After our return to Canberra, I once again tried to open up discussion as to why he had not made contact with his family after the war. He was evasive and non-committal, so I sought my brothers’ help. Even they, and they had a very close relationship with him, agreed that there may well be a mystery surrounding our parents’ lives before they had moved to Australia in 1942. We discussed many possibilities, but none seemed logical or feasible.
Very discreetly, Tony, who was unmarried and still living with Denis, would ‘borrow’ Denis’s passports and any personal papers that he thought of interest from the desk in Denis’s bedroom, and photocopy them before carefully replacing them. We three siblings would then meet for coffee to discuss any interesting finds that Tony had made. After dissecting everything that Tony brought us, we were none the wiser for our troubles. All his post-war passports, and there were many as we had travelled regularly until the 1950s, seemed in order and told a story that we were all familiar with.
With so little to go on, it seemed our detective work was bound to fail. Although there were virtually no letters, or papers predating the war, Tony had found Denis’s original 1929 employment contract with Dunlop and a letter from an estate agent indicating that he was definitely living in Malaya in 1938.
At the time I could not see anything in either of these documents that shed any light on Denis’s family. Why would such a secretive man keep a 1938 letter from a Malayan estate agent instructing him to get the house he was renting in Rifle Range Lane, Kuala Lumpur sprayed for white ants? It seemed so ephemeral; in fact, banal. No doubt there was a good reason but heaven knows what it was.
On the other hand, I could understand him keeping the employment contract. It had been his ticket to another world and new life. The contract, dated 18 November 1929, was a four-year agreement between Dunlop Plantations Limited and Denis. It stated that the company would provide a ship passage and 10 pounds sterling, cover incidental expenses on the voyage and provide a further 10 pounds for the ‘purchase of Bungalow necessaries not furnished by the Company’ — this was on top of his regular salary while he was training to become a plantation manager. It must have seemed an excellent arrangement for a young man bent on making something of himself. Years later, we were to find an entry in the Singapore Straits Times listing him as arriving in Singapore on the P&O ship SS Mantua on 29 December 1929, a bare six weeks after the contract had been signed.
It was the position as assistant plantation manager for Dunlop that had first brought him out to Malaya as a young graduate; I could understand its value. But, I wondered, why keep a contract for a job long past, and not other documents such as his children’s birth certificates, his marriage certificate or even a photo of his now long dead but beloved mother or any other member of his immediate family?
There were other perplexing features of those two documents. Of the two names listed on the contract as guarantors, one was unfamiliar, but the other was Emerson — the first part of Denis’s hyphenated name. The other strange thing was that only the second part of his surname, Elliott, had been used on the contract and accompanying letter.
At first sight, the contract posed more questions than it answered. However, in the years to come, it was the Dunlop contract that was to give us our first breakthrough in discovering something of Denis’s real past.
In 1983, our life was to change direction. We had decided to spend the following year overseas. We had scrimped and saved to accumulate enough to pay for five round-the-world airfares. Lindsay took a year’s leave of absence and his employer helped to arrange work for Lindsay in both the USA and Britain, and paid his airfares. In the last few months before we left Australia, I made a point of writing down everything that I knew about my family on both my mother’s side and father’s side. It wasn’t much, but if we were to do serious genealogical work we needed any and all information we could get.
Denis and Tony would regularly lunch with us on Sundays, so Lindsay would pull out his writing pad and ask Denis for details of his and my mother’s family history. Denis always looked very uncomfortable during these sessions and would often make some excuse to leave early.
Our two older sons had heard that if your grandfather was British, you were entitled to have your passport stamped with an Ancestry Visa. This would allow them certain privileges and the ability to work in the UK. Chris, the eldest, was particularly keen to work, as he would turn 18 that year and would finish school at the end of 1983.
To have their passports stamped, they had to prove their eligibility by providing their grandfather’s birth certificate or passport, and their grandparents’ marriage certificate. Apparently this posed a problem for Denis. The passport was fine, he had a current one — it was his marriage certificate that was the problem. It had been, Denis said, lost with most of their possessions during their flight out of Singapore. ‘But you can always get a copy,’ I said. ‘It should be quite easy.’ No marriage certificate was forthcoming.
As our departure drew nearer, I kept asking why it had not come. Denis kept stalling. And so it went on. It was within weeks of our departure, and we had just about given up all hope of being able to get our sons’ passports stamped, when Denis arrived at the University Library where I was working. He appeared uncomfortable and very nervous.
It was a warm day, so I hurried him outside to a nearby bench were we could talk privately. A copy of his marriage certificate had arrived, he told me, but there was something he needed to explain before I took it home. His speech was hurried, his demeanour edgy. I took the paper he held out to me; at first it all looked fine.
