Tamam Shud (6 page)

Awake! For Morning in the Bowl of Night

Hath flung the Stone that sets the Stars to flight;

And Lo! The Hunter of the East has caught

The Sultan's Turret in a Noose of Light.

Its most famous stanza made beautiful and poetic and luxurious the consumption of sandwiches and cordial under a tree with one's favourite boy.

Here with a Loaf of Bread beneath the Bough

A Flask of Wine, a Book of Verse – and Thou

Beside me singing in the Wilderness –

And Wilderness is Paradise enow.

From being relatively unknown, FitzGerald became an instant celebrity and old Omar Khayyam kept him comfortable for the rest of his life, which is always nice to hear. In his introduction, FitzGerald informs us that Omar Khayyam was born in the latter half of the eleventh century and lasted until the first quarter of the twelfth. His poetic name means Tentmaker, possibly a family profession. He achieved his loafing, lazy life by being a schoolmate of a future Vizier. The four boys pledged that when one of them became powerful, he would give the others whatever they wanted. Nizam Al Mukh succeeded and gave the other two power and place.

All Khayyam wanted was an independent income and he got it: enough money to please himself. Not that he wasted his time in continuous drinking. He was an astronomer, a mathematician and a scientist. He was amongst the group of wise men who reformed the calendar. He wrote a treatise on algebra. But fortunately that left him a reasonable amount of time for lounging around under trees with houris. FitzGerald in his introduction comments:

Having failed (however mistakenly) of finding no Providence but Destiny, and any World but This, he set about making the most of it; preferring to sooth the Soul through the Senses into Acquiescence with Things as They were, rather than to perplex it with vain mortifications after what they might be. It has been seen that his Wordly Desires, however, were not exorbitant; and he very likely takes a humorous Pleasure in exaggerating them…

I first found
The Rubaiyat
in Grandmother Greenwood's bookcase.

When I was a child there were three sets of significant bookcases in my life, as well as the ever-present scatter and pile of ordinary books all over our house. The first was Grandma McKenzie's bookcase, a glorious collection of Edwardian books bound in pressed cardboard with wonderful covers and titles like
Ida Pfeiffer and Her Travels In Many Lands
and
Adventures in the Land of Ice and Snow
and
The Fairchild Family
, the only book that my mother ever removed firmly from my grasp and would not return, even though I begged her to. At the time I sulked briefly and then grabbed another book. It was the three-volume novel
The Rosary
by Mrs Florence Barclay and Mother never said a word.

When I read
The Fairchild Family
as a grown up I
understood why my mother had taken it away from me. It is a grim, severe and merciless book of Victorian morality that I would snatch out of the hands of anyone under thirty, even now. The chapter where the parents take their children to look at (and smell) the body of a murderer hanging on the gibbet to show them how crime does not pay is worthy of Edgar Allen Poe. Or Stephen King.

The second bookcase was a large and beautiful cedar construction with glass doors in my parents' house. It contained wedding present sets of books, fragile and precious. I read all of them:
Myths of Many Lands
,
The Collected Plays of GB Shaw
,
The Collected Works of Charles Fort
,
The Children's Encyclopedia
by Arthur Mee,
The Works of Dickens
.

Bookcase number three belonged to Grandma Greenwood and also contained wedding present sets, this time of Trollope and Thackeray. I read them, too. My mother specialised in poetry, so when I was at Grandma's one Sunday as usual, I was surprised to find a lovely little book bound in limp, violet suede, containing poems I had never seen, in a form with which I was unfamiliar. I remember sitting down in Grandpa's comfy brown leather chair, reading it in one gulp.

The grandparents were in the garden with my father, showing him something to do with a new rose. Grandpa was an accountant, who grew glorious roses and loved Mozart and Gilbert and Sullivan. My father was totally uninterested in gardening and loved big bands and
jazz. They had nothing in common, except us, but they maintained a polite and guarded truce. By the time they came inside and I had to go home, I had engulfed Omar Khayyam and adored it, so I asked very politely if I could borrow it. Grandma asked me if my hands were clean and told me to be very careful and put
The Rubaiyat
in a clean white envelope, which is what she always did with a book. I never lost or damaged one of them, not even the wedding present Trollope with pages as thin as rice paper, very easy to tear when reading under the blankets with a flashlight.

