The Wicked Boy (34 page)

Harry always addressed Robert as ‘Mr Coombes' and Robert called Harry ‘Boy'. As with an army officer and a soldier, or an asylum attendant and a patient, there was never any doubt about who was in charge. It was Robert's duty to lead, protect and care for Harry, and the child's duty to obey his guardian. Robert grew fond of Harry, and he let the boy depend on him.

Robert was tidy in his habits. He trained Harry to wash the dishes and to clean the house thoroughly. They both wore shorts to work and had smarter outfits for best: Robert chose jackets for Harry at Mackelly's clothing store in Grafton. He could alter and repair their clothes himself, thanks to his training in Charles Pike's tailoring shop at Broadmoor. Robert and Harry slept on folding stretcher beds in the bedroom. They kept a bull terrier as a pet, then two fox terriers. They shared their meals with the dogs.

In time, Robert restored the medals that had been damaged in the fire and he replaced their ribbons: the red, white and blue watered silk of the 1914–15 Star, the orange blaze of the British War medal, the double rainbow of the Victory medal, the deep blue, white and crimson of the Military Medal. He bought a new violin and a new cornet, and would play the piano at neighbours' houses when he stopped by for tea. He taught music to children in the village.

Just over the creek from Robert's garden, also on the road to Glenreagh, were the village cricket pitch and two tennis courts. At weekends, Robert crossed the creek to play cricket or to watch the younger Nana Glen men compete against other teams. When electricity was run to a few buildings in Nana Glen in the mid-1930s, cricket enthusiasts were able to listen to broadcasts of international games on the radio in ‘Pop' Thompson's pie shop.

Though the 45th Battalion had been dissolved in 1919,
the band kept going
. In the 1920s it was one of the few such bands regularly to compete in regional competitions, military gymkhanas and tattoos. Robert used to go by train to Sydney to perform in Armistice and Anzac Day parades. One April in the mid-1930s he took Harry with him to the Anzac parade and the Royal Easter Show. They stayed for two days in a small boarding house, eating their meals in a café across the road. On 25 April, the anniversary of the Gallipoli landings, Harry stood in the crowd to see his guardian play the cornet and march with his fellow veterans through the streets.

Robert impressed Harry as an educated, strong-minded man who could converse on any subject. He was a keen reader of books – novels and histories borrowed from the Grafton public library – and he followed the news, including the international cricket tests, in the
Sydney Morning Herald
. Robert also
competed in chess tournaments
at local clubs and by post. In the late 1920s the
Australasian
newspaper printed details of three correspondence games that he had won against a clerk from the town of Lismore, New South Wales.

In Holloway gaol, Robert had wept for his cats and his mandolin. In the Australian bush, he took solace in his violin and his dogs, in cricket, chess and books. And he had Harry, a child to look after as he had tried to look after Nattie.

Nattie occasionally came to visit his brother. After being demobilised in May 1919, when the
Swan
returned to Sydney, he had settled in Newcastle, 300 miles south of Nana Glen, and found work as a stoker on government boats that dredged the state's rivers and harbours. He married a widow called Mary May in 1928, when he was forty-five and she forty-seven.

On one visit to the Orara Valley, Nattie stayed overnight in the Glenreagh Hotel, a single-storey clapboarded building where Robert and Harry joined him for dinner. Robert seemed to bear his younger brother no grudge, despite the fact that Nattie had testified against him in 1895. If Nattie had ever resented Robert – for killing their mother, for upending their lives, for disappearing to Broadmoor – he seemed to have laid that to rest, too. Just as he had been chief witness to his brother's crime, Nattie had become the chief witness to his life: during the war, Robert had asked that he be notified of all his injuries, promotions, decorations; and now he introduced him to Harry.