Yes, there he was — Age 32 (I thought he had been younger when he married); Marital Status Bachelor; Profession Merchant; Residence 38 Tanah Merah Road; By Licence — why licence, I wondered, hadn’t it been a grand affair with Mother’s parents coming from England to attend the marriage of their eldest daughter? There was my father’s full name, and my mother’s details. But wait, wasn’t she 18 when they married? Not 21. And yes, they were married in St Andrew’s Cathedral, Singapore. But suddenly I saw the date. Really saw the date: 19 January 1940. A bare two years before I was born and after both my brothers’ births.
It was a very warm November day, but I went cold.
Why leave the wedding until many years after they were obviously together? Where was the big wedding that Norma’s parents came all the way from England by ship to Singapore to witness? Why leave the marriage till two children had been produced? Why, I asked?
I knew as soon as he started to speak, that what he had to say was not going to be the truth, not by a long shot. I felt cold inside — why couldn’t he, wouldn’t he, just tell the truth?
The story he told me that day, was just that, a story. He would have me believe that, after Norma and her parents arrived in Singapore from England, Norma had asked that they be married in a Catholic church. Denis’s parents, who were staunch Anglicans, would, he said, have been horrified. So to cause no hurt to his beloved mother, Denis refused. So the wedding was off and my mother’s parents returned home to England leaving their daughter behind in Denis’s care. What rubbish.
If, I thought to myself, the families had been close friends, wouldn’t Denis and his parents have known that Norma’s family was Catholic? Wouldn’t the two families have discussed religion and what sort of service they expected long before they arrived in Singapore? And wouldn’t Denis, who was in his late 20s and living an independent life, agree to marry my mother in whatever church she wanted if he loved her as much as he professed?
And why, after living together for five or six years, had they decided to marry? I asked. Because both his parents had died by then and he would not be causing them hurt, he said. The war in Europe had begun, he explained, and he was to join the British Naval Reserve and he needed to make sure Mummy was looked after should something happen to him.
Sitting on that bench in the warm morning sun, listening to Denis try to retell his history to fit this new piece of irrefu
table evidence just hardened my heart to these ridiculous stories he told. What he was telling me was absolute nonsense and I didn’t believe a word of it.
My feelings of disbelief and distrust intensified that day. From now on, I would believe nothing he told me until I could prove it was true. After so many years of being conditioned to ‘not upset the apple cart’ as it were, it had become almost impossible for me to challenge Denis on his interpretation of his life. I did not believe his explanation, not one word of it, but I was unable to tell him so. My fear of his displeasure and disapproval won over once again.
I took Denis’s passport and marriage certificate to the British High Commission where, after due process, the boys got their passports stamped. But, at this stage, I could not bring myself to tell them the story of why the marriage certificate had taken so long to come. Nor did I tell them that when we got to Britain, I would be spending a lot of my time hoping to find their grandfather’s ‘real’ past.
After our year’s sojourn overseas, many months of research and my abortive trip to Milverton, I was still none the wiser about my parents’ history. We had found neither Norma’s nor Denis’s birth certificates, nor any trace of them in the village where they were supposed to have been born and raised. We had looked at different spellings of their names, looked a few years either side of their supposed dates of birth. Nor could we find any record of their parents or any of Denis’s siblings. No war records of his two brothers who had supposedly died, one in World War I, and the other in World War II. No record of my paternal grandfather, who was said to have been a Member of Parliament from Somerset. No gravestones, baptismal records, or entries of baptisms or christenings in church records under either my father’s surname or my mother’s maiden name. My parents simply didn’t exist. Only, of course, they did.
Life would go on as before in our family. I had no new identity to offer our sons in exchange for the grandfather they knew, respected and loved. I had found no wealthy lords in distant castles, no hideous tales of monstrous doings, and no family scandals to rattle the dark closets of the past. I had simply found nothing. So I kept the status quo and kept silent.
Now that our youngest child was almost a teenager I felt I could stretch my wings a little and find more interesting work. I was lucky enough to be offered a position at the ACT Health Authority. The work was both fulfilling and challenging. I was hard working and diligent and rose in the ranks. I shed my jeans and sloppy joes for smart little suits, my shabby handbag for a briefcase. I was ‘getting on’ in the world and enjoying it. Not only was I finding new strengths and interests in my life, I was making a whole new set of friends apart from the ‘mums’ in our street. The work broadened my outlook, stretched the imagination and gave me challenges to tackle; the friends enriched my daily life, providing encouragement and support when I needed it.
So the years slipped by. Quiet years filled with the small doings of an ordinary family. But underneath the pretence of playing ‘normal’ families, I wasn’t giving up! I would continue to dig, to tease out every bit of information I had, to watch for a slip, a chink in Denis’s armour that would give me a lead. No piece of information did I consider so insignificant as to not warrant investigation. That Denis was lying about his background, I had no doubt, but the extent and detail of his lies remained unknown. I saw his fabricated life as a complex terrain of possible truth and definite falsehood. Finding a path to the kernel of truth of his many stories would need, I knew, patience and determination.
When I thought all my leads had been exhausted, I decided to seek advice from another quarter, a close family friend.