Thereafter I read Omar to my mother while we were cooking or peeling potatoes. We all liked him, even my little brother. The poems were, as FitzGerald said, a ‘Strange Farrago of Grave and Gay'. My favourite was:

The Moving Finger writes; and having writ

Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit

Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,

Nor all thy Tears wash out of Word of it

Or possibly:

And those who husbanded the Golden Grain

And those who flung it to Winds like Rain,

Alike to no such aureate Earth are turn'd

As, buried once, Men want dug up again.

The Rubaiyat
was a particularly appropriate book to find in Somerton Man's possession, I would suggest, because it was both commonly available and undeniably secular. (A Communist carrying a bible, for instance, would instantly draw attention.) Beautiful editions of
The Rubaiyat
with hand-painted illustrations, bound in limp, purple leather, abounded. Cheap editions were everywhere. It became a good gift for someone you did not know very well. Indeed, Saki Reginald remarks, ‘I am not collecting copies of the cheaper editions of Omar Khayyam. I gave the last four that I received to the lift-boy, and I like to think of him reading them, with FitzGerald's notes, to his aged mother'. It continues to be in print, with a last surge during the 1960s, when it was read while stoned to appreciative audiences.

The Rubaiyat
found in the car near to Somerton Man was a first edition, published in 1859 by Whitcombe and Tombs. This is curious in itself. If Somerton Man or his colleagues wanted a throwaway book to use for a book code, one would have thought that they would have chosen one of the commonly available editions. In fact, there are substantial differences between the editions of 1859, 1868 and 1872, which could have an effect on decryption.

The second odd thing is that
The Rubaiyat
is the only thing in Somerton Man's possession which is not strictly
utilitarian. Apart from that, his belongings contain not one single thing that points to his origins or his personality. Every person who has travelled comes back with a scatter of junk in their luggage. In the days before the euro, this used to include coins of all nations, along with receipts, notes, postcards and one lost butter menthol vulcanising itself to the lining of the suitcase or backpack. I remember being touched to tears by the itemising of the contents of the pockets of dead soldiers, which always included one picture of their girl or their family or their home or their favourite railway engine. Or their dog. Also a talisman of some sort – a pebble, a shell, a holy medal.

Not so our dead man. He had envelopes but no stamps, writing paper or pen. No address book. He had buttons but no coins except those of the realm and no photo of Mum or Mr Waggles.
The Rubaiyat
was his only extraneous possession, probably an expensive one. Which he treated with such disdain that he – or someone else – wrote telephone numbers and a code in pencil on the end page. The code is as follows:

W (or possibly M) RGOABABD

MLIAOI

WTBIMPANETP

MLIAB
AIAIQC

ITTMTSAMSTGAB

The second line has been struck out and is repeated in the fourth line. There is an X over the last O, which may be significant, but no one has been able to break the code and determine its significance.

Book codes usually consist of page and word numbers and they are very hard to break because you have no idea what the letters or numbers refer to, unless you have the book in your hand. That is why they were so popular with spies in the fifties and that is why, lacking the book, they still cannot be broken, even with the spiffy technology that is now available. Extensive efforts have been made by Adelaide University to break the Tamam Shud code, using as a base the idea that it is a one-time pad encryption algorithm, but they need a copy of the first edition of
The Rubaiyat
and so far have not been able to find one. I would suggest they enquire at the six copyright deposit libraries in Britain, established since 1610 – The British Library in London, Cambridge University, the Bodleian, and the National libraries of Scotland, Wales and Dublin – but they have probably tried that.

