Daddy, We Hardly Knew You

  It was only possible for Eric Reginald Greer to get away with these nebulous forebears because my mother’s father was not consulted in the matter of his nineteen-year-old daughter’s marriage. At the end of May 1935, my uncle. Bernard, left home because he was constantly at odds with his father, whom he considered unreasonably strict. The ‘old man’ as we all knew him was half-Italian; he wouldn’t let his daughter paint a big blood-red bow where her mouth ought to be, or cut off her glossy braids, or stay out late. He was furious when she gave up her scholarship to Windsor Convent and went out to work in the fashion business. He lurked in wait to attack the boys who brought her home from a date. She and her mother had dreams of a glamorous future for her. Some weeks after Bernard moved into his own lodgings, his mother appeared on the doorstep, with his sister and little brother.

  A few months later the little sister was tripping down Collins Street in her lunch-hour when she saw and was seen by a handsome well-dressed man, standing chatting with his cronies. She turned and came back for a second look. The man detached himself from his mates and offered to buy her a cup of coffee, and so my parents’ courtship began.

  Reg Greer was big in advertising and it was probably through his offices that Peggy Lafrank got her one big modelling job, the job that in hindsight became a brilliant career that she gave up when she became pregnant with me. One of the rapidly forming advertising agencies devised a campaign for Swallow and Ariell Ltd, the Uneeda bakers, based upon an antique theme, principally to dispel prejudice against factory-made foods. On the back cover of Table Talk, for 6 February, 1936, appeared an advertisement, which averred that ‘They lived well in 1854. They knew good food and liked it—even as you and I. Certainly they used more home-cooked food those days, but there was one delicacy they always bought ready for use. Swallow & Ariell’s Biscuits. They knew these could not be improved on, and they wanted the best—even as you and I.’ By way of illustrating this series of contentions, a fat, bald actor was leering at a young woman dressed in what passed for an olde worlde gown who was offering him a plate covered with a doiley, from which he was taking a biscuit. The young woman, her bobbed hair inexpertly curled and her eyes gluey with mascara, was my mother. Beside her on a table covered with a lace cloth stood a cut glass decanter with a four-inch-long decorative stopper and two champagne glasses full of some dark liquid. Mother’s arm, emerging from under a rather clumsily draped fichu, was still rounded with puppy fat. She was eighteen.

  ‘I never thought of myself as a beauty,’ said Mother, who all her life has thought of little else, ‘but no one else had such a neck, such a line of head, neck and shoulder.’ This one example was the sum-total of Mother’s career as a photographic model which was part of the mythology of my childhood. Perhaps the truth about Daddy would be as insignificant.

  The lack of curiosity about my father’s background would have been much less understandable outside Australia. Australians detest snobbery and insist that a man is to be valued for what he is in himself, and not the stock he may have come from on whatever side of the blanket. Migrants are special people who have the courage to venture into the unknown in order to beat the systems of inequality and limitation into which they were born in the old country; the process of making ‘a new life’ is long and fraught with danger of failure, destitution and death. There is little point in going through it all if you are still unable to escape from the fact that your grandfather was a smith who couldn’t pay his debts or a country parson whose weaker children died of the diseases of malnutrition. Father’s marriage to my mother was no rush job; her mother and brothers thought they had got to know him for ‘a good bloke’ and that was all they needed to know. Why, oh why, did I need to know more?

  Mother was not disposed to jettison her illusions simply because I could not substantiate them. ‘Well, perhaps it wasn’t Tasmania,’ she suggested.

  ‘But, Mother, he said it was.’

  ‘When?’ challenged Mother.

  ‘It’s in his repatriation file. It’s on the record. You went to the trouble of getting a copy from the Department of Veterans’ Affairs. Didn’t you read it? I’ll show it to you. Where is it?’

  Mother went to the cupboard under the sink and foraged among some plastic bags stuffed with papers. A blocked S-bend and we could lose the whole family archive, I thought gloomily. I found the page of the file for her. ‘There, you see?’

