Daddy, We Hardly Knew You

by Germaine Greer

  William Henry King told the justices at his father’s committal that his father had threatened his life and that of his mother, and had offered to cut his son-in-law’s ‘inside out’ because he had stolen a horse from him, which he had not. John William was also claiming falsely that a Mr Louth of Ulverstone had stolen a horse from him. He believed that he was a great horse doctor and told Dr Stuart of Ulverstone that his horse had worms, which he diagnosed by putting his ear to the horse’s hoof and listening for them. The justices believed that he might prove dangerous but in the five months that he remained in the New Norfolk asylum he gave no trouble. He employed himself usefully, although he was piteously confused most of the time and imagined that the other patients were people he had worked for outside the hospital.

  By this time my grandmother would have been working as a domestic in Ulverstone. In September 1902 her father was in trouble again. Mr Bishop of Sprent found him in a highly excited state intent on setting fire to his barn, saying that it was infested with anthrax, and, as Bishop would not burn it himself, he would have to do it for him. When they were bringing him to Ulverstone he insisted that the willow trees, the cattle, sheep and horses that they passed all had the disease. He gave tobacco to a police constable, advising him to smoke it to fumigate the diseased vegetation around him. ‘He knelt before a notice paper printed in Hindustanee and sang aloud, the words being those of the National Anthem, saying he was singing the words.’ This time the justices opined not only that he was likely to become dangerous, but that the cause of his distress was ‘hereditary tendency’. He was more difficult to control, constantly quarrelling and fighting with his fellows. He was allowed to go home at the end of June 1903. For four and a half years he kept his wits, but by April 1908 he was singing and dancing in the street, declaring that he had anthrax and bot-flies were coming out of his mouth. Six months later he was discharged and remained calm again until 1915 when he started threatening Harriett with an axe, and running about the streets on hands and knees like a dog; again he was discharged after six months. The diagnosis of hereditary disorder was never repeated.

  John William was in the asylum on 10 June, 1903, when William Henry got married at Holy Trinity Church in Ulverstone, to Jane Agnes Rodman, sister of the man his sister Ada King married in 1896. Rhoda witnessed the marriage, signing her name in a wobbly fashion which missed out half of one letter altogether. At Christmastime, the same year, she conceived a child. She was not yet twenty.

  De occultis non scrutantur. Let us assume merely that what happened so often to poor girls happened to my grandmother. Far from home, struggling to learn how to adopt the manners pleasing to the Australian gentry, to keep herself clean and tidy, low-voiced and inconspicuous, my grandmother probably had also to repel the advances of one of the men of the household. To make a fuss about this harassment would have been to lose her place. She was lonely and defenceless. The gentleman’s casual caresses were probably the only human warmth she felt from one month’s end to the next. Perhaps she even deluded herself that he loved her.

  She can hardly have foreseen the appalling consequences of her lapse. The man’s affection, such as it was, would have vanished as soon as her trouble became apparent. The lady of the house would have blamed only her servant, for men will be men. She would have directed the seducer to give the girl money to pay for her lying-in and get rid of her. And so my grandmother, in dread and misery, made her way to the big city, to Launceston.

  On 1 September, 1904, in a mean house in Middle Street, Launceston, my grandmother gave birth to a boy. She gave him the name Robert Hamilton, and because she was unmarried he bore her own surname, King. The name Robert Hamilton was probably the name of the child’s father, for neither name ran in her own family. Mrs Helena Beston, usually called Lena, the tenant of the house, registered the child for her. Robert Hamilton King was my father.

  In saying so, I say more than my poor father knew. He was never a ward of the state and his name did not show in the register of her charges that Emma kept on top of her wardrobe. There was no government department keeping a file on him in his own name. After Mrs Beston had the baby entered as Robert Hamilton King in the register, the name was never heard by mortal ear until the Registrar read it out to me in Hobart. It is entirely owing to his kindness that I have any name for my father at all; he agreed to read the register for me, looking for any male child born in Tasmania on my father’s birthday. He had other names in other places, but I did not even ask what they were.

