Allen & Unwin’s House of Books aims to bring Australia’s cultural and literary heritage to a broad audience by creating affordable print and ebook editions of the nation’s most significant and enduring writers and their work. The fiction, non-fiction, plays and poetry of generations of Australian writers that were published before the advent of ebooks will now be available to new readers, alongside a selection of more recently published books that had fallen out of circulation.
The House of Books is an eloquent collection of Australia’s finest literary achievements.
Kylie Tennant was the author of nine novels, plus short stories, plays, journalism, criticism and biography as well as much writing for children. She is noted for her social realist studies of urban and rural working-class life from the 1930s, that began with Tiburon (1935), and included Foveaux (1939), named after a street in the slums of Surry Hills.
Her working life encompassed such jobs as barmaid, reviewer, church sister and publicist for the ABC. Seeking to be true to the society she observed, she took to the road with itinerant workers in the worst years of the Depression, and went so far as to spend a week in gaol for the sake of research.
Tennant was born in Manly, New South Wales, in 1912 and died in 1988. She was awarded the Order of Australia in 1980.
HOUSE of BOOKS
The autobiography of
This edition published by Allen & Unwin House of Books in 2012
First published by the Macmillan Company of Australia,
Melbourne, in 1986
Copyright © Kylie Tennant 1986
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or 10 per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to Copyright Agency Limited (CAL) under the Act.
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Su Tung-p’o
Families, when a child is born
Want it to be intelligent.
I, through intelligence
Having wrecked my whole life,
Only hope the baby will prove
Ignorant and stupid.
Then he will crown a tranquil life
By becoming a Cabinet Minister.
On the birth of his son: A.D. 1036-1101
Author’s Note
1. The Missing Heir
2. ‘God Sends the Wind’
3. The Infant Phenomenon
4. How to Smash Up a Career
5. The Firebrands
6. GPO Box 2000
7. The Duellist
8. The Glugs of Gosh
9. I Come to Murder Mountain
Appendix: A Bibliography of the Works of Kylie Tennant
Notes on Chapters 1, 3 and 6
Index
The reader is indebted to my cousin Hector McLean for the lack of dates in this book. Hector could always come up with an alternative and was so very exact I decided not to be.
The reader is also indebted to the academic, whose name I have forgotten, who visited us when my husband was dying and went away with the clipping books my brother-in-law John Rodd had kept, dating publications of my novels in England and America by the book reviews. (This, no doubt, is a nemesis for all the belongings of other people I have lost in my time.) It was about six years ago that the PhD writer went off with my records promising to post them back. When I die he may sell them for a nice sum.
‘The older I am the more I dream of my childhood,’ the Parent said just before he died. He was nearly ninety-five. ‘I’m riding out with my father to hunt rabbits. It’s so vivid I can hear the creak of the Old Man’s saddle, as he rides just ahead of me. When we came on any rabbits the first thing he did was to make sure I was safe behind a tree. “Where is Tommy?” “Where are you, my boy?” Of course, by the time he had fussed around making sure I didn’t get shot by accident, the rabbits were long gone.’
Grandfather (T. Hately) Tennant was a doctor. He had begun his career as a Presbyterian missionary to China and decided that what the Chinese needed was not so much spiritual salvation as medicine. He returned to Edinburgh and discarded his Greek and theology for a scalpel. He never went to China but was in America for a time. The Parent will have it that the ‘Old Man’ came out to Australia with Lord Carrington ‘as part of his suite’. He was probably a ship’s doctor in 1870, a refugee from the Glasgow smog. After his marriage he went from Ballina to Tenterfield with a side excursion to Sydney with a weak chest and ended up as medical officer in Hillston. These far-stretching plains provided — for coronal enquiry — many not-so-fresh samples of people who had ‘done a perish’. ‘Body-snatching was very rough in those days,’ a cheerful undertaker once told me when I visited Hay. From one such unsavoury remnant Dr Tennant contracted a septic infection and knew he had only days to live. He betook himself to the barber to have his hair and beard trimmed.
‘I look like an old crow,’ he said disgustedly. ‘It will be a big funeral and I’m not going to have them all peering into my coffin to see me like this.’ It was one of the biggest funerals ever seen in those desolate parts.
But the Parent preferred to remember the Old Man in his glory, a bewhiskered monarch of medicine: ‘He’d drive up to the hospital with me in the carriage and the coachman on the box. He always wore his top hat — he kept his stethoscope in it. And there would be all the hospital staff drawn up on the steps to greet him, from the Matron down.’ This great spectacle impressed the doctor’s son. He felt himself a child of rare promise. When they travelled in Cobb & Co.’s coach he was allowed to hold the reins. ‘Even as a baby,’ he announced, ‘I was a King Baby.’ There is indeed a photograph of the Parent in a lace christening robe looking uncommonly like a small sucking pig.
The boy was told that he was the head of the Tennant Clan in Scotland. After the doctor’s death — and a queer episode in which the coachman Cracky (who had followed his friend the doctor all over the world) got drunk as, I gathered, he often did, and the house burnt down — the widow, her two young daughters and little Tommy beat a retreat to her relatives in Sydney.
