Hans Erikson was born Lars Olof Grebst
in Gothenburg in 1906. Nearly everything I know about his childhood comes from
his own pen, The Rhythm of the Shoe published
in Brisbane in 1964. That account is sadly bereft of dates, names and other
specifics keenly sought by biographers. Despite this – or perhaps because of it
– the book is a funny, entertaining and captivating account of his life with
its many joys and sorrows. I know nothing of the editing process the book went
through but I am greatly impressed by the author’s command of the English
language and his ability to develop a storyline and deliver a punchline. The Rhythm of the Shoe is a great little
read. For me, it easily surpasses the verbose and repetitious writings of Erikson’s
uncle, Willy Andersson Grebst. It is well to say that Willy was writing in
another era when another style was in vogue. Had Willy Grebst been alive and
writing in the 1960s, I doubt very much that his sense of self-importance and
propriety would have permitted him to match the amiable, self-deprecating
humour of his nephew. In the end, they became very different men.
Erikson wrote this of his childhood:
It makes me very annoyed when people say that one’s childhood is the best time of one’s life. If I had my life over again I would gladly skip, not only my early childhood, but the first twenty years of my life. Being the moulding period of one’s character, one has to suffer all the frustrations and discomforts, call them secondary birth-pangs if you wish, inevitably preceding the making of a man.[1]
And a sickly child at that. Sweden was hit by epidemics of
polio in 1905 and 1911. The latter epidemic involved nearly four thousand
cases, one of them being Lars Olof Grebst. His parents were tireless in their
efforts to have him cured. He was taken to the best doctors in Sweden and
Germany and even to a faith healer. I feel sure he would have been examined by
the Swedish expert on polio – the man who named it ‘Heine-Medin disease’ in
1907 – Dr Otto Ivar Wickman. Despite his tremendous knowledge and expertise,
Wickman had a stutter that was the cause of his medical colleagues denying him
the opportunity to lecture at university. Frustrated by this, Wickman shot
himself through the head on 20 April 1914. When medical science failed to cure
their child, the Grebsts became desperate. Wally Grebst had heard about an old
Lapp woman in the far north of Sweden who claimed to be able to cure polio. She
tried to get the woman to come to Gothenburg but her pleas went unanswered.
Harald Grebst then travelled to Lapland to meet her and bring her back. He
discovered that she was totally illiterate and adamant that she would not be
leaving Lapland. She said that the boy would have to be left with her for six
months. So it was that Lars Olof and one of his nurses was sent by train and
reindeer sled to the old woman’s cabin in the wilderness near the Arctic
Circle. The old woman refused to let the nurse stay and had her taken back to
the railway station. Lars Olof was left all by himself with the toothless old
Lapp who looked like a witch from Grimm’s Fairy
Tales. “She could easily have hired herself out to haunt houses,” he wrote.
Of course, the Lapps – or Saami as
they are more properly called – are culturally very different from the Swedes.
The Swedish and English languages are more closely related to Hindi than they
are to Saami and even from Viking times, the Saami were avoided because of
their power to give “the evil eye” to good Christian folk. So it is little
wonder that the young Lars Olof was terrified.
The treatment began. Every day, even in winter, she
collected roots and herbs and made a brew for him to drink. “It tasted like
squashed worms.” She hugged him, massaged his limbs and made compresses with
Stockholm tar. She sang to him in her strange language and combed his hair. Neither
of them ever washed but he found their earthy odour to be pleasant. She hunted
squirrels and hares and, along with the reindeer meat she got from her kinsfolk,
added them to a huge pot of vegetable stew that was forever simmering on a fire.
It was delicious. Gradually, the young patient became so fond of “his old
witch,” he never wanted to get better and go home. Harald Grebst sent one of
his employees to Lapland to check on his son’s progress. When he arrived, the
old Lapp was out hunting and Lars Olof crawled over and opened the door. This
was seen as a miracle.
In time, the old woman cured him of polio completely. When
Harald arrived to take his son home, Lars Olof did not want to leave. He tried
to persuade the Lapp to come back to Gothenburg. She wouldn’t hear of it.
Father, son and old woman wept openly.
Back in civilisation, Lars Olof’s education went disastrously.
He claims to have been expelled from four of Sweden’s best schools. These
included “the most exclusive school in Sweden” – which, as usual, he does not
name – and where he sat next to “the son of the crown prince.” One doesn’t need
to be Sherlock Holmes to recognise this as Lundberg’s School in Värmland.
