English Greers do exist, and none of the English Greer families can be excluded. Thirty-five babies Greer were born in West Derby between 1901 and 1910, twenty-eight in Prescot, twenty-six in Salford. Melvyn Bragg, holidaying in the Isle of Man, sent me slides of Greer graves he had found there. One of them was fairly easy to read, ‘In Memory of William Greer of Douglas, painter, who died 17th of May, 1875 aged 56 years Also in Memory of Jane Greer, of Strand St. Douglas, relict of the above, born August 9th, 1812, who fell asleep March 28th, 1882.’ Nothing remarkable there, except perhaps that my sister is called Jane, which was not when she was christened a popular name, and I was born with a facile talent for drawing. The other gravestone was at the wrong angle to the sunlight; holding it up to the desk light didn’t make it legible, even with the magnifying glass from my compact Oxford English Dictionary. I rigged up another stronger light by turning a spotlight upside down and putting a sheet of paper over it. ‘Robert Greer of Douglas,’ I read, ‘something who departed this life on the tenth of, was it October? aged something and Elizabeth Greer, something, beloved wife of the above, something, who departed this life the something of something, and Coultry Greer (Tom) youngest son of the above’… The sunlit graveyard scene framed in my square magnifying glass suddenly darkened. The conjured spirits of Robert Greer and his kindred vanished with a confused noise. The slide had melted to treacle.
Melvyn had said in his note that Manxmen were great seafarers. I could have told him not only that many of the Greers are greater wanderers, but that when they go they never return. There was no return to Scotland for the scions of McGregor stock, but their Quaker descendants who went west to Pennsylvania in the seventeenth century, and those who turned southwards to South Africa, New Zealand and Australia in the nineteenth, never came that way again. They sent back no antipodean gold to found colleges and hospitals at home; the better I knew these Ulster Scots and their unforgiving ways the less likely I thought it that my grandparents had tried the new world and ‘gone home’.
My quest had travelled many miles before I discovered in the Melbourne Probate Index notice of the will of Rachel E. Greer, late of Ireland, widow, died on the 26th of May, 1931. I scribbled the reference and tore out of the library and up the hill and round the corner and into the probate office which was on a building site, and was promptly sent out again to run to the post office and buy a slew of duty stamps to pay for the ‘search’ and back through the building site. They wanted me to make a second visit and tried to pretend that finding the documents would be a long and tedious business, but they were on the point of closing for the Christmas break and didn’t they understand that if this was my grandmother I would know where not to look at least and… So five minutes later the slim packet tied with the pink tape always miscalled red, just as huntsmen’s red coats are always miscalled pink, was on the table before me.
Rachel Elizabeth Greer died at a house called ‘Wharparilla’, after a township near Mildura, in Portaferry, County Down. At the end of the day I knew the precise value of Rachel’s estate in Victoria, and I also knew that she was not my grandmother who had returned to Ireland leaving her son to fend for himself. I went to Northern Ireland and read every Greer will I could find, visited Greer graves in dozens of country graveyards, Church of Ireland, Presbyterian, Wesleyan and Quaker, and deciphered dozens of mossy Greer gravestones. And the sum total of my inquiries, into the Greers of Portaferry, Derrynoose, Ballyhalbert, Donaghadee, Drumbo, Knock, Killyleagh, Tullylagan, Ballyculter, Downpatrick, Moira, Strangford, Ballylesson, Dromore, and Greerstown itself was a pair of wet feet and a memorable meal of Irish oysters. I tried more desperate measures, appealed on TV chat shows for a sign from my kinsfolk, published my father’s picture in mass circulation newspapers.
The more I repeated our childish scenario, that Reg Greer’s parents had finished what they came to do in Australia, and returned to the old world, the less convincing I found it. There was never any hint in my father’s behaviour that he remembered a different way of life. He only drank fizzy Australian beer, and he drank it half-frozen. His beer, beer glasses and silver beer mugs were all kept in the refrigerator so that no tittle of the deep chill could be abated in the pouring. So ubiquitous is the Australian preference for ice-cold beer in glasses so cold that water condenses on them in a white rime that I could never find any tumblers in Australian hotel rooms. My god-child Hannah would click her teeth and say, ‘Where are glasses kept in Australia?’ and sure enough there they would be, in the frigo-bar.
