The only time Cynthia performed well as a Hermitage girl was on stage at the annual public performances given at the year’s end.
Shortly before Cynthia’s sixteenth birthday, her grandmother died at the prodigious age of ninety-eight. The last glimpse we have of Margaret in her imperious aspect was in the aftermath of the Prince’s rejection of their hospitality four years previously, when the matriarch aired her disapproval in front of all at Mount Pleasant. She had, of late, retired to her room, venturing outdoors only when the weather was kind enough to allow her to sit on the terrace reading her Bible in gentle senility. Launceston’s Daily Telegraph published notice of her death on 9 September 1924. Margaret was interred alongside the husband she had so long outlived.
Barbara completed her schooling at year’s end, then embarked on a holiday to Europe, before resuming her life at Mount Pleasant. John completed his law degree in England, then returned to live in South Yarra and work in Queen Street for a legal firm. In England, Margaret graduated as a doctor. Cynthia was among a group of Hermitage girls who were confirmed by the Archbishop at St Paul’s Cathedral in Melbourne in 1925.
Cynthia regretted that she wouldn’t be matriculating the next year but would leave with only an Intermediate Certificate. In 1926, without examinations to face, Cynthia worked most with Carrie Haese, who lectured the girls on the ‘beauties of spoken verse’ and directed their theatrical performances. She would give Cynthia the only prize she got at school, for Elocution.
Carrie Haese commuted from Melbourne to the Hermitage. She was a protégé of Louise Dyer, a patron of the school. For her birthday in 1926, Louise gave a ‘divertissement’ at her home in Toorak. It gives a glimpse of the social world Cynthia inhabited, with Carrie Haese at its centre, reading Shelley’s poems.
Miss Haese was robed in trailing garments of white, with the tiny sleeves and V neckline outlined with gold braid. With her brow band of gold Liberty leaves she looked like some Greek statue warmed to life and colour. Both her gown and Mrs James Dyer’s picturesque trailing robes of celestial blue silk were designed for the occasion by Mr Blamire Young.4
The most original extracurricular offering at school that year was arranged by Louise, who was growing in confidence and influence as a patron of artists and musicians. She asked the debonair Professor of Music at the University, Bernard Heinze, to visit the Hermitage and play his violin with an accompanist on the piano. He would soon have a profound influence on Cynthia’s life as her first lover, who opened up new vistas for her. He surely felt her huge eyes fixed on him and noted her rapt, pale face.
A highlight for Cynthia in her last year at school was seeing Anna Pavlova dance in Melbourne, the first ballerina to reach a large audience. The senior girls had begged their headmistress to go. Cynthia, who had her mother’s talent for charm and powers of persuasion, was probably instrumental. Miss Morres had contacted Pavlova, who replied with a telegram ‘signifying her willingness to perform the Swan Dance at the matinee’. Her tutu was made of real feathers. At the Hermitage, five cars, to transport forty girls and a large bouquet of flowers, were ordered. Great was their delight when the bouquet was received by the famous dancer ‘amidst much applause’.5
Coached by Carrie Haese, Cynthia ended her public performances dying triumphantly as a heroic French noblewoman in If I Were King. She was excited to leave school behind — in her second novel, Hyacinth leaves school shouting ‘Tyranny is dead!’ — and determined to improve on her education.6
At home she read voraciously, and began plotting out a novel with the working title Parents — Your Daughters. She wanted her writing to be a conversation with the reader in a contemporary vernacular, like the American Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, but in Australian idiom.
To placate her irritable father she took some golf lessons, and to escape the house went riding on her horse with her new dog, a black Alsatian she called Woden. The nicknames Henry gave his children were taken from his favourites among his working dogs and hunting hounds. (He hated Cynthia’s Woden, however, perhaps because of its German origins.) Henry in turn was dubbed ‘the Hatter’, after Lewis Carroll’s Mad Hatter in waistcoat and top hat — with his height and strong bony face, Henry cut a fine figure in his top hats. Cynthia was called ‘Bob’, a name she must have liked for its brevity and implicit androgyny, for she kept it for her friends as well.
Bob was now free to visit Melbourne and stay with Margaret, who was working in the city. She and John grew closer, regularly exchanging books and letters. Barbara returned home, happy to resume the social round of parties and agricultural shows, with men talking of wheat and wool. She was content with her lot in Launceston, contemplating a life like her parents.
At home, Henry Reed grew more impatient, retiring to his study to worry over accounts. Lila complained about headaches he could not take seriously, as he wrote to John in South Yarra:
Mother is up and down. I think her state of health is largely caused by worry, she rebels against modern conditions and will not make the best of them, this keeps her in a constant state of perturbation.
Unlike his children, with their new experiments in living, Henry had done his duty by the family, whether he liked it or not: ‘It was up to me to take hold of the Estate and manage things for Granny and your aunts.’
Dick had defiantly gone his own way. Margaret had removed herself from the family to follow her profession. John had been compliant, but his father was concerned by his political views: ‘You seem to think our Class doesn’t worry exerting itself much about Public life. Universal suffrage has practically cut our Class out of Public life.’7 It was ten years since Henry had last been active in public life, when he went to Egypt to assess the effectiveness of the Red Cross.
At eighteen, Cynthia’s appearance as a guest at various local events was noted in the papers: at a private dance, she is seen in an ‘uncommon frock of gold lame veiled with layers of grey and black’. Her coming-out party with a hundred guests at Mount Pleasant was reported at length in Launceston’s Examiner in May 1927. For the last time, her full name is given: Miss Violet Cynthia Reed.
Cynthia and her mother had planned a perfect evening. Swinging Oriental lamps on the verandahs, in the conservatory and in the main rooms gave the elegant house an exotic air. A marquee linking the exterior of the main entertaining rooms was added to serve claret cup and ices. For dancing the fox trot and waltzes, a saxophone orchestra was set up in the Big Room. Supper was laid in the dining room among the masses of chrysanthemums and poppies, a diminutive but recurrent motif of violets, her namesake flower nestled in fern.
Miss Reed wore a charming French frock of white georgette over a very pale shade of pink, the bodice being of straight-lined effect and sleeveless. The low waistline was emphasised by crystal and silver bugle beads … Tiny silver medallions adorned the bodice, and Miss Reed carried a sweet posy of pale pink carnations, violets and maidenhair fern …
The straight-lined effect was what she wanted, rather than the hourglass figure of her elders. It was a common practice to flatten fulsome breasts with bindings. The journalist also noted her mother ‘gracefully gowned in a handsomely beaded black French frock in jet’.
The harmony Lila and Cynthia had so carefully designed for her party was short-lived. Dr Margaret Reed returned in late 1927. The first published photograph of Cynthia appeared in the Launceston Examiner, on Station Pier in Port Melbourne, welcoming her big sister’s return on a large steamship carrying over a thousand passengers and bedecked with streamers. Standing in the middle distance with her back to the camera, a small figure in a long coat wears a cloche hat, a style worn with short hair. A year or two previously, to her family’s dismay Cynthia had her long hair cut short, an act of defiance that reverberated in the family chronicle.
John kept three of the letters she wrote him in 1927. They had found more in common through their shared interest in books, fashion, ideas and people of individuality. John had started paying more attention to his little sister and wanted to know what men she might have her eye on now she was in the marriage market. The first began: ‘Dear-with-difficulty-tolerated brother’ and explained only that she was ‘in correspondence avec deux hommes’.
She was reading The History of Pendennis: