Daddy, We Hardly Knew You

by Germaine Greer

  ‘There was at this time in Malta, as elsewhere, a difference of opinion concerning the best methods of dealing with the progressive demoralisation that comes to an individual taxed beyond his endurance… the “tough” school holds that the expression of fear in any form is a display of cowardice and should be treated as such….’

  In March 1942 a sign was put up in every gun position in Malta. It said:

  Fear is the weapon which the enemy employs to sabotage morale.

  Anxiety neurosis is the term used by the medical profession to commercialise fear.

  Anxiety neurosis is a misnomer which makes ‘cold feet’ appear respectable.

  To give way to fear is to surrender to the enemy attack on your morale.

  To admit an anxiety neurosis is to admit a state of fear which is either unreasonable or has no origin in your conception of your duty as a soldier.

  If you are a man you will not permit your self-respect to admit an anxiety neurosis or to show fear.

  Do not confuse fear with prudence or impulsive action with bravery.

  Safety first is the worst of principles.

  In civil life ‘anxiety neurosis’ will put you ‘on the club’. In battle it brings you a bayonet in the bottom and a billet in a prisoner-of-war camp.

  In Malta anxiety neurosis remained a dirty expression. The MO at SSQAHQ Malta who sent Reg Greer over to Imtarfa Hospital thought he might have a serious lung infection, ‘NYD chest C/O pain in the left side of chest anteriorly—1/52—more marked after exercise. Increasing dyspnoea past 6/12. Morning cough with expectoration and anorexia past 3/12. Loss of weight—1 and a half in 3/13 and general malaise.’ This time Reg Greer’s bout of pleurisy had moved up from 1927–8 to ‘nine years ago’, or 1933.

  In April, Reg Greer came before the RAF medical officers at AHQ Malta; their diagnosis was that he was suffering from bronchial catarrh, not contracted in service, and ‘a well-developed anxiety neurosis’, which was; the date and place of origin of the second was given as Malta, December 1942. The anxiety neurosis was moreover ‘aggravated by service in Malta under siege conditions and by unsatisfactory accommodation in which he was required to work’. This time the pleurisy had retreated to seventeen years before, 1926, but the treatment had taken five months in hospital. Again they noted that he had arrived in Malta during the siege and that he had lost two stone and four pounds, his weight being nine stone and five pounds. (His enlisting weight was in fact ten stone and seven pounds.) For eight months he had been working underground. His temperature and pulse were normal. He could produce no sputum for examination. He could produce very few symptoms at all. Wing-Commander Knight and Flight-Lieutenant Dowd decided that ‘this Officer should be invalided from Malta and returned to Australia’.

  It was a month before F/O Greer got as far on his way home as Cairo. Mr Admans came across him in the Kiwi Club. ‘You look terrible,’ he said. Reg Greer tore him off a strip.

  ‘Been in Malta, jumping out of the signals truck into the slitty every time the bombers came over,’ said Mr Admans, which was odd, because it was quite wrong. Mr Admans felt quite sorry for Reg Greer, as everybody felt sorry for anyone who had endured the siege of Malta, which they mostly confused with the blitz. If civilians thought that he had endured the worst that the Luftwaffe could unleash, he let them think it.

  How F/O Greer got from Cairo to Bombay and then to Devlali, I cannot say. In the crowded tent city of Devlali Reg Greer probably had to endure more uncomfortable conditions than he had encountered in Malta; inadequate sanitary arrangements were made worse by the mixing of men from all theatres of the war. Disease was rife, and boredom is no relief from stress. On 22 July he was admitted to No. 1 New Zealand Hospital Ship at Bombay, ‘in debilitated condition and showing signs of general exhaustion’. After sixteen days he had ‘improved greatly in appearance and his general nervous stability’ was ‘much better’. The NZ Medical Corps Officer noted further that ‘his improvement during the last two weeks is such that the prognosis appears good and with an adequate spell should be suitable for duties in Australia in accordance with his training and ability’.

