Europe @ 2.4 km/h (13 page)

The insistence on separateness can be taken to comical lengths. Leaving Christiania I pass under a sign that reads, ‘You are now entering the EU’. Yet, outside the gates, the counter-culturalists have made their own contribution to the land where the bike is king. The Christiania bike is a three-wheeled pedal cart covered by a tarpaulin that protects small children, and groceries of all sizes, from the elements. Three yellow circles form the Christiania ‘trademark’ and I will encounter these bikes as far south as France. As Steen says with a wicked smile, it would be a great irony if 100 years from now the only relics to have survived the grand experiment of ‘Freetown’ peace and love were these ‘material objects. They would hate that!’

312 km

On my last night in Scandinavia, Steen introduces me to the ‘Danish cold table’, a culinary ritual with protocol as exacting as the Changing of the Guard. As you might expect, it centres on that noble fish the herring. When our delicious meal was consumed, I asked Steen to email me the recipe. Whether the herring was soused I can’t remember but we definitely were. ‘The Danish
kold
borde
is usually served at lunchtime. As a first course one will in all likelihood eat pickled herring (
marinerede sild
) or another herring dish. The most common herring is marinated either in a clear, sweet, peppery vinegar sauce (white herring) or in a red seasoned vinegar (red herring). It may also come in a variety of sour-cream-based sauces, including a curry sauce which is very popular. The white herring is typically served on buttered black rye bread, topped with white onion rings … and served with hard-boiled eggs and tomato slices … Herring is usually served with ice-cold snaps’ — schnapps — ‘which according to Danish tradition helps the fish swim down to the stomach. Also the high alcohol content of snaps helps dissolve the fat left in the oral cavity after eating the fish. This allows the lunch participant to more readily taste the different dishes. As a second course one will in all likelihood eat warm foods (
lune retter
) served on rye bread with accompaniments. Some typical warm foods would be: Frikadeller, Danish meatballs, the “national dish”; Danish sausage (
medisterpølse
); pork tenderloin (
mørbradbøf
) with sauteed onions and pickled [sic] slices (
surt
). Beer (in particular the Danish brands Tuborg, Carlsberg or Faxe) is the preferred beverage during this meal … It is also quite acceptable to have another shot or two of the akvavit along the way. Finally one is served a variety of cheese along with crackers or white bread. To the cheese there should be added another snaps. If the occasion is more informal and/or in the bosom of the family, there may well be more than two snapses during the lunch. In fact we have a saying, used when the outcome of something was too meagre. “It was like a formal lunch. There was too far between the snapses.”’

Ditto the synapses, Steen. And cheers.

COPENHAGEN, NYKØBING and BREMEN

Journey distance to date: 10,895 km

A straight line may or may not be the shortest distance between two points but no physical journey proceeds on straight lines alone. When undertaking a chronological journey — reaching into one’s past, one’s family’s past or even a nation’s history — obstructions, some of them mountainous, are bound to impede progress. It was between Denmark and northern Germany that my course across Europe intersected with a route of personal exploration I was always going to take one day. It was only a matter of time …

My mother — Marie Isabel Haley, née Watson — tells me she was born on 18 June 1928 — and, since she is not the sort of person given to lying, I believe her. To tell a family history, one must start with the first generation — not the first chronologically, but the nearest — so that is what I have done. Yet this chapter is not about her.

Marie’s mother’s name was Ruby Dagmar and her then husband, my mother’s father, was Warren Watson, a Melbourne lawyer in the first half of last century. Ruby Dagmar, born into the family Dess — my favourite grandmother, who provided my first conscious memory as she peered over my cot when I must have been all of two — was born in Newtown, Sydney, on 23 November 1899. I will always remember her strong and doting presence. But this is not about her either.

This is a story that forms part of my own journey through Europe while standing as a journey in its own right; a story whose principal characters, Edward and Maud — great-grandparents whom I never knew — could have stepped, fully formed, from a novel. This is a story with the power to shock, and yet it remains a tale for all the family.

If ‘the past is a foreign country’,
¹⁰
the past in one’s own land can be just as unfamiliar. But, then, you may have noticed my mother’s mother — that loving grandmother who was known to a younger me as Ninny, later as Nin — had two names that would have sounded ‘foreign’ to those who knew her as a girl a century ago — Dagmar and Dess. Perhaps only her closest friends and some of her brothers and sisters would have known the family’s true European origins. In those days it did not do to advertise the ‘foreignness’ of one’s family.

Dagmar is a Danish name. Dess I couldn’t place, but for years I assumed it to be Danish too, from the basic knowledge that my mother’s mother’s father hailed from Denmark. The young man who came to be known in his new country as Edward had been christened Johannes Carl Edvard Ludwig.