When World War II ended, John Batten, one of Aunt and Uncle Batten’s sons from our Melbourne days, turned his back on the world and became a Dominican monk. Many years later we would meet him again when our family finally settled in Perth in 1955. He would visit us occasionally over the next few years and would again have a close relationship with Denis.
Some years after moving to Canberra, John reappeared in our lives. After leaving Western Australia, he had spent some time in Rome and had then been moved to the Dominican Priory in North Canberra.
He had not known of Denis’s existence before they met in Perth in 1942. He would know, I assumed, only the history that Denis had, by then, appropriated for himself. I had no illusions that John would have any revelations about Denis’s past but there was something that he would know. He had known my mother when she had first arrived in Melbourne. They had been good friends, I knew. He would have some insight into what sort of person she was. He could, I hoped, freshen the faded memories I had of her. Help me give her a personality of her own, a persona other than the mother of we three children, or Denis’s now long dead wife.
I rang him at the priory and asked if he could see me. We made an appointment for an evening early the next week. I deliberately put no high expectations on that visit. I had been disappointed before when I had hoped for so much and got so little. This time I would ask my questions and just see where they led me.
John, by now in ecclesiastical retirement, was welcoming and friendly. He still had the quizzical brown eyes and friendly smile that I remembered so well; he was just a little more rotund. He had always enjoyed his food and a glass of good red wine. I told him everything — the searches for Denis’s real identity, the dead ends we encountered in all our research in London in 1984 and my visit to the village of Milverton. I told him of my frustration at being lied to, the anger of being denied the opportunity to know my background and to meet any relatives I may have. I assumed he would be shocked, but I should have known better. He was a priest, well versed in looking deep into one’s heart.
We talked for several hours. He told me he had always had doubts as to the accuracy of Denis’s past, doubts also as to the reliability of the kinship that Denis claimed. But his friendship, he explained, had been with the man, not the history. His sense of kinship was not driven by family charts, but the knowledge that mankind was one in the eyes of God. He sympathised with my dilemma, but had no answers or suggestions as to how I could solve the riddle of Denis’s life.
We then spoke about my mother and I told him of my disappointment that I had been so young when she died so that I had not had the opportunity to really know her. It was then I made an exciting discovery. He told of another Norma, an altogether different person from the mother I thought I knew. He told me of a flesh and blood woman who had a charming sense of humour and a happy disposition; someone he cared deeply about. He spoke of Norma with such warmth and pleasure. They had been great friends, he said. There were, he told me, two versions of Norma. The Norma who sat quietly in the background, deferring to Denis and having little to say for herself, and the effervescent laughing Norma, full of fun. When Denis was not around, the second Norma appeared. We talked a lot about this second Norma and his stories about her brought her back to life in my mind. This time a different woman — one with laughing eyes, vivacious and full of life.
As John walked me to the car, I told him that I would continue my search for the truth — he turned and held my arm — concern in his face. ‘Don’t waste too much energy on the search,’ he advised. ‘You and your family are the important things in your life.’ I saw real apprehension in his look. ‘Life’s short; don’t waste it on trying to find something you may never achieve.’ I assured him I would be prepared to fail but had to try. He understood. We smiled as we parted, he to his comfortable armchair and book in the priory, me back to my home and growing family.
John died about 18 months after my visit. I was so glad to have spoken to him.
It was such a bizarre idea for Denis to look back at his childhood and reinvent it to his own liking. To create a father, mother, brothers and sister, relatives, friends and even a home in a landscape totally in his imagination. His need for respectability dictated that he let the world believe that his early home life was governed by the etiquette of the times. A home filled with good furnishings and gleaming silv
erware, and ancestral portraits on the walls. Days filled with sunshine, tennis parties, dancing and horseback riding. A good education at boarding school and university, expectations for a bright future, a young man with a sense of knowing where he fitted in the world — this was the past he gave himself.
Who knows when he began to reinvent himself, to claim a history and memories that were not his to have? By the time I was old enough to ask, he could tell of the gentleness and kindness of his mother, the good breeding and generosity of his father, the madcap adventures with his brothers and the beauty of his sister. All, I was now sure, were figments of his imagination or at very best, not as he would have me believe.
Len Emerson, one of the earliest photos I have of him
Aerial view of a rubber plantation in the making, Malaya, early 1930s
Len Emerson (second from right), early days in Malaya
My mother and brother Tony at Whitelawns, Singapore, ca 1940
Tony on his pony Brown Rascal at Whitelawns, ca 1941
Whitelawns some time before 1942
My father and mother, Almer Manor, England, 1949
My mother, pre-war Singapore or Malaya
My father, pre-war Singapore or Malaya
Tony and me, Croydon, Victoria 1945
My mother and me, Victoria, 1945
We three children holidaying at Cameron Highlands, ca 1947
Me playing in the walled garden at Almer Manor, England, 1949
Brother Tony and me in Sydney, 1963
Somewhere in the Malayan jungle, Nona (above) with sisters Daisy and Irene. This is the earliest photo I have of my mother
At the Australian War Memorial – my first year in Canberra, 1962
Whatever Remains Page 11