She was deaf. She had been deaf since a swimming accident in Middle Harbour, when, as a girl, she nearly lost her life. Her husband had, my aunt told me, taken her to seven doctors but none of them could do anything. It was the Parent’s delusion that she had been a seamstress for a fashion house in Woolloomooloo before her marriage but my aunt said she couldn’t sew very well and hated sewing. It was a pathetic return the widow made to her family’s orange orchard at St Ives. The small boy heard the women wailing: ‘Who will take care of little Tommy?’ and from that time onward little Tommy took very good care of himself.
It was expected that little Tommy would become his uncle’s heir. He remembered the fountain in the garden, and once took me to gaze pathetically through the wrought-iron gates at the ruined house, the weeds, the slimy dry fountain. Instead of bequeathing this domain to his nephew, Uncle Cates married the widow’s housekeeper. This action the family regarded with horror because the housekeeper was — a Catholic. Naturally she renounced this questionable position on her marriage but it was, my aunt said, ‘always held against her’. ‘They hated Catholics. None of them would have anything to do with Maude.’
Part of the Parent’s legend — we will not call it family history — concerned this dark shadow of the Roman Catholic Church. A certain Cardinal Curran in Ireland was supposed to have had two girls, nieces, as wards, and their brother who strangely enough later came to Australia as a cardinal. Their name was Moran. One of the girls became a nun and the other was to follow her into the order. However, a young man, a gardener who wooed Miss Moran by leaving posies of flowers on her windowsill, fell in love with her. Naturally they had to come to Australia because he was a Protestant. ‘I think his name was Scarlett,’ the Parent once said vaguely, ‘but they changed it to Cates.’
In Australia they decided to settle on land beyond what is now Canberra. The delicate Irish girl trudged behind the dray which held her piano and the glass windows for the house they would build on their property at Braidwood.
When I was later writing a book called The Battlers I took a horse and cart over part of the road they must have followed through the gloomy scrub and I reflected on what the thoughts of the Irish girl must have been on that long-ago slow journey.
The young gardener had no sooner established himself on his property than all the convict servants ran away to the goldfields. Their employer thought he would try his luck there too. Leaving his wife and children he set off to make his fortune. ‘He came back with the arse out of his pants,’ the Parent stated. Once back in Sydney the family took up land at St Ives, now a suburb but then only bush. Here Cates became a prosperous orange grower and his wife, whom he called ‘Pinky’ from her Irish complexion, had a carriage with white ponies. ‘He worshipped her,’ my aunt told me. ‘In the evening at five o’clock she came out to walk in the gardens and all the paths had to be swept before she did. There was not a leaf underfoot where she walked.’ The family were brought up to a fear and dread of Catholics. When he was dying the husband of the Cardinal’s ward said at the last: ‘Well, the priest didn’t get me.’
I remember as a child that my father and mother — in all else domestic enemies — were both agreed on the dark cunning of Catholics. Although at one time when N.S. Wales was a penal colony a third of the Australian population was Catholic, from Ireland, the predominance of Protestants continued until possibly World War II. The Labor Party was mistakenly supposed to be, in its origins, influenced by the Catholics. ‘Oh, no, dear,’ my mother would say, ‘They’re frightfully common people.’ In World War I, owing to the troubles in Ireland, Cardinal Mannix and the anti-conscription campaign, there was still extant this feeling, among the middle-class Australians, that the Catholics were up to no good. When I married a man who had meant to be a High Church priest, an Anglo-Catholic, although this was condoned, the idea that I now frequented a church which had incense, confessions and stations of the cross sent a shiver of superstition through my parents which they handsomely disregarded.
My father did not forget, as a boy, that he was head of the Tennant Clan. Unfortunately, when out picking Christmas bush with his sisters, he fell over a cliff and nearly ended his life. The little girls had to run a long distance for help.
He had the most expert doctors of the time. ‘And it was all free,’ the Parent would say sunnily, ‘because I was a doctor’s son.’ He liked anything he didn’t have to pay for.
‘You can’t tell me it doesn’t come against him,’ my mother would say when the Parent was in full foam in one of his rages. ‘He fell on his head.’
Be that as it may, his importance as the centre of concern to his mother and sisters, to Aunt Grace, a stewardess on the coastal line who lived with them, and her daughter Eddie, was established in his growing years. He was surrounded by worshipping women. He expected it. Was he not the Heir, the bearer of the Tennant name?
This did not prevent him, as a boy and later in life, from exercising his accurate memory for detail (alas that I did not inherit it! I need to write everything down in a notebook). And I will insert at this point some reminiscences of the Parent’s boyhood so that you can know the tone of his talk: he could speculate on some meaningless trifle and build it up into significance — for him. As a child I found this habit very boring. He would drag us out in the rain to search for Aboriginal carvings on a rock. He knew when mushrooms would be pushing up on the golf links and insist on going to look for them. He taught us to eat wild currants (very sour) and would, later, stop the car and prowl through graveyards. ‘That’s a very old stone,’ he would say solemnly. ‘That is the year I was born.’ It was 1884 and hideous. He was firmly rooted in the past, his past, in his legend, which was not mine.
