The Cardboard Crown (8 page)

Then the second sword fell, this one more accurately. Lady Langton wrote from Rome, on note paper with black edges a quarter of an inch wide, that Sir William had died. Again it was assumed that Austin must leave at once for Italy to settle their affairs and bring his mother home. This time he did not hesitate, but asked Thomas for the carriage and drove to the station within an hour of receiving the news.

In a few days Alice had a letter from Zurich saying that he had seen Hetty and her baby and that it was a fine boy, weighing ten pounds. Alice was amazed.

‘Is Zurich on the way to Rome?’ she asked Mr Langton.

‘Not directly, I think,’ he replied.

‘But Austin has written from Zurich. Surely he would go
by the shortest route?’ She was going to add, ‘To his mother when she is in such distress,’ but thought it would imply a criticism. ‘He says he has seen Hetty Dell and her baby. But he dislikes the Dells. You heard what he said at the time of their marriage.’

‘He certainly did not sound attracted by them,’ agreed Mr Langton.

‘He probably thought,’ said Mrs Langton, ‘that they would want one of the family to rejoice with them over their first child. That was a kindness he could perform without delaying his other duty more than a few hours. I have noticed that Austin is often very kind in those ways.’ Mrs Langton always put the best interpretation on any action.

Lady Langton and Austin returned to Waterpark at the beginning of April. Everyone was shocked at her appearance. She had always been thin, but now she looked ravaged. Her life, without warning, or rather with warnings she had not understood, had collapsed. She felt she must be somehow to blame, and tried to find what mistake she had made. She kept saying that they should not have left Australia. Everything had gone wrong since then. She did not remember that in their first weeks in England it appeared that everything was going right. But she had not attempted to relate herself to England. She had perhaps been full of hubris, of that elation which angers the gods. When she went up to London to see her relatives, people of no great social pretension but in some ways more civilised than herself, and who, in twenty-five years, had changed almost to different people, her manner had been that of a great lady. This created a falsity and irritation in reunions
which she had long anticipated as wonderfully happy. But she was not putting on her manner. For many years she had been the second most important woman in the country where she lived. When the Governor was away, her husband represented the Queen. Her manner had grown from the deference to which she was accustomed.

Now that Nemesis had followed, she half recognised what had happened, but she could not wholly resolve it in her mind. To do that it would have been necessary to accept the idea of divine injustice. She was forty-five years old. She had twenty-five years of married life behind her, and ahead were perhaps thirty or more years of widowhood. The proportion was cruel. When she left Melbourne she achieved the ambition of more than half her life. Her long exile was over. Now she saw her departure as only a terrible mistake, her advent in Europe as an immense defeat. She could talk of nothing but an immediate return. Above all things she wanted to be in the country where she had spent nearly the whole of her happy married life. The Thomas Langtons offered her the little Elizabethan dower house at Waterpark, which was then empty, but she said she must go home. ‘Home’ had switched again to the antipodes.

‘We have all decided to return to Australia,’ wrote Alice. ‘Lady Langton and I had a long discussion about it this afternoon. She seems calmer now that we have made this decision. She spoke with sad resignation, but much more sensibly than of late. She said that we have to accept the inevitable changes in our condition—that our life at first is full of hope and beauty. Then comes a period of fulfilment, but it is very short. The same thing happens to every form of life, to trees, and
animals and men. The branches fall, the fur becomes less glossy, and we feel pain in our joints and in our hearts. She also said that apart from these natural processes we enter periods of misfortune, when the fates turn against us. Wisdom lies in recognising when this has happened. It is no longer of any use trying to impose one’s will on life. I did not agree with this and said: “Surely no adverse fate can work against us if we are Christians?” She replied that God Himself may send us misfortune. I disagreed even more strongly. I said: “All evil must come from evil. Evil cannot come from good. If we do not ask God’s help against misfortunes, instead of accepting it as His Gift, it may overcome us.” She did not answer that. Although I did not agree with her it was a very interesting conversation, and certainly this has not been a fortunate trip.’

Alice did not realise until ten years later how unfortunate it had been.