Though Reg Greer never went to the beach, and was so unused to the sun that he got blisters on the tops of his feet if he wore sandals without socks, he began to seem to me less and less English and more and more Australian. His conviction that there was no better place on earth than Australia was never rationally propounded; beyond a fleeting encounter with North Africa, Malta and India, it seemed to me that he knew nothing whatever about any other country, beyond a grab-bag of assorted clichés. If I suggested that he travel to Malta or to England, his reaction was not so much that of a man who had seen it all, as of a man who was terrified of ‘abroad’. He would not like the food, the drink, the climate, the people; he would be incapable of adjustment. A boy who had been brought up by newcomers to the country could hardly have viewed the world from such a perspective. Little by little the notion that he was the child of British migrants or Gastarbeiter or whatever faded away, until I could hardly believe, unless I read my notebooks, that I had ever believed it at all.
In the missing persons game there is no substitute for luck. Even Philip Marlowe and Lord Peter Wimsey have to have luck. It never occurred to me in setting out on the father hunt that I would be dogged by super-bad luck. Or that I would spread it around me like a foul smell. Omens proliferate. If I thrust my stainless steel fork into the stiff cold earth, lo, I have pierced a toad through the belly. He flings his arms wide and opens his mouth, spread-eagled by me, who love toads better than flowers. I have to shut my eyes and push his body off the fork before I have time to register what has happened, before my knees go weak. I bury him fast, hoping he was still in his winter sleep before my steel icicle transfixed him. If I turn my car out of the drive on to the road I find one of the hares I have just been watching as they leapt and caracoled in the plough, mashed on the road. The wind lifts one black-tipped ear and flutters it, a reminder of past frivolity, and on the other side of the hedge a lone hare goes March mad on its own. The silver cat brings in a shrew and loses it under the kitchen bench where it dies slowly until I draw it out with the broom. The cat, Shanghai Jim by name, flicks it from the broom with a paw and bites its face off. Christopher, the red cat, meanwhile concentrates on rolling a new-laid egg to the edge of the table, so it will smash on the floor and he can eat it. I pick a horse to run in the Grand National and it falls at Beecher’s and breaks its neck. It was second favourite, so it wasn’t just my luck that day. If I become so arrogant as to think all these disasters a judgment on me, I shall have become completely, instead of just fairly, irrational.
Oh, let me not be mad, not mad, sweet heaven;
Keep me in temper; I would not be mad.
(Oh, Papa, I would be your Cordelia, but I’m afraid I shall prove a Goneril or a Regan.)
Every day, in every way, it is demonstrated to me that there’s nae luck about the house, but I cannot go backward. I’ve spent too much of the advance; I must blindly struggle forward but I need some energy harnessed on my side. Somebody out there knows my story and doesn’t know he knows it. I decided to send stronger signals so I agreed to do ‘Wogan’, for ‘Wogan’ is watched by millions all over the British Isles.
Impossible with ten million viewers that someone somewhere hadn’t connections with South Africa and Australia. Before the programme was over a gentleman rang; the television workers were wildly excited. This was it, this was the breakthrough. This was the power of television to bring people together.
I had been to the dead end of so many promising
leads that I found it hard to share their excitement. In fact, I’d got to the point where I thought that my very expectations were blunting the needle of my compass and preventing my coming to the truth. I took the number but I waited to return the gentleman’s call in privacy and calm.
First of all I had looked in Burke’s Irish Families and there they were, a distinguished family of Greers, going back to the Quaker linendraper Thomas Greer whose account-books are a major source for the history of the linen industry in the seventeenth century. Many of his descendants had turned Church of Ireland or taken their Quakerism to Pennsylvania. There were members of parliament, soldiers and judges galore, canons, prebends, bishops and lepidopterists.
