Whatever Remains

by Penny F. Graham

  We also had to face the reality of earning a living and paying off the accumulated travel bills. We travel light and cheaply, but five months away has its costs. We needed to get ourselves back to work.

  I had been back at work for a few weeks when an unexpected phone call came through to my office. It was my brother Derek. Even though he had said he would ring on our return, the voice on the other end of the line startled me. We talked amicably enough and set up a day and time to meet to discuss our new family.

  When a family has been estranged for the length of time we had, it was not easy to feel the level of trust and ease that usually exists between siblings. It took many months of exploratory meetings with both my brothers to feel that I was once again part of their lives and they of mine.

  I was very nervous at my first meeting with my father as there were still many unresolved issues and a lot of anger on my part. Heaven only knows what his feelings were for me as he had a consummate ability to seemingly ignore the past and see only the present. ‘Cool as a cucumber’ were my first thoughts, then knowing that if there was any hope of our family being a family again, I hid my exasperation and resumed playing the role I had played for so many years. The role of the dutiful daughter.

  It was all too confusing for our boys; one minute they had a loving grandfather and uncles and a much-loved aunt and cousins, the next they didn’t. Now here I was, asking them to once again be part of their extended family’s life. I had mixed success. The older two were very wary of once more becoming part of an outwardly ‘normal’ family group; the younger two, especially the youngest, were more forgiving. They had all experienced a lot of hurt over the intervening years. They all took their own time to come to terms with the new situation.

  In earlier years, I had kept our research on family matters hidden from the children, but now I made a point of keeping them informed of any, and all, recent events. Now they were no longer children, being truthful about our family situation was, I felt, the best I could offer them.

  Life settled back into a routine. My brothers and I met occasionally for coffee and a chat. We talked about my visits to family in England and I filled them in on all the Emersons we had met. Their reaction to my persistence in not accepting Denis’s ‘truth’ about his family was guarded. They appeared happy to have found another sister and a whole new family but did not particularly want to know the details of how it had been accomplished. Perhaps a case of what you don’t know won’t come back to bite you.

  Denis and my brother Tony resumed their habit of either lunching with us on the weekend, or coming for afternoon tea, and Derek and his family and our family would meet for an informal meal every few months or so. Life was back to normal. Well, on the surface anyway.

  Denis never asked about his family and I rarely mentioned them. ‘How ridiculous is this?’ I would think as we sat chatting over a cup of tea, talking about trivial things, talking about anything but why he had lied so outrageously about his family! My brothers, on the other hand, were interested to hear all about our new family members. By now both Tony and Derek were in regular contact with Pat and Albert by letter. They seemed delighted to have another sister and since Pat was of a very conciliatory and easy-going nature, they were probably happy to have a less troublesome sister than me.

  I had shown both brothers the photo albums and sword that we had brought back from England. Luckily in those days taking an overseas flight with a sword in your luggage was not looked on with the same suspicion that it would be today.

  One of the first things we had done when we got home was to check the phone book for Emersons. We knew that Denis’s brother Nen had had three sons — Trevor, Bruce and Ronald — and we found entries for T. Emerson and R. Emerson. We had also checked and found that Nen had died some years ago, as had his middle son Bruce.

  It was now I discovered, after telling Derek about the Canberra Emersons, that he knew two of our relatives who had been living in Canberra. Trevor and Trevor’s daughter Cheryl both worked in the same government office as Derek. Derek remembered Trevor as a cheerful and friendly older man who had been the security guard on the front desk before his retirement some years ago. Cheryl was still working in the same department as Derek. Until my revelation of our connection with the Emersons, neither they nor he knew that they were related to each other. I made contact with Trevor and Ron and Derek spoke to Cheryl. We agreed to meet at our home so that we could hand over the photo albums and sword and get to know each other.

  Here seems the appropriate place to tell what I know of Nen’s story. He was another of the adventuring Emersons; a man prepared to make his own way in the world, cut off from country and family by distance, by circumstances and, quite possibly, by inclination.

  Chapter 22

  Nen’s story, 1891–1974

  I never knew Nen and only have a bare skeleton of the facts of his life. So for my purposes, skeletons will have to do.

  Henry (called Nen by family) was born in 1891 in Lambeth. He was the seventh child born to Thomas and Fanny Emerson though not all his siblings had survived. We know very little about his childhood. In the late 1800s, Lambeth was not an area of London where the wealthy chose to live. There was overcrowding in many of the streets and by the mid-20th century, much of Lambeth was deemed slum areas and many streets of tenement housing were demolished to make way for less crowded streets with better sewerage facilities.

  When Nen was born there were three other children (aged from three to seven) to support — Bert, Maud and Jack. The Emersons’ first child, Ernest Thomas, had died as a two-year-old and twins George and Charles both died in their first year from coeliac disease. So easy to say — ‘three babies died’ — but how hard for the parents to bear. Nen was either born lucky or strong, or maybe both, as he survived infancy. As the third surviving son, Nen would have left school at about 14 and then tried to find work to contribute to the family income.

