Other ingested toxins could be responsible but, like Tetrotoxin (TTX) or a potent neurotoxin as used in Michael Crichton’s State of Fear scenario, this would most often cause a paralytic type of death leaving post-mortem evidence of that mechanism. One could posit a pure snake venom cardiotoxin but that would have been very hard to purify in that era and, due to the availablity and lack of means of chemical detection at that time, of digitalis-type cardiotoxic ‘poisons’, rather pointless.
And that about wraps it up for snake poison, unless it was injected into Somerton Man through that ‘boil mark’ or he put his hand down on a snake. In either eventuality, he was unlikely to retain his dinner or light a smoke. Oh, well, it was worth a try. And I am so grateful to all the kind persons who bent their minds to my problem. And my friends, who must feel seriously nagged by now. Sorry. But you have to admit that it is fascinating.
Chapter Three
And so matters rested, with the overworked Adelaide police force receiving answers to their requests for information from all over the world. J. Edgar Hoover wrote back to say that Somerton Man’s fingerprints were not on record with the FBI and no one at Scotland Yard had identified them. Somerton Man was entirely, as police parlance says now, ‘off the grid’.
He had no passport, no demob certificate, no ration card, no seaman’s ticket, no union membership card. Without these things, or at least one of them, he would have found work hard to come by in Australia, where the police were prone to ask for identification from anyone who was in any way different – on the street late at night or consorting with known criminals (my dad said you could do that any night just by walking down Rundle Street) or simply unknown to them personally. Losing, abandoning or being robbed of his identity card was a very serious matter for Somerton Man.
I have my father’s demobilisation certificate before me and I am wearing his Redheads T-shirt, which I bought for him, as I type. He feels very close to me at the moment because I have just sorted out his papers, three years after he died. The beige booklet instructs me that Army Number VX501875 Signaller Alfred William Greenwood of West Footscray followed the correct procedure to get out of the army. On 25 March 1948, he was medically examined and X-rayed and found to be fit. On 24 April 1948, he received whatever pay was owing – twenty-four pounds and five shillings, to be exact. And suddenly he was unemployed, dropped at Central Station in Adelaide and given a railway warrant to take him back to Melbourne. No longer a number but a free man.
My father went home to see his mother and his sweetheart, my mother. (He even named his cat Jeannie, so she knew he was serious). Somerton Man, on the other hand, walked into oblivion. More can now be guessed about his movements after he arrived at Central Station on 30 November. He bought a ticket for the Henley train. He then requested a wash and a shave and was told that the station amenities were closed and he would need to go to the City Baths, which housed not only a swimming pool but an actual set of bathtubs for travellers who needed a wash. This detour would have caused him to miss the train, so when he returned to Central and checked his suitcase, all shaved and clean, he decided to take a bus. Both tickets in his pocket are now explained. I find it very pitiable that he groomed himself so neatly for what was about to come.
So, how much do we know about what happened next? Somerton Man took the bus to Glenelg and would have arrived there by noon. He is next seen sitting on the beach and – probably – dying at 7 pm on a hot night, wearing lots of clothes. His shoes are still highly polished. Where had he been in the interim? Somewhere along the way someone gave him supper – the pastie, which was still in his stomach. And in his watch pocket, folded up very small, was the last page of The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, the words ‘Tamam Shud’, which means, in effect, the end.
The police began another vigorous rummage through public libraries and bookshops hoping to find the actual book from which the page was torn. Amazingly, on 22 July, Mr Ronald Francis remembered that his brother-in-law had left a copy of The Rubaiyat in the glove box of his Hillman Minx. When he called to enquire, he was told that his brother-in-law had found the book on the floor of the car and put it tidily in the glove box. On 30 November the car had been parked in Moseley Street, the street above Somerton Beach.
The next day Mr Francis took the book to the police. The torn out page matched and, what’s more, it contained a code and a telephone number in pencil. The case of Somerton Man had just become even more complicated.
The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam was a free – some say unduly free – translation of a Persian poet’s series of verses. How much of The Rubaiyat is Edward FitzGerald’s work and how much comes from old Omar is a matter for conjecture. As that eminent scholar, Renaissance man and good friend Professor Dennis Pryor once told me, ‘All translation is betrayal’. One can never get translation right. All that we translators can do is to do the best that we can to convey the meaning and the spirit of the writer, taking the different historical, linguistic and social conditions into account. That’s hard enough in Latin languages, like Provençal, and it must be hideously difficult in Persian. At least Khayyam was writing social criticism and love poems, which is a universal theme – although I find it hard to fully understand why he had it in for Sufis.
From the moment it hit the bookshops in London in 1859, The Rubaiyat was a success. I suspect I would not have liked Mr FitzGerald if I had met him but he was a good poet, despite his views on women as authors. He observed at one point:
Mrs Browning’s death is rather a relief to me, I must say: no more Aurora Leighs, thank God! A woman of real genius, I know: but where is the upshot of it all? She and her Sex had better mind the Kitchen and the Children: and perhaps the Poor; except in such things as little Novels, they only devote themselves to what Men do much better, leaving that which Men do worse or not at all.
He said this in a letter to WH Thompson on 15 July 1861 and I do wish he hadn’t. I really like The Rubaiyat but I am one of the female writers of ‘little novels’ he so despises. On the other hand, Robert Browning, the widower, wrote a very ferocious poem in response to this heartless comment, so I suspect honours are about even.