One of the descendants of this family, the Great Greers, I call them, had fought with the Australian Imperial Forces in the First War. My heart leapt when I beheld Nathaniel Alexander Staples Greer, and sank as suddenly when I found that he had died unmarried. If Daddy had been the son of a remittance man sent to cool his reprobate heels far from the sight of his offended family, his reluctance to claim the connection would do him no shame. Perhaps Nathaniel Alexander Staples Greer had issue that Burke’s wotted not of. It was a forlorn hope. I found Nathaniel for myself; when he arrived in Australia he went opal-mining for a few years in south-western Queensland, but he did not make his fortune. After the Great War he drifted from town to town; when he died, he was a labourer in a fruit-growing town called Yenda, in the Murrumbidgee Irrigation District. His grave in the local cemetery is unmarked.
The name Robert Greer that my father gave as his father’s name on his wedding certificate seemed to me to hark back to the Scotch origins of the Irish family; it was a name to be expected of the Presbyterian Greers, who had never swerved from the faith that caused them to be driven out of Scotland by James Stuart. The Great Greers arrived in Ulster forty years after the Presbyterian Greers and came from Northumberland; they seemed to be at pains to distinguish themselves from the Presbyterian Greers and called themselves names like William and Frederick.
Those who kept the Quaker faith were usually called biblical names but the Robert Greers who arrived in New York in 1804 and Philadelphia in 1827 were probably Quakers. I longed to find that Daddy was originally a Quaker. His antipathy to organised religion, and cant and hypocrisy of all kinds, would have taken on a positive character for me, if it had been grounded in the democratic traditions of the Society of Friends. I could have understood how the disciplines of Quakerdom might have been irksome to a young man, and how he might have run away from them, and lost the baby along with the bathwater. There was a Quaker school in Hobart, and a strong Quaker presence in East Africa; perhaps that explained his parents’ wanderings.
At St Katherine’s House I had found ten Robert, Robert Somebody or Somebody Robert Greers married between 1890 and 1904, two on the Isle of Man, and one each in Runcorn, Portsea, South Shields, Basford, Birmingham, Neath, Newcastle-on-Tyne and West Derby, but none married to an Emma Rachel Wise. I found a Reginald Ernest, too, born in Hampstead in 1875, and married there in 1898, but not to an Emma Rachel Wise. In the births I found a Robert who was born in 1880 and seemed not to have been married in England, from Middlesborough. After many weeks of struggle with genealogists amateur and professional helping me in South Africa, in Australia, in Ireland and in England, no one had found anything. One old hand wrote, ‘Depend upon it, if your father didn’t tell where to find his parents, it is because he had something to hide.’ In my first flash of indignation, I tore the letter up, fancying it had been prompted by malice and superciliousness. I see now it was a warning, and well-meant I’m sure, but I had no choice. My hand was on the plough, and the apparently solid ground was already gashed. There could be no stopping until it was all laid open. Time then to tend the wound.
I wrote in my notebook: ‘The day has turned dark now. Snow is whirling through the bare branches. A wicked little draught is licking at my ankles with an icy tongue although the heating is full on. I feel as if my heart itself is turning hard and failing to pump warmth into my body. I am afraid that my father is a liar, not just economical with the truth, reticent and unwilling to disabuse others of their cherished fantasies, but a deliberate liar. I am afraid that he married an uneducated child woman, with none to protect her interests but a brother barely older than she and a gullible mother, impressed by my father’s sang-froid and savoir faire and tailored elegance, and deliberately told lies on the register. I am afraid “Robert Greer” does not exist, never existed. “Thou shalt not uncover the nakedness of thy father,” says the commandment. Daddy forbade me to search; perhaps he told me I would find nothing and I disbelieved him and so forgot what he said. I have no one but myself to blame.’
Everyone asks me the same question, ‘Doesn’t your mother know who she married?’ I don’t know if she even cared. Perhaps she had been systematically misled, or perhaps, like me, she misled herself. Daddy was so affable, so genteel, so well-dressed, so nicely spoken; we would be doing violence to our own capacity for judging people to have taken him for anything less than a public-school man. Why would anyone doubt the information he gave for the Register? Of course, his parents were overseas if he said they were. But where did he say they were? Most people thought he was English, and he seems to have wanted them to. The reasons they thought him English were bizarre: ‘He always wore gloves when he went out of the office, even on the hottest day,’ according to the man who worked beside him in 1933, ‘so we assumed he was English.’ I thought his family were in England; when I suggested making contact when I left for Cambridge, he didn’t tell me I couldn’t or wouldn’t find them; he told me not to.
