Whatever Remains

by Penny F. Graham

  After the initial excitement had flared and then simmered to a more ‘clutching at straws’ fatalistic attitude, I saw that being part of this ‘new’ family was far more likely to be a faint possibility than a high probability.

  As the day, and my hopes, slowly dwindled, David peered earnestly over his glasses and warned me of the perils of looking for someone who, so obviously, didn’t want to be found. ‘If your father has managed to change his name and birth date and manufacture a whole family history, there’s usually a very good reason! Sometimes,’ he said quietly, ‘it’s better to live in the present — not to worry about where you came from, just be happy to be who you are.’ There was concern on his face. ‘You never know what you might find out and what effect it may have on your life.’ His obvious concern touched me. His kindness was reassuring. His was the first of many warnings I would have over the years of my search.

  Now on Sunday evening, on my bus trip back to Taunton, I closed my eyes and, hunched into the cracked brown leather seat, thought only of the comforts of getting home. My home, my family, a space and time that knew me for who I was. This, I thought, could well be the end of my search.

  How wrong I was. It would be many years in the future, after many more false trails, that I would finally contact David again. It would be David of the myopic eyes and shy kind smile who would head me in the right direction in one of the most important journeys of my life.

  Chapter 2

  Unravelling the mystery, England 1984

  The Old Country or Home were the euphemisms used to describe England when I was a child growing up in Australia. Despite my parents’ heritage, I never felt the pull of the old country, nor that I was anything other than Australian born and bred. Now here I was with my family happy to be spending six months in England. ‘What a wonderful experience,’ friends had exclaimed, as we told them of our plans for a year-long sojourn overseas. This trip, two years in the planning, was to accomplish three things: to give Lindsay work experience overseas, to open our children’s eyes to other countries and cultures, and to start unravelling the mystery of my past.

  We had spent the first six months in Minnesota, USA. Lindsay worked with health maintenance organisations in the USA for six months, then for BUPA in London for the next six months. The health insurance firm he worked for in Australia would, it hoped, benefit from this knowledge and experience, and we, as a family, would benefit too. What a wonderful opportunity it was for us and how hard we had scrimped and saved to make it happen.

  The farming community of Minnesota in the mid-west of America had been an eye-opener — big country, big state, big-hearted people. We had skied and played in the winter wonderland of snow and ice of a harsh northern winter. And when the spring came, we had canoed on its many lakes and walked its many prairies. After leaving our home in Long Lake, a few kilometres outside the twin cities of Minnesota and Saint Paul, we travelled some of the east coast of America using cheap flights for the long hauls and rental cars for the shorter distances. And, of course, we made sure that Florida was on our route so we could visit those icons of childhood desirability, Disney World, the Epcot Centre and Wet ’n’ Wild. Oh, so many people and never-ending queues, colour, noise, music and lots and lots of gimmickry. But how the children loved it!

  By the time we arrived in England we were all a bit shell shocked and weary from the hectic last few weeks of our sojourn in the USA. The people at BUPA had kindly organised a small three-up three-down semi-detached in Wood Green. After living there a few weeks, we realised that the name Wood Green meant exactly what it wasn’t. No woods to be seen and certainly no green! Just street after street of shabby semis just like ours.

  After a few tearful episodes from me bemoaning the lack of grass for the kids to play on and not a rose-covered porch to be seen, we moved to Essex. The charming village of Ingatestone had it all: two pubs, a primary school, high school, adequate shopping, a bus to London and a direct train line into London. Perfect for our needs.

  I had been particularly eager to spend the second half of our year away in England. It would give us the opportunity to do some exploration at St Catherine’s House where Births, Deaths and Marriages Records were then kept. A treasure trove of information and, in those computer-less days, so easy to access, as St Catherine’s was only a train or bus trip from our front door.

  I was a product of my generation — married at 22, with four children by my early thirties. A mainly stay-at-home mum, with a part-time job that accommodated the need to be at home to see the children off to school at 8.45 in the morning and again to see them safely in the door at 3.30 that afternoon. Happy in my marriage, lucky to have four healthy and well-adjusted sons. Living in a comfortable home with enough money to put food on the table and educate the children. There was just one major thorn in my side, one nagging ‘family skeleton’ that just would not stay quiet.

  Over the years, my suspicions had been growing that the stories my father told of his childhood and younger life were just that — stories. It was just too convenient to have lost all living relatives, with no living grandparents, no cousins, no aunts or uncles, nobody to dispute or question my parenthood. So many times as a child I had begged our father to tell me again the stories of his youth. I had loved to hear the exploits of a young boy growing up in early 20th century Britain. His memories were the only link my brothers and I had to an extended family life.

  After a long and painful fight with tuberculosis, my mother died in 1952 when I was only 10. Maybe the vacuum created by her absence brought about the need to find family and have something more than just a father and two brothers in my life. My mother’s premature death had given me no opportunity to ask her about her family, her life as a child growing up in rural England. My father had told us very little about our mother and her life. Only that she had, by the time I was old enough to ask, no living relatives. From the time of her death, my mother’s whole life history became his property to do with as he wished.

