Daddy, We Hardly Knew You

  ‘Bad teaching,’ said Mary, smiling at my consternation.

  ‘They all had the same bad teaching. It still makes him the worst of a bad lot. Besides, it’s not down to the teaching really.’

  ‘Perhaps he didn’t work?’

  ‘I can’t see Emma not making them work. What else did they have to do? He wasn’t serving in a shop after school or milking cows or anything. The state wards weren’t allowed to do part-time work and Emma wouldn’t have made a distinction for Eric. He was obviously an air-head.’

  If I said that I worked very hard at school I would be lying. The fact is I couldn’t have got marks as low as my father’s no matter what I did or didn’t do. When I was thirteen I was learning three languages and physics and chemistry as well as the subjects my father had taken. The standard he reached was much lower than his age would nowadays indicate. My poor father was barely literate. And yet he affected a lordly disdain of my convent education, which was light-years ahead of his own. The only time I remembered him commenting on my examination results was when amid high marks for all my other subjects he spied a mere fifty per cent for maths.

  ‘What is the meaning of that?’ he asked.

  ‘I don’t like maths,’ I said unhappily. ‘I suppose I wasn’t trying. It’s only half term. I’ll have it sorted out by finals.’

  ‘I hope so,’ he said coldly. ‘That mark is a disgrace.’ Not a word about the other marks. If I could get such high marks in those subjects they must all have been easy.

  I applied myself to the dreary maths and got a hundred per cent at the end of the year. ‘Hm,’ said my father. ‘That’s more like it.’

  And now I find that the bloody man was never better than a fifty per center in anything. ‘Don’t be so hard on him. He might have been a bad examinee,’ said my conscience. ‘They thought he was good enough to go to high school. They must have, to have put up his marks.’

  The Eumenides answered back at once. ‘I should think so too. Good enough to go to high school? You won scholarships to go to high school, and he pretended it was all in a day’s march, the old fraud.’

  ‘Well, he did give me a watch.’

  ‘Don’t remind me!’ shrieked the Fury. ‘The bloody song and dance about that watch, you’d have thought it was a Rolex instead of the cheapest of the cheap. Price of winning all your secondary education gratis, a two-bob watch. And it was supposed to be your Christmas present and your birthday present as well. He probably got the damn thing free from a client anyway.’

  ‘More to the point,’ said I to my worse self sternly, ‘is that I completely mistook the way to his heart. I only threatened him by being so clever. I should have tried to be lovable.’

  ‘Flirted with your father? Been cute? With that face? Spare me,’ screamed the Fury.

  ‘Nobody likes a clever child,’ I said miserably. ‘Well, only teachers like clever children.’

  ‘Crap!’ said the Fury. ‘No Australian likes a clever child. Italians, even the most illiterate Italians, burst with pride and delight when their children do well at school. Nothing is too good for them.’

  ‘And Jews,’ I said to myself as my halves drew back together again. ‘Perhaps that’s why I wanted so much for Daddy to be a Jew.’

  The next academic year Eric Greeney entered the Launceston State High School, as we have seen. He lasted two months before Emma withdrew him. She had got him a job with a book-binder, perhaps because, as she was not receiving any money for his support, she could not afford to keep him at school. Perhaps she realised that he did not have academic ability, but she ought also to have realised that he had little manual dexterity or mechanical aptitude. He didn’t last long at the bindery. He was soon, I don’t know how soon, doing what he was really good at, using his gift of the gab, selling.

  The jeweller’s shop where he worked for a year or so still functions in Launceston. The ornate scrolling and gold leaf painted on its glass windows is as fresh and bright as it was when handsome Eric Greeney waited on its customers. For the bicentennial they had placed some of their old ledgers in the window as evidence of the venerable antiquity of the firm. The shop had very little merchandise displayed, and very few customers as far as I could see, but when I called hoping they had searched their ledgers for Eric Greeney’s name, they explained that they had been much too busy. After three visits of an excruciating nature one of the women behind the counter said that they had after all cleared out all their ledgers before 1940. ‘Yairs,’ said the lady behind the counter, nodding her head slowly up and down as if to agree with herself, a habit Australians seem to have acquired by dint of watching thousands of hours of American television. I regret to say that I was not convinced. It seemed to me most odd that after searching upstairs in the shop she had discovered something that she should have known before she started. As the woman’s vowels were bringing tears to my eyes, for she was talking to me as if I was on the opposite side of a busy street and a moron to boot, I abandoned the quest as hopeless.

