September 2, 2003
A son combs five continents to find the father he never knew. The journey ends in heartbreak and happiness. Our correspondent Eric Ellis is that son
ON A bleak June day in 1961, the trader MV Holtheim set sail from Geelong harbour bound for ports in Africa and Europe. Aboard was a 29-year-old Danish seaman, Lennart Haagensen, on his way home to Copenhagen after five years in Australia. On the wharf below, waving teary goodbyes to her lover, was 19-year-old Melbourne student Una Le Couteur, five months pregnant with Lennart's baby. They were never to see each other again. Four months later, she had his son.
What has passed during the 42 years since is a story of secret loves lived and lost, sometimes tragic, sometimes triumphant, a story of social stigmas and shifting mores and of families connected – for the most part unwittingly – across five continents.
It's also a tale with a happy ending. Well, at least I think so because I've lived much of it: the teary young woman left dockside was my mother, I was the baby she was carrying and the Dane was the father I never met.
FAST forward to January 5, 1988, a wintry day in Copenhagen's busy central Hovedbanegård Station. At a bank of payphones, a young Australian of 26, your correspondent, is navigating through the Danish telephone directory; juggling some kroner, making calls and hoping the other end speaks English. And doing it all as Danes celebrate an extended Jul, their tradition-laden festive season.
I had come to Denmark from Hong Kong, where I was posted as a correspondent, on my first European visit. Many young Australians go to Europe to swoon at Paris, run with the Pamplona bulls or get sloshed at the Munich Oktoberfest. I came with the sole purpose of finding my father, that sailor on the Holtheim 27 years earlier.
For the first half of those years, my mother maintained he'd died in a car accident. So what? I shrugged. Stuff like that didn't matter much to kids like me, with the footy in winter, cricket and the beach in summer and the usual rites of adolescent passage. Besides, I'd had a dad since I was five, about the age of one's first memory, when my mother married – her first and thus far only husband – Kevin Ellis of Melbourne who, on first meeting, I apparently asked: "Are you my daddy?" He proposed soon after.
(As I later learnt, he officially is my father. After marrying my mother in 1966 – a wedding the social pressures of the day prevented me from attending – Kevin arranged for me to adopt his name by advising the Births and Deaths Office in Melbourne that he was my birth father. He simply hadn't got around to filling out the appropriate forms at the time, he apologised. They duly completed the paperwork – and secured the official lie.)
But there was a more pressing – and today almost unfathomable – reason for my mother's ruse that my natural father had died. Hailing from a grand and God-fearing Western Districts family in Victoria, her pregnancy to a man of her relatively brief acquaintance, a man 10 years older and – shocking, this – a foreigner, was scandalous.
My mother was pressured by various people – clergy, relatives, even my natural father – to abort me and, when she refused, to place me for adoption. Instead, she lived an elaborate fiction lest she – or I – be stigmatised from what today is commonplace. This strong woman's name is Una and from when I could first talk she encouraged me to call her "Noonie".
Publicly, I wasn't her son but if people wanted to think me her little brother, that was fine. She was only 19, anyway. For six years at the office job she took to support us after cutting short her arts degree at the University of Melbourne, none of her colleagues knew she'd been an unmarried mum. The office gossips would have had a field day.
At some point in my early teens, my mother confessed that my natural father hadn't died in a car accident. She still is not sure why she changed her story but I remember it was at the time of the saucy television soap opera Number 96, which awakened so many of my 1970s generation to the loss-of-innocence notions that relationships weren't always of the white picket fence variety.
In a testimony to my parents, I wasn't particularly fussed by this newer disclosure and, thanks to Kevin's passions, more concerned at how Lillee and Thomson were winning the Ashes for Australia. Or if Kerry Miley, the childhood sweetheart I had a crush on, was as keen on me as I on her (she wasn't).
However, I stored away my mother's revelation.
THE ONLY real information I had about my natural father was his mother's address in Copenhagen in late 1961. It was in a letter he wrote to my mother that year from Djibouti, where he had shore leave. I wasn't even sure if the family name was Haagensen, Hansen or Jorgensen, some of the names bandied around by my mother's relatives over the years.
Whoever he was, his letter intimated to my mother that he was unlikely to return to her arms. In an earlier love letter to him, she'd included a photo of their infant son sitting on her knee. A photoshop anomaly had somehow placed what seemed like a halo over my mother's head. The son's name was Eric, she wrote, a nod to my half-Danish origins. (Her original intent to make me the more Scandinavian Erik was lost when she groggily allowed midwives at Melbourne's Women's Hospital to fill out the official forms.)
His response from Djibouti was telling. He self-deprecatingly writes of his own career plans, briefly inquires after her, never once acknowledges the new arrival but sends her $US65, about £50 in the currency of the day. In apparent answer to my mother's angelic image, a tramp illustrates his card.
"I still had plans to go to Denmark and be with him," my mother remembers. "I was still in love but when I got that letter, I knew it was over. I thought: 'Bugger him'." Apart from a brief note sent from Copenhagen in late 1961, it was the last time she heard from him.
TWENTY-SEVEN years later, I embarked on my odyssey. On my first day in Copenhagen, I went to the apartment on Annebergvej, in the Brønshøj district, where his mother lived in 1961. I knocked on the door. This was the big moment. Would he be there? And if he was, how would he regard me, and me him, the father I'd never met, let alone speak his language? As an adult, I had reservations about how he'd treated my mother. What to do? Embrace him? Punch him on the nose? "Hi, I'm Eric, your Australian son you abandoned and here's one for my mum!"
There was no answer. It was an anti-climax. I asked some neighbours if a Mr Haagensen-Hansen-Jorgensen lived in the flat. They said such a family lived there years ago but had moved. They advised me to consult the Danish government's FolkeRegister, which documents centuries of Danes' comings and goings. I opened up another investigatory front, calling the Interior Ministry and convincing a Mr Jan Jensen to help out. Then I gave my story to Politiken and Ekstra Bladet, two of Denmark's leading newspapers.
Jensen was the first to come back. "Good news," he announced. "I think I have found your father." He said that my father was now working out of Dar Es Salaam, the Tanzanian capital, on a Danish government aid project. "I'm waiting on a cable from our embassy there for further details," he said.
This was exciting, first Europe, now Africa. I went to the SAS office to inquire about flights to Dar. It was now December 29, a Tuesday. There was a flight the following day but Jensen cautioned not to do anything until he'd heard from the embassy. Denmark was shutting down for the new year and wouldn't surface again until January 4, the first Monday of 1988. I waited it out, thinking that my father may have returned home to celebrate Jul.
A grave Jensen called Monday morning. "I have bad news, I'm afraid. Your father is dead. I am very sorry for you."
Jensen explained that my father had been killed in a car accident, as it happens, near Dar Es Salaam the previous February. The previous February! I had left my search just a few months too late, all the more poignant given that I had planned this trip for 1986 but decided against going as I'd just started a new job in Hong Kong with The Sydney Morning Herald.
I was disappointed but it was also a relief. I didn't have to traverse the unknown turf of confronting a man about whom I was naturally curious but one who had also treated my mother shabbily. Still, there was a life to research, background to check out, so many questions. Jensen revealed he'd studied at a prestigious school for mariners, got a captain's certificate and earned the skills that took him to Africa on government service restoring Tanzania's decrepit rail system. He'd become an accomplished man.
Was he married? Kids? "It doesn't appear so – it says here he was single," Jensen said. As for family, his parents were long dead but I learnt from a family friend whose name was on his death certificate that he had a younger sister – my aunt – in Vancouver, Canada. Where was he buried? Tanzania? Jensen said his remains had been transported back to Denmark and cremated at Copenhagen's main Bispebjerg Crematorium. I resolved to go there. But first I had a new aunt to contact.
INGRID Hagerlund retrieved her mail on a cold February day in 1988 and settled into her West Vancouver sitting room to sift through it. A letter from her best friend Grethe Jeppesen and husband Poul in Denmark caught her eye. Since settling in Canada in 1969 with her Danish husband and two boys after postings in Africa, Ingrid treasured Grethe's dispatches with their lively tidings from home. But this letter was jaw-dropping.
"I was absolutely stunned," my aunt remembers. "His sudden death was a terrible shock and then came this news that he had a son. I never knew him even to have had any sort of relationship in his entire life."
As Ingrid contemplated Grethe and Poul's astonishing news, I was back in Hong Kong preparing my own letter to her. I explained who I was, why I wrote and assured her of my innocent intentions. A month later, I received her brief reply. She said she'd never had any inkling of my presence, adding that "my brother was a wonderful man". Her note had a slightly sceptical tone, which made me think that despite the solid evidence I'd compiled I might have got it wrong. Maybe my father was still out there. I sent back a recent photograph of me.
