A Paper Inheritance

by Dymphna Stella Rees

  Mary lived with her daughter, Averil, and granddaughter Ailsa at 39 Elizabeth Street, South Perth, a comfortable Californian bungalow made available to them under some suitably vague long-term arrangement, courtesy of Averil’s admirer, a well-heeled gentleman with his own wife and family.

  So Les was back home, basking in the glow of reunion with friends and family and soaking up the autumnal sunshine. But he was concerned that Coral might not be realistic about what she had taken on. Their sea journey did not live up to expectations. Four weeks in a shabby cabin of what they called The Mortifying Bay was not the rest they were hoping for. And they found themselves little prepared for Eileen Joyce’s constant moods and ever-present insecurities.

  Once they arrived in Perth, there were dramas for Coral to contend with, thanks to Eileen’s fracas with the Western Australian press, who found she had been a little loose with the truth in overseas interviews. She had lied about her age, but they were more concerned about reports in British papers where she’d made uncharitable statements about her home town and the nuns who had taught her. Her compatriots questioned her on these and made it clear they did not appreciate her embroidery. Then there was Eileen’s outrage at discovering she had signed up to perform three concerts each week – a detail that had escaped her notice when she took the contract months earlier in London. When she agreed to the conditions she had been on the point of collapse from exhaustion.

  Coralie had her own personal disappointments. She found she was required to stay with Eileen in the Adelphi, Perth’s glamorous city hotel, when she had been pining for at least a few days in the cocoon of her loving family. After six years away she was longing to luxuriate in endless talk, relaxed laughter and her mother’s good cooking. Instead she was only allowed one day’s release before the first round of social engagements she was required to attend in her role as Eileen’s ‘secretary’. On their second day on home soil, Loreto Old Girls put on a dinner where president Miss Octavia Grave ‘in exciting cerise and silver matt crêpe, welcomed Eileen, her mother, her two sisters and 90 past pupils’. Other functions of similar magnitude followed.

  However, the Perth concerts were a sell-out, the audience transfixed. A notice in The Bulletin from a local correspondent recorded:

  In Western Australia, Miss Joyce seems to have swept everything before her. She has given four concerts in Perth. At her first recital the platform was hung with black curtains, and the only light in the hall was a lamp in a bell-shaped shade immediately over the keyboard. Miss Joyce came on dressed entirely in white, and, as she is only a little over five feet high and daintily built, the effect was extremely charming. At the second concert in Perth, the young pianist was recalled to the platform 20 times.

  Coralie at once came face to face with the realities of her contract – effectively to be at the performer’s side to fulfil her instant demands for every waking hour. She was required to be at all the recitals as well as the functions and interviews, dealing with the press, soothing Eileen, escorting her to and fro, arranging suitable accommodations and dealing with reviews, reviewers and any other inquiries or unexpected problems. Her most pressing and ever-present task was to make sure there was a piano – not just any piano – available for the diva to continue her schedule of six or seven hours of practice a day.

  After the Perth concerts, the two young women had to contend with the commitments of the ABC’s first national concert tour. On 15 April they set off for Sydney, unprepared for the strenuous months of travel ahead. There were only two options for getting from Perth to Sydney, a distance of almost four thousand kilometres. There was the Trans Australian Railway, actually a series of distinct railway journeys, requiring changes at Kalgoorlie, Port Pirie, Melbourne and Albury over four or five days. Or there was the sea voyage from Fremantle down the west coast and across the Great Australian Bight (rumoured to be rough) to Adelaide and Melbourne, then up the east coast to Sydney. The ABC’s concert schedule did not allow for this longer alternative; in any case, it would not have suited the delicately constitutioned Miss Joyce, who had a tendency towards mal de mer.

  Les had to face the reality of being separated from Coral for up to three months. In their years abroad they had never spent a night apart. He was worried about her, worried too about her luggage, the ‘Five Bob Case’, a cardboard contraption of tenuous durability. The Kalgoorlie Express had barely departed when he penned his first letter to her, standing at a bus stop:

  Wrap the rug around your 5/- case and the strap around both.