  Eileen and Daphne told us that Nen was considered by the family to be a headstrong boy with a strong sense of adventure. For whatever reason, Nen left the family home at about 17 to make his own way in the world. He didn’t choose the next county or even somewhere in Europe, he chose Australia. Why Australia? So far from home, so inaccessible. In fact, how could he afford the ship’s passage to the other side of the world? Eileen believes that his mother had relatives, the Battens, who were living in Melbourne and Nen was sent to them. And yes, Nen’s great-uncle John Batten, a printer by trade, had migrated to Australia in the 1850s and settled in Melbourne. He married three times and on his death in 1919 was comfortably well off enough to leave his son and grandchildren reasonable inheritances. It is quite possible that wealthy Great Uncle John helped financially to get Nen to Australia.

  We can find no record of Nen’s passage to Australia, but he did indeed make that long journey. He may have visited Melbourne first to see his relatives, but he ended up many thousands of miles away in Queensland. In climate and culture, Queensland in the early 1900s would have been a revelation to a city-bred boy. The heat and humidity, the flies, the floods, the very size and scope of the place could have deterred many. But not Nen.

  The next we know is that he enlisted in the Australian Army in October 1914. World War I had intervened and he, like so many others in Mother England and many of her colonies, had decided to do his bit for King and Country and join up. It may have been for patriotic reasons, for the adventure of seeing other lands or just because it was steady money, but many young men from the country and the cities flocked to the call to arms. Many would leave the shores of Australia for overseas duty, not so many would return.

  His service records show that he enlisted in Queensland and did his initial training at Enoggera Army Base about 6 kilometres north-west of Brisbane’s City Centre. After training, the 23-year-old Nen was sent to Sydney where he and his unit, ‘C’ Squadron of the Australian 5th Light Horse Regiment, boarded HMAT Persic bound for a ‘secret destination’. He had enlisted as a s
ignaller, giving his prior occupation as ‘Station Hand & Telegraphic Linesman’. His enlistment papers show his next of kin as his mother, Mrs Fanny Emerson, 145 Tyers Street, Lambeth, London, England. His pay was 5 shillings per day.

  After collecting more keen young men who had signed up in Melbourne, the Persic sailed for her secret destination — Gallipoli. What horrors awaited Nen and his fellow soldiers on the beaches and cliffs of Gallipoli, I need not theorise on, as history tells us in all too graphic detail. Nen must certainly have been born under a lucky star. He survived while so many of his comrades did not. After the horrors of Gallipoli he, and what was left of his squadron, were sent on to Egypt where his luck continued to hold. Apart from one short stint in hospital with tooth problems, he managed to survive the rest of the war unscathed, at least physically.

  Now, when I think back on the two photo albums that we handed over to Nen’s son Trevor, there were many desert scenes featured in those albums. His squadron landed at Alexandria then sent inland. We do not know where he ‘souvenired’ the sword from, but it is definitely of Turkish origin.

  On 9 September 1919, Nen was discharged as S/Sgn in the 5th Light Horse and was demobbed in London. He was returning to the family that he had left all those years ago, now a war-hardened 28-year-old. And he had ideas about what he wanted to do with his life. With his oldest brother Bert, he used the skills he had been taught as a linesman in Australia and as a signaller in C Squadron and training at the Imperial School of Instruments in the Egyptian desert, to start an electrical business at 81 Brixton Road. Brixton was perhaps not considered the best part of town, but rents were cheap there and, after all, this was Emerson territory.

  Again, luck was on his side. During the years following the Great War there was a need for skilled electricians in Britain. With electric street lighting being rolled out across London and all things electric, particularly radios, becoming not only fashionable but affordable to the less well off, the business grew and prospered. Nen’s parents and some of his younger siblings (including a teenaged Len) moved in above the shop. Ernest John (known as Jack), the fourth child of Thomas and Frances, also joined the business. 81 Brixton Road was to be the last home of Thomas and Fanny Emerson and became the focal point and gathering place for the extended Emerson family for many years to come.

  But not for Nen! Was it because he could not settle after the trauma of his war years? Or was there friction between the three brothers and some of Nen’s other siblings who believed they had a right to be part of the prospering business? Maybe a combination of many factors, but whatever it was, Nen was dissatisfied with his life in Britain and unhappy that the business he had started was being taken over by family. Both Daphne and Eileen told me that, not long after the extended family moved into Brixton Road, trouble started. Arguments erupted between the brothers and Nen decided that he wanted out.

  In January 1922, only three years after being discharged from the Australian Army, Nen once again left his home, the long, cold English winters and his family for adventures in another land. And once again he chose Australia.

  He sailed on the Euripides bound for Melbourne, Australia. Interestingly, on the Euripides passenger list, Nen gave his occupation as ‘Farm Worker’, not electrician. Maybe he saw this as being a more desirable occupation to entice the Australian Immigration Department to take him, or maybe he had tried his hand at being an electrician and decided he wanted a new occupation for a new life. Whatever the reason, there is no evidence of him working as an electrician or a farm worker from that time on.

  From Melbourne he made his way to Canberra. Canberra was a place where work could be found easily. This was a place where opportunity, acceptance and anonymity could all be achieved. Canberra and its environs were where young Nen headed and where he was to live for the rest of his long life.