When the William Langtons first set out for Australia their ship was wrecked between London and Plymouth. They came ashore in a lifeboat, bought new equipment and went on by the next ship. The ship in which Austin with his family now embarked also ran into a storm and Lady Langton thought that she was going to be wrecked a second time. It is a curious if irrelevant fact that nearly every outward voyage was stormy and difficult, and nearly everyone back serene. As if to compensate this their years in Australia seem to have been less complicated, and freer from unexpected misfortunes than those in England.

Alice was glad to be back in Australia. She did feel that
the large light landscape was her natural element, and that the gum trees were more friendly than the winter oaks. But she felt defrauded. She had actually been, if not defrauded, deprived of more than half her income by the Draxes. This was only a partial cause of her feeling. Another perhaps was Sir William’s refusal of a baronetcy, but the chief cause was that she had endured these two long sea voyages and had seen practically nothing of Europe. She had longed to travel in France and Italy. Austin and Lady Langton had done so, though without any pleasure, while, apart from a few days in London, she had seen only the countryside round Waterpark, delightful for the first three months, but after that brown and cold and dark, unless it was covered with snow.

Since her marriage she had had no home of her own. Now she was determined to have one. Bishopscourt had returned to its natural occupant. Even if it had been available they could not have afforded it. Sir William had paid a thousand pounds for eleven months tenancy. Rents everywhere were still very high. Alice wanted to buy some land and build a house on Toorak hill, but then they were told of a nice house vacant in East St Kilda. It had two added attractions. There was in the same road another smaller house vacant which would do for Lady Langton and her three unmarried sons, and it was only a few hundred yards from the Bynghams, who had settled in a grey gabled house like a large English vicarage, with gothic touches in the chimney pieces and the windows. It is still standing, but shorn of its acres and squeezed among red villas. It was and is called Kilawly, after a seat of the Bynghams in Co. Sligo.

It may be as well to explain the significance of Melbourne suburbs. Most of the early colonists of the better sort, the judges, army officers and gentlepeople who somehow found themselves in Victoria, lived in East St Kilda, which remained an ‘exclusive’ neighbourhood up to some time in the 1920s. But long before that it had been overshadowed by Toorak, where the first large Government House with its fine renaissance drawing room was built, and where, as the wool-growers became richer, they raised their Italianate mansions. Toorak with its neighbour South Yarra became the Mayfair of Melbourne, and the descendants of the St Kilda gentry, as they felt their social importance in danger, fled to any cottage in the shadow of the mansions of the squatters, many of whom their grandparents would have refused to know, in the same way that people would rather live in two rooms above a delicatessen shop behind Berkeley Square than in a house with a ballroom in Putney. It was also possible to live in Kew, Brighton and other suburbs, but this was only done by people who preferred the river and the sea to ‘society.’ It is necessary that the reader should understand the character of these different suburbs, particularly the potent meaning of the word Toorak. If Alice had decided to build in Toorak instead of buying the house in East St Kilda, this story would probably have been very different. In fact I might not have been born, as it was that decision which brought about our close association with the Bynghams.

Alice had just settled in her new house and was beginning to enjoy having a home of her own, when Hetty and Percy Dell arrived in Melbourne. They did not want to spend
their lives economising on the Continent, and she had persuaded him to return to Australia and follow his original intention of practising there as a solicitor. They took a cottage which was separated from Alice’s house only by a two acre paddock. None of the families already settled there appeared very pleased to welcome them, but Hetty was unaware of this, or indifferent to it.

There followed what was probably a very happy period, one of those when babies burst, like squalling pink flowers on the younger branches of the family tree. The three couples, the Langtons, the Bynghams and the Dells produced twenty children between them, half of them Bynghams. I might almost in the language of Holy Writ, put: ‘Captain Byngham begat …’ But it is only confusing to give the names of people before they are concerned in the story. We have numerous relatives whom I may not even mention.