  Cheerio, m-darling. Remember that I would be with you if I could and that I shall be with you as soon as humanly possible. Keep faithful and write often. Don’t get panicky but keep cool. You’re all the world to me and I want you back looking just as lovely as you ever were.

  In a few weeks Les would be ready to leave the West himself and head for Sydney. He arranged a passage on the SS Mongolia. Meanwhile, as he had no income and hardly any savings, he was churning out articles for various newspapers and journals. And the reality of Coral’s absence was biting already:

  I have been rushed off my feet since you left – scarcely a moment to sit still – except for the purposes of writing some blasted article. It’s terribly hard work to do any writing in these circs …

  How I am missing your conversation at the moment, dear. This morning I finished The Daily News article on Perth-after-six-years (not until The News had been ringing me around the town for it) and on reading it over, instinctively held out a hand for your assistance. This dependence! I shall be very pleased when we are together again. I trust you are standing up to the racket O.K.

  Since returning to their home town, Les and Coral had been treated as wunderkind who had made their names across the seas. During the last few years, their columns, Coral’s London Woman’s Diary and Les’s London Lights, had been devoured by the locals in Perth’s daily paper, The West Australian. With this reputation came the weight of expectation. Les warned Coral:

  There’s a tremendous responsibility on us two to do some big work in the future, since many people even now think we’re geniuses. Whereas … you know the rest.

  Although he penned daily letters to Coral, Les did not factor in the haphazard nature of the mail service, or on some days the total absence of one. Then he realised that the mail would be travelling by the Trans, too; in fact, his letter would probably be on the same train as Coral so she wouldn’t get it till she reached Sydney – damn!

  Meanwhile Eileen and Coralie were about to arrive in Kalgoorlie, close to Eileen’s family home in Boulder, for a jubilant welcome ceremony. The first leg of the journey had not gone well. They found they were separated from their luggage. The guard nonchalantly informed them: ‘Probably in the luggage van – no chance of getting at it till Kal.’ Then Eileen became bilious and blamed the water on the train. It was provided in a heavy glass carafe perched in a decorative wired cage up near the luggage racks. They watched it jostling between two glass tumblers of questionable cleanliness, the water inside sloshing around rhythmically with the rocking of the carriage. There was no toilet in the cabin, just one men’s room and one ladies’ room at the end of the corridor.

  So the glamorous Eileen had no clean clothes to change into and wondered how she would combine a gastric attack with a very public welcome when the train pulled into her home town. Her mother, who had come to Perth for the reunion, warned her that the goldfields were planning big celebrations. The nuns from St Joseph’s would be there too, the women who first recognised her prodigious musical talent. The idea of cheering crowds, her family and supporters waiting at the station weighed on Eileen’s sick stomach and filled her with dread.

  Then she would need to prepare for her performance at the Kalgoorlie Town Hall, a sumptuous edifice of baroque architecture with a real red carpet. That would also be an august occasion for the Australian Broadcasting Commission, a fledgling institution – the first concert
to be broadcast, even though the radio waves did not carry very far. The Clarke and Rees families would be gluing their ears to the wireless in Perth, a few hundred kilometres to the west.

  Les sent Coral a wistful message:

  I shall be listening to the recital broadcast from Kal. and it will be some small link with you, dear. Pity you can’t seize the microphone for a moment and whisper a message. You only need to whisper.

  Give Eileen a chaste kiss for me. Keep beautiful, love, and please write.

  Two days later he was on his way to Sydney by sea. On board the SS Mongolia he wrote:

  This leaves me in the middle of the Great Australian Bight. I wonder how and where it will find you. The news of you has been so horribly sparse that I find it hard to grip the idea of your being in Sydney at all. But I suppose we must both put up with this business of not hearing from each other, not having time to write letters, missing letters, getting them whether they are stale and so on for some time. Certainly I shall be glad when it is over.

