After this delayed and somewhat disconcerting start to our journey I pointed the car south and kept my foot on the accelerator, ignoring signs to Miami and Florida and even the intriguingly named Australind, site of what was to have been an important settlement linking Australia and India by trade. Now, Australind boasted the smallest church in Australia, a titanium oxide plant and a rock museum (minerals not music), and left the business of being an important settlement to Bunbury, itself celebrating its one hundred and fiftieth anniversary – its sesquicentenary, as Australians like to put it – this very year. We weren’t looking for a party ourselves, just refreshment; and this we found, in the form of milky coffee, cold chips and scalding dim sims, in a milk bar right next door to Paulette’s Bridal Palace, a large double-fronted emporium offering everything a bride could ever want in the way of veils, ribbons or royal coronets. We looked in Paulette’s window, not with the intention of buying anything, but as an act of filial homage. For it was here in Bunbury that Ros’s father had courted Ros’s mother on his Harley Davidson. He had worn the long leather coat in which he would later wrap and bury the family dog, Nicholas Monsarrat, and no other bloke in Bunbury had got a look in. We drove around the sleepy Sunday streets where, almost fifty years before, he had revved his engine, and we fell easily into that trance of misty innocence which people of our generation invariably wrap around the romantic histories of their parents. Part country town, part industrial port, part sea-side – even today, in the unsettled weather, families lay on the beach in the shadows of the refineries – Bunbury possessed those qualities of dreamlike remoteness and torpor which conjure a sad past as surely as a tinted photograph. By the time we’d driven up the hill to the Catholic church and convent – scene of Ros’s mother’s maidenly devotions – and looked out, as she surely had, far over the slumbering town to the harsh sunlit and scruffy harbour waters beyond, our eyes were hollow with vicarious melancholy.

And there was worse to come. Donnybrook: just a little over half an hour’s drive inland, where, in a manner of speaking, it had all begun. Donnybrook: which had given the world Walter Lindrum, the billiards player; the Granny Smith Apple; and Ros.