‘I’m telling you this, my father would say, ‘because Fred Smith was my cousin.’ (My father believed that it branded his tales as true if he could say he was related to one of those in it.) ‘At least, Fred Smith and I had the same aunt — Aunt Emily Sandy.
‘The Sandys built the big house, Verata, on the Cowan Creek Road — Norfolk Island pines, ballrooms, fountains. I roller-skated in the ballroom. They lived like the plutocrats of old. My grandfather had bought practically the whole of St Ives for a pound an acre. He grew flowers, acres of violets; and that’s how my father met my mother, because the young men from the city would ride into the country at the weekend along the bush roads through the orchards. Now, at weekends, you can see swarms of cars going out bumper to bumper along the North Shore track that they took.
‘It was all orange orchards around Chatswood. In the early days, the convict timber-getters cut immense trees on the ridges of North Shore, and the timber mills on the Lane Cove River would turn out weatherboard for houses and slabs and shingles for roofs. They were a tough crowd — in with all the bushrangers. But then there were only enormous stumps; and respectability set in.
‘The only convict I knew when I was a boy was a splendid old chap. He said he had been sent out for dressing up as a woman and going to a show for a lark. His family are all doctors and professionals today.
‘Jenkins had a huge orchard and ran the steamer Nellie, which took the fruit and vegetables down the Lane Cove River, calling in for cornflower from Clifford Love’s mill. When I was a boy we used to fish off the wharf. The big flathead appreciated the pollution from the flour mills and the prawns liked the mucky mud. I was washing my feet one day on the Nellie’s wharf when I saw the engineer from the flour mill jumping about on the high ground and waving his arms. He could see this monster shark only feet away from me. As I threw myself back, the wash from the shark went all over me. That shark killed a young fellow swimming there two days later.
‘The district was isolated, but it was being opened up. About that time Verata was cut up into scores of little farms. The Sandys had made a lot of money importing bananas from Fiji. They used to ripen them in a honeycomb of tunnels under the old Queen Victoria markets. Turn them yellow with little gas jets.
‘Willoughby was the big centre for the North Shore, but the roads were being put through as the big Chatswood estate was opened up. Anyone who couldn’t get a job would be stone-breaking for the roads. You’d get a bag and sit on it with two or three little hammers and make heaps of rocks all the same size. You were paid by the yard.
‘We had to walk four or five miles to school at Chatswood, and would wait for Anthony Hordern’s van to hang on underneath. But the place was too far out for most people. They had to drive to Milson’s Point to the passenger ferry — sometimes they raced each other — and a vehicular ferry there took them across. Old Blind Freddy sat on the wharf for years with his concertina, and when he heard the ferry coming he’d start up. You’ve heard people say, “Even Blind Freddy could see that”? It was a favourite saying of Ben Chifley in Parliament, when I knew him.
‘Tell you how isolated it was at Chatswood — a friend of my uncle’s in the city could read his paper in the morning, fold it up, address it neatly and put it in the post. Uncle would be reading it that evening. At Roseville, there was Archibald’s, Pymble’s orchards at Pymble, my grandfather, Cates, and the Sandys at St Ives.
‘Well, Fred Smith, my cousin at the time the Boer War broke out, was a tall, gangling cove. He was eighteen and couldn’t get a job so he enlisted. He was in the Australian Bushmen, and you had to be able to ride with those feathers in your hat. It was only the second military contingent ever to leave Australia. My uncle was in the first one to the Sudan. He was in the camel corps, and they rode two to a camel. The cove hanging on behind him was killed by a dirty big spear. They were Dervishes in those parts, followers of the Mad Mahdi. Our men and the camels would be chasing the Dervishes, then they would camp for the night, and in the morning when they set off they would find that the Dervishes had sneaked round behind them and were creeping up, spearing them from the rear.
‘Anyway, when the Boer War broke out and Fred Smith enlisted, you wouldn’t believe the money that was collected for widows and orphans of those who went from our district. I was in the Chatswood School Cadet Corps and we were all out begging, “Please give a penny, sir, for the soldiers’ orphans.” We had a verse to recite.
‘And when it was all over there weren’t any widows or orphans. Fred was the only one killed. He was shot at Bloemfontein, and he hadn’t any time to provide any widows and orphans. He was only eighteen. I think there was another chap died of fever later. What were they to do with all that money? There was only one name on the war memorial fountain when they put it up — F.V. Smith.
‘It was down at the end of the Chinamen’s gardens, where there was a big dam we used to go swimming in. It was pretty filthy but we didn’t care. Then the Chinamen’s gardens were made into playing fields, and the war memorial fountain was dismantled and lay for years behind the lavatories at the back of the grandstand. Later, a rose-garden was made up near the railway station and this drinking fountain was taken there and put together again. On Anzac Days they used to go there to hang wreaths and hold memorial services.
‘It’s no use you trying to check on me because what with the one-way streets and the big shopping centres, there’s not a place to park your car. But if you do you’ll see the name: F.V. Smith, Killed at Bloemfontein. Never did know what the V stood for. I am telling you this,’ my father would say wistfully, ‘because nobody would remember who F.V. Smith was. He was Fred, my cousin.’