  At Fremantle they took another look at him and, finding him unusually fit in that he had been subjected neither to malaria nor bilharziasis nor amoebiasis, they granted him three weeks’ leave and packed him off to Melbourne.

  And there we met him on Spencer Street Station. My aunt asked me, ‘Do you know where you spent the night before you went to meet your father?’

  ‘No,’ I answered, a little puzzled as to why she should ask.

  ‘With me,’ she said, and waited for it to sink in.

  ‘All night?’

  ‘Your mother picked you up in the morning.’

  ‘I see.’

  When F/O Greer’s three weeks were up, he was admitted to No. 6 RAAF Hospital at Heidelberg, and he stayed there for more than three weeks. There he was interviewed by Squadron-Leader Forgan, to whom he told the story of his life, in more detail than his wife and children had ever been given. Sick though he may have been Reg Greer remembered himself well enough to distort the truth, as I could see from his description of his newspaper career, which culminated in the impressive word ‘manager’. Reg Greer was not a manager, but a rep. He continued the exaggeration of his weight loss, adding seven pounds to his enlistment weight and claiming that when he was evacuated his weight had fallen to 125 pounds. And he still allowed people to think that he had lived on Malta through the blitz.

  These small lies might all be construed as permissible ploys in a bid for compassionate leave. Besides, Reg Greer was being loyal to his wife: ‘He had a lot of dreams last night, dreamt someone had tried to sell his wife frocks without coupons and when he got home he was very annoyed about it. His wife has always been very dependant on him and devoted to him. Suggest relationship between dream contest and actual return from overseas with slightly modified home relationship.’ Squadron-Leader Forgan was doing well but not well enough. When Reg Greer enlisted his wife was a sheltered twenty-four; she had grown up a lot in three years and had come to some of her own conclusions about life, helped by the flattery of her dancing partners. Reg Greer’s home-life was not slightly modified but completely transformed. If his marriage was to survive he was going to have to work on it. Now I know that in his description of his childhood and education there was not one word of truth, now I know that his wife and child were the only kin Reg Greer could ever call his own. I know that he was lying for me.

  Lies are vile things, with a horrible life of their own. They contaminate the truth that surrounds them. Looking at the record of my father’s desperate lying to Squadron-Leader Forgan, I am troubled by a nagging suspicion that the anxiety neurosis was a calculated performance. Reg Greer was not just a salesman, but a crack salesman. A salesman’s chief asset is his trustability. He had learnt to use the techniques of manipulation in the desperate struggle for survival during the depression; S/L Forgan was putty in his hands. ‘Patient very keen to remain in RAAF,’ he noted. Actually the patient was very good at conveying the impression that he was keen to remain in the RAAF at the same time that he marshalled symptoms to ensure his discharge. At Heidelberg Hospital the professionals examined his urine, his faeces, his sputum, auscultated his heart, lungs and abdomen, much the way that I have ferreted away in the archives for verification of his autobiography. ND. Nothing detected. No acid-fast facts to be found. Except that after three weeks of my mother’s loving care and attention Reg Greer was losing the weight he had gained on the hospital ship.

  On 11 October, 1943, the Central Medical Board agreed that F/O Greer should return to work, the kind of work that would allow him to live at home and sleep at nights in his own bed, but nine days later the patient was complaining that he could not carry on. ‘He has been at work for only three days and all his anxiety symptoms have returned,’ wrote S/L Forgan. ‘He feels that he cannot take the responsibility or stand the long hours of work. I now consider that he is unlikel
y to be able to carry on in the service, and recommend his discharge on medical grounds.’

  Reg Greer’s war had lasted not quite two years. He joined the Returned Services League so that he could wear the badge and not be asked embarrassing questions about what he was doing in civvy street while Australians were dying in the Pacific. Everybody knew he had been on Malta during the siege, and that no more could be asked of any man. His marriage survived. On 5 February, 1945, my little sister was born. Seven months later the Japanese surrendered.