  It has been a good trip – a cabin to myself, food excellent, accommodation luxurious by comparison with the ‘Mortifying Bay’. In this cabin I have lights above bed with switch, bell to ring my steward, chest of drawers, electric fan with switch at bedhead. I am at the Captain’s table, for the officers rarely condescend to eat with the vulgar passengers. The weather has been mostly bright and the sea quite calm. The dreaded Bight is a fiction.

  Now, darling, you will say that this letter is all about me but I have no news from you on which to bite. Nor is this a complaint. I trust also that no he-men Australians have been wanting to run off with you and that, if so, you have stoutly denied them. You know how jealous I am.

  While the ship was wallowing in the Southern Ocean, somewhere between Adelaide and Melbourne, Les found a passage in Hemingway that spoke to him deeply.

  Darling one – Here I lie me down in my bunk and begin to write. (Actually just now the ship is giving some spectacular heaves and rolls. One of these has just smashed a kitchenful of crockery.)

  Each day not only the time but the space between us lessens. I shall be glad to get off the ship tomorrow in Melbourne as it is getting rather dull. Nevertheless it has been a good rest. I have enjoyed a good deal of reading, both of English papers on board and of Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms. The novel has set me thinking a great deal about you, sweetheart. I think the love story is most affecting and beautiful by implication. How it all recaptures for me our slightly wistful but lovely early life in London. The expressed emotion, always given in dialogue, never in the prose, is beautiful. Hemingway should have been a playwright. I imagine his slightly affected simplicity of style, his deliberate naivety takes its cue from Gertrude Stein. […]

  Yesterday we were at Adelaide. I went to lunch at a pub with several other journalists. I offered the Chief of Staff my carbon copy of ‘Tension in the Mediterranean’ (The Daily News) and he may take it.

  Love to self and a little to Eileen

  Meanwhile the concert party – Eileen with ABC Concerts Manager Leon White and Coralie – had arrived in Sydney. Coral set herself up at the Commodore, a guest house in Kings Cross. She made it clear she was disappointed in her husband’s epistolary performance:

  Well, of all the husbands! and of all the wives!

  to start a love letter by nagging. But, darling, I haven’t yet got over the disappointment of receiving only a brief rushed postcard by today’s mail. You forgot my letter! And if you only knew how I was longing for it! […]

  Darling, now that I know you’re coming over to Sydney, I positively can’t wait until you get here. Can’t. Well just. Funny thing, but if I knew I was not going to see you and feel you for six months, I’d feel calm and resigned; but now that it’s so much closer I could stamp my feet and scream. Come quickly; because I’m fit as a fiddle and ready … etc. Actually more ready than fit, so all the more reason why you should hurry. Get out and swim behind the boat and push it faster.

  You said ‘love to self and any that’s left over to Eileen’! Well, there’s none left over. So – Vitabrits!

  Coral had sniffed out a possible job for Les on The Sydney Morning Herald. She tried to tone down his expectations:

  It’s not first class so I hope you haven’t been building too much on it or telling people about it in large capitals. You’ll be second fiddle to the existing critic and knowing your temperament, I doubt whether you’ll like that. He will naturally pick the plum shows in art, drama and films and leave you the rest. You won’t have your name in The Herald, but you’ll be able to write your best stuff. He murmured something about casual rates for a start, while you’re on trial and then a permanency at about £8 a week.

  The day after Eileen, Leon and Coralie arrived in Sydney, Eileen was ready for a flurry of interviews. At noon she was in the ballroom of the Wentworth Hotel, posing upon the grand piano for the reporter and cameraman from The Wireless Weekly. The meeting was published as ‘An interview with the real Eileen Joyce’:

  We observed the reason for the flowing dresses Miss Joyce wears in concerts; in her ordinary dresses she is as lithe as a tuning fork, not thin, but really well-developed, and, sitting at the piano, gives the impression of being a very special machine contrived for piano playing, compact of nervous and muscular energy […] You can’t be a nice little girl and a great pianist. She’s an artist; you can see it in her face; she has thin features and thin arms, all freckled. She had little make-up, except blue stuff under and over her eyes, probably for the benefit of the cameraman; and she talks nervously and impulsively and no-nonsense.

