Sunday, May 5, 2013

Hans Erikson's Childhood as Lars Olof Grebst


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]
I think Erikson would need to skip more than the first twenty years of his life to reach a point where he was at peace within himself. But it is no doubt true that many of his emotional problems stemmed from his childhood. We have already examined the love-hate relationship he had with his mother, an upper class socialite who ‘outsourced’ his upbringing to wet nurses and boarding schools. His father, too, he accuses of rarely being around, always off pursuing “big business.” I wonder how much of this is true and how much is the subjective, self-centred and unfair view of a child.


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.

[1] TROTS, pp 1-2

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