A Paper Inheritance

by Dymphna Stella Rees

  Delighted with this letter, my father responded by inviting Mem to a meal at his home – by all accounts a joyous meeting.

  What made my father’s books so popular and timely? Was it the scrupulously researched detail depicting native creatures in their own environment? Or was it because all the stories follow a pattern? They are constructed within the arc of the universal life cycle, with its dangers, triumphs, challenges and adventures, so they mirror the trajectories of our own lives. Importantly, they also shadow the dark side: the desecration of habitat through human interference, the ruthless two-legged threat that has led to species’ vulnerabilities and extinctions.

  But they do more than that. They shine with engaging narratives and beautiful writing – often lyrical and poetic. Although written for a certain age group, they assume intelligent reading. My father never watered down his vocabulary for children. Nor did he romanticise the bush. But his enchantment with the Australian natural world and its creatures, his awe and reverence for our landscape in its many forms – what he called his ‘intoxicating faith’ – is everywhere apparent.

  My mother was also a successful writer, though my father’s reputation tended to overshadow that fact. Her gender was against her, too, as were her time and place. And, unaware, she carried a genetic marker that would have a grievous impact on her work and her quality of life.

  Coralie Clarke Rees also showed a versatile talent. As a young woman who had already written and performed in her own play, she established herself as a journalist and editor and went on to create one-act plays, short stories, works for children and a book-length elegiac poem. A scriptwriter over decades, she also collaborated on a series of travel books.

  My mother’s style was quite different from my father’s. He was a narrative writer, like a Robert Louis Stevenson tusitala, a teller of tales. My mother’s writing had more psychological depth, with subtlety and sensitivity, though she was also capable of flashes of showy brilliance. I sometimes thought she was the better writer – though of course I never said so.

  Towards the end of his life, my father anointed me as manager of their joint literary archive. ‘You’ll have to deal with all this when I’m gone,’ he announced. This meant taking care of their publishing contracts and manuscripts, and protecting the copyright of their works, which continues for seventy years after the creator’s death.

  When the time came, I found myself burdened by the impost of this bequest – weighed down by the sort of resentment a person inheriting the family farm might feel. This uncharitable response was heightened by a sudden and painful awareness that my own hourglass was rapidly filling. What about all those elusive possibilities: floating down the rivers of Europe, exploring more Australian deserts, playing my piano instead of just dusting it, devouring all the books I never had time to read, even polishing my own manuscript that loitered under the bed? Instead I found myself the recipient of a diverse literary archive reaching back nearly a hundred years. But I had no idea what riches I would expose.

  My most precious discovery was the love letters between my parents in the years 1929, 1930 and 1936. Suddenly I was privy to their early life. I could witness how passionately they loved each other as they explored their dreams of a literary partnership. But finding these letters carried its own dilemma. This was private correspondence. My parents never thought their letters would see the light of day – let alone be read by their future offspring. How could I justify my overriding urge to transcribe them, to bring them out of the darkness of their dusty envelopes and into the light of the twenty-first century, to share them and make them integral to my parents’ story? How could I smother the guilt of a filial voyeur?

  The letters were buried in the unmanageably large and disorganised assemblage of paper my parents had amassed over their lifetimes. Books, press cuttings, photographs, manuscripts, radio scripts and notebooks all spilled haphazardly out of bookshelves, drawers and a tower of cardboard cartons. Though my parents had strenuously resisted gratuitous consumerism, it was clear this did not apply to anything containing the written word.

  I was tempted to hand the material over to the Mitchell Library in Sydney where my father had already begun the Coralie and Leslie Rees Collection, depositing his correspondence with George Bernard Shaw, Somerset Maugham and other famous writers, along with some of his own memorabilia.

  But I was patently not ready to share this collection, let alone give it up. It was my precious link with a lost world.

  ~

  Holding on to my paper inheritance proved to be the right decision. Raking through my parents’ literary archive, I’ve come across jewels of discovery, some that light up my smile for days, others that leave me questioning or digging for answers.