  ‘What could it possibly matter if a man called Eric Greeney worked here in 1919?’ I could see her thinking, as she and her off-sider exchanged glances and their one client wandered disconsolately along the half-empty showcases. Because he was supposed to be bloody jackerooing, that’s why, I thought, but I had no intention of explaining who I was or who he was or of buying the silver frame I meant to give to Cousin John for Emma’s picture. He did know jewellery, after all; the diamond he bought for my mother’s engagement ring is one of the best I have ever seen.

  The mystery of Eric Greeney’s dressing so well was quickly solved. He was employed for about a year by McKinlay Proprietary Limited in Brisbane Street as a salesman, probably but not certainly, of menswear. He may have had to measure out the ‘smart and exclusive frockings’ from the bolts that McKinlays opened in preparation for Race Week, the taffetas, grenadines, foulards, pongee tussores and fujiettes, in fashion shades of mole, mastic, putty, nigger and bottle, but he would not have been allowed to counsel ladies on the correct choice of bloomers or madapolam camisoles or long-cloth combinations, or wedding robes of ivory charmeuse. I wondered if he wrote the copy for the advertisements that the Examiner carried on the front page of every edition, advising ladies that ‘Nautilus corsets—the secret of a commanding figure’ were to be had at ‘Launceston’s busiest store’. The newspaper relied on the half-dozen’ drapers’ stores in Launceston, who placed large advertisements every day, in a veritable trade war. At sale times they took half pages with lists of slashed prices. Eric Greeney may not have learnt anything at school, but once out of school he quickly mastered the business of selling clothes and the role that newspaper advertising plays in it.

  When Eric Greeney turned fourteen he had to train as a cadet in the working boys’ battalion. One night a week they had to drill, and they had to spend a week a year under canvas. They were supplied with weapons and with uniforms and had to turn out in good order. Their employers were required to give them time off for parades. The working boys did not succumb to this regimentation with a good grace. On at least two occasions the entire corps was put on a charge for rowdiness and insubordination. They chiefly resented the interminable time that this pointless discipline was intended to continue; after seven years of compulsory drilling, they were required to serve five years’ compulsory membership of the militia. After much agitation the last requirement was waived. None of the boys wanted to be commissioned; they despised the ranks and usually refused to volunteer for officer training. But I suspect that Eric Greeney liked the idea of stripes and became some sort of officer in the cadet corps. He used to say that he had been a cadet major, but this seems unlikely.

  (It was the Fury who wrote that last bit.

  My better self demurs. ‘Just because a man lied about one thing does not mean that he lied about everything. Besides he doesn’t lie much. If he lied more, if he enjoyed lying, you’d never have pierced his alias. He’d have got away with it.’

  ‘The bl
oody man is driving me crazy,’ said the Fury.

  ‘No he’s not. You’re driving yourself crazy.’)

  In 1920 came the biggest parade of all. In an attempt to damp down the furious anti-imperialist sentiment that swept Australia after the grim debacle of 1914–18, the Prince of Wales was to undertake a gruelling tour of the colony. His job was to convince Australians that their contribution to the war effort had been noticed and appreciated. (This expedient never fails; after the visit of their Royal Highnesses in 1988, republican sentiment in Australia became most unfashionable.)

  The Launceston cadets were told that they would ‘march from the forming up position in Cornwall Square, via the Esplanade to Victoria Bridge, thence along the route of the procession until they reach their allotted positions’. The military cadets, under the command of Captain A.L. Weston, accompanied by the band of the Twelfth Military Regiment, were to form up at the Railway Station at 10.45 a.m. to receive his Royal Highness.

  Reg Greer used to tell a story that he was part of the cadet guard of honour for the Prince, and, although it was not a hot day and the wait was not long, he fainted. He came to on a wool-bale in a shed by the station. ‘Feeling better now?’ asked the Prince.

  ‘Yes, sir,’ answered my father, stood up and snapped a salute. There is no verification of this fable in any contemporary source.