  I do not know why a certain little girl mis-remembered that her father went to war early and stayed late, when he went late and left early. I do not know why the time he was gone seemed to me so long, when in fact it was so short, except that I must have missed him very much. There is a sliver of memory that snags my mind every so often: I am wheeling my little sister in her pram and the war is still on. I am aware of it, afraid of it, just there beyond the housetops. I remember that, you see, but I do not remember that when my sister was born my father was home to look after us. There were fireworks over Port Philip Bay to celebrate the armistice; I remember being allowed to stay up and watch through the long window of the ‘lounge’. When the explosions began and light fell from the sky like tracer, I began to scream, certain that the invasion had begun. There were shadowy people in the dark room with me, one of whom must have been my father. But I did not recognise him.

  That is the truth of it, you see. I did not recognise him.

  The Overcoat

  Now Israel loved Joseph more than all his children, because he was the son of his old age; and he made him a coat of many colours.

  GENESIS XXXVII.3

  When one is in the business of snatching at straws, an overcoat is a sizeable clue. When I went up to Melbourne University and out of the school uniform which was all the clothes I had had, I acquired a gabardine raincoat. This was the current version of academic subfusc, dignified, drab and clerkly. As salespersons say about their drearier lines, the gabardine coat went with everything. It was rainproof. It was necessary, especially if you had no other overcoat.

  The second or third time I wore it, the coat was pinched off the hook behind my chair in the university cafeteria while I was table-hopping. It had cost me more than twenty pounds, and on eight pounds a week there was no way that I was going to replace it. The Melbourne winter was just getting underway. It is a season of deep, intractable seaside cold, that cannot be held at bay by walking briskly or running. The damp winds blow so cold that the skin on your legs on the windward side goes quite numb. I had no car, nor any prospect of one. Even if Barry Watshorn gave me a lift in his P-type MG, and it didn’t break down in Swanston Street, the lack of a hood for it meant that the cold progressed through my shoulderblades and into the narrow lungs I inherited from Daddy. Still it was better than sitting in the unheated train as it crawled the sixteen stations from Flinders Street to Mentone. The bronchitis bacilli had a good year that year. My mother occasionally asked me to eat in the kitchen because my breathing was so noisy and my breath smelt so of phlegm that I was putting the others off their food.

  Then I discovered hanging in the back of Daddy’s wardrobe a coat he never wore. It was hand-woven Harris tweed, pepper and salt, flecked with tiny speckles of every shade of red, and yellow, even green, that you couldn’t see unless you came up and looked really close. Then the warp and weft became a sort of Highland landscape, of fells and pebble-strewn runs, of bracken and ash and rowan. Pre-war quality, it hung on me like a sack, for the weave had sagged here and there, from being sat in in a hot car, instead of striding over the moors in the mist. The coat became my uniform, too ratty for Daddy’s taste, too idiosyncratic to be pinchable.

  When I went walking on the cliff top in a gale one day, staggering under a load of adolescent despair, wondering if my life would ever begin, the Harris tweed coat saved my life. The cliffs had been weakened by recent rains, and hand-lettered signs from the council warned walkers to keep off. I stepped under the temporary fence and deliberately walked where the red sandstone drooped like a stalactite over the void. I stood on the shakiest piece, asking God in my teenage arrogance to save my life if it was worth saving. There was no noise as the spur came down. I shot down the cliff face with no sound but the scratching of the low scrubby bushes that were all there was to break my fall. Suddenly the bushes stopped flashing past me, as the Harris tweed coat caught on some stump or another. I hung there by my sleeves with the coat spread out behind me. Then the spur gave and I fell again, but more slowly this time, sliding and rolling down the shallower pedestal of the cliff.

  As I sat in the deep coarse sand of the beach, getting my breath back, a stone I had dislodged came bouncing down behind me and cracked me a painful blow on the head. This seemed an apt comment on the foolishness of the proceeding. Though I went through a period of reading the Sonnets in graveyards and getting Hamlet by heart, I did not try to gamble with my life again. And, if I should so forget myself in misery as to think again of ending it all, there was a three-cornered tear in my beloved coat to remind me.