  It is true that all writing has its pitfalls, but writing about one’s parents can be truly hazardous. One should be careful not to elevate the dearly departed into sainthood, nor – if from a challenging upbringing – to paint them as unreservedly evil. One has to grapple with finding the right emotional distance to describe what is an intimate relationship. In this work, I have tried to avoid the risks – where possible – by letting my parents tell their own stories.

  This book is about Coral and Les, their writing partnership and literary lives. In my authorial role, I’m looking over their shoulders, observing, narrating. For other parts, I’ve transcribed firsthand accounts faithfully from the faded ink on paper so dry and crackly it almost falls apart at a touch. Every biographer and researcher knows that primary sources are gold. And, given that both my mother and my father were highly accomplished wordsmiths, it would be presumptuous of me to assume I could relate their experiences better than they could themselves, particularly the earlier parts of their lives that I did not share.

  So their story is told – not by one writer or even two – but by three of us.

  2

  Genes Worth Having

  Coralie Clarke and Leslie Rees had very different childhoods. Leslie’s was such that he couldn’t bring himself to speak or write about it till nearly the end of his life. Coralie, on the other hand, needed no encouragement to reminisce about hers.

  The Clarkes were a large, riotous, expressive family who lived in a sprawling Federation home in the suburb of Mt Hawthorn, its wide verandahs overlooking the dusty paddocks towards the small city of Perth. Sylvia and Guildford Clarke (known to their irreverent brood as Syl and Gil) produced six children. Coralie was the first born, arriving an embarrassingly short time after their marriage in 1908. She used to say that position in the family makes a significant difference to one’s experience of growing up, no doubt because in her childhood ‘there was always a baby crying somewhere’. But she was not complaining. The family had great fun together.

  It was before television was in every home, even before radio. Words were their currency, music filled the air, laughter shook the walls. Gil sang in a rich baritone, Syl played, and on Sunday nights they would gather about the piano for a singsong, or play pencil and paper games round the kitchen table. There were weekend picnics up in the hills, first in a sulky pulled by ‘that reluctant nag’ Sparkles, then, as the family grew, in a motorbike with an enormous sidecar, four of them crammed inside. When that became overcrowded, they moved to a Model T Ford with a canvas waterbag hanging off the front bumper bar.

  The Clarkes adored nicknames, the more cryptic the better. The youngest sister, Roma, was known as Chas (originating from Charlie Pushcart). When they were older the children called their father Bass (short for Bassendean, the Perth train station before Guildford, his real name). I never heard the derivation of my mother’s nickname. Fancy reducing Coralie to Codge! Nor did I hear why two of Sylvia’s sisters, Helen and Rose, were called Toss and Rid. Cousin Beryl bore the unfortunate moniker of Bedge, while another cousin, Margaret, was forever known as Pidgee.

  As they grew up, all the Clarke children developed into engaging and eloquent speakers,
writers and raconteurs, oozing wit, wordplay and the family hallmark: sardonic humour, preferably self-deprecating.

  This was not surprising as Sylvia, their mother, relished language and was a hive of colourful expressions, rhyming slang, acronyms and hyperbole. An uncommon event was ‘rare as Halley’s Comet’, an angry person had ‘thin lips’, a person of inner strength was ‘SUV’ (steel under velvet), and an old person had ‘one foot in the grave and the other on a banana skin’. People of dubious intent ‘worked underground like the white ants’. Forthright characters were ‘OPs’ (outstanding personalities). A persistent admirer of one of Sylvia’s daughters was dubbed ‘Ubiquitous’. In her senior years, Sylvia’s financial mantra was ‘POPs NTC’ (‘poor old pensioners never touch capital’) – advice she obviously self-administered as she left each of her seven grandchildren a tidy sum, in my case enough for half the price of a grand piano.

  Sylvia Clarke was the only one of my grandparents with whom I enjoyed a relationship (the other three were dead by the time I was nine) and she was a significant influence in my life. In 1959 I travelled overland to Perth in the first Pioneer coach to cross the Nullarbor Plain, the road a seemingly endless narrow track in the red dust. My grandmother, by then widowed, had invited me to stay for a couple of months in the family home, where my mother and her siblings had all grown up. The long holidays after my second year of university provided this opportunity and my parents obviously thought it was time for me to travel across the continent on my own, meeting various far-flung relatives along the way.

  During my time in Perth, not only did Nan have me laughing at her rich language and dynamic phrases but she passed on her accrued wisdom. She taught me her favourite song with its important message: The world belongs to everyone; the best things in life are free. She explained to me the art that had helped her through a long and at times gruelling life: live one day at a time and practise gratitude (advice that pop psychology seems to have just discovered).

  An attack of rheumatoid arthritis in her twenties crippled her hands, feet and spine, but Sylvia lived to ninety-eight. By the end of her life she had buried all six of her children. My father said he had only ever heard of two women who had suffered grief to that degree. One was Elizabeth Cook, long-suffering wife of Captain James Cook, the explorer. The other was Sylvia Clarke.

  Sylvia’s sense of humour was all the more miraculous because her life was a journey of epic loss. Her youngest, Max, was killed in a flying accident in World War II; her partner, Gil, fell dead into the arms of his son when playing a bowls tournament at the age of sixty. Her four daughters, Coralie and her sisters, Marjorie, Jess and Roma, all died of illnesses in middle age and within one decade. Her remaining son, Ron, died not long after she moved into his home as a ninety-year-old. She was no doubt grateful for the sterling daughter-in-law who continued to care for her in her last years.

  Coralie used to say that Nan would have made a great journalist. She had the facility with words and she had the genes; her father was editor of Perth’s Sunday Times. Before moving to Western Australia, he had been a senior editor on Melbourne’s daily The Argus.

  There were two striking differences between my parents’ formative years. One was position in the family. Coralie, as the eldest of six, blazed the trail for her siblings: she was the first to gain entry to Perth’s only selective high school, the first to attend university, the first to travel out of the country, and the first to marry and have children. Leslie (his full name was George Leslie Clarence Rees) was the youngest of six and came as a surprise package after a brief reconciliation between his estranged parents, when his mother had probably thought four sons and one daughter was quite enough, especially as she had to raise them singlehandedly.

  Leslie once referred to himself as ‘an islanded boy’, but he also told me he never missed having a father as he had four older brothers. He said little to us about his childhood but one story revealed important clues. He was about sixteen when told by an elder brother that his father was dead. He said he felt nothing but ‘the greatest, the profoundest relief’. Then he added, ‘He wasn’t much of a father, but his genes are worth having.’

  Leslie’s father, John Henry, known as Harry, was a trained teacher and a gifted musician. Apparently he also had a Celtic facility with words. Harry’s parents, Mary Loveluck and John Davis Rees, had also been teachers, one headmistress of a girls’ school, the other headmaster of a boys’ school. They migrated to Tasmania from Wales, bringing with them only a heavy family Bible (which I have inherited – it is inscribed in immaculate copperplate, Mary Loveluck, October 1860) and a little pouch of gold sovereigns donated by the grateful people of Merthyr Tydfil. Obviously competent and self-motivated, on arrival in Lebrina they set up a school and an Anglican church, as well as an apple orchard on the property they named Resica – home of the Reeses.

  Like his forebears, my father was a born teacher, so much so that I credit him with a significant part of my education, despite having had the benefit of two excellent public schools and four universities. He passed on his own intellectual curiosities and passions in a way that was both enlightening and memorable. Perhaps that is why the occasional critic has suggested a strain of didacticism runs through his works for children.