Harry rarely saw his own family, but he learned later that Harold Smith had continued to hurt and frighten his stepchildren. When Harry's younger brother Alf was helping to fix a fence on a farm one day, Smith became furious with him for holding the barbed wire incorrectly, and as punishment he tore the barbs through the boy's palms. On another occasion, Smith ordered Alf to sharpen a piece of steel and drive the spike through the heart of a sick horse. Alf was too distressed to carry out the task, so Smith made the boy hold the animal's head while he shot at its temple with a pistol; to Alf's horror, Smith missed, instead shooting off the horse's ears.

In October 1936,
after a year of drought
, bush fires were blown in to Nana Glen by fierce, fast winds. Robert and Harry were working in the garden by the creek when the flames shot to the tops of the surrounding bush, lighting the trees like beacons, and the sparks flew ahead to their house on the hill. They rushed to the building but were too late to save it. The farmers of the district battled for days and nights to quench the fires with water. Scores of cows and pigs were burnt to death in their sheds and sties, hundreds of miles of fencing were lost; pastures were scorched and plantations razed. The O'Connells barely escaped from their blazing farm: the parents bundled their three children into a sulky, wrapped in wet towels and blankets, and drove them out to safety through the burning trees.

This second fire marked the end of Robert and Harry's life together. While Robert started to piece together a shed of wood and iron at the garden by the creek, Harry was given shelter by the family of Herb Morrow, the soldier who had returned to Australia on the same ship as Robert, and he was then offered a room to rent in Reg Gill's house. He was seventeen, over six feet tall, and he felt ready to leave Robert's care.

Harry joined
the 15th Light Horse Regiment
of the AIF, a part-time militia that trained in nearby camps for several weeks a year, and he took a job as a road-builder for the forestry department, clearing land and laying tracks to ease the loggers' access to the bush. He would cycle twenty miles up the mountain to work on a Monday morning, stay in the bush for three nights, and cycle back to Nana Glen on Thursday night. At weekends, he spent time with Herb Morrow's niece Isabelle Rockey. Belle had been a fellow pupil at the Nana Glen school: Harry remembered that she and her best friend Maizee, an aboriginal girl, had read aloud to the class from the Australian children's classic
Dot and the Kangaroo
. Belle was a good tennis player, he now discovered, and an excellent dancer. Her parents gave Harry permission to take her to dances organised by the Methodist Church.
The couple won
a box of chocolates in a waltzing competition at the Cavalry Ball in the Nana Glen village hall in 1938, and two prizes at the Younger Set Ball the next year. The dance band was led by the Cowling brothers, Jack and Bill, local boys whom Robert had taught to play the drums and piano.

Robert continued to tend his garden and he now sold the vegetables himself. He carried his produce around the neighbourhood on the sulky, pulled by a small bay pony. His dark hair was greying and streaked with white.

When the Second World War broke out in 1939, Robert joined a volunteer defence corps in Nana Glen, composed chiefly of those too young or too old to join the army. The group met twice a week for training: in the village hall on one evening and at the sports ground each Sunday morning. Robert would take along his cornet to play for the small corps. Military service, for him, was an opportunity for music.

Just over a year into the war, Robert was able to join the army itself. The Australian government put out a plea at the end of 1940 for First World War veterans to form an emergency defence force to protect the coast of New South Wales in the event of a Japanese invasion.
Robert volunteered for the 8th Garrison Battalion
in February 1941. Since the unit would accept only men younger than fifty-five, Robert gave his age as fifty-four when he signed up (he was in fact fifty-nine). Before leaving home he wrote a will in which he left everything to Harry; his chief allegiance was no longer to his brother, but to his ward.

Robert and his fellow veterans were issued with uniforms and weapons, and sent to train in camps near Newcastle for three weeks at a time. The pay was six shillings a day, as it had been in the Great War. The 8th Garrison Battalion band
led the Armistice Day parade
in Newcastle in November 1941.

Harry was training
as a gunner near Maitland, in southern New South Wales. On visits to Nana Glen he continued to court Belle Rockey and in September 1940 they became engaged. The following March the two were married in the Nana Glen Methodist church. Belle's health deteriorated soon afterwards, and in July 1941 the army discharged Harry on compassionate grounds, so that he could look after his wife. He worked in a Nana Glen sawmill, cutting timber for defence works.