  Mother read wonderingly: ‘Pre-service life. School—Secondary Senior Public Aet fifteen and a half years Tasmania. What’s Aet?’

  ‘To the age of. He went to school in Tasmania until he was fifteen and a half, or so he told this trick cyclist here. I’d like to know what Secondary Senior Public means. Is it an exam he would have taken or what?’

  Neither of us knew. I read on. ‘Average amount of sport. Elsewhere he says that he played football and cricket and rowed. Look what he says about his occupation, “newspaper work. Reader – Reporter – Interstate Representative – Manager.”’

  ‘What’s wrong with that?’ asked Mother.

  ‘Well, he wasn’t a manager, was he?’

  ‘He was when he retired.’

  ‘Mother dear, this is more than forty-five years before he retired. We’re talking about 1944. He certainly wasn’t a manager in 1944.’

  ‘Well, I’m glad he wasn’t more ambitious,’ said Mother. ‘Alec McKay got that job and look what happened to her.’ Those used to my mother’s mental processes would have realised that she was talking about the abduction and murder of the wife of the man who took my father’s old job in Adelaide and went on to become Rupert Murdoch’s second-in-command. I gave up the half-hearted attempt to call one of my father’s lies to her attention.

  ‘Mother, didn’t you think he had lost all contact with his family by the time you met him? Then what’s this? “F.” Father, okay? “died aet 58 years. 1 year ago—Heart trouble. M. died aet 53 years. 3 and a half years ago—Influenza.” That means that Daddy’s mother died three and a half years before September 1943, early in 1940. Did you know about this? Did you know his father died in 1942? How did he know these things? Who told him?’

  For the first time Mother actually looked surprised, and not pleasantly surprised at that.

  ‘Don’t worry, Mum,’ I said wearily. ‘It doesn’t add up in any case. See here he says he has a brother forty-two; Daddy had just turned thirty-nine. And yet if his father had been alive he’d have been fifty-nine; that’d make him seventeen when he fathered his first surviving child, according to Daddy’s figures. Doesn’t sound much like “Robert Greer Journalist”.’

  ‘Do you think he was lying?’ asked Mother. She liked the idea as little as I did: besides it didn’t seem to fit what we knew of his character.

  ‘I think he was trying to get this part of the interview over. Perhaps he didn’t want the trick cyclist to realise that he was estranged from his parents and answered without giving himself time to think. Or perhaps the interviewer wrote it down wrong. I saw the original; I know this is what was written at the time. He didn’t have to say all this, you see. It would have been easier just to say parents alive and well, see, a & w, as it says here about his brother and his sister, three years younger again. “Childhood days happy—well cared for—no home discord.” So what went wrong?’

  ‘You can’t put too much reliance on what somebody says to a doctor,’ said Mother soothingly.

  ‘Don’t think I don’t know; it happens to be all I’ve got.’

  The cats had had their morning milk; the hens were tucking into their laying pellets; the bird-feeders were filled and Livingstone the parrot had rather noisily watched ‘Good Morning Britain’, before I climbed back into bed with the red cat and called the number the caller to the ‘Wogan’ show had given. Would he say, ‘I was at school with Reg Greer…’ or ‘I knew a Greer family who lived in Tasmania…’ or ‘My wife had a brother Eric in Australia somewhere…’

  ‘Oh, yes,’ said the man, ‘I was wondering if you knew about
the International Genealogical Index compiled by the Mormons, you know, with details of births, marriages and deaths all over the world.’

  That was it. The break-through. Of course I knew of the International Genealogical Index. Without grandparents or a firm place and date of birth for my father there was no way I could use it. Thank you, very kind, goodbye. The red cat heard disappointment in the cadence, walked up my chest and put his white mitten on my cheek. Sometimes I understand the people who leave all they die possessed of to their cats.

  I jumped out of bed and went to the study. There were three hundred or so Greers listed in the Belfast telephone directories and five hundred or so in the Australian directories, and heaven knows how many in the American directories. I would write to them all, telling them my story. Somebody somewhere must know something. If none of the details meant anything, I wrote, ‘please forgive my intrusion and simply throw this letter away.’ Replies are still coming, with photographs and great scrolls of family trees and kind words of acceptance and encouragement. I could hardly have made a bigger fool of myself.