  During early childhood, our family was constantly on the move. Shifting from house to house and country to country inevitably meant that I made no lasting childhood friendships and developed no sense of belonging. To me, the constant upheaval with minimal formal schooling all seemed quite natural. Because I knew no different, the absence of grandparents or relatives of any kind was equally unremarkable. Then, finally in the summer of 1956, my peripatetic father settled on the hot and sandy shores of Western Australia. Our roving days were over.

  It was not until my late twenties that I began to seriously doubt his easy assurances about his lack of family. No photos of his early years graced our family sideboard. No mementoes of his or Mother’s childhood sat proudly on our mantelpiece. Like hatchlings from the egg of time, my parents just appeared with no tangible evidence of their past. The explanation, my father said, was the desperate struggle to get out of Singapore during the last days before the surrender in 1942. Almost everything was lost, he said, left behind when we abandoned our home just days before the Japanese army overran the city. To a young child it had all seemed plausible enough, but as I grew older I questioned why neither he nor Mother had tried to contact their respective families when the war was finally over. ‘All dead,’ Father would say with a sigh and a gentle shake of the head. War, that thief of time and family, had stolen a whole generation.

  Before we left Australia in 1984, I had applied gentle pressure on my father to tell me anything he could of his family in the hope that the research we planned to do in England would enable us to add flesh to the bare bones. Even though for many years I had been uneasy about the apparent gaps in our past, I had kept my misgivings from him. Although my father was charmingly mannered, quietly spoken and elegantly dressed, to openly question his word was unthinkable to us children. He was quite emphatic that he knew of no living relatives from either side of the family, could suggest no old family friends for us to contact, no favourite haunts of his youth to visit. He was evasive in specifics, unwil
ling or unable to remember facts relating to his early years. A certain closed look would appear on his face and you knew that it was pointless to proceed. So, I reasoned, six months in England would give me the opportunity to visit my parents’ place of birth, check the records of their ancestors and visit the places my father had spoken of in earlier years.

  This was to be the first of our many journeys to the other side of the world in quest of my past. It proved a valuable and certainly enjoyable experience, but as for unravelling the many mysteries of my parents’ past, it resolved nothing. After a year away, I came home with more questions than answers.

  Chapter 3

  False stories from the past, 1908–1942

  Even now, when I believe I know about as much as I will ever know of my father’s early life, I know very little. All I have are the stories told to me of his younger days growing up in England and of his life as a young man in Malaya. During the early days, when we three children would ask questions about our parents’ childhood as children love to do, Father would tell us stories from his boyhood. Of his and Mother’s early childhood years, of the voyage to the Far East he took as a young man and the many adventures he had there. His stories came as small vignettes, full of colour and action. Even when we were adults these false stories from the past never wavered.

  When I was no longer a child, I began to suspect that many of these yarns were morsels of fact wrapped up in many layers of fiction. Without an extended family network to corroborate or debunk the stories, I had to take them at face value, until the cracks of disbelief became too wide for me to accept.

  Then, later, much, much later, when I was starting to unravel the mystery that was my father’s life, I made contact with my cousins on my father’s side of the family and slowly started to make some sense of the few facts I had.

  The tools I used for my quest for the truth were few: a husband with a good knowledge of genealogical research and never-ending patience and, initially, only a few photocopied letters, photos and documents. As small pieces started to fall into place, we were able to use birth, marriage and death certificates, English and Singaporean business directories, census records, war records, British and Australian shipping lists and newspaper articles. Slim pickings to reconstruct a life.

  But I am jumping ahead of myself. I have threaded his vignettes together as best I can and rounded out the topography and geography of his world with some historical facts. They are his stories within a setting of the real world. The story I was brought up to believe of Father’s childhood and younger days went something like this …

  In 1908 my father was born in Milverton, a sleepy little English village just outside Taunton in the County of Somerset. He was christened Leslie Denis Emerson-Elliott but known as Denis by family and friends.

  I will now refer to my father as Denis as it is this name he used for most of his adult life.

  He was the fifth and youngest child born to well-to-do middle-class parents. His father, Theodore Stacy Emerson-Elliott, was an architect by profession and the Member of Parliament for Somerset for some years during the early 1900s. His mother, Rosemary Frances, was a gentle, unworldly woman devoted to her husband and children. She was a loyal, loving wife and the kindest of mothers, who ran the home with a sweet smile and a velvet glove.

  Denis had, he said, the happiest of childhoods, growing up in a deeply Christian household where it was usual, in fact mandatory, to attend church twice and sometimes three times on Sunday. Their home was comfortable and substantial, his parents kind but strong disciplinarians, particularly his father. I always sensed, but was never told outright, that Denis had an ambiguous relationship with his father. He respected him, but father and son were not close. His mother, on the other hand, figured often in his stories and his relationship with her was one of adoration.