  ‘Do you think that’s the one?’ he asked, not convinced.

  ‘It has to be,’ I answered. ‘How many illegitimate boys were born on the first of September in Launceston that year? How many illegitimate boys were born in Launceston that year? There were only 23,000 people in Launceston, for heaven’s sake! It could be a coincidence, but I don’t think so.’

  Some days later Mary Nicholls found the christening entry in the register of St John’s, Launceston, Emma’s parish church. On 9 November the tiny boy was given the names Robert Henry Eric Ernest. The curate had some difficulty reading what was painfully written on the piece of paper Emma Greeney brought. He entered the child’s father’s name as ‘Robert Hambett’, or something like it, when it was in fact Robert Hamilton, and the column where his occupation should have been entered remained vacant. Perhaps the curate actually meant to shield a good middle-class family from a servant-girl’s accusations and simply refused to believe what was written.

  For there was a Robert, or rather a Richard Robert Ernest Hamilton, who would have been known to the vicar at St John’s Church, if not to his curate, for he had been a member of the Rev. Beresford’s congregation when he was Vicar of Holy Trinity Church, Ulverstone. The Rev. Beresford had married him, come to that. Robert Hamilton was born at Colenso, near Ladysmith, north-west of Durban in 1865, and educated in England. He emigrated to Tasmania in 1887 and set up as a house, estate and general commission agent in 1888; he married a Tasmanian girl in 1895. A daughter was born in 1897, another in 1902, and another in 1908. In 1905 he extended his operations to include customs, shipping and forwarding, representing Holyman’s White Star line of steamers, and Commercial Union Assurance. He was also a district valuer. When Robert Hamilton King was born, R.R.E. was secretary to the Leven Road Trust which eventually became the Ulverstone Council, with R.R.E. still lending his services as secretary until a town clerk could be appointed. He was also secretary of the Leven Harbour Trust.

  But R.R.E. was not the kind of man to get a servant girl pregnant and turn her out. For one thing he was married and his wife had had a baby the year before Rhoda became pregnant. Respectable middle-class men do not seduce the help when their wives are pregnant or pre-occupied with new babies. There was no way a bad ignorant girl like Rhoda King was going to compromise Mr Hamilton’s reputation by putting his name in the St John’s Church register as father of her child for all the world to see. Everything I have told you about the man is irrelevant; it is also irrelevant that he was tall, narrow-chested, had a moustache, a long face, a narrow nose, deep-set eyes, very fair skin and rode a bicycle around Ulverstone. He lived to the great age of ninety-one and died of athero-sclerosis of the brain. All utterly irrelevant.

  Rhoda was not there when her five-week-old son was christened; she had already given him up and gone her way sorrowing. None of the people standing round the font knew what to answer when the curate asked what the child’s father’s occupation was. The curate opted for discretion. If Robert did eventually become a charge upon the state legal proceedings to secure a contribution from the father for the child’s support had to be instituted, and the curate was not prepared to furnish material for a scandal.

  If my grandmother dreamed of her baby each night, and woke calling his name, she did no more than relinquishing mothers usually do. If when she went to Launceston she stared at little boys his age, looking for her own features, she did no more than relinquishing mothers usually do. A year after her ordeal she marr
ied. She had found another position, as a domestic servant in Sassafras, and there she found a husband, the son of a fell-monger from Perth, thirty-two years old, a labourer. They went to live at Deddington, a tiny place on the upper waters of the Nile River, between Gelignite Hill and Lowes Mount. They had ten children, seven girls and three boys, which is why I shall not tell you her married name, for I have not been able to tell all of them or my eighteen half-cousins, about their half-brother. Rhoda died in 1968, fifteen years after her husband.

  My father’s names, ‘Robert Henry Eric Ernest’, were probably chosen partly by his mother and partly by Emma. Perhaps Emma was preparing her new little boy as a replacement for Henry Ernest, whom she still seemed likely to lose. So Robert Hamilton King became Eric Greeney, and later, Eric R. Greeney, as the name appears in the register of results from Wellington Square school. From the beginning my father hardly had a name to call his own.

