Australia. And why, since a boy, I had felt an emotion comparable to the one which Andrei Sinyavsky describes in A Voice from the Chorus. ‘Whenever one sees Australia on the map one’s heart leaps with pleasure: kangaroo, boomerang!’

  IV

  MY GRANDFATHER WAS SENT TO STAY WITH HIS RECKLESS UNCLE in Devon at the same age as I was when I went to the Dragon School in Oxford.

  Hordern’s two estates were on the fringe of Exmoor. Yarde, near Stoke Rivers, lay in a hollow with no view of the sea, a long low white house with a hornet’s nest right outside SPB’s window. The hall gave off the odour of old timber. ‘Ever since I first smelt that strange unanalysable smell,’ SPB wrote, ‘I have been under the spell of Devon.’

  Hordern

  Yarde was occupied by Hordern’s maiden sisters, who, in their relations with SPB, pursued what he called ‘a consistent policy of “No!”’ He wrote: ‘I wasn’t allowed to play even solitaire on Sundays and no book was allowed to be opened except The Quiver or The Sunday at Home.’ Conversation at meal times was never lively. ‘I remember that in the evening Fanny and Bertie used to rise from their seats exactly as the clock struck ten and without a word of “Goodnight!” would disappear to their respective bedrooms.’

  Into this world stormed their brother in his dogcart, popular and spirited, who liked to dress well, even nattily, in white spats, with a gold toothpick flashing from his mouth and smelling of milk to disguise whatever he had had to drink.

  Hordern rode SPB back the 17 miles to Boode House, near Braunton, whipping his horse on with a silver-handled crop – a drive not without hazard since at a certain point Hordern preferred to sleep and leave it to his horse to pick its own way along the high-banked Devon lanes. ‘So great was my confidence in my uncle that I, who always accompanied him on these trips, which were usually in the dead of night, also went straight to sleep soothed by the rhythmical jog-trot of the horse.’