The retired detective Gerald Feltus, who has written an excellent book on Somerton Man, believes that the code is a series of capitals which refer to the first letters of words, in the same way as SWALK means ‘sealed with a loving kiss'. For example, the final line of the code could mean ‘It's Time To Move To South Australia Moseley Street'. When questioned by the media, Mr Feltus did not elaborate,
although perhaps he will change his mind in future, if everyone who reads this book contacts him on his website and implores him to reveal the rest of the message.

I can demonstrate the advantages and disadvantages of a code made from first letters by replicating the To Do list I wrote this morning. It goes:

p/u dr cl

ss

t/a 3MBS

alf

b pp

AA batt

This means ‘Pick up drycleaning, sesame seeds, telephone interview.' (T/a is lawyer's shorthand for a telephone attendance.) Less obviously, ‘b pp' is baking paper, ‘alf' is alfoil and ‘AA bat' means AA batteries. If I made my list into a Somerton Man code, it might read pudrcl ssta3 mbs alfbpp. And if I then ran it through an alphabet substitution, where a = k, it would read zkthiijk3crikbvrzz, which makes no sense at all. An alert code reader might notice the number of z's and decide it was an alphabet substitution but that would just take her back to the original coded version.

Now, while you might be able to guess that p/u is pick up and dr cl is drycleaning, it is my own private
knowledge that tells me that ss is sesame seeds, not sweet sauce or super sugar or swimming snakes or any other combination of things starting with ‘s'. The same goes for b pp and alf. This kind of shorthand is so personal as to be unbreakable. My friends wouldn't be able to read it, unless I had previously sent them a list of my code words, and informed them that ss was only ever going to mean sesame seeds, which rather cuts down its use as a method of communication. On the other hand, it is only meant to remind me that I have run out of some household goods, whereas Somerton Man's code may have had a more public significance.

Internet and text messages have made us aware of standard meanings for initials. I particularly like the phrase KTHXBAI which means ‘okay, thanks, goodbye'. New variations appear every day, a new generation of ROTFL and IMHO, not to mention new and imaginative spellings like Sk8r, which cut down the strain on the thumbs. Concerning the Somerton Man case, we might well say WTF? Frequency analysis will not reveal any meaning in a book-based code but if M always means the same word in the Tamam Shud code, why is it repeated four times – unless, perhaps, it means ‘help!' On the evidence before us, it seems that this code must be the kind where the sender and receiver use a code book with agreed meanings for each letter or combination. And lacking the code book, this kind of code cannot be cracked.

Meanwhile, it is time to remind you that there was a telephone number pencilled on the back page of Somerton Man's
Rubaiyat
, as well as a code. The telephone number was unlisted and belonged to a nurse called Teresa Powell or Johnson. (There's that Johnson default setting again.) She lived in Moseley Street, Glenelg, just above Somerton Beach. And here the story gets very interesting.

The police questioned Teresa, who said she was not at home on 30 November but her neighbour mentioned that a strange man had called at the house. When Teresa was shown the body cast of Somerton Man, the police officer who exhibited it said ‘she was completely taken aback, to the point of giving the appearance that she was about to faint'. An odd reaction, perhaps. Nurses are, regrettably, used to death and Somerton Man's face had been extensively plastered across the newspapers. Teresa must have already known that he was dead. If she knew him at all, that is.

When asked about the phone number in
The Rubaiyat
, she volunteered that she had once owned a copy while she was working at the Royal North Shore Hospital in Sydney, but in 1945 she had given it to Alfred Boxall, who was a soldier. This, as the alert reader will have noticed, is not an answer to the question. But she also said that the body cast was not of anyone she knew. The police decided to find Alf Boxall, hoping, I expect, that this mystery would finally be marked ‘closed'. But
Boxall was not Somerton Man. He was alive and well, living in Randwick and working in bus maintenance. Boxall was unable to identify Somerton Man and what's more, he produced his copy of
The Rubaiyat
, complete with its last words, ‘Tamam Shud'. The copy given to him by Teresa was the 1924 Sydney edition. In the front she had written what sounds to me like an invitation to begin or continue an affair, addressed to a lover.