  One of my father’s boon companions has sent me a letter about him. The high point of his story describes an incident in the Grosvenor, when Bill Lynch came in wearing a new coat, ‘saying, “Reg, what do you think of my new overcoat?” The reply came quickly, “It’s (expletive omitted). (shithouse? ed.) Drop everything and I’ll get you something much more suitable.” They both then left and returned half an hour later with (certainly) a much better—and definitely dearer—outfit. That was the way Reg was. He was most fastidious, forthright (and usually right at that) but with a charm which allowed him to get his way—certainly with men. He took great pains with his own appearance—always attired “for the occasion”—whether this be striding along Collins Street or as manager of the St Kilda cricket team on Saturdays.’

  So Daddy took Bill Lynch to Flinders Lane, did he and bought him a good coat at cost from the Jewish shmatte merchants he hated so? If only he had done as much for me. I might have had a gabardine coat as good as the one Anne Kornan carried over her arm or slung over her shoulder when her daddy dropped her off at the caf door in the Jag and every man and boy in the room rushed to hang it up for her. When I lost it, I might have been able to afford another. He let me pay full price for rubbish, and found good stuff at cost for his friends. And, when I lost my cheap and nasty coat, he did not notice that I had no coat at all. Funny.

  My correspondent continues: ‘I recall him saying that he was “critical” (to put it mildly) about the type of youth you were bringing to the family hearth during your University days. Anything savouring of scruffiness was alien to Reg and his own efforts to describe his feelings probably account for the brilliant essays of our wonderfully descriptive language in his daughter.’ Unable to speak to me, Daddy seems to have waxed eloquent about me.

  Of course all my friends ‘savoured of scruffiness’; we were university students, not salesmen. Most of us had only what our parents could spare after paying for our tuition. My tuition was paid for by my scholarship. Everything else had to come out of the allowance I got as the holder of a Teachers’ College Scholarship, eight pounds a week, from which my loving mother exacted a nominal rent, meaningless to her, crippling for me. To this my father added nothing, not even a trip to his mates on Flinders Lane, yet I am told he made great fun of me in my sagging tweed coat and my sloppy joes. It wasn’t that he didn’t notice how poorly dressed I was; he noticed and laughed at me for it. I made my own skirts and knitted my own cardigans, because once I had paid for my fares and my stockings and underwear, and my books and writing materials, there was no money left. Sometimes I bought my shoes in sales. Some of us would go into the store in worn-out shoes and leave them by the sale table, walking out in a new pair. It took a long time before the authorities worked out that they should only put out one shoe of a pair. We would tell each other when there was a cosmetic promotion and carefully husband the tiny vials of Je Reviens that wer
e given away as samples.

  What can Daddy have expected me to bring home but young men as shabby as myself? We lived so far away in the outer reaches of suburbia I was doing well to bring home any boys at all. The only dapper men of our age were spivs and lounge lizards, who would have seen nothing in me to interest them. Was Reg Greer so naive that he thought that embryo doctors and lawyers were already dressed in the three-piece chalk stripes that would be their uniform after they qualified? If Daddy was so good a judge of quality in cloth, why was he not a better judge of quality in people?

  In fact Daddy met very few of the men I knew. Most of them had no car; if they took me home on the train at night, they had to walk home. I was what was known as GI, geographically impossible. There was never any suggestion, nor did it cross my mind, that I could have used my mother’s car. Who would pay for driving lessons?

  Bringing boys home was a high risk business. Unless I was really sure of a young man’s loyalty, I could not allow him to glimpse the bizarreness of my domestic reality. As like as not we would be assailed at the door by mother wearing an old pair of underpants on her head, to protect her hair, and very little else, except the suntan for which so much was sacrificed. My best mates knew what to expect, because the satiric wit that Daddy expended on me I expended on my mother. Nevertheless she could still take their breath away. About six months after I lost my gabardine coat, Tony Archer (who said he quite enjoyed walking home the fourteen miles to St Kilda Road) and I were confronted by mother clutching a bundle of gabardine, sprouting black and white mould and smelling to high heaven.