  His mother was the first of several women left to grieve for my father and helplessly wonder what had become of him. For his part, he never knew her name. It seems unlikely that he would not have known of the existence of Emma Greeney’s register and its place on the top of the wardrobe. He probably knew that his name was not to be found in it. He was too smart not to realise that he did not have the same encounters with officialdom that so harassed his foster-brothers and -sisters. Yet Emma never concealed from him or from any of her children that they were adopted. The state wards all knew what their entitlements were, although they often misunderstood the nature of their trust funds and the limitations on their access to them. Until Emma Greeney legally adopted them the state wards were entitled to their own names if they wished to assume them, and their files were kept in their own names. No legal form of adoption existed when Emma took Robert/Eric away from Middle Street, but this was one child that Emma had to call her own, after the uncertainty and anguish of expecting month by month that Ernie would be returned to his mother. Robert and Emma’s only hope of keeping Eric was to hide him from his mother, for they had no legal claim to him. For several years after they got Eric, Robert Greeney’s name did not appear in the post office directory.

  If Rhoda wandered the streets of Launceston, looking for her little boy, she never found him. He may have thought that he had been abandoned and forgotten but he was almost certainly wrong. Middle-class women might try to pretend that the birth had never happened, but working-class women usually confessed their lapse to their husbands and took their children back from the state when they married. The mothers of state wards wrote letters to the Neglected Children’s Department, many years after their children had been given up, mostly without success. Robert Hamilton King’s mother, persuaded or duped into countenancing private adoption, had no way of knowing if her son was alive or dead, well or ill, happy or unhappy.

  Actually he was happy, although he may not have realised the fact.

  Eric

  A bachelor and a bohemian, [the female impersonator Perce Lodge of the Smart Set Diggers] always upheld noticeable dignity, which gave him a certain air of distinction. This was an acquired art which proved very successful, enabling him to gatecrash any of the high society functions he wished to attend. He was tall, extremely good-looking, had charming manners and was an exquisite dancer… it was never apparent to anyone that he was any other than an invited guest.

  HECTOR GRAY, MEMOIRS OF A VARIETY ARTISTE

  Very probably Eric, like his own son, Barry, my brother, was an adorable little boy. He had the kind of aquiline features that are dainty in childhood, very fair English skin, and large grey eyes. He also had a very soft heart and extremely cuddly ways. Emma Greeney would have been forgiven for spoiling him, but as far as his foster-sisters recall he was treated the same as any other of the children who slept two to a room in Emma’s house in Bathurst Street.

  The town children of Launceston roved the streets in barefoot gangs getting up to all kinds of devilry and considered themselves pretty hard cases. When school was out the boys at Wellington Square school used to ‘duck home, whip off their boots, chuck them over the back fence and race off to be in it’, according to Dave Chandler who went to school with Ernie, Eli and Eric. The Greeney boys had to be more circumspect; Robert Greeney was out and about all day with his horse and dray and might turn up in the middle of a good stoush (street-fight) or just as you jumped over a wall with your pockets and your shirt front stuffed with stolen fruit. The boys well knew how to outwit the bobby on the beat, but Robert Greeney was another matter.

  Emma had no intention of letting her boys run wild; if they got into trouble the consequences were far more serious than they were for boys who lived with their natural parents. Emma’s lads would not be fined or bound over to keep the peace; they would be on the way to the Boys’ Training School within hours. Eric was not a ward of the state and could not have been sent away unless Emma herself declared him uncontrollable, something she only ever did when discontented older boys threatened to disrupt the household. When one of her boys threw a stone at a street boy who was tormenting him, missed and broke a shop-window, Emma stepped in at once; within hours he had penned and delivered a laborious explanation and apology, with an offer to pay for re-glazing the window.

