John tracked down its membership names and they revealed that some of Jack Scott's female relatives - including his mother - were members of the Guild, and had attended its functions.

Yet, despite the fact that Frieda, in her - largely useless - account of their time in Australia, had mentioned that they had met a "young Army captain" on the Malwa who had told them that in France the sound of the rain on the roofs of the trenches had reminded him of his iron-roofed home in Sydney, try as we may - and I can assure you we tried very, very hard - we could find no significant connection, direct or indirect, between Captain Bertie Scrivener and Jack Scott's secret army.

(I was later told by someone close to the secret army - Ernest Whiting, in fact - that "the women" were not told what "the men" were up to.)

* * *

However, this is probably an opportune moment to explain my "largely useless" comment, interpolated above.

According to Frieda's account of their time in Australia - which she recorded 12 years afterwards in Not I But the Wind [Heinemann, London 1935] - she and Lawrence, soon after they arrived in Sydney...

...went to Sydney's Central Railway station; got on a train (with "all our trunks"); travelled south "looking out the window" for somewhere to stay; "got out where it looks nice" - which happened to be Thirroul, about 50 miles south of Sydney; and where, an hour or so later, they were settled "in a beautiful bungalow on the sea" (which happened to be "Wyewurk", more than half a mile from Thirroul station).

Frieda's account is nonsense. Lawrence was too sensible and experienced a traveller to do such a silly thing as to fetch up, some time after 4pm on a Monday afternoon, in a place of which he knew nothing, and where he knew nobody, and from where it is unlikely he could have returned to Sydney that day.

Nor is there any way two strangers could have, after getting out of a train at Thirroul, found "a beautiful bungalow on the sea" (a good 10-minute walk from the station - and which had yet to be cleaned after the previous tenants had vacated it) and been settled in there before nightfall...even if they had all their trunks with them (which they didn't).

When, more than 10 years later, Richard Aldington was trying to piece together the truth about Lawrence and Kangaroo, his Australian informant Adrian Lawlor (see below) suggested that he might ask Frieda about what had happened in Australia. He replied:

Your suggestion that I should apply to Frieda for information about Australia (or anything else) shows a most happy ignorance of that highwellbornone's nature. In answer to my letter [asking for information] she ordered me to say that L. is the successor of Augustine and Francis of Assisi and "has no place amongst English novelists"...It is useless to ask Frieda, she has the memory, not like a sieve, but a bottomless bucket. That book of hers [Not I But the Wind], apart from letters [her book contained many Lawrence letters] consists almost wholly of things she was reminded of by Pino [Lawrence's publisher in Florence], David Garnett, Huxley and myself.