It is usual to think of these large mid-Victorian families as slightly comic, and sometimes it is difficult not to caricature them. Arthur himself did so. When one considers what their lives were really like, they were not a joke. Mildy, the most comic had the most tragic life of all, as she did not once achieve a true sympathetic understanding with another human being, though she went on to the end trying to see every darkening night as a spring morning. Even if the large Victorian families were not funny, they are rather surprising in the confidence of the parents that they were conferring a benefit on these children whom they brought into the world, though if they judged by their own circumstances they were justified in thinking so.

Captain Byngham had a sheep station in the Riverina,
but it was run by a manager and he seldom went there. It did not occur to anyone until after the 1914 war that there was any obligation to work unless it was necessary, and they may have been right. If a man has an unearned income of £5,000 a year, and goaded by his puritan conscience takes a position at £500, he has still failed to justify his drawing an unearned income of £5,000 from the community. My grandparents had no qualms about their incomes.

When I was a child I used to be taken by my mother to sing ‘Good King Wenceslas’ to Grandmamma Byngham at Kilawly on Christmas Day. At that time the group of houses where the Langtons, Bynghams and Dells lived was much the same as when they first went there, so I can fairly easily visualise the outward circumstances of their lives. I can even remember some of the furniture and the pictures at Kilawly, apart from those which have come down to me, and are now here at Westhill, mixed with Langton belongings.

Except for the frequent pangs of childbirth, theirs must have been as agreeable a life as it was possible to lead. Oceans lay between them and countries afflicted by war and serious poverty. The climate was excellent. Their slow means of transport gave them leisure and dignity. Mrs Byngham and Alice had their carriages, Lady Langton drove herself in a pony phaeton, while Hetty and Percy Dell trotted about in a jinker, Hetty driving and Percy beside her, looking like a minor accessory of the equipage. Where their style of living fell below that of their relatives, Percy prided himself on their freedom from vulgarity. They all gave frequent entertainments, lawn parties and dinner parties. I have seen the equipment for these functions at Kilawly, monstrous epergnes
and candelabra—and finger bowls weighing each about two pounds. They had brought out with them their English style of living, but it was tempered by a pleasant colonial informality. They had to satisfy no one but themselves. They did not follow the social pattern, they set it. The men rode, went to the races, shot, hunted and sat in the Melbourne Club.

Austin alone seemed dissatisfied. At times Alice found him difficult and irrational in his moods, but never really bad tempered. He had joined the volunteers to give himself something to do, but that did not cure his restlessness. He said he wanted to live in the country. It might have been thought that East St Kilda at that time was countrified enough. The milk, butter, fruit and vegetables were all produced on the place. It was only necessary to drive a mile or two to shoot and fish, or in the hot summer to go to the sea to bathe, but Austin had there no scope for his pioneering instincts. He wished to leave some mark on the country. As will be seen later he had other reasons for wanting to move from that neighbourhood.

Alice was reluctant to give up her pleasant social life, but she agreed to buy a place in the country, even to carve a new estate out of the virgin bush, if this would cure Austin of his discontents. She was more willing to do this as she had just won a round in her long drawn-out series of lawsuits against Mrs Drax, and had some extra money to invest. As soon as he had her agreement, Austin hired a covered wagon from the grocer, filled it with camping equipment, and taking his youngest two brothers set out in the direction of Gippsland. When in the evening they were near any habitation, a farm or rough hotel, he would choose a camping site, leave his young brothers to pitch the tent and prepare a meal, while he went
off to have a yarn with the farmer or innkeeper, though the latter seems an inaccurate word to apply to these men whom he would sound about the land available in the neighbourhood.

On their second day, at a hamlet some miles beyond Dandenong, a man told Austin that there was both very good grazing land, and very beautiful wooded country, up in the hills towards the ranges, and he turned the grocer’s wagon in that direction. It was not a good road, up hill and then steeply down into a gully, where they had to ford a brook, or creek as they are called here. By the creek were tree-ferns and the aromatic sassafras, and the cool air was full of the sound of bellbirds. They stayed here to water the horses and to bathe. From the creek they drove up a very long steep hill where the grade was one in six. They had to stop at intervals to rest the horses, and the boys put large stones behind the wheels to prevent the wagon rolling back. After five miles they came to a clear space with magnificent views, to the north across the valley to the ranges, to the west across twenty miles of plain to the bay, an expanse of pale gold in the evening light, beyond which could be seen the delicate purple peaks of the Youyang Mountains, ninety miles away.