When the Parent was seventeen he had a truly magical moment. The Tennant family in England advertised for Thomas Walter and sent his aunt Elizabeth to Australia to look for him. By this time he was an office boy in the firm of Lysaght, importing steel from England. He was to go to England and become a cadet in the family business. His mother, an austere lady of frugal habits, wanted to know how much he would be paid. His allowance would be about twenty pounds a year. He was earning fifteen shillings a week at Lysaght’s. Of this his mother allowed him five shillings and saved the rest for him. She thought poorly of sending the Missing Heir away from home. ‘Until he is twenty-one,’ she declared, ‘he is my son and he stays here. After that he can do as he likes.’ She refused to let him go to the splendour that awaited him. Whenever the Parent spoke of Sir Charles Tennant, the head of the firm, that being sounded like God the Father in gold clouds in a stained-glass window. The redoubtable Sir Charles, who had left smoggy Glasgow to become an international financier, was not lacking in offspring. He had sixteen children from two wives.
‘Of course, when I was twenty-one,’ the Parent would say wistfully, ‘I married. So I never did get to be Sir Thomas. Ernest took over the place I should have had and became Sir Ernest.’ Women again — spoiling a man’s prospects! (Actually he married at twenty-three.)
When I was a child I detested the Tennant family. The Parent’s pompous references to his cousin Margot, who had married Prime Minister Asquith, his side glances at Lord Glenconner and so forth sickened me. I became a terrible little anti-snob and decided to join the Communist Party when I grew up, having heard the Parent speak of the Communist Party.
As a handsome young man living in Artarmon where his mother had a roomy house of ugly brick — she also owned two houses in nearby Chatswood — the Parent was set to follow his father into the Presbyterian ministry. He became a lay preacher. However, he told my husband, he was seduced, in a hammock, by the lady organist. This made him lose faith in the Presbyterian Church. He should have been warned against lady organists because my mother was one.
He also had dreams of military glory when World War I broke out. Had not his father, Dr Tennant, formed a regiment at Tenterfield which was, according to the Parent, known as Tennant’s Own? On one occasion this regiment of horse was to be reviewed by some notable — the Parent said it was the Duke of Edinburgh. To present a more uniform appearance it was decided to dye the horses brown. One can imagine that this may have been some ploy of the shadowy Cracky the Coachman. The horses were dyed with Condy’s crystals, but it came on to rain and they all turned green. I can imagine the vast laughter of the local horsemen as they spoke of Tennant’s Own.
I still have my grandfather’s cavalry sword — a heavy long blade, a metal scabbard, a twisted metal hand protector. I don’t quite know how I came by it but my mother was in the habit of foisting anything she didn’t want on me. She certainly wouldn’t have wanted the sword around the house. Nevertheless, my father had a photograph of himself as a handsome cadet in the cadet corps of Shore where he won the King’s Medal for marksmanship. Yes, the World War must have offered opportunities. I was two years old in 1914 and my sister a small baby — that would not have held him back. But he contracted appendicitis — or peritonitis — and lay in hospital with a large jagged wound across his stomach while other men were enjoying that masculine mateship of muck and danger. He lay at death’s door once again without firing a shot.
I remember visiting him in hospital when my sister was a baby. He was, of course, the life and soul of the ward, making friends, learning the life history of every one of his ward mates. Limping out of hospital he attained importance in the collecting of funds for the troops in an organisation known as the War Chest. He mingled with the great, leaving my mother in a pokey terrace house with two tiny daughters, while he attended functions and banquets.
I remember being taken to see lines of khaki-clad soldiers marched down Macquarie Street to the troopships. Some kind of road repairs were going on and we stood on the edge of a ditch of yellow clay as though it were an open grave. The nurses in their white uniforms passed, the men in khaki went by with a squeak of leather boots, a pounding of a huge drum that filled my heart with terror. There were cheers but below the cheers, the blare of the bands, I felt a terrible silence with the ominous drum thudding over all. I hated the procession — I hate all processions because they are a false showing, changing individual worth to a fused blind clamouring of power. I always weep at processions and circuses — the circuses because little children are being asked to applaud the cruelly trained animals and the stupidities of clowns. They are trained to think circuses — the remnants of the old arenas — wonderful.
My father was in his element. Recovering from his stitches he even took us for a holiday to Stanmore Park, a beach on the South Coast where my parents spent their honeymoon. There on the verandah of the boarding house, an officer in uniform, who was trying to flirt with my pretty mother, picked me up and teased me. I screamed at him. To me he represented all that masculine arrogance which later made me a pacifist. The World War I period had an hysteria of a hateful falsity that a child could sense. But, as I said, in the fund-raising festivities my father shone.
My distaste for masculine violence spread to a wider social field when as a half-grown girl I made the acquaintance of a certain Major Jacobs who lived next to my grandmother Tennant at Artarmon.