  He would tell of the quieter times at home, of his love of literature and the times he would be reading by his bedroom window on Sunday morning and hear the bells of the local church calling the village to morning service. He told of the games he and his brothers played in the spacious gardens of his home before he was old enough to be sent away to boarding school.

  He had four older siblings. The eldest, John, grew up to be a Church of England minister. He was married with two children, Denis and Dorothy. Tragically, while holidaying in Florida, he and his wife were killed in a car accident, orphaning their two young children. Father had no idea what had become of the children — brought up by their maternal grandmother, he suspected.

  His second brother, Derek, was equally unlucky. The Great War was into its third year before Derek was old enough to join up. The minute he turned 18, he joined the RAF, only to be killed on his 19th birthday in 1918 when his plane, a biplane that he had just learned to fly, was shot down in the last months of the war. He was not married.

  Denis’s third sibling, and the only girl in the family, was Helen. In her early twenties she married Frederick Dyble, who was to become the Solicitor General for Northern Ireland. Tragically, however, she was killed while out horse riding with her young husband on their honeymoon.

  Lawrence, or Lawrie, was the brother closest in age and affection to Denis. It was Lawrie, the daredevil, the charismatic adventurer, who seemed to feature in most of Denis’s stories of adventure in his early childhood. Lawrie was married with one son. As soon as World War II was declared, Lawrie joined the RAF and trained as a Wellington bomber pilot. He was shot down in 1940 when 50 bombers attacked Sylt in Holland, but none returned. Father had lost contact with Lawrie’s wife and did not know of the family’s whereabouts.

  So, all his siblings died in one way or another — how very convenient.

  Tragedy seems to have dogged the family and I remember being in awe of Denis’s bravery in the face of the terrible loss of all his siblings and the early death of both his parents soon after World War II. Even though there must have been an extended family of aunts, uncles and cousins, Denis seemed to be at a loss as to their whereabouts. How could you lose a whole family? I wondered.

  After leaving boarding school, he started a medical degree at King’s College, London but, after just one year, due to a disagreement with the Dean of the Faculty, he had switched universities and decided on Aberdeen to further his interest in tropical agriculture.

  By 1930, Denis had completed a degree in Agricultural Science (Tropical) at Aberdeen University. As a 20-something-year-old, he left the family home in Somerset to travel to Malaya to carve out a career for himself.

  Many years later when we were trying to track him down using academic records, we found that neither King’s College nor Aberdeen University had any record of an undergraduate with Denis’s name and no degree called Ag. Science (Tropical) was ever offered at Aberdeen University.

  When Denis completed his degree, Britain was still suffering economic depression and jobs were not easy to come by. Denis believed there would be opportunity for advancement and a secure future for him in the Straits Settlements, a group of four territories that jointly constituted a single British Crown Colony.

  If Britain was lacking in exciting opportunities, the Far East presented him with the chance to travel, to learn new skills and to make his mark on the world. He secured a job as a trainee rubber plantation manager for Dunlop Plantations Ltd. His initial training was on the Malayan peninsula on one of the Dunlop plantations. He was with Dunlop for four years before leaving to join the firm of Guthries in 1934.

  Guthries was one of the largest rubber plantation companies in Malaya at that time. Its history dates back to the 1820s when the British colonial presence in South East Asia was making its mark. The company’s involvement in Malaya began indirectly with the purchase of crops for sale on the London commodity market. This eventually developed into acquisitions of many large rubber and oil palm estates throughout Malaya.

  The oozing, glutinous sap, drained from fresh diagonal cuts made to the hevea trees in the ever-expanding rubber plantations that snaked acros
s Malaya, was becoming an increasingly important commodity. Rubber was not the only ‘treasure’ to come pouring out of Malaya; half the world’s tin was scraped out of great mines that spread down the mountainous spine of the 400-mile long peninsula. Railway wagons continuously ferried their cargo along the old single-line railway from the Kinta Valley to Singapore Island, where they discharged the precious cargo into the hungry holds of tramp steamers that lined the docks of Keppel Harbour on the southern edge of the city of Singapore.

  The life of the European rubber planter could be lonely. Many of the big Malayan plantations were miles from the capital, Kuala Lumpur. Living conditions in these rural areas were primitive. There was no piped water or sewerage systems, houses were basic wood and attap structures and medical treatment could only be obtained if you could get to town. Poor roads, the constant humidity, perpetual rain in the wet season, lack of effective medicine to combat malaria and the isolation of many of the plantations drove many a young planter to go ‘native’ or take to the bottle.

  But not Denis — he seems to have thrived on the life of a trainee planter. Taking the humidity, isolation and demanding work in his stride, he made a new life for himself. Learning Malay and Tamil, enjoying the new foods that were on offer and participating in the active social life available when he and his peers got together when their work was done — this life seems to have agreed with him and kept him from becoming home-sick.

  He was charming and hardworking, and success came easily to him. As he progressed up the ladder at Guthries, he sent home letters and photos to his family in England telling of the good life. The work would have been hard, conditions sometimes dangerous, and always very demanding.