In her next letter, "my brother" become "your father". She invited me to Vancouver to meet her, her husband and their two sons, and included her own photo of my father, taken just before his death. This time it was my jaw that dropped. The resemblance was one of the strongest father-son likenesses I'd ever seen. There was no mistake.
It took me eight years to accept Ingrid's invitation, with zero contact in between. She and her family got on with their lives and I got on with mine, reporting from Hong Kong, Sydney and Europe. In mid-1996, I was posted to Los Angeles with The Australian Financial Review and in October that year, as Pauline Hanson spread her racist poison around Australia, my editors suggested a report from Vancouver on how Canada was dealing with immigration issues. I could finally take up Ingrid's invitation.
I ARRIVED at Ingrid's place in October 1996. I can still remember the look on her face when she answered the door. "You were more or less a carbon copy of my brother: same looks, same walk, same mannerism, same laugh, same way of talking," she told me.
My relationship with Ingrid has blossomed. My wife Sara and I have made 20 visits to Vancouver since 1996 and we've all become very close. She has come to regard me as almost a third son and calls me Min Lille Danske Dreng – My Little Danish Boy. She and husband Kaj came to our wedding in Spain in 1998, presenting us with a fabulous Danish festive cake, a kransekage, festooned with Danish flags. She met my mother there for the first time and I have a wonderful photo of the two of them deep in conversation, catching up on what was then 37 lost years.
Every three Christmases, most recently last year, Sara and I are two of the 20-odd people, traditionally Danish expatriates in Vancouver, who gather on Boxing Day in Ingrid's dining room for a festive Danish lunch, all herring, gravlax, frikadela and aquavit and very, very jolly. As is the tradition, everyone has to do something: sing, tell a story or a joke. This year, cousin Martin and I sang the Danish national anthem Der Er Et Yndigt Land (A Lovely Land Is Ours). He's fluent but for me it was an improvement on the only Danish I know: hygge (Danish for cosy) and ingen ko på isen (literally "no cows on the ice", Danish vernacular that evokes the Australian "no worries"). In frozen Denmark, if the farmer's cows aren't on ice, everything's fine. And after 42 years, everything is.
Of the many things Ingrid has revealed about my natural father, three stand out. He'd been keen on a Japanese girl – my mother remembers being very jealous of her way back when – but she apparently committed suicide because of her own family's shame at her seeing a foreigner.
Ingrid also remembers a family dinner at their mother's Copenhagen apartment in 1962 when she was pregnant with my cousin Martin. She was close to her brother but, not long back from Australia, he seemed odd this night, cranky for no apparent reason. "Lennart left in a huff right after dinner, not to contact me until several months later," my aunt recalls. "Knowing what I do now, I think it was him seeing me pregnant and happy. It touched a raw nerve with him."
And in March 1987, as Ingrid cleared out her brother's Copenhagen apartment, she came across a photo of an unknown toddler on his dresser. Knowing he died unmarried and presumably childless, she was puzzled by it but thought little of it and threw it out. My mother tells me she sent him a bundle of photos of me through 1961-62.
Ingrid is steadily working through history. Each time I go to Vancouver, like I did last Christmas for another lively Jul, uncle Kaj shows me the perfectly symmetrical deck my capable father built them, overlooking a salmon stream. And Ingrid gives me something that belonged to him: a lamp by a famous Danish designer, his 1932 silver baby spoon set, an old cigarette case, an etching. And she tells me how much I am like Lennart. And assures me that he was a good man.
IN THE freezing Scandinavian winter, Bispebjerg Crematorium is an austere, cold place, and one cloaked in darkness by 3pm. That afternoon, 15 years ago now, when I learn my father is dead, I make my way to a spare field at Bispebjerg that Danes call simply The Lawn. It's studded with thousands of flowerless rose sprigs, each marking a cremation. The sprigs are unmarked, and so too their urns, anonymous per the wish of the deceased. My father's ashes are somewhere among them.
I approach one of the sprigs, placing a bouquet down by the urn. I say a brief prayer and something about not knowing him but thanks at least for helping me into the world, adding a little spray that he should've looked after my mother.
Then I call her in Geelong, from that bank of payphones in that draughty railway station in Copenhagen. I tell her what has happened. And down the line, across a dozen time zones and 27 years, I can hear my mother quietly weeping.