‘You ought to go and have a yarn with Jacobs,’ the Parent advised, ‘Went all through the Gallipoli campaign. I think he’s a bit cracked about it. Never stops talking.’ On one of the family’s rare visits to Grandma Tennant I was reaching for one of the half-wild lemons with thick skins which grew along her fence when I made the acquaintance of the famous major. I mentioned politely that my father told me he had fought at Gallipoli. I was invited through the crack in the fence and the major — a thin dark man — brought out album after album of scenes in the trenches and launched out on a description of what had happened from the landing on the beach until the survivors were evacuated. I hope those albums are now somewhere in the War Memorial at Canberra and that no busy relative loaded them on to a bonfire. I listened to the major for several hours — until, in fact, my mother, with her sweetest falsest smile came peering at the fence to ask whether I shouldn’t come inside as the major must be very tired of talking to me. The major relinquished me — wistfully. He would seldom have found a better listener. I should, when I grew older, have gone back to take notes but by that time the major had died.
To say that he made an impression would be an understatement. He was recounting the period of life when he had lived at peak but to a stern-faced little girl his narrative reinforced my lurking suspicion that there was something very wrong with the society into which I was born. I resolved that I would not only never do anything to assist any war effort whatever but I would do everything within my weak power to oppose, resist, defeat, thwart, any of the glory boys, the diplomats, the rich, the army heads who sent men to become lumps of mud and blood in some far corner of the world. I knew about the splendid horses sent to Flanders because the old men still thought World War I would be won by cavalry charges. The horses died of pneumonia and poor feeding, standing in the rain behind the front lines. The Australians who went with them and loved those horses also died of pneumonia — some of them — waiting hour after hour and day after day in the lashing downpour while officers conferred about more important matters.
The Turks and the Australians at Gallipoli had no particular quarrel but they killed each other on orders from England in the biggest fiasco of a long line of military fiascos. And in Australia on Anzac Day people marched with bands to war memorials to celebrate a hopeless defeat. It didn’t make sense. Many years later when I was on some panel on the radio I was asked: ‘What are your views on Anzac Day?’ ‘It is on a level with the Japanese shinto — the worship of the ancestors —’ I responded. ‘It should be abolished.’ Naturally, I was never again asked to speak on that program.
‘Lord Glenconner,’ a friend of mine once mused. ‘If they were out here they’d be the Conners of Conners Gully. A glen is a kind of gully.’
The Tennant Clan, the Glenconners, were the curse of my childhood: rich, aristocratic, owning a castle and various mansions, they led the Parent to contrast his own circumstances of suburban anonymity in a second-class country on the backside of the world. ‘You have to have influence,’ he would repeat. ‘If you don’t know the score where are you?’ Underneath this not unusual layer of discontent he was an average Australian with the Australian’s naive generosity, curiosity and interest in everything whether it concerned him or not. He had a capacity for enjoyment and good fellowship; he made friends easily and busied himself with his friends’ affairs. He had an extraordinary charm when he cared to exercise it. If there was a scheme for money-making, however fantastic, he was into it. He had money in shares. At one time he even owned the fourth part of a race horse but it never won when the owners were told it would. ‘My leg must have been the one that wasn’t running,’ the Parent said.
‘I wish I had all the money your father has sunk in gold mines,’ my mother would say. ‘And inventions.’
‘What is the use in being the only black steel expert,’ he demanded of heaven, ‘when there isn’t a rival company to sell out to?’
When I was working as a reader for Macmillan in the early 1970s, they published a book called Tennant’s Stalk. Two copies of this interesting work reached Australia and I bought both of them, giving one to the Parent and the other to my favourite aunt Emily, his sister. I read the Parent’s copy and exclaimed joyfully: ‘Parent, I have news for you. We are descended from a long line of bastards!’ The Parent, who had suffered for years from my evil sense of humour, merely grunted dubiously.
The Tennants had, for centuries, existed in circumstances of extreme poverty, hardship, mud and Scottish mist in the wilds of Ayrshire on an obscure oat patch. One ancestress was the last witch burnt in Scotland. The stroke of fortune which raised the Tennants to the first step of the social ladder was when an adventurer, returned from India, bought a Scottish lordship and married the maid from the Tennant farm. When she became a widow she called on her old friend Glenconner to become her factor and run her affairs. His sons went to school and it must have been an interesting school. A neighbour’s son, Robert Burns, was a fellow pupil. The teacher seems to have been a young radical at a time — remember the French Revolution? — when radical ideas were tantamount to treason and the smouldering resentment of the Scots against the English rulers inclined them to their centuries-old accord with the French.
As soon as the church elders found out about their brilliant young school master’s radical ideas, they threw him out, but not before he had infected the Tennant boys and Robert Burns with his own radicalism. One of the Tennant boys, Willie the weaver, set up as a linen bleacher and made a fortune out of the chemical process which replaced the old idea of simply spreading the flax on the grass. The Tennants of Willie’s generation — and later — built a huge chemical works with the proud high chimney in Glasgow and poisoned the air for ten miles around. Today they would have had environmentalists picketing them but in those days the slums for the workers coughing out their lungs in the polluted air were taken for granted. This was progress. The head of the firm refused a knighthood more than once. They had this queer streak of despising English or Scottish conformity. The Parent’s great-grandfather was one of three generations of Tennants who marched at the head of the procession in 1832 to protest in favour of the Reform Bill. As a boy the later financier and millionaire Charles Tennant was marching in that procession with his relatives. The Parent’s grandfather, William, set up house with a pretty girl — naturally of low degree — by whom he had six children. Although he was the head of the firm his family never spoke to him again. He didn’t seem to mind.