  The shopkeeper was only too happy to leave the matter there, and Emma breathed easy again, although they could ill afford the seven and sixpence that the window cost. She knew that the matter was on the boy’s file at the Neglected Children’s Department and would not be forgotten if he got himself into trouble again. This was the genesis of my father’s constant refrain, that if we children were not good we would be sent to Father Gilhooley at the Reformatory School, but no Father Gilhooley ever was employed by the Tasmanian correctional services. This detail is probably an anti-Catholic embroidery.

  Eric was not a fighter, but he was a great egger-on and manipulator of fights. He was a ‘hard doer’ says his foster-sister, Dulcie, by which she means I think that he was always up to something, constantly teasing and acting the fool. Dulcie, though still a small girl, used to like to eat raw onions. Eric would sniff her breath as he passed and, if it smelt of onions, he would flip at her with his bath-towel so that it stung. When Emma got on her high horse he would smack her on the bottom or make her laugh.

  Though Emma was sincerely religious, and dependent upon her church for support and guidance in bringing up her crew of damaged children, she was not a wowser. The children played cards uproariously around the kitchen table after their chores and their homework were finished, and it was probably there that Eric first took on the role of official interpreter of the rules. The boys played for sixpence in the pool at the local snooker tables and became fairly proficient. They could buy cigarettes for a penny each and a penny ha’penny for two at Ginny Hazelwood’s shop on the corner by Wellington Square school. The pennies they got by returning beer-bottles to the pub, or by offering ‘dinks’ on their bicycles at a penny a time.

  The boys’ greatest pleasure was also their greatest ordeal. St John’s Church prided itself on its all-male choir. The choir-master was none other than Mr George Hopkins whose grandfather had been choirmaster to George III. Every Thursday night the trebles were paraded through the town in their surplices and cassocks to sing on Cleaver’s corner by way of attracting custom for the church. The street urchins with whom they fought on other days used to gather round and insult them with impunity, as they chirped their way through the boy soprano repertoire. That was how Reg Greer came to warble ‘Oh for the weengs, for the weengs of a derv’ in the shower, many years later in a nicotine-laden baritone.

  Dave Chandler sang in the choir with Eric and Eli and Ernie, and he loves to tell a story of Eric Greeney’s derring-do. Mr Hopkins habitually wore ‘apple-catchers’, i.e. plus-fours, with the curious addition of a bowler hat. When he conducted the choir he would remove the hat and leave it at the head of the choir loft staircase. As the boys filed out one night, Eric Greeney said, ‘I hate to see a hat without a dent in it.’r />
  ‘Bowler hats don’t have dents,’ said Dave.

  ‘There’s a bowler hat gunna have a dent now,’ said Eric and gave the crown of the bowler a sharp downward chop with the side of his hand. The boys hid in a side chapel to enjoy the spectacle of poor Mr Hopkins confronted with his ruined hat, first trying to punch out the dented crown and then marching down the church steps with an extremely misshapen object on his head. It is remembered by the surviving choristers as a rattling good laugh.

  In December of each year the Wellington Square school students who were considered bright enough were presented for the qualifying examination for entrance to the Launceston State High School. In 1916 Ernie gained a very creditable pass, 452 marks out of a possible 700 and went on to graduate from the high school two years later with credits in book-keeping and business practice, as well as passes in English, History, Geography, French, Arithmetic, Algebra and Geometry. In 1917, thirteen-year-old Eric took the qualifying examination for the high school. Mary Nicholls found the record of his results for me. Here at last was the answer to my question of how intelligent my father actually was. His colleagues all thought him very sharp. Dictation (dictation!) 48 out of a hundred. Writing 28 out of fifty, we thought. Composition 52 out of a hundred. Grammar 43 out of a hundred. Maths 124 out of two hundred, geography 12, out of fifty we hoped, and history 32 out of a hundred. He tied for second bottom of the class with a girl called Esther Begent. Both of them had their marks adjusted to a bare pass of 350 so that they could after all enter the high school. The only child with lower marks failed outright. Joint twenty-ninth out of thirty-one. I had my answer.