  Eric Greeney really liked to sing. He would pretend that his life was a musical comedy and seize any pretext for a song. If Emma touched something of his, he would do his rendition of ‘Take your hands off, that’s mine.’ If you asked him how he was, chances were he would give you ‘Too many parties, too many pals….’ If Emma asked him if he had missed her when she came back from her periodic visits to Longford, he would carol, ‘You never miss the water till the well runs dry.’

  The imminent arrival of Ted Russell’s Black and White Costume Comedy at the Academy Theatre was announced in the Launceston papers in the fourth week of January 1921. Ted Russell was occasionally described as ‘Australia’s premier yodeller’. This was no mean claim, for every country show featured one or two yodellers; singing jackeroos and warbling drovers were as much a part of the Aussie scene as the double-handed sawing match, the tossing a sheaf contest, stockwhip cracking and guessing the weight of a sheep. ‘Ted’s act is one of the cleanest, cleverest, smartest, most novel and unique ever seen in Australia.’ He had ‘the goods, which are always put over with a well-balanced brain,’ according to Hawklet, a Melbourne magazine which dealt with racing, boxing and variety theatre.

  In return for the advertisements Ted Russell took every day, the Launceston papers obligingly puffed the show, making it sound for all the world as if the Black and White Costume Comedy Company was world-famous. ‘By the “Kooringa” on Wednesday night,’ twittered the Daily Telegraph, ‘there arrived a band of well-known and talented mainland artists… a big combination of vaudeville stars….’ It was to be the first appearance in Tasmania of the Falvey Sisters, variously described as ‘personality girls’ and ‘Hawaiian harmonists’, Roy Kent, the ‘eccentric comedian’. Rosa Darcy, lyric soprano, ‘the girl with the golden voice’, Mark Ericsen, the improbably named ‘genial Irishman’, Edna Taylor, the ‘dainty soubrette’, George Blythe, ‘monologist’, and the husband and wife team, Ted Russell, ‘everybody’s favourite’ and Peggy Dean, ‘soubrette’. ‘Dancing is a specialty turn…’; ‘mirth and song’ would be the lot of anyone who went,’ the papers burbled. ‘Book or be sorry,’ they warned. The seats were priced at three shillings, two shillings and a shilling, plus tax, showing the performance to be a cut above those that advertised a hundred or so seats at sixpence. Every Friday there was to be a talent contest for local performers. It seems very likely that Eric Greeney took his silvery tenor up on to the stage in one of the weekly talent contests and won himself a ‘gold’ medal. He may have even danced a bit, for in those days all the boys could dance. While Ernie and Dave were rowing on the Tamar, Eric was moving in on the girls, haunting the blood houses (as the Launceston hard nuts called the dance halls) and the Bathurst Street band-room perfecting his dance-steps as well as his line.

  Though his fellow Launcestonians may have thought of this as his big break, it was an opening that led nowhere. Very few of the members of the Black and White Costume Comedy Company had ever played the major variety circuits, Fuller’s or J.C. Williamson, and none had ever been at the top of the bill. The company was put together specifically for the Launceston season and never existed before or since. Ted Russell was not a distinguished actor-manager but a battler from Melbourne who usually played a one-man act or a duo on the suburban and country circuits. He seldom worked more than one day a week, because the country towns could not provide audiences for a full week’s run, and was more often to be found propping up the bar at Fuller’s Hotel.

  The Falvey sisters, Violet and Eva, were front-line performers, who often appeared with Stiffy and Mo, fast becoming the most famous vaudeville act in Australia. The girls worked every week and had occasionally played for J.C. Williamson, ‘the Firm’, and the Fuller circuit; Russell got them for only three weeks on condition that they got top billing. Sweet-voiced girls like Phyllis Clay and Rosa Darcy were tuppence a dozen. Rosa’s specialty was the Jewel Song from Gounod’s Faust, in which she displayed ‘brilliant technique and splendid memory’ according to the Daily Telegraph critic. Mark Erickson, the spelling of whose name was corrected later in the season, came fresh from playing the Baron in the pantomime at the Princess Theatre in Melbourne. Edna Taylor had last appeared with the Blue Bird Costume Company at Cohuna and Leitchville.