An anecdote in this invaluable Tennant’s Stalk recalls how a friend bet five pounds William couldn’t say the Lord’s Prayer.
‘The Lord is my shepherd,’ he began, ‘I shall not want.’ The friend handed over the five pounds. ‘I would hae sworn ye couldnae recall it,’ he said ruefully.
His son Charles left Glasgow for London and by audacity and energy built up a financial empire. You could see the craggy Glenconner features gradually softening into Englishry as the Tennants intermarried with the southerners. Sir Charles became Lord Glenconner and produced in all sixteen children by two wives. They always remained Liberals and supporters of their friend Mr Gladstone; they were cursed by tuberculosis and the girls were considered very daring, particularly that Margot Asquith whom the Parent claimed as a cousin.
There came into the Parent’s possession a handwritten book of poems by that ancestor who had been a friend of Robert Burns. When he went off to England later he took this manuscript book with him and presented it to Sir Ernest who had written a book of his own. It was joyfully received and destroyed later in the Blitz. In all the Parent made three or four visits to England and on his last he didn’t even trouble to look the Tennants up. On one of these jaunts he was entertained at their house at Ugley where a female cousin of splendid manners was told off to entertain him and it was possible to lose an Australian in some far suite. Luckily for the Tennants business called the Parent away. Not so a friend of his who later camped in the Ugley mansion for months. They probably said: ‘Who’s that feller in the haunted wing?’
‘Don’t know. Some friend of Tommy’s who came with an introduction. You remember Tommy. Entertaining feller. But like all Australians…’ (commiserating glances).
‘Well, when’s this bird leaving?’
‘Dunno, haven’t liked to ask him.’
The Parent told this story gleefully. ‘Don’t know how he ever got away,’ he said. ‘They were so polite and he couldn’t just sneak out. He didn’t know how to go and they didn’t know how to kick him out.’ The Parent enjoyed this.
Another of his stories concerned the round of entertainments to which he was invited among the noble and great. On this particular occasion he was drinking hearty and Sir Somebody asked him what was the difference between Lysaghts Blue Orb and Red Orb which the Parent had developed. In many Australian country towns there are dusty stretches of grass surrounded by corrugated iron fences as sportsfields. One brand was softer than the other. The Parent greatly enjoyed going out and selling this iron. He explained at the banquet in England that one of its uses was for fences. And in country towns one of the uses of fences was for sexual intercourse. ‘If you have Blue Orb the iron is imprinted on the girl but with the Red Orb the girl is imprinted on the iron.’ There was an icy silence. And then Sir Somebody broke out into a roar of applauding laughter. The rest of the company then felt free to laugh also. These Australians — never know what they’ll come out with! The Parent didn’t care. He had quite got over his earlier humility. He had a great success being an Australian and not bothering to be anything else. He rather overplayed it — hammed the part.
The elderly nobleman who headed the firm of Lysaght came out to Australia, throwing the head office into a flurry at a time when the Parent was preparing to go down to Canberra to negotiate a change in import duties that would save the firm some millions — that was if the new machinery for the rolling mills at Woolongong could come in under Schedule B instead of Clause 42A. He usually arrived in Canberra with a case of whisky under his arm. Chifley, the Prime Minister of the time, had a wry affection for the Parent and called him ‘Sir Thomas’. ‘I used to put on his racing bets for him,’ the Parent stated.
The men in Lysaghts head office in Sydney were drawn up much in the way that the hospital staff had drawn up for old Dr Tennant when the Parent was a boy.
‘Where is Tom Tennant?’ the old man enquired. There was an immediate rush to find out the Parent’s whereabouts and report that he had left for Canberra.
‘Did you want to see him about something important?’ they asked anxiously. The Parent had refused promotion so often that now he did exactly as he pleased.
‘No,’ the old man said wistfully. ‘He always used to meet me at the ship. First he was the office boy, then he was custom’s clerk — of course that was many years ago. But he always met me. I miss him, you see.’
I asked the Parent — when he was ninety-three — what kind of a child I had been. He considered this cautiously.
‘You were a quiet child. You didn’t seek affection. Now your little sister Doffie was an affectionate child. A nice soft little thing who liked to be cuddled. I used to nurse her. But you just stood off—quiet.’
This sounded like a politician trying to cover up a mistake of a billion or so in the budget.
‘What! I thought I was a poisonous little screamer with the manners of a meat ant. I was a show-off, clamouring for attention.’ I contradicted him from force of habit. I was a great boaster — I pointed out — a child of inordinate ego. How the Parent and my sainted mother had put up with me I could never understand. I had deserved to be the victim of two outraged child-bashers. Instead I demanded, and received, inordinate admiration.