  The other striking difference between the Clarke and Rees families was material comfort and stability. Coralie readily acknowledged her true good fortune to grow up with committed parents who delighted in their children and supplied an abundance of nutritious food, educational opportunities, music and laughter. Though not prosperous, Guildford (his mother was German, his father Australian-born of English derivation), diligently provided for his family. Trained as an accountant, he once stood for Federal Parliament. The Clarkes enjoyed the pleasures of a comfortable home and a large garden, with pets and the usual chooks up in the back corner. By the time Coralie was at university, her father had a car and had taught his eldest daughter to drive it, both rarities in the 1920s.

  This secure background, along with Coralie’s looks and academic brilliance, no doubt contributed to her resounding self-confidence as a young woman. She thought – she knew – the world was her oyster.

  Leslie, on the other hand, grew up in a rented workaday brick cottage only a few kilometres away in the suburb of Subiaco. He gave this grim picture of the area (now a ritzy inner suburb) in his autobiography:

  Outer Perth was then raw and rough-roaded, with new collections of dwellings facing up to a blistering sun (and only ‘Coolgardie safes’ to keep the butter from melting) or driving winter rains, and spreading its tentacles over low-level woodlands of small jarrah, banksia, grasstrees and ground-hugging zamia palms. And everywhere sand – paddocks of grey sand, bright chrome yellow sand to cover buffalo lawns, sugar white sand dunes by the sea.

  Mary Elizabeth Rees, my paternal grandmother (she met me when I was a baby but I never really knew her) was clearly a strong and dignified woman who was determined to give her family the best, even though there was little available to give. She nursed tender feelings for her husband, but his drinking and violence destroyed whatever chance of happiness they might have had together. Her children, including young Leslie, had not the slightest affection or respect for their father, who had been sacked by education departments in three states. He terrified them all when drunk and brought shame upon the family.

  It was not till his late seventies that Leslie published this graphic account of one of the more terrifying moments of his childhood. He was about eleven and home alone one night:

  Suddenly I woke to the sound of a hoarse voice – his voice, dreaded above all things – outside the window and assuring the neighbour in a thick tone that ‘it was all right’, he knew what he was doing. The next moment, in the silence of the dark night, there was a horrendous crash, unbelievably close, glass splintering and shrieking and whirling to the floor beside me. Wrenched from sleep I could nevertheless guess in a flash what had
happened. ‘The Old’, having tried all the doors and windows and raging mad, had decided on directest action. He had seized a brick and crashed it through the window, so as to be able to handle the lock inside.

  I lay like a corpse on my bed. I could not move a muscle. I felt myself a tiny child, helpless. I was certain I was going to be murdered. Had I been able to drag myself from the bed, I could have opened the locked front door of the house and disappeared into the night. But I could not move an inch and just waited for the end.

  The window pushed up, my visitor had no trouble in jumping into the room and crunching over the broken glass towards the light switch. The electric globe flared and he pulled me from my bed.

  ‘Where are the others?’ The words were threatening.

  When I could find voice, I choked out, ‘I don’t know.’

  To his credit he didn’t try to murder me. Instead he rushed me to the kitchen. Apparently he was ill. From the pantry he demanded a bottle of medicine which he said had been prepared for him. I found it. He stared at the instructions without spectacles but couldn’t read them. Neither in my terror could I. He ordered me to take the bottle into the house of the neighbours on the other side and find out what the instructions were. Coming into the street, in my pyjamas, I took a quick gape up and down the two lines of front fences and will never forget the spectacle of people in their pyjamas standing there, peering my way and wondering what in hell that almighty crash of glass had been about.

  The neighbours, a middle-aged man and his wife, were waiting tremulously on their verandah. I showed them the bottle and they told me what it said. Here was my second chance to escape but some mesmeric force pulled me back. I told my father what was on the label: Take one teaspoonful. He grunted with contempt, raised the eight-ounce bottle to his lips and impulsively drank half of it. He put the corked bottle into his coat pocket and left the house by the open front door. He had not uttered another word.