Established in 1896 using an English boarding school model, it has educated a
succession of youngsters from the Royal Family including the sons of a Crown
Prince: Gustaf Adolf (1906-1947), the Duke of Västerbotten who would blossom
into a Nazi sympathiser and perish in a plane crash in Copenhagen and Sigvard
Bernadotte (1907-2002), the Duke of Uppland who would be stripped of his titles
by the snobbish Royal Family as punishment for marrying a German commoner.
Sigvard went on to become a famous designer in Germany and Denmark. In 1929, he
designed the window in the church at Lundberg’s School. It is an exclusive
educational establishment that has attracted its fair share of criticism in a country
with strong socialist undercurrents. And it was used as the setting for the
2003 film “Evil” [Ondskan] directed
by Mikael Håfström and based on the novel by Jan Guillou, a grindingly wicked
tale of bullying and cruelty from step-fathers and fellow students.
Lundberg’s School kindly confirmed for me that Lars Olof
Grebst was a student there from 1917 to 1920 and a resident of the boarding
house called Berga. The Crown Prince’s sons attended from 1918. The school was
unable to supply me with any information about Grebst’s alleged expulsion so
for that we must rely upon his own account in The Rhythm of the Shoe. He confesses to being part of a student
plot to “get” the school sportsmaster during a ski-jumping lesson. At the top
of a mountain, Grebst and the other students attacked the teacher, tied him up
and rolled him down the mountain towards the creek at the bottom. He did not
roll straight, however, and veered over a precipice, breaking a leg and
fracturing some ribs. In a panic, the students drew straws: Grebst and another
boy lost out. The other boy went for help while Grebst stayed with the injured
teacher. Both were expelled. Given that the teacher himself would have had his
own recollection of the incident, I would not be surprised if Grebst had been
the ringleader, or one of them, behind the whole affair. In any event, it was
1920 and Lars Olof Grebst was sent back to Gothenburg in disgrace. One can
imagine the reception he received from his parents, themselves struggling in a
loveless marriage, and from dear Uncle Willy who would not see the year out.
“I think it a mistake to revisit the scenes of your
childhood,” Hans Erikson wrote explaining why he had no desire to ever return
to Sweden. But he then goes on to give a tantalising, almost homesick account
of Christmas in Sweden and all the old traditions the Grebsts followed each
year. His favourite part was going to church early in the morning on
horse-drawn sleds decorated with little silver bells and birch-bark torches.
The church sat atop a hill surrounded by pine trees and one could see the
torches of all the other sleds slowly making their way upwards through the snow
and ice. The church service itself was only a few minutes long on account of
the poor, sweating horses outside. “We Swedes feel that Christmas is not only
for the humans but for every living thing,” he wrote with more than a hint of
patriotism and forgetting to mention the vast array of meat dishes awaiting the
worshippers when they got home from their sacred duties. One of those mythical
Swedish national attributes is ‘kindness to animals’ and I recall reading an
article in Vidi in which Willy Grebst
railed against the cruelty of a bullfight he had witnessed in Lima, Peru. You
would never see a bullfight in Sweden. A factory farm – well, that’s another
matter altogether. Or is it?
Before 1920 was finished, Willy Grebst was dead, Harald and
Wally Grebst were separated and Hans Erikson was on the high seas never to see
his parents or his homeland again. It truly was a watershed year.
I cannot see how Erikson could have “run away to sea” without
his father’s knowledge. Harald Grebst was very prominent in the shipping life
of Gothenburg and no captain would take the Consul’s son on board without
official permission. It is my educated guess that Harald, in despair and
exasperation at the Lundberg’s School episode, forced – or at least allowed -
his son to go to sea in the hope that it would “make a man of him.” In The Rhythm of the Shoe, Erikson says he
often heard the expression ‘the sea will make a man of you’ and he debunks it
savagely. When the little, rich boy sailed out the Göta River as galley-boy on
a square-rigged ship, he soon found himself in rough company. Sailors hated the
sea but were unemployable away from it. There was no refrigeration, the food
was ghastly and the drinking water rusty. The living quarters were cramped and
pest-infested. When you got to port, the locals locked themselves away in fear.