‘No, you were quiet.’
I had, before she died, asked my mother what kind of a child I was.
‘You were always surprising me, dear. I remember when you were a tiny thing just learning to walk — your sister wasn’t born then — we were staying with my father and mother at Lauderdale and there was a terrible quarrel. Your father said some unforgivable things to your grandma and she said: “Get out of my house.” Well, we had to go. But we didn’t have anywhere to go to. So we set off for Manly.’
My grandfather’s two-storey house overlooked the little bay of Fairlight about a mile from Manly. ‘We took a short cut and sat down on a sandy track. Your father threw himself full length on the ground, muttering furiously. You know what his temper was like. Well, you got up on your little fat legs and tottered away and found a big rock. I don’t know how you carried it. You came back and dumped the rock on his forehead. Very quietly and deliberately.’
The incident came back to me, dimly.
‘Your father yelled and swore.’ He must have thought that it was the last straw to be attacked by an infant daughter.
‘Where did you go?’
‘We went to the Salvation Army and they were very kind to us. Of course we made up the quarrel with your grandmother. But I will never forget how surprised I was when you dropped that huge rock.’
The Parent and I had had some epic battles over the years, and I had won most of them, gradually wearing the poor Parent down. ‘I stand in loco parentis,’ he used to roar when I was young.
‘Loco, maybe,’ I would mutter to myself.
In his last years he would plead: ‘Come down and have a row with me.’ And I would drive the three and a half hours from my farm on Murder Mountain to the bush-enclosed waterway of Patonga Beach where you could step through the Parent’s broken-down front gate on to the sand-dunes. There the lighthouse by Lion Island winked through the night and there was the faint roar of the ceaseless tide. The Parent would sit on the glassed-in front verandah with a pair of binoculars and count the big container ships held up at anchor waiting to go into Sydney wharves. ‘Bloody trade unionists,’ he would yell. ‘There’s always a strike losing this country millions in turnaround.’ Cursing the trade unions and saving money were all the pastimes he had left. I would come down loaded with vegetables, honey, apples from our orchard, my home-made jam.
‘How the hell do you think we’re going to eat all this?’ he would roar, hurrying out tremendously pleased, eager to see what I had brought. He would hoard it away and live on it after I left. I would go down to the store and buy in tins and assorted delicacies he was far too mean to buy himself. I bought fresh lobster or oysters from a resident with whom the Parent was not on good terms. I always paid for the food from the store but then the Parent, after a struggle with himself, told me to put the stuff on his bill. ‘You shouldn’t do it,’ he would wail. When the bill came in it affected his blood pressure. I took no notice. My sister and I treated with contempt his plea that he wanted to leave us money in his will. We had decided he should have all the comforts we could buy him.
‘Anyway,’ I would snarl, ‘you have to stay alive because I can’t afford to have you die and leave me any money. It would muck up my income tax.’ If he was in hospital I would go down and get him out and nurse him for a while. He always got out of hospital too soon and once when I drove him home I was in the middle of having his kitchen painted. It only had one coat. The sooty grime of years had taken the men all their time soaping it off. He noticed the new letter-box. ‘It’s a birthday present,’ I told him. ‘And I suppose this is another birthday present,’ he said, glaring around the kitchen.
So I had to sack the men and moved the furniture back. Also I had to pay for it myself, because it might have taken him back into hospital if he had been asked to pay. We circled around each other cautiously like two jaguars, I reminding myself of the Parent’s extreme age and high blood pressure, and the Parent reminding himself of my extreme bad temper. If my visit ended peaceably we went our separate ways congratulating ourselves on our inordinate restraint.
‘She is a true Tennant,’ he used to say reverently when I was a child. ‘The Tennants are a race apart.’
My mother also respected my sudden bursts of fury. ‘Just like a kitten,’ she said fondly, ‘bounding into the air, bristling and glaring.’ Other people were not so tolerant. They called it a prima donna temperament. My husband joined joyfully in battle and found the throwing of plates something he could do well. He would get in first. ‘Many a time I have put back one of your favourite vases,’ he mused, ‘saying to myself: “No, if I smash that it will take too long to make up.”’
So my father’s statement that I was a quiet child was wishful thinking.
My parents had married far too young. She was eighteen and he just twenty-three. At that time my mother’s father, Frank Tolhurst, had a large house overlooking North Steyne at Manly. He was a prosperous builder, and the house had a tennis court. My uncle had a sailing boat. It was a hospitable house where everyone sang at the piano. Grandpa had a splendid tenor, my aunt Beryl was a contralto, mother sang soprano. They danced, they gave dinners and musical evenings. The Parent was entranced by the pretty blonde elder daughter, Kathie Tolhurst. I have often heard my mother describe life at The Gumtrees on a rocky eminence with the surf rolling below, the magnificent view of the coastal headlands, and outside the gate a stone statue put up where the first kangaroo was killed by Captain Phillip’s men when he landed at Manly. This, in some later flurry of sentimentality, commemorated a murderous beginning that continues to this day.
