Frieda and Mrs Laura Forrester taking a stroll in the Botanic Gardens in Sydney in July 1922 - another Forrester snapshot. Apparently at the time Mrs Forrester had only one good hat (see Joe Davis's book cover above).

ON THE OTHER HAND, some apparent dead-ends could turn out to lead to somewhere useful after all.

In Kangaroo, Lawrence's alter-ego Somers was introduced, at an afternoon tea-party the day after his arrival in Sydney, to a group of people who were to lead to his involvement with the "fictional" secret army...the "Diggers Clubs" and "the Maggies".

One of my tasks - now ably assisted by John Ruffels - was to find where such a tea-party might have taken place "in real life", and if possible to also place Jack Scott and Lawrence together there...for that would be another crucial link between fiction and fact. (See below for its actual - unexpected - locale.)

When in 1976 I interviewed Scott's stepsons, they told me that in 1922 their mother had lived at a seaside house called "Hinemoa" in the then sparsely-populated suburb of Collaroy on Sydney's northern beaches. Scott, they told me, had been a regular visitor to the house (it was, they said, "his second home").

Early in the novel Somers and his wife Harriett travel by tram from Manly along the northern beaches to the terminus at Narrabeen, passing through Collaroy, the contiguous beach suburb.

More significantly, the detailed description that the stepsons gave me of "Hinemoa" tallied with the description of the "fictional" house in Kangaroo - "St Columb" - where the all-important tea-party takes place (but see my correction of this below).

In 1979, before I left for London, I had visited "Hinemoa" and spoken with its owner, and builder, Horrie Hayman. As well as providing me with a drawing of the interior of the original house (showing "the settles" round its bay window - also see below), he told me that if I wanted to learn more about Collaroy in the early 1920s, I should speak to a gentleman called Walter Friend who lived in the next street, Beach Road.

(This - in 1979 - was the first time the name "Friend" impinged on me.)

Time precluded that, but about a year later, on a brief trip back to Sydney, I went to visit Walter Friend, who did indeed live round the corner from "Hinemoa". He was in his 60s and he and his wife Edna had resided in Collaroy for many years.

There was nothing, he assured me, in the descriptions I read out to him from the novel that rang any bells for him. He denied, vehemently, any knowledge of Lawrence, Scott or secret armies.

However, he did volunteer the address of his younger brother, who lived in the country, and suggested I might write to him telling him of my interest. I did - his brother was called Robert Moreton Friend - but from him I received neither response nor reply.