This had been a conscious decision on Betty’s part, and despite being a true romantic at heart, had had nothing at all to do with love. As a woman of the world, she had decided that twenty years of age was high time to lose one’s virginity, and she’d gone about it in a very practical manner. She’d made her selection with care, a pleasant young Australian soldier who’d been pursuing her for several weeks, and she’d made sure he performed with a condom. The act had taken place in one of the hotel’s little upstairs rooms, where she occasionally stayed when they were busy – as a rule she went home to her mother’s house a twenty-minute walk away.

She’d not found the experience traumatic, but nor had she found it particularly pleasurable, so she hadn’t considered a repeat performance necessary. What would be the point? The exercise had served its purpose – she knew what sex was like and she could now go back to simply having fun. Which she did, much to the confusion of the young soldier who’d been so sure they were about to embark upon a full-fledged affair.

Her return to ‘simply having fun’ was marred a week later, however, when Carole Lombard was killed in a plane crash in Nevada, USA, on 16 January. Betty went into mourning for a fortnight. Genuinely affected by the star’s death, she wrote a letter of sympathy to Carole’s husband and sent it to MGM in Hollywood. Poor, poor Clark Gable, her heart ached for him, the two had been so much in love.

Betty Francis was a well-brought-up girl from a typically middle-class family. Her father, George, was a policeman and her mother, Grace, a housewife, and little Betty was born in Brisbane. She was six years old when in 1928, upon her father’s promotion to senior constable, the family moved to Townsville. Then one year later her baby brother, Tom, was born.

The family lived a comfortable life in the lazy, tropical township where nothing much seemed to happen. They even owned a weekender on Magnetic Island, a rustic little shack, certainly nothing fancy, but the childhood adventures shared by Betty and Tom in the idyllic setting of Arcadia were magical.

Everything proceeded as might have been expected. George became senior sergeant; Grace, whose mothering duties were now less demanding, became involved in charitable works; Betty entered her movie-obsessed teenage years, and young Tom proved a wily little manipulator with a good head for business.

Then the war came and turned things upside down.

For the Francis family, the upheaval of their life did not occur, as it did for most Townsville citizens, in 1942 following the fall of Singapore and the bombing of Darwin, but a full two years earlier.