The only establishment that welcomed you was the brothel. Using condoms was
considered unmanly and, as a result, the whole crew had sexually-transmitted
infections. Young Erikson held a pot steady while a Finnish sailor treated his
condition by dipping his crown jewels into boiling water. It was all a terrible
shock to the fourteen year old who had just come from sitting beside the Crown
Prince’s son in the most exclusive school in the kingdom. For the first two
months at sea, he cried himself to sleep nearly every night. Things got worse,
not better, but he just had to bear it in silence. Galley-boys were paid five
shillings a month so it took him a long time to save up for his first visit to
the brothel. The big occasion was in the Palm Café in Durban. He nervously insisted
on using a condom and the whole thing was over in a flash leaving him feeling a
little dazed. But at least now he was “a man at last” like the rest of the crew.
Erikson moved from square-rigged ships to steamers where life on board was a
little more comfortable. But the life of the sailor remained much the same.
There was no way in the world that Hans Erikson was going to
spend a lifetime at sea enduring bleak conditions on miserable wages and
entertaining himself at brothels. He had been raised as an uptown boy with his
eyes looking beyond the horizon to the exotic shores his father and uncle had
explored before him. It was only a matter of time before he left the galley and
‘jumped ship’ at some foreign port. In The
Rhythm of the Shoe, he says that port was Melbourne in 1925. Archival
records show, however, that he arrived in Melbourne on board the Swedish
steamer, Unden, in May 1924. I have
no idea when he first boarded the Unden
and whether he was part of her crew on 28 January 1922 when she escorted the
iceberg-damaged Garthforce into Port
Natal. ‘Jumping ship’ was a perilous business. If you were caught and returned
to your ship before it sailed, you were made to work your way back to your
homeport without pay. It was therefore critical that you remained on the run
until the ship sailed. Erikson knew this and so headed inland as fast as he
could and ended up in Warburton. What defeated him was lack of money and the
fact that he couldn’t speak a word of English. Like his father and uncle, he
was fluent in German and was fortunate enough to meet a German man who helped
him for a while. He got some work and was the butt of many practical jokes based
on his poor English: on one occasion, the other workers sent him to the boss to
ask for “six inches of your popubloodylation rod.” He, of course, obeyed, not
knowing the trouble it would cause. In the end, hunger got the better of him
and when he overheard some Norwegian sailors saying they needed a byssegut [galley-boy], he joined them
and set sail for South Australia.
The
Rhythm of the Shoe has many little date discrepancies and
I suspect the truth was manipulated in some areas to increase the entertainment
value of the story. For example, I have some difficulty with the idea that Hans
Erikson didn’t speak a word of English. We know that the Grebsts were very much
a pro-German family and so it isn’t surprising that Harald, Willy and young
Lars Olof were fluent in German. Indeed, Harald and Willy were schooled in
Germany – at least for a time. But Willy also spoke French and English and
Harald must have had some grasp of English for his consular duties, his
exporting of timber to Britain and for when he represented Sweden in the United
States. Willy’s wife was an American who presumably spoke English and, if Lars Olof
had much to do with her, there was an opportunity for him to develop a grasp of
English. Did he study English at school? I was never able to find out. We must
remember, too, that the 1935 newspaper article by Eskil Sundström – which
Erikson confessed to writing – contains reference to him listening to an Arab
speaker in London making impressive use of an alien language. One assumes the
Arab was speaking English in London and that Erikson was there, listening and
comprehending. Was this pre-1924 when the young galley-boy was sailing the
trading routes? Or did Erikson make some subsequent trip to London pre-1935
that he fails to include in his memoirs? Or did he just plagiarise the incident
or simply make it up? We may never know. But, using as his starting point a
zero knowledge of the local lingo, Erikson was able to empty into his memoirs a
swagful of humorous anecdotes about his adventures learning English in
Australia. In fact, he claims the whole exercise set him back: he had to unlearn Australian in order to learn English in the years ahead! They
are two different languages.
In any event, the battle-weary young Erikson joined the
Norwegian ship bound for South Australia. As the hunger pangs subsided in the
galley and he was peeling a mountain of potatoes, he began to have second
thoughts about resuming the life of a byssegut
and returning to Sweden a failure. When the ship docked in Port Germain, he was
off again, fleeing inland as fast as he could go. And ‘inland’ in South
Australia, he was soon to discover, is a very different place to the verdant
fields and forests of Scandinavia. He turned his back on the sea, perhaps
forever, and walked towards the deserts that are the Red Centre, the Dead Heart
of Australia. The little rich boy from Gothenburg was going to have to toughen
up some more.
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