  By the early 1920s, the new capital of Australia was being developed. With the road work, house building and construction of office and administration buildings under way, there was work for anyone who was willing to put in the hard yards. Nen apparently was, and sometime in the latter part of 1922 he arrived in the fledgling town. His occupation is listed at this time as ‘Road Ganger’.

  Three years later, on 31 December 1925, Nen married Elsie May Savage, a local girl from Queanbeyan. Queanbeyan is a quiet country town nestled just outside Canberra. Their marriage certificate states that they were both residents of Queanbeyan and Nen’s occupation is still shown as ‘Ganger’. They married in Sydney at St Matthew’s Church, Manly. Nen was 34 and Elsie just 20.

  Over the next seven years, Nen and Elsie had three children: Trevor, Bruce and Ronald. During World War II, Nen, now 51 years old, enlisted in the 21 Battalion, Volunteer Defence Corps on part-time duty. He was discharged in September 1945 at the end of the war in the Pacific. At that time he gave his occupation as ‘Road Patrolman’.

  Elsie died in 1964, Nen in 1973. He never returned to Britain to visit family but did keep in touch. Nen was the consummate adventurer; he broke free from the constraints of family expectations to travel widely in Australia. He survived two theatres of war, learnt skills that were to see him through some hard times, married well and lived life on his terms. He died at the respectable age of 83 and left family who still live in, and around, Canberra.

  I never met Nen, even though both our families were living in Canberra for many years. Did Denis know that his brother was living in the same city as he? I believe he did, as even if he did not keep in regular contact with his family back in England, we know he visited family in England in 1933 and again, briefly, in 1939. I can’t believe that he would not have been told of his brother Nen’s emigration to Australia and marriage to Elsie and that they had settled in Canberra. So if he knew — how cold, how calculating a decision was it to ignore your own kin to preserve your new identity? Did they ever pass each other on the streets of Canberra? The mind boggles at the possibility.

  Later, much later, my brother Derek would say ‘Good day’ quite unknowingly to his first cousin Trevor, who was the security guard at Derek’s place of work in the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet. Then, later again, when Derek joined the Department of Veterans’ Affairs, he would chat to Cheryl (not knowing that she was cousin Ron’s daughter) on a regular basis.

  Our first meeting with our Canberra relatives was on a bright summer afternoon. We met for afternoon tea at our home in Kambah. Once again I was to greet unknown cousins and their children on our doorstep. First had come the Russians (that now seemed so many years ago), and now first and second generation Australians.

  Unfortunately, Ron and his wife pulled out at the last minute as did Cheryl, but Trevor, his daughter Michelle and some of her children came. They seemed a nice group of people who were no doubt as surprised as we were to suddenly find they had a whole new set of relatives living, relatively speaking, on their doorstep.

  We duly handed over our precious cargo of photo albums and sword. I did suggest to Trevor that the Australian War Memorial would be a great repository for at least some of the photos and definitely the sword. I am not sure whether they ever contacted the War Memorial, but I am quite sure that what we handed over that afternoon would have had great historical value.

  It was a happy afternoon. The younger children helped to break any awkward silences as young children do. We chattered well into the evening and made promises to each other to meet up again sometime soon. Sadly, although we kept in touch with one another by telephone and Christmas cards for some years, the contact between families has waned over time.

  Part Six

  At the end of the nursery rhyme, my father would finish by tickling me all the way up to under my chin. As a child, I would giggle with pleasure as he dramatically finished the rhyme with the words:

  all the way home.

  Chapter 23

  Visitors from England, 1994

  It was all arranged; we were to have visitors from England. Pat and Albert were to arrive in the secon
d half of the year to take advantage of our spring and early summer and to be with us for Pat’s 68th birthday in October. A treasured three months. They would fly from Heathrow to Singapore, stop off there for a few days to see the place where Denis had spent so much of his early life, then on to Sydney before catching a connecting flight to Canberra.

  Before their expected arrival, much polishing and cleaning went on in the house, and much digging and pruning in the garden. The wisteria trailed its delicate finery over the back pergola and to see the garden in all its springtime glory, even our usually streaky windows got an unaccustomed wash.

  Would Pat and Albert feel both comfortable and at home here? I wanted them to love our country and drew up lists of places that I hoped would impress them. I sorted through my recipes planning to cook what I hoped they would consider ‘traditional Australian’ meals, involving lamb and even kangaroo.

  The big day finally arrived. Their plane touched down at Canberra Airport mid-morning after their overnight flight from Singapore had got them into in Sydney at the crack of dawn. Pat, I think, found the long haul flight more difficult than Albert, but she somehow managed to step off the plane looking on top of the world and quite at ease. It was wonderful to hug them both knowing they were now safely with us. Although they were both seasoned travellers, flying to the other side of the world was a first for them.

  We bundled them into the car and took them home. We reckoned that with a nice quiet house they would sleep while we went back to work for the day. Arriving home from work that evening I had expected them to have slept, but no, they were concerned they needed to adjust their body clocks to Australian time and had decided, droopy-eyed and pale, to stick it out until bedtime.