  The reporter asked if she was travelling alone.

  ‘I went away alone; but have come out with Coralie Clark-Rees [sic] and her husband; Coralie’s a very old friend, and has been my secretary for some time. Always calm; the calmest person I ever met; no matter what goes wrong, Coralie remains calm. Especially when I get temperamental.’

  ‘Do you get temperamental?’

  She smiled. ‘So much happens. We got stuck in the desert near Port Augusta; the engine had consumption, burst one of its tubes. Two and a half hours. No one knew I was on the train coming over; every day I got up at four to practise.’

  ‘Piano on the train?’ the reporter queried.

  ‘Yes. When the passengers heard, they said they wished they’d known.’

  Coralie’s duties apparently extended to getting up with Eileen for the daily practice. In a rose-coloured account, ‘Sidelights on a Memorable Broadcasting Tour’, she records:

  Yawny and blear-eyed, I rose with her and watched the pale fingers of the dawn creep out over the Nullarbor Plain to the accompaniment of a Rachmaninoff concerto.

  Just over a week later, Les arrived in Sydney and moved into Coral’s room at the Commodore. But Coral was not there. She and Eileen had taken the train to Melbourne and then travelled by boat to Hobart. Nonetheless, Les got down to making connections and started work at the Herald. One of his first tasks was to report Hitler’s May Day broadcast. Les, having just come from Europe where the awareness of rising fascism was on everyone’s lips, knew it was critical.

  I sat with pencil poised and heart aflutter for Hitler to begin his May Day broadcast from Berlin. I got most of it down (the translation). There was another chap from The Telegraph writing brilliant shorthand while I struggled with longhand. I felt very inferior until after the broadcast when The Telegraph man confessed that he couldn’t read a word of his shorthand back, so I had to go through it with him. (Incidentally, I picked up a phrase or two from him). Moral: To hell with shorthand. Coming back to the office at 11.30 pm I found myself the man of the moment, all of them waiting on my Hitler hit. It is in the paper today and I hope Hitler will not send over a special envoy to shoot me.

  Les was under the impression he would be hired as a critic on the SMH so it was a painful comedown to find he was required to do news reporti
ng. Eventually he got his chance.

  I find it difficult to impress the Chief of Staff with the fact that I have come 12,000 miles from the hub of the universe, the centre of civilisation, centuries’ core, in order to report church services and RSL beer-gatherings.

  However, I’ve got my first engagement as SMH dramatic critic!

  And, at last, he had the possibility of some income.

  I find that if I am put down to do five and a half days work a week at 35/- a day, that works out at nearly £10 a week, so not bad.

  In Hobart for the concerts, Coral found the town disturbingly quiet.

  I’m writing this in the concert studio of 7ZL Hobart. Eileen is practising on the grand here becos [sic] she got temperamental about the upright we hired for her at the pub. She’s playing some lovely Bach. I find its ringing counterpoint very soothing. It’s 8.15 pm. This must be the fourth time I’ve walked to and from this studio today. But what a prize awaited me. Your letter! I’d been longing for it.

  Life is going smoothly, and much more quietly than hitherto. Almost too quietly. There’s nowhere to make whoopee in this 1-horse village, if and when the mood’s upon one. Hobart would be nice for a rustic holiday – with you – but stultifying to live in. The mentality seems very small town.

  Devilish hard to get a moment to myself, living in the same hotel as Eileen. We haven’t had time to go out much. Eileen sticks at the piano and I’ve had a lot of her letters to write and her Press Book to do. Yesterday afternoon there was a cocktail party for her. Wish we had time for walks and drives and river trips. Goodnight, loved one, sleep well and dream of