Austin told the boys to pitch the camp, and he walked about the open space to different vantage points, giving grunts of satisfaction. Then he went to ask for water at a little whitewashed cottage by the roadside. A house in Australia, the first of its kind built only a hundred years ago, may suggest the antique more than a sophisticated palace built centuries earlier. There are in the country outside Melbourne little cottages built of bark and tin, whitewashed, with vines
along their walls, and the fowls pecking at the hard earth under the fig tree, where one feels the disguised Ulysses might have asked for shelter and a bowl of goat’s milk, while one cannot possibly imagine him calling at Waterpark, with its far greater antiquity. But this may be partly due to that feeling one has in the Australian countryside, that it has known the morning of the world. This cottage, where Austin asked for water, had the appearance of belonging to all time. When the man brought him his full bucket he asked him:

‘Have you much land here?’

The man said that he had about a hundred acres. He was rather gloomy. He said that his wife was ill, and that he wanted to sell the place and get work in Melbourne.

‘There’s no neighbours,’ he said, ‘and they’re all Germans like. Some of them have run away from ships and they’ve settled in the bush round about here. They seem decent folk but I can’t understand their talk.’

Austin thanked the man for the water, gave him a shilling, and went back to the camp. He was excited. Certainly there was not much land but he had no doubt he could extend the boundaries, and he was not concerned with a revenueproducing property. He wanted a country house where he would not see suburban roofs two hundred yards away—particularly one suburban roof—but where he would be monarch of all he surveyed. While his brothers grilled chops, holding them on long forked sticks over the gum-scented fire, he walked about on the grass plateau, and visualised the mansion from the windows of which he would look out on these serene and splendid panoramas.

In the morning he asked the man, whose name was
Darke, how much he wanted for the property, and he named a reasonable price. Austin asked what it was called.

‘Westhill we call it,’ said Darke, ‘because it’s on a hill to the west, like.’

Austin gave him a guinea and asked him not to sell it until he heard from him, which was hardly necessary, as the man had been trying to sell the place for eighteen months.

When they had packed their tents and equipment into the wagon Austin turned the horses’ heads towards Melbourne. The boys were disgusted that the fortnight’s camping expedition had lasted barely three days, but he promised to bring them back later. Alice was surprised that they returned so soon, but she was also relieved that Austin was enthusiastic about a site only thirty miles from Melbourne, already cleared and with a cottage on it. She was afraid that he might have chosen somewhere hundreds of miles away in the depth of the virgin forest.

As soon as the purchase was completed and the Darkes had moved out, Austin and Alice went up to camp in the cottage and to plan their future home. There began for them two years of struggle and frustration. Their worst defeats have proved of the greatest benefit to me. They found it would be too difficult to cart bricks up those hilly unmade roads, so they had to be baked on the place, with the result that I have a house of handmade bricks of that soft red which one sees in old houses in England. They had a tiresome old-fashioned builder whose ideas were still Georgian, and who put in round arches, six-paned windows, and plain classical chimney pieces, thwarting Austin’s grandiose Gothic ideas. Best of all, half-way through the building, Mrs Drax brought
another lawsuit and they were afraid that they might not have the money to finish it. At the same time the man making the bricks died, so they decided to reduce the size of the house by leaving off the top storey. If this had not happened, I would not have attempted to live here.

At the end of two years they moved in. Still only half the rooms were ready, but Austin was full of the spirit of the pioneer. He put his arms in stained glass over the front door and above them in Latin: ‘Unmindful of the tomb you build houses.’ As well as struggling with his own property, he worked hard for the improvement of the countryside. He blazed a track from the sea to the ranges, which passes Westhill gate and is still called Langton Road. He became a member of the Legislative Council, Alice providing the necessary £500 a year. This gave him the title of ‘honourable’ with which he was very pleased. It is on the uniform cases and many other of his possessions lying in the outhouses.