It took me nearly an hour to reach the orphanage which put the time at close to five o’clock. The photographs I’d seen of the place hadn’t done it justice. It was straight out of Dickens or maybe even Mervyn Peake; every angle and corner suggested order and discipline. It had no charm; I like old buildings, but I wouldn’t have minded if they pulled this one down. It looked in pretty good shape however, and the grounds were well cared for which suggested a groundsman. Groundsmen and caretakers tend to be long-term employees and I was counting on that now. I parked back up the road from the main gates and set off on a circumnavigation of the grounds which covered about ten acres. The main building stood on a rise more or less in the middle of the land which was enclosed by a high fence of cast iron spears. A paved drive ran from the main gates up to the front of the building and down to a smaller set of gates on the other side. There was a football oval and a fair bit of lawn and garden but too much asphalt and government issue cream paint.
I scouted around the fence until I found what I was looking for — a small cottage in the northeast corner of the grounds. It would have been a city trendy’s dream, sandstock bricks, double fronted and without obvious signs of later improvements. A man was standing in front of the cottage doing nothing in particular. At that distance he looked old, bent over a bit, and there was a pipe smoking gently in his face. He had his hands and a good part of his arms deep in the pockets of a pair of old khaki overalls. I stuck my head up over the spears.
“Gidday,” I shouted.
He stood like stone. I shouted again with the same result. He might have been deep in reverie, but it seemed more likely that he was hard of hearing. I looked around for something to throw and found a piece of rotten branch. I heaved it over the fence and it landed a bit off to one side of him. He took the pipe out of his mouth and looked at it. Then he put the pipe back and looked at it again. I reached down for another piece of wood to throw when he 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.