We left Walpole pretty smartly the next morning, for all that it looked more dramatic in daylight than it had in the dark. One of the reasons for visiting Walpole is Nornalup Inlet, a severely beautiful enclosure of water rescued from the Ocean, but we weren’t prepared to give it more than a cursory look on the way out. We were going to have to move quickly today if we were to do our best by Denmark and Albany and still make it back to Perth before nightfall, so it was necessary that we become uncompromisingly terse in our evaluations.

‘It seems to me that Nornalup belongs essentially to the drab-spectacular genre of landscape,’ I said. ‘It should be more striking than it actually is.’

‘I’m against inlets,’ Ros reminded me.

‘I’m not in principle’, I said, ‘but I am in the case of this one.’

‘It seems to me,’ Ros went on, ‘that there is altogether too little colour variation in the bush hereabouts. Olive seems to predominate.’

I thought that the trees were too uniformly gnarled also. Altogether we had it pretty sewn up between us that there was insufficient natural differentiation in and around Walpole.

After which there wasn’t an awful lot to do until we got to Denmark except refuse a lift to a tattooed hitch-hiker with an eye-patch, and listen to part 20 of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s serialization of The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. From the pace of the dramatization I estimated there were another 100 episodes to go. ‘I have an infernal fire in my veins,’ a character bearing a remarkable resemblance to Heathcliffe said, ‘which all the waters of creation cannot quench.’ Not having had breakfast yet, and not knowing whether we would be able to get any at Denmark, I knew how he felt.

On our arrival in Denmark (to quote Great Expectations), at five minutes short of nine (as they say at Wildfell Hall), we found only a pastry shop open and had to make do with a cherry and a vanilla slice, which Ros showed me how to eat without squelching the custard, on the banks of the Denmark River at a little picnic table in the Norm Thornton Park.