  The papers obligingly reported that hundreds had been turned away from the opening performance on Saturday night and that an ‘ovation’ had been ‘tendered’. The Falvey Sisters left; in February ‘big-voiced’ Lal Logie arrived and was ‘taken into the hearts of lovers of rollicking humour’. The cub reporter from the Daily Telegraph tried out his variety press jargon, telling us that Logie promised ‘to go big from this out’. Edna Taylor left to play soubrette parts for Dora Mostyn’s Dramatic Company on tour in Gippsland. Russell picked up Gladys Shaw and Fred Webber, a speciality dancing act that had played fourteen weeks in Hobart. The ‘pot pourri of music and nonsense’ was considered, by the tame press, to be ‘entertaining to a degree almost inconceivable’.

  However the show did run into difficulties. It was rumoured that it was indecent, so the advertisements announced that it was ‘clean and free from vulgarity’. The weather was very hot and the advertisements promised, ‘No more hot nights. Electric fans in this theatre!’ Some of the audience found that they had taken home some of the less entertaining members of the theatre world, and Russell had to put a new line into their announcements, ‘This theatre is disinfected and fumigated twice weekly.’

  The show ran and ran. More performers left, and others arrived, Carlyon and Phillips, ‘Singing, Dancing and Harmony’ duo, Neil McInnes, ‘Harry Lauder’s rival… direct from Scotland’. On 31 March, Hawklet revealed that Lal Logie had had a fit while taking an encore at the Academy: ‘he suddenly stopped, grasped his throat, and fell across the footlights, striking his head on the corner of the piano, and became unconscious.’

  In fact Logie had something of an alcohol problem, which almost finished his career in 1921. He stayed on in Tasmania after the rest of the company left, spending a good deal of time in hospital. He took a job as a stage manager for one of the companies that played the Academy later that year, and was sacked. For a few weeks he worked as a barman in Launceston. Then he went on the wagon and reappeared on the Melbourne suburban circuit in the spring of 1922. ‘Lai has talent,’ said Hawklet, ‘and the water materially helps to purvey it.’

  On April Fool’s Day the run was obliged to close, for the Academy had booked another company, the Scarlet Gaieties, which played for only three weeks before moving to the Mechanics’ Hall, having been adversely affected by an accident which befell one of their leading acts, Harry Webster by nam
e. In Melbourne Ted Russell announced that he would be taking a new show back to Launceston, and invited artistes to contact him at Fuller’s Hotel.

  When the Black and Whites reopened in Launceston, Rosa Sinclair and Dorothy Dane, ‘two sure winners with the Adelaide boys’, who had recently been playing the Ozone Pavilion at Semaphore with the ‘Red Gaieties’, supplied the glamour. Lal Logie was back in the line-up with his Melbourne mates, Frank Crossley. Eddie Bush, ‘comedy merchant, tumbler and acrobat’, and Max Desmond. Eddie Bush had a ‘tumbling table’ routine which was considered very unusual. Frank Crossley, singing comedian, was principally famous for having been part of The Smart Set Diggers who were invited to perform at Buckingham Palace. The comics were assisted by the Fletcher Girls, Nellie Steward, and Harry Penn, ‘light and pleasing tenor’. In May, they were joined, ‘by special and expensive engagement’, by the operatic tenor Darvell, Darville, Darval or even Daniel Thomas, ‘direct from Fuller’s’ and ‘late of Quinlan’s Grand Opera Coy’, who was in fact best remembered for playing King Spider in the Christmas panto at the Princess using ‘two electric green bulbs in place of his own eyes’.

  The new show was deemed to be ‘a scream and a yell’. From 14 May the show billed Rhodesbury and Ralph, ‘Australia’s premier patter comedians’, and Thelma Doward, ‘late of the English Pierrots’, that is to say, out of work since the summer season ended and Pierrot-land, at St Kilda, Victoria’s answer to Blackpool, closed down for the winter.

  On 19 May, the Academy Theatre management was arraigned for over-crowding, and found guilty of a criminal offence. Nothing of the sort had happened in Launceston in ten years and the daily advertisements immediately boasted of the fact. The company was joined a week later by Reg, Red or Ted Anderson. On 28 May, Ted Russell undertook a publicity stunt the like of which had never been seen in Launceston. Between noon and one o’clock he flew over Launceston in an aircraft piloted by Captain Huxley and dropped playbills and two hundred free passes to the show.