Adoptions in the old days were frequently informal. The big difference between any country, then and now, is that there was a surplus of children then. Before reliable contraception, many women had, perforce, far more children than they could feed, so some of those children went to orphanages and children’s homes and sisters and aunts. Children born out of wedlock were often not even registered, if they were born at home, and some of them were quietly done away with. The writer and historian Lucy Sussex reports that her grandmother found a tiny skeleton buried in a vicarage garden and buried it again, saying with compassion that it must have been ‘a servant’s child’ and that it was best to ‘let sleeping dogs lie’. In short, even if our HC Reynolds is definitely not on the official record, at least under that name, there might be many reasons for it.
Somerton Man continues to attract speculation. There is an article in the 1994 Criminal Law Journal by that excellent judge and historian, John Harber Phillips, who gives a nice little summary of the case and decides that Somerton Man died of digitalis poisoning, despite the previous forensic objections to this idea. My sister believes that the story of Somerton Man is a love story and she might be right. Others have suggested that the piece of paper in his fob pocket saying ‘Tamam Shud’ is a love token rather than a code. We are also told that Stephen King’s novel The Colorado Kid is based on the case of Somerton Man. It is the story of a man found dead on a beach with no identification and the newspaper reporters who try to solve the mystery. I do not usually admire King but I am an avid watcher of Haven, the TV series derived from The Colorado Kid, and the book itself is an interesting meditation on the nature of apprenticeship, experience and learning.
However, it is not about Somerton Man, according to Stephen King himself, who says in his introduction to the 2005 edition that the book was, in fact, inspired by the case of a woman found dead on the shore in Maine. King reports that a fan sent him a clipping, which he has since lost, about a young woman with a bright red purse, who was seen walking on the beach one day, found dead on it the next and remained unidentified for a long time. King loves the strangeness of Maine and in his introduction he says, ‘In this case I’m not really interested in the solution, but in the mystery’.
The same could be said of all of us who have puzzled over the mystery of Somerton Man. ‘Wanting,’ says King ‘is better than knowing.’ And he may be right.
In her 2010 article ‘The Somerton Man: an unsolved history’, Ruth Balint, a senior lecturer in the School of History and Philosophy at the University of New South Wales, goes to considerable lengths to understand her subject. For instance, she is conducted around Adelaide by Gerry Feltus, the detective who published his own book on Somerton Man in the same year, visiting various places that are important to Somerton Man’s story, like the station and Somerton Beach. There are theories that point to the Somerton Man being a displaced person, which do make sense considering the time and place.
After the ruin of Europe, thousands of people flooded into the less destroyed parts of the world. Nazis tended to go to Argentina, for example. On the other hand, my old and distinguished friend Dennis Pryor came to Australia from England as a ten-pound tourist and never wanted his money back. Australia was seen as a fresh start, innocent of the dreadful animosities of old Europe.
Balint sees Somerton Man as a wandering refugee, clad in anonymous second-hand clothes, rather than attributing his lack of labels to deliberate action. She points to a conversation the police had with ‘Mr Moss Keipitz, an Egyptian, employed in Adelaide’, who told the police investigation that Keane, the name on Somerton Man’s tie, could have been an Anglicisation of Keanic, which is a Czechoslovakian, Yugoslav or Baltic name. (My mother did think he looked Baltic.) However, Balint adds that since Somerton Man’s fingerprints were only sent to the United States and to other countries in the British Commonwealth, not to Eastern Bloc countries, there is no way to prove or disprove her theory. She observes that there are an infinite number of potential endings to the mystery, which is interesting and also true but not helpful.
One of my favourite theories is that Somerton Man was a time traveller, related to Teresa Powell because he was her great-great-grandson come back from the future, where clearly it is colder than here, hence the heavy garments. According to this theory, Somerton Man was waiting on the beach for the Mothership but he was killed by an acute reaction to some local allergen or a death ray from his enemies before he could be picked up. As one who read their first speculative fiction story at eight – a time travel story by Ray Bradbury called The Sound of Thunder, which scared the hell out of me – I love the idea. Both of the unidentified dead men found on Somerton Beach were inappropriately dressed for the weather in their current location but were they, perhaps, appropriately dressed for their ultimate destination – a colder future earth or a chilly day on Mars? The only trouble with this hypothesis is that time travel really is impossible. Much as I like the idea.
A similar degree of suspension of disbelief is required by the idea that Somerton Man was an alien/human hybrid. As a matter of fact, this theory requires that disbelief be not so much suspended as hung out of the window by its heels. I suspect that the theorists watched The X Files and thought it was fact. Still, it’s an attractive hypothesis, based on the fact, uncovered by Professor Abbott, that Somerton Man had some unusual genetic features – those odd teeth and strange ears. However, strange ears do not a Vulcan make, nor a fairy, werewolf, elf or supernatural personage of any sort. Despite what you may have read in Twilight. Despite the novels of Charlaine Harris. No, really. Srsly.
In the end, after all the theorising, Somerton Man remains an ambiguous figure. Was he on our side or on their side? Was he a good guy or a bad guy? Where did he come from, what was he doing there, how did he die? Only a novelist, I suggest, could possibly provide a solution, because every hypothesis put forward so far has had to ignore at least one of the facts, like the Marx brothers packing a suitcase by cutting off the bits which don’t fit. And my own solution is only a story, or rather, several stories; and I am a storyteller who draws inferences from many sources. We cannot really hope to solve this mystery now, even if we dig up poor Somerton Man and trace his blood relatives by their DNA or the shape of their ears.
When I asked my father to expand on the story of Somerton Man, he confessed that he knew no more. But then he said ‘It’s because it’s a mystery, see, little mate, stories where you know the solution, you forget about them. But if you don’t know – if you can’t know – well, they stick in your mind’.
And they do. It has stayed in my mind all these years.
Chapter Eight