There were many reasons for not searching for my father through my mother. There would have been ways of interrogating her over time that would have built up a picture of what she knew without knowing that she knew it, but such a proceeding seemed to me impious and brutal. At a lower level lay another motive: I wanted to find my own father, not my mother’s husband. I did not want simply to adjust my mother’s fantasy to fit myself. My mother was sure that he had loved only her; any evidence that he may have loved me she would have suppressed or distorted. I will always remember a particularly grim moment during a family conference not long before his death. Daddy was already making his shaky way to the place I had made for him beside me on the sofa, when Mother came up and pushed him at it. ‘Oh, go on. Reg, sit next to her!’ she said, crinkling her face in a parody of earnest persuasion. As he sat bewildered, she shouted, ‘Oh, go on, give her a kiss!’ as if cajoling him to take cascara.
Though I could not make Mother party to my search, I had to go through the motions of consulting her. She was waiting for me on her sun bed, her head wrapped in a towel to protect her skin and scalp from the perpendicular sunrays.
‘I can’t find your parents-in-law,’ I said.
Said Mother in a little girl voice, ‘He told me he was an orphan.’
‘Mother, if he told you he was an orphan, what are those names on the parish register at Saint Columba’s?’
‘What names?’ asked Mother.
‘Father: Robert Greer, journalist, and mother: Emma Rachel Wise.’
‘Oh, those names,’ said Mother.
‘Who brought Eric Reginald Greer from Durban to Australia? Why would the South Africans send an orphan boy to a place where he had no kin? We’re all orphans when our parents die; he seems to have known who his parents were. It’s just that I can’t find them. They don’t pan out.’
‘They went back to England,’ Mother said patiently, ‘when their job was done. Finished the assignment and went back. There’s nothing so very unusual about that, is there?’
‘Mother dear, that assignment took as long as it takes a child to grow up to be old enough to leave him behind. What do you think it was?’
‘Oh, his father was an editor, of a newspaper. Wasn’t it the Examiner? The Launceston Examiner?’ I gazed out of the window at the row of houselets each with a door and a wi
ndow and a little verandah that had somehow supplanted our neighbour’s garden. All the glass doors and windows seemed to be staring into our emptiness.
‘I know all the names of all the journalists associated with the Examiner and with its rival the Daily Telegraph which went broke in 1928. There is never a Greer among them. There is never a Greer who was a member of the Australian Journalists’ Association, Mother. Australian newspapers were not graciously set up by foreigners and edited by foreigners for the benefit of foreigners. They were an intrinsic part of their communities. The Launceston Examiner was owned by W.R. Rolph and his associates; the editor was Prichard, the father of Katherine Susannah Prichard, and then Stanley Dryden; you could have found that out by looking in any Who’s Who in Australia.’
Mother looked mildly non-plussed. ‘But his father was an editor. He made him work long hours, and travel all over the place, getting copy, so that his health broke down.’
Poor Mother, it was all wrong. I did not tell her that I had written to the doyen of Tasmanian newspapermen, Sir Ray Ferrall, who replied as soon as he got my letter, ‘I wish I could remember a Robert or a Reg Greer as one of my comrades, but sadly I can’t… if you would like me to follow up any clues please let me know for I will gladly do so.’
I had no further clues: Sir Ray’s letter was the last of the many stones I had to turn. As I lay sleepless in my bed that night a greasy sweat of embarrassment collected under my chin and on the nape of my neck. Sir Ray, clever, solid, distinguished, courteous Sir Ray, knew my bizarre secret, that I had a phony grandfather, ‘Robert Greer’, and a mother whose family cared so little how she fared in the matrimonial lottery that they did not even bother to check whether the bridegroom’s account of his background was true in any respect. In the stressful weeks that followed I slept little and when I did I ground my teeth to ruins.