As the Crow Flies

“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:

The only worthwhile thing that came out of all the extra work I had put in was that I sailed through my finals and was awarded with a first-class honors degree when the graduation results were announced. But I was still no nearer to getting myself to England.

In desperation I telephoned the British High Commission and was put through to the labor attaché. A lady came on the line and informed me that with my qualifications there would be several teaching posts on offer. She added that I would have to sign a three-year contract and be responsible for my own travel arrangements—nicely worded, I considered, as I still wasn’t able to afford the trip to Sydney, let alone the United Kingdom. In any case, I felt I would only need to spend about a month in England to track down Guy Francis Trentham.

The only other jobs that were available, the lady explained the second time I called, were known as “slave traders.” These consisted of positions in hotels, hospitals or old people’s homes, where you were virtually unpaid for one year in return for

your passage to England and back. As I still had no plans for any particular career and realized this was virtually the only chance I might ever have of getting myself to England and finding someone I was related to, I called into the labor attaché’s department and signed on the dotted line. Most of my friends at university thought I had taken leave of my senses, but then they had no idea of my real purpose in wanting to visit Britain.

The boat we sailed to Southampton on couldn’t have been much of an improvement on the one the first Australian immigrants took coming the other way some one hundred and seventy years before. They put three of us “slave traders” to a cabin no larger than my room on the university campus, and if the ship listed more than ten degrees Pam and Maureen ended up in my bunk. We had all signed on to work at the Melrose Hotel in Earl’s Court, which we were assured was in central London. After a journey of some six weeks we were met at the dockside by a clapped-out army lorry which took us up to the capital and deposited us on the steps of the Melrose Hotel.

The housekeeper allocated our accommodation and I ganged up with Pam and Maureen again. I was surprised to discover that we were expected to share a room of roughly the same size as the cabin in which we had suffered together on board ship. At least this time we didn’t fall out of bed unexpectedly.

It was over two weeks before they gave me enough time off to visit Kensington Post Office and check through the London telephone directory. There wasn’t a Trentham to be found.

“Could be ex-directory,” the girl behind the counter explained. “Which means they won’t take your call in any case.”

“Or there just isn’t a Trentham living in london,” I said, and accepted that the regimental museum was now my only hope.

I thought I had worked hard at the University of Melbourne, but the hours they expected us to do at the Melrose would have brought a combat soldier to his knees. All the same, I was damned if I was going to admit as much, especially after Pam and Maureen gave up the struggle within a month, cabled their parents in Sydney for some money and returned to Australia on the first available boat. At least it meant I ended up with a room to myself until the next boatload arrived. To be honest I wish I could have packed up and gone home with them, but I hadn’t anyone in Australia to whom I could cable back for more than about ten pounds.

The first full day I had off and wasn’t totally exhausted, I took a train to Hounslow. When I left the station the ticket collector directed me to the Royal Fusiliers’ Depot, where the museum was situated now. After walking about a mile I eventually reached the building I was looking for. It seemed to be uninhabited except for a single receptionist. He was dressed in khaki uniform, with three stripes on both arms. He sat dozing behind a counter. I walked noisily over and pretended not to wake him.

“Can I ’elp you, young lady?” he asked, rubbing his eyes.

“I hope so.”

“Australian?”

“Is it that obvious?”

“I fought alongside your chaps in North Africa,” he explained. “Damned great bunch of soldiers, I can tell you. So ’ow can I help you, miss?”

“I wrote to you from Melbourne,” I said, producing a handwritten copy of the letter. “About the holder of this medal.” I slipped the piece of string over my head and handed my prize to him. “His name was Guy Francis Trentham.”