  When a Girl Marries

  Each word

  had been tried over and over, at any rate,

  on the man who was sold by the man who filled my plate.

  ANNE SEXTON, ‘AND ONE FOR MY DAME’

  The day Reg Greer’s eye was caught by that striking, snappily dressed girl as he stood chatting in Collins Street, the most elegant street in Melbourne, many thought Australia, he was pretty well able to call the world his oyster. He had more offers of jobs in the expanding world of advertising than he knew what to do with. When the girl turned around and came back for a second look at him, Reg Greer made his move. He raised his hat and asked her if she would like a cup of coffee. Brazenly, she said she would. He asked her where she would like to go to have it, and she said the basement of the Manchester Unity Building, because she knew you could get a cup of coffee for thrippence and there was a band and a dance floor. The distinguished stranger was amused.

  ‘You’re very young, aren’t you?’ he said as they sipped their coffee. My mother was eighteen.

  ‘Of course, he rubbished the place,’ said Mother. It was a shopgirls’ hang-out after all.

  In a letter my mother explained her attraction to the mysterious stranger like this: ‘When I was at the vulnerable age of looking for someone as dapper as my father and about half his age (at that time the bespoke tailor was out of the question for a man on the basic wage) the great majority wore factory made suits and even with the two pairs of trousers supplied the coat was so “near” that what with the lean times and all, the view from the back was all depressing sag.’ Australia was at that time unique in the world for having a ‘basic wage’; men on the basic wage have never been able to afford a bespoke tailor and in mid-1935 times were less lean than they had been for ten years. Nevertheless Peggy Lafrank’s description of the impression Reg Greer made is probably spot on.

  By her own admission Peggy Lafrank at the ripe age of eighteen was looking for a husband; Reg Greer happened to be looking for a wife. He called on her family, and discovered that the role of father figure to the three children was vacant. My grandmother was only too happy to cook for him and launder his shirts, in return for his charming presence and avuncular concern for her boys. Reg Greer visited every weekend, and he did not fail to notice that Alida Lafrank had brought up her daughter to believe in a strict division of labour, for all the samba and lipstick. Men do all the work outside the house, women all the work inside. Simple, but crushing. Peggy Lafrank was exactly what Reg Greer was after, a highly decorative and utterly innocent supermenial. Under his expert supervision she learnt to ‘make the best’ of her face and figure. Other people thought she wore rather too much make-up, but Reg Greer liked it. The more attention she attracted as they walked down Collins Street together, the happier he was. We used to have a photograph of Mother peek-a-boo under a tiny hat with veiling, clopping along in peep-toed sling-backs, her skirt whipping around her long brown legs, clutching my father’s arm, and laughing a huge, painted, gleaming film-star’s laugh.

  Although she had no pretensions to be anything but a salesman’s daughter and a milliner’s apprentice, Peggy had the refined and modest manners of a Catholic girl educated by nuns. Reg Greer had no difficulty at all in persuading the little family that he was their social superior. He took over the role of father and elder statesman to Peggy’s mother and brothers. He advised the older boy to drop a girlfriend who was trying her hardest to drag him into bed, because her aim was forced marriage as soon as possible, and his advice was taken. The fatherless Lafranks were impressed by this worldly, distinguished man from a cosmopolitan background, and never dreamed of quizzing him.

  They did not see how like their own father he was. Their father too dressed beautifully and spoke well. Like Reg Greer he was a crack salesman, but he came from a rough and tumble background. His mother was said to have had so many children that she couldn’t remember their names. At mealtimes she would plonk a pot in the middle of the table and shout ‘scran’s oop!’ and leave the children to fend for themselves.

  Albert Lafrank did not waste his charm on his family but kept it for his clients. Reg Greer was different. His refined manners and gentle, almost lost air went straight to Peggy’s mother’s heart. He said he was tired of wandering and living in hotels. He was looking for a family to belong to. When he asked Peggy to marry him everyone was thrilled. If Albert Lafrank had heard of it and come for a look at his son-in-law, the outcome would have been very different. The questions would have been asked, and failing satisfactory answers no marriage would have taken place. Not that Albert Lafrank was well-connected; his parents had run away from their respective spouses and children in New South Wales and set up house together in Victoria. Probably Albert Lafrank no more knew of his parents’ adultery or the informality of their union than his own children knew that the eldest of them was born out of wedlock, but he knew salesmen. Reg Greer would never have been allowed to put a ring on Peggy’s finger, until he had given a pretty comprehensive account of the thirty-two years of his life that had passed before he met her. The ‘Old Man’ was not consulted in the matter of his daughter’s wedding. The questions remained unasked for fifty years. Now try as I might I cannot push back into my father’s past any further than 1933, when he was twenty-nine.

  In early 1933, Arthur Searcy, out of a job, with a wife and young children to support, succeeded in landing a job as a space-seller at The News in Adelaide. His boss was a rather punctilious man called Perce Messenger, who was so mean that he would not even use his expense account to buy dinner on the train when he went on inter-state trips. He was famous for saying that he’d ‘hop off and get a cup of tea and a scone on the station at Seymour’, when all the other reps were wining and dining each other in the restaurant car. He was the sort of man who worked hard and wore his glasses lop-sided, the diametric opposite in fact of the other member of the advertising team at The News, Reg Greer.

  Reg Greer was then living in the best room at the Victoria Hotel in Hindley Street. The best room was the first-floor corner room, with a fancy bay that commanded a view not only up and down the main business street of Adelaide, but also down the alley to the News building fifty yards away.

  Every morning at nine o’clock, Perce Messenger held a nugatory conference with his salesmen, just to make sure that they were out of bed. Reg Greer always arrived at the last minute. No matter what the weather, which in Adelaide can be quite unbearably hot, he wore an elegant belted raincoat and a blue and white spotted silk scarf round his neck. It took Arthur Searcy, who was a serious sort of chap, some time to realise that under the raincoat Reg Greer was still wearing his pyjamas. The conference over, Reg would stroll back down the alley to the Victoria, and shower, shave, dress and breakfast at his leisure. He would then work, selling more space in an hour on the telephone than other men could do in a day on the hoof. Then he went to lunch. The afternoons he
spent in Brady’s billiard saloon.

  Reg Greer specialised in the clothing trade, which was the backbone of the newspapers. All the clothiers and drapers not only took a regular ration of advertising space every day, but at sale times bought whole pages and half pages to publish a full list of reduced prices of sale lines. The man who kept the clothiers happy was more necessary to the newspaper’s survival than the journalists who wrote the news, although very few of the editorial staff ever realised the fact. Newspaper News, the organ of the advertising industry, remarked in an aside in the personality column in 1933, ‘Some years ago an Editor met his chief space-seller in the office lift. The whole business was hushed up…’

  In 1933 Wally Worboys went to Adelaide with his golf clubs, to take up his position as advertising representative for Colgate-Palmolive. He knew no one in Adelaide so he spent the first week with Reg Greer at the Victoria Hotel. ‘It was a nice pub, full of young fellows. Reg’s was a good big room, and the lads used to gather there to listen to the test matches on his radio.

  ‘He was great mates with the Helpmanns then. The Helpmanns were in the meat business; Max was a playboy when he wasn’t lugging sides of meat in his blue overall and cap. When asked if he was having any success he’d say, “I’m fucking ’em as fast as the Prince of Wales can pull ’em from under me.”

  ‘Performers appearing at the Palace Theatre used to stay at the Victoria—the Russian Monte Carlo Ballet stayed there, Marian Winter, a very nice bloke, Teddy Harrisby…

  ‘Reg Greer used to go backstage after the shows. He liked theatricals, got on well with them…. We used to go to Aussie Rules football, to cricket and the fights….’