Edward marks a setting-off point in my second journey, from the ‘known world’ of the family hearth into the unknown world of the past over the horizons of time and space. And, although being in Copenhagen brings me closer to
his
first known world, the speedometer and diary, map and compass that have served me so well in today’s Europe must be set aside for now I truly am entering a foreign country and must do things differently here myself.

How do I know that great-granddad Edward Dess arrived in Australia in 1871? His departure from Copenhagen is recorded in the Danish Emigration Archives, as his arrival is in the Queensland Archive, a statistical compendium of the day. Nin left a small scrap of paper in her belongings, later inserted in a family Bible, stating that in 1871 young Dess sailed on a ship, the
Shakespeare,
out of Copenhagen, bound for Australia.

Even with the light of research shone full on him, he seems much more ghost than man of flesh. It is easier to say what did not induce the move. He does not bring the taint of criminality with him. We have no evidence he ever visited Great Britain but, even if he had done so and run foul of the law there, the use of Australia as a dumping ground for convicts had come to an end in 1868, three years before he set sail.

As I prepared my itinerary for Europe, the prospect of coming to Denmark, land of Edward’s birth, spurred me into action. It gave an outlet to my latent curiosity about this relative of whom I knew almost nothing except that he and wife Maud conceived my grandmother, Nin, in 1899, three decades before dying in Melbourne at age 75.

That outlet did not exist solely because I was in the city my great-grandfather had left, never to return to Europe, but because it was the hometown of someone I believed to be a fifth cousin — the admirable Steen.
¹¹

Steen Thomsen looks nothing like me. He has a glint in his eye and a rough beard. But his personal traits, a wicked sense of humour and an irreverent regard for conventional authority, are not dissimilar to mine. Yet none of this is evident at first sight.

Steen, 58, had devoted countless hours to the history of the Bendixsen clan, which he had explored right back to AD 1225. While I was about to delve into my own piece of European history, he had long since unearthed his own. Proudly he ‘introduced’ me to Dethlef Thomsen, who had made a fortune in the salmon trade before drowning off the Icelandic coast during a fierce Atlantic storm in 1854, exactly a century before my birth.

At only 21 his son, Hans Theodor August, took over the business and became the most successful merchant in Iceland before his death in 1899, the same year that Ruby Dagmar, Nin, was born half a world away. A grandson of his — Steen’s father — was practising as a lawyer in Reykjavik during the 1940s, at precisely the same time Warren Watson, my mother’s father, was doing so in Melbourne. Each of them died at the age of 80. These are hardly notable coincidences, but I have included them here in honour of Steen, who — as students of the Danish ‘cold table’ will already be aware — is a world authority on the red herring.

So what more was there to know about young Edward Dess, the immigrant from Denmark who was the first Australian of his clan? Research by an interested cousin had established that he was born in February 1854, and grew up, in the small Danish city of Nykøbing, across the sea from Germany — that Edward came from a ‘broken home’ and by the age of six was living in an all-female household with his grandmother, an aunt and his mother, Thora, who would have found a place in any of Dickens’s earlier novels.

Further research by Steen reveals that — nine years before she gave birth to my great-grandfather — Thora, along with her parents and siblings, was consigned to a poorhouse, their living quarters shared with more than 30 strangers. This serves as a reminder that for millions at any time the reality of Europe has never yet squared with the ideal of Europia.

By 1855 — a year after Thora gives birth to Edward — she is registered as living in Nykøbing. Edward’s father, Carl Eduard, shows no sign of marrying her and, now I learn, is not himself Danish but an immigrant from the German Free State of Bremen, to which he has returned after fathering my half German, half Danish great-grandparent.

This revelation will prove of great significance for my search. But first my imaginative sympathy goes out to poor Edward. At six he doesn’t know his own father.
What have they told you? That he is
dead
? He is certainly dead to Thora — but still alive across the sea.

In August 1861,
when you were seven, Edward
, in Bremen — 300 km away in a foreign land — Carl Eduard, occupation cigar maker, is registered as the father of baby Elisabeth Henriette Dess by at least the third woman in his life.

Carl Eduard Dess will not be buried in Bremen’s cemetery, Walle Friedhof. After 1861 we hear no more of him, but, as we shall see, there are more skeletons in closets than in graveyards.

One of his son’s fellow passengers aboard the
Shakespeare
a decade later was Olga, a woman in her mid-20s. They may or may not have had a shipboard romance; at any event, they did marry the following year, 1872. Sometime after the birth of their fourth child, in 1880, it seems Edward up and left. Like father, like son …

Somewhere in Sydney, we cannot know exactly where or when, a new arrival in the Antipodes — Maud Green from central London — caught Edward’s roving eye, thus beginning a liaison that would shape the rest of his life and hers. Beginning in 1889, Maud would bear him thirteen (and, if family rumour of an unnamed twin is right, fourteen) children over a 27-year period, the eighth of whom was Ruby, my Nin. Counting the children Maud bore Edward, altogether the man fathered seventeen, and probably eighteen, children by two women.