"I've never seen anything quite like that before," he said, taking my little piece of jewelry between his fingers.
"Another first."
"Not quite." He laughed. "Because I've seen one very similar."
"What do you mean?"
"It's a medal," he explained. "My father won three or four of them himself but none of them's made of silver."
Looking back on it now, I consider that this particular piece of information was well worth losing my virginity for.
In the library of the University of Melbourne there is a large selection of books covering the First World War, biased not unnaturally towards Gallipoli and the Far East campaign rather than the D Day landings and El Alamein. However, tucked away among the pages of heroic deeds performed by Australian infantrymen was a chapter on British gallantry awards, complete with several colored plates.
I discovered that there were VCs, DSOs, DSCs, CBEs, OBEs—the variations seemed endless until finally on page four hundred and nine I found what I was searching for: the Military Cross, a ribbon of white watered silk and purple horizontal stripes and a medal forged in silver with the imperial crown on each of its four arms. It was awarded to officers below the rank of major "for conspicuous gallantry when under fire." I began to hypothesize that my father was a war hero who had died at an early age from terrible wounds. At least that would have explained his perpetual shouting as something that had been brought on by so much suffering.
My next piece of detective work came when I visited an antiques shop in Melbourne. The man behind the counter simply studied the medal, then offered me five pounds for it. I didn't bother to explain why I wouldn't have parted with my prize had he offered me five hundred pounds, but at least he was able to inform me that the only real medal dealer in Australia was a Mr. Frank Jennings, of Number 47 Mafeking Street, Sydney.
At that time I considered Sydney to be the other side of the globe, and I certainly couldn't afford to make such a long journey on my tiny grant. So I had to wait patiently until the summer term when I applied to be scorer for the university cricket team. They turned me down on account of my sex. Women couldn't really be expected to understand the game fully, it was explained to me by a youth who used to sit behind me in lectures so that he could copy my notes. This left me with no choice but to spend hours of practice on my ground strokes and almost as many on my overhead smash until I was selected for the ladies' second tennis team. Not a major achievement but there was only one match on the calendar that interested me: Sydney (A).
On the morning we arrived in Sydney I went straight to Mafeking Street and was struck by how many young men who passed me on the street were in uniform. Mr. Jennings himself studied the medal with considerably more interest than the dealer from Melbourne had shown.
"It's a miniature MC all right," he told me, peering at my little prize through a magnifying glass. "It would have been worn on a dress uniform for guest nights in the regimental mess. These three initials engraved down the edge of one of the arms, barely discernible to the naked eye, ought to give us a clue as to who was awarded the decoration."
I stared through Mr. Jennings' magnifying glass at something I had never been aware of until then, but I could now clearly see the initials "G.F.T."
"Is there any way of finding out who 'G.F.T.' actually is?"
"Oh, yes," said Mr. Jennings, turning to a shelf behind him, from which he removed a leather-bound book and flicked through its pages until he came to Godfrey S. Thomas and George Victor Taylor, but could find no trace of anyone with the initials "G.F.T."
"Sorry, but I can't help you on this one," he said. "Your particular medal can't have been awarded to an Australian, otherwise it would be catalogued right here." He tapped the leather cover. "You'll have to write to the War Office in London if you want any further information. They still keep on file the names of every member of the armed forces awarded any decoration for gallantry."
I thanked him for his help but not before he had offered me ten pounds for the medal. I smiled and returned to join the tennis team for my match against Sydney University. I lost 6–0, 6–1, being quite unable to concentrate on anything except G.F.T. I wasn't selected for the university tennis team again that season.
The next day I followed Mr. Jennings' advice and wrote to the War Office in London. I didn't get a letter back from them for several months, which was hardly surprising as everyone knew they had other things on their mind in 1944. However, a buff envelope eventually came and when opened informed me that the holder of my medal could have been either Graham Frank Turnbull of the Duke of Wellington's regiment or Guy Francis Trentham of the Royal Fusiliers.
So was my real name Turnbull or Trentham?
That same evening I wrote to the British High Commissioner's office in Canberra asking whom I should contact for information regarding the two regiments referred to in the letter. I received a reply a couple of weeks later. With the new leads I had acquired I dispatched two more letters to England: one to Halifax, the other to London. I then sat back again, and resigned myself to another long wait. When you have already spent eighteen years of your life trying to discover your true identity another few months doesn't seem all that important. In any case, now that I had begun my final year at university I was up to my eyes in work.
The Duke of Wellington's were the first to reply, and they informed me that Lieutenant Graham Frank Turnbull had been killed at Passchendaele on 6 November 1917. As I was born in 1924 that let Lieutenant Turnbull off the hook. I prayed for Guy Francis Trentham.
It was several weeks later that I received a reply from the Royal Fusiliers to inform me that Captain Guy Francis Trentham had been awarded the MC on 18 July 1918, following the second battle of the Marne. Fuller details could be obtained from the regimental museum library at their headquarters in London, but this had to be done in person as they had no authority to release information about members of the regiment by post.
As I had no way of getting to England I immediately began a new line of investigation, only this time I drew a complete blank. I took a whole morning off in order to search for the name of "Trentham" in the birth records of the Melbourne city registry on Queen Street. I found there was not one Trentham listed. There were several Rosses but none came anywhere near my date of birth. I began to realize that someone had gone to considerable lengths to make sure I was unable to trace my roots. But why?
Suddenly my sole purpose in life switched to how I could get myself to England, despite the fact that I had no money and the war had only recently ended. I checked every graduate and undergraduate course that was on offer, and all that my tutor considered it might be worth applying for was a scholarship to the Slade School of Art in London, which offered three places each year to students from Commonwealth countries. I began to put in hours that even I hadn't realized existed, and was rewarded by a place on the shortlist of six for a final interview to be held in Canberra.
Although I became extremely nervous on the train journey to the Australian capital, I felt the interview went well and indeed the examiners told me that my papers on the history of art were of particular merit, even if my practical work was not of the same high standard.
An envelope marked The Slade was dropped in my cubbyhole a month later. I ripped it open in anticipation and extracted a letter that began: