When I was thirteen, the tottering finances of the one remaining Miss Cheriton finally collapsed and Doone terminated its brief but illustrious ten years’ existence. It had, as a school, made its mark: it had panache—it was smart—it provided good educational facilities, and its older pupils of the finishing school level had become locally renowned for their looks. The Doone girls, in the Sydney of that day, was a collective term conjuring up an image of youthful, well-educated beauty gathered for the picking under one roof and the eager and not too strict chaperonage of ‘Cherry’. They frisked through amateur theatricals and the Arts, Government House dances, ADCs, and the last of Cherry’s money.
When the end came, I was enrolled in the most exclusive and expensive boarding-school in the state, Frensham. My memories of Frensham are all pleasant ones: experiences to shock and distress me may have occurred during those significant adolescent years, although by now, I was fairly shockproof, but I cannot recall them. My time at Frensham was one of deepening and happy expectancy of the future. Situated eighty miles from Sydney, the school buildings had grown gradually and were scattered through acres of beautiful mountain bushland. The mistresses, in those days, had all travelled out from England and with them they brought English educational ideas and principles, tempered and tailored to the Australian life and the Australian material on which they had to work. I doubt if many of them had had experience of the Australian father, and nothing to equip them for their encounters with mine. On the whole, however, I managed to preserve the illusion of a suitably paternal figure in my background, at the risk, on one occasion, of severe punishment.
The occasion was a school concert—not an official affair, but one produced entirely by the girls, which was traditionally known as a ‘Scratch’ concert. My musical background has produced no stirring of talent in me. Although listening to music is one of my greatest joys, I can play no instrument, nor recognise by ear one note, and if ever I am obliged to sing, nothing will emerge from my willing throat but a painfully unmelodious dirge. I cannot remember what paucity of numbers—it cannot have been talent—caused me to be chosen as one of a chorus of four or five girls to chant the Volga Boat Song. I suppose some long-suppressed wish to be recognised as not entirely unmusical led me, foolishly, to disclose the fact in my weekly letter home. The Saturday morning of the concert, I was in a state of happy and fairly confident tension. As we were a country school, served by a small local telephone exchange, telegrams were telephoned through by the operator to the Mistress on Duty, who was, on this day, the most elderly, fussily eccentric and hysterically inclined member of the staff. She sent for me at 10 a.m.: the operator had telephoned through a telegram addressed to me, for which Miss Livingstone demanded adequate explanation. Written in Miss Livingstone’s elegant and flowing script, it read: ‘Knock ’Em Rotten, Kid. Bing Crosby.’
Only my father could have sent it, and those that followed at half-hourly intervals throughout the day. I prayed, as I floundered for explanation and Miss Livingstone’s hysteria mounted, that each one would be the last. But there seemed no end to my father’s flow of invention that day. As each fresh summons to her room came, I listened to Miss Livingstone calling for first my form mistress, and then my house mistress and as she read out the latest horror, I watched the telephone with apprehension waiting for its next shrill attack. ‘With you in Spirit’ signed ‘Nellie Melba’ and, tersely, ‘I hate you. Grace Moore.’ From Australia’s leading theatrical firm, J. C. Williamson’s, came the entreaty, ‘Is £150 a week enough?’
‘Who is this man? I demand to know,’ shrieked Miss Livingstone, waving at me the message ‘We WANT you. MGM.’ When I failed to answer this too, the council of my three inquisitors decided that the time had come to report the matter to the headmistress. The girl on the exchange had by now entered into the spirit of my father’s intentions and was giggling so uncontrollably that she had even greater difficulty than usual in transmitting the messages to Miss Livingstone, who was, under the most sedate of circumstances, in a fairly advanced condition of deafness. This further indignity to the school was reported to Miss West, along with the sheaf of offensive messages. As I refused, professedly through ignorance, to divulge the name of the sender, Miss West sighed, ‘Very well—as you will not tell us whom you believe to be sending these frivolous and insulting messages, there is only one course you leave open to me. I am very sorry to have to do this, but I am afraid I shall be obliged to turn this entire matter over to your father and he must deal with you as he sees best.’
I escaped with no sterner punishment than being deprived of my only chance of musical performance, and without having ‘owned up’. Neither did my father.