Anyway, handsome young Thomas Tennant had no more chance than that first kangaroo. At the time he had a secure job with Lysaght’s, he was building up a carrying business for himself with teams of Clydesdales and he owned a block of land, inherited from his father over towards Harbord beyond North Steyne. Although he lived at Artarmon with his mother and two sisters he came down to Harbord with a group of gay young blades to camp and enjoy the surfing at the weekend.
You could rent a cheap weekend cottage at Harbord and the young men clubbed together to find their own freedom. As Don McIntyre, the Parent’s friend, once said: ‘Girls were snatched up and hustled out the back door half way through lunch if anyone like a wife or mother appeared on the horizon.’ The Parent was introduced to the Tolhursts when sailing with his future wife’s brother. He also knew the Farr family who lived in Artarmon. Grandma was a Farr, the eldest of thirteen children. In a later quarrel my father reproached my mother with having snatched him from his fiancée, the youngest of the thirteen Farr children. If the Parent escaped marrying my mother’s Aunt Myra he ought to have thanked her for a merciful salvation. None of the Farrs ever stopped talking. And Aunt Myra could also thank Mother’s wooden-headedness for her escape. My mother looked down from the balcony on to the tennis court and said: ‘That is the man I’m going to marry.’ At the time she was a blonde with curls and a dreamy expression. She had nothing to do but go into the city and buy herself costly raiment or practise her piano. The Parent had a small black moustache waxed at the tips which he later mercifully discarded. He was athletic. He sang baritone, rendering ‘I am the Bandillero’ with verve. He was a passable dancer, wrestler, surfer and tennis-player. What else could you ask of a prospective husband?
There should have been set up some marriage board to test incompatibility. Neither Katherine Tolhurst nor Thomas Walter Tennant would have passed. Alarms should have been sounded in the streets to warn them. Instead the Tolhursts moved happily to their new house — Lauderdale above Fairlight. Grandpa Tolhurst built his daughter a house called Narbethong on the rise of land behind Lauderdale. Orange blossoms, my red-headed young aunt Beryl as bridesmaid, white satin, costly wedding presents of silver and china, a three-tiered iced cake with a sailing skiff on the top and the motto: ‘God sends the wind to fill the sails’, which Tom Tennant claimed was his family crest, all these signalised a wedding that should never have taken place. My mother treasured the little silver-painted skiff from her wedding cake for many years when the lustre had worn off everything else.
It looked, then, as though the future was set fair for them. After a year the Parent was brooding. Why had his wife not produced a son? Did she not realise it was her duty to carry on the Tennant name? This naturally aroused resentment in an idealistic young girl who had looked forward to a romantic and continuing dream; the Parent being expected to equal that deference, courtesy and affection with which Grandpa Tolhurst treated his womenfolk.
She was just twenty when I was born. A daughter! What the hell use was a daughter? Where was his son? The heir? He lamented dramatically and went on lamenting. Two years later she bore my sister Dorothy. By this time my mother’s attitude to her husband was tinged by disillusion. My sister was adorable, cuddly, with a blue mark on her lip which caused anxiety. Not even the Parent could resist her. He enjoyed his second daughter, petted her. but did not cease his vocal dramatics, telling everyone of his great tragedy. He had grown up with a widowed mother and two sisters. Now he had a wife and two daughters. ‘I always wanted a son, not a lot of women.’
He had not reckoned with my mother, who had a far firmer character than his. She set her face against any further childbearing. There was nothing a husband could do. So many women of my mother’s generation had their own means, handed down for generations, of protecting themselves from unwanted offspring. Had the Parent been just a little less selfish, arrogant, overbearing towards her, he could possibly have had a flock of sons, but he had spoilt his chances.
Many years later, when I was a member of the Commonwealth Literary Fund board, I was down in Canberra when Sir Harold White persuaded me to put my name in a large book he kept in the library of Parliament House. Still later he insisted I look at the next signature. It was my father’s. And beside it my father had written ‘The Parent’. Nothing else.
‘I have never,’ Sir Harold declared, ‘known such charming modesty. What a splendid gesture. What a delightful man your father must be.’ I gave a very sceptical grunt.
I can remember learning to breathe when I was born — an exquisite sensation, but it has to be learned consciously and practised. Once you have mastered it you go on to other things. I was weaned to Horlick’s malted milk — why I don’t know, becoming independent of maternal nourishment. Walking is not difficult after learning to breathe. It is complicated. Later I learned to walk on stilts, and this was a repetition of walking on legs. Scrambling forwards and sideways, moving, rolling, working the toes, crawling, all are preliminaries to the stagger. You hump up your hind-quarters, proceeding on hands and hind feet. Then dragging up on a chair-leg. Why not? The thought comes: Stand. Swaying and falling. Up again. The thud on the padded backside stimulates further thought. Up! Sometimes large hands maddeningly interrupt the procedure. You sulk or give cries of rage.
Ah, the crib again. Solitude. Cautiously you experiment in pulling up. Got it. Pulling along sideways. Got it. Standing. No hands, no sway. One foot forward. Careful! Thud! Try it again. What a sense of achievement. No triumph in later life will ever equal the thrill, any success in business or art pales before learning to walk.