made a slow turn in my direction. I stood there with the wood in my hand feeling foolish. I gave him another hail and he ambled over to the fence, scuffling his feet in the damp leaves. He made it to the fence in pretty good time given that he wasn’t in a hurry.
“Didn’t mean to startle you,” I said.
“You didn’t startle me, mate.” His voice was the old Australian voice, slow and a bit harsh from rough tobacco and a lifelong habit of barely opening his mouth when he spoke. I handed him one of my cards through the fence and brought a five dollar note out into the light of day.
“I’d like to ask you a few questions if you’ve got the time. There’s a quid in it.”
He stuck the pipe back in his mouth. The hair was classical, a brutal short back and sides and his ragged moustache, yellow from tobacco had nothing in common with the modish Zapata model. He was one of the old style of tie-less Australians, one without a collar to his shirt so how could he wear a tie? He inclined one ear towards me, but his faded blue eyes were sceptical.
“How long have you worked here, Mr…?” I bellowed.
He shuffled back. “Don’t have to shout mate,” he said, “I can hear orright. My name’s Jenkins, Albie Jenkins and I been here since the war.”
He didn’t mean Korea.
“Since 1945?”
“Forty-six. I got demobbed at the end of forty-five and this’s the first job I took, been here ever since. I went through all of it, unnerstand? Middle East, New Guinea and that.”
“I see, like this job do you?”
He appeared to be thinking about it for the first time. He took the pipe out, looked at it and put it back again.
“Dunno,” he said slowly. “S’orright, crook pay but a place to live, they leave ya alone. You weren’t old enough to be in it, were you?”
“No, I was in Malaya though.”
“Where?”
“Malaya.”
“Oh yeah, against the Japs?”
“No, later, against the communists.”
He shook his head. “Never heard of it.” He wasn’t interested, the only real wars had been those with the Germans and the Japanese. I asked him if he remembered a dark boy who would have been at the institution in the 1960s, but he didn’t have a clue. He explained that he didn’t have much to do with the kids. He said that they’d be able to help me up at the office and when I told him they wouldn’t he shrugged as if that settled it. I handed him the five dollar note to unsettle it.
“Who’s in charge here now?”
“Bloke named Horsfield, soft bugger if you ask me.”
“He’s new is he? Wasn’t here when you came?”
He sparked up and drew hard on the pipe, the smoke surged up into the trees that grew along the fence. Then the pipe died abruptly. He took a pull, found it dead and knocked the ashes out against the fence. He waved it about for a minute to cool it, re-packed it from a leather pouch and got it going again. I waited while he did it.
“No.” he chuckled through the spittle, “when I came it was the Brig, tough joker, ex-army, kept everyone in line and they bloody loved him.”
“When did Horsfield take over?”
“Five, six years ago.”
The big question. “Is the Brig still alive?”
“Yeah, course he is. He’ll bloody live for ever, he was out here for something or other last week. Had a yarn with him, ‘bout the war.”
“What’s his full name?”
He scratched his chin. “Jesus, I’m not sure, just think of him as the Brig. Easy find out though.” He jerked his thumb back at the cottage. I pulled out another five and it went through the fence. He tucked it along with the other one into the bib pocket of his overall and shuffled off to the cottage. I stood at the fence gripping the iron until it occurred to me that I must look like one of our primate cousins who didn’t quite make it to civilisation, suicide and the bomb. I let go the fence and dusted off my hands and tried to think of something else to do with them. As usual, a cigarette seemed the only answer and I rolled one and had it going by the time Albie came back. He looked down at the sheet of paper he was holding and read off it very carefully: “Brigadier Sir Leonard St James Cavendish.”
I couldn’t see much problem about finding that in the phone book. I reached through the fence to shake his hand, he obliged but he was very out of practice.
“Thanks, Mr Jenkins, you’ve been a great help.”
“Orright, so’ve you. I’ll be able to have a decent drink for change.”
He shambled off through the leaves. I finished my cigarette and ground the butt out into the concrete in which the iron spears were embedded.
I stopped at the first phone booth I saw and called the Brig. He lived in Blackwood, not far away, but you don’t just drop in on Brigs. A gentle female voice answered and confirmed that I had the right residence. I gave my name as Dr Hardy from the Australian National University and told her I wanted to consult the old soldier on a point of military history. She said she’d ask her husband and I stood with the silent phone in my hand for about five minutes feeling guilty and exposed. She came back and told me that Sir Leonard would be delighted to see me and would ten o’clock the following morning suit. I said it would, got my tongue around “Lady Cavendish”, hoping that was right, and thanked her. I drove back to the hotel. The rain had started again. I had a Scotch and wasted the time watching the news on television and watching the rain pissing down on the churches.
I had a shower and went out at 7.30 to look for the laminex cafe where I’d eaten a brilliant steak on my last visit to Adelaide three years ago. I could still taste the steak and the carafe of house red had been like Mouton Rothschild compared with the swill we buy in the east. I found it at the end of one of Adelaide’s narrow, quiet, wet main streets. I ordered the same food and drink and experienced that feeling when eating alone — that everyone is looking at you with pity whereas in fact no one gives a damn. I combated the feeling by reading Forsyth’s The Dogs of War which I’d bought at a newstand opposite the hotel, and I learned all there is to know about equipping a mercenary force while I worked through the meal. It was better than spreads I’d paid three times as much for in Sydney, but when I got outside the cafe that cool drizzle reminded me that I was a long way from home. I walked fast back to the Colonial and worked on the Forsyth a little more. I went to sleep and had a long, involved dream about Uncle Ted and his two-up games at Tobruk.
26
I skipped breakfast in the hotel’s lounge-dining room in favour of a quick research job in the Barr Smith library at the University of Adelaide. Cavendish got a mention in Lean’s Official History of Australia in World War II. He’d been in on Wavell’s North African offensive in 1941, with the Ninth Division at El Alamein and he was there at the capture of Wewak in May 1945. There was one obvious question — why didn’t he go on to Borneo? But there was plenty to ask him about the New Guinea campaign and his assessment of MacArthur whose reputation is a bit on the decline at present I gather. The morning drizzle had cleared when I left the library and the traffic was moving quickly along the roads which were drying out by the minute. It took me three quarters of an hour to get to Blackwood.
He either had a private income, or Brigadiers’ pensions can’t be too bad, or he’d done all right out of flogging off army jeeps for scrap metal, because Sir Leonard St James Cavendish wasn’t feeling the pinch. He lived in one of the better houses in a neighbourhood which comprised mostly hundred foot frontages and tennis courts in the back yard. Adelaide doesn’t have the same amount of old, gilt-edged money as Melbourne or the new, flashy stuff of Sydney, but there are plenty of people in the city of churches who’ve put it together at some time and are watching it grow. Cavendish’s house stood on a corner block with frontages on three streets so the high, white painted brick