Robert, too, became unwell. In February 1942 he developed heart problems and was discharged from the army. He returned to Nana Glen and resumed his gardening. Over the next few years he took part in local events –
in 1946 he was a guest of honour
at a meeting of the Orara Valley branch of the Returned Servicemen's League and a judge at a fancy-dress ball in the village hall. He kept at work on his land. Once or twice when Coldwater Creek burst its banks and the garden flooded he had to be rescued from the iron roof of his shack.

In 1945 Nattie fell ill with lung cancer, an occupational hazard for ships' stokers, and in September 1946 he died, aged sixty-three. He was cremated in Newcastle, New South Wales, and his estate of £103 passed to his widow.

Robert had a heart attack at the beginning of May 1949 and was taken to the hospital in Coffs Harbour, seventeen miles south-east of Nana Glen. Harry, who had recently moved to Coffs Harbour with his family, was notified of Robert's illness but did not manage to get to the hospital before his former guardian
died on 7 May
. The causes of Robert's death were given as chronic nephritis and arteriosclerosis, diseases of the kidneys and the heart.
The assets he had bequeathed to Harry
amounted to £3-worth of shares in the Orara Dairy Co-op, issued during his dairy-farming days. He had already given him his medals.

At the time of Robert's death, Harry was building a bungalow for his family and did not have the money to commission a gravestone. Robert was buried in an unmarked grave in the Church of England section of the town cemetery.

In the decades that followed, Harry worked at various sawmills, helped to raise his three children and to look after Belle, whose health was still poor: she suffered from kidney disease, severe stomach ulcers and anaemia. Harry accompanied her to Sydney for treatments; he once slept in his car for six weeks while she was recovering in a Sydney hospital from a stomach operation, as he could not afford a hotel. At home he made use of the skills that Robert Coombes had taught him: he cooked, washed up, cleaned and tidied, tended a bed of roses, petunias and marigolds in front of their house. In another plot he planted lettuce, squash, tomatoes and beans. Harry had adopted his wife's faith, and the family went regularly to Methodist services.

Harry used to talk to his children about Robert, and how he had rescued him from Harold Smith. He passed on to his son the war medals that Robert had entrusted to him. In the 1960s
he appealed to the War Graves Commission
for funds to erect a headstone for his former guardian, but the application was rejected on the grounds that Robert's military service had not caused his death.

Belle Mulville died in 1995, aged seventy-six, and the next year Harry decided at last to commission a headstone for Robert. It was almost half a century since he had died. When the stone and plaque had been installed in the Coffs Harbour cemetery, Harry took his youngest daughter to visit the grave. He placed a posy of plastic flowers on the tomb. His daughter, seeing that he was close to tears, remarked that it was a lovely thing that he had done for Mr Coombes. ‘He looked after me very well,' Harry replied.

When I spoke to Harry Mulville's children in November 2012, I realised that Robert had been like a father to Harry, and a symbol of strength and kindness to them all. Harry's son told me that he had no wish to learn any more about Robert's past.

‘What I want to retain,' he said, ‘is Mr Coombes' goodness to my dad.'

He asked me not to speak to his father about the murder, though he wondered aloud whether the secret of the crime might not have been Robert's alone.

‘The pertinent question is whether my father knew,' he said. ‘I think there is a fifty-fifty chance that he knew.'

Though they did not want to talk to me further, Harry's son and older daughter told me that it would not affect their relationships with their sister if she chose to help me with my book.

Harry's younger daughter and I corresponded for more than a year. When she visited her father in his nursing home in Coffs Harbour, she would ask him about his life with Robert, and then email or telephone me to pass on his recollections. She sent me a photograph of Robert and several pictures of Harry. In this way, I gathered much of the information that I needed to put together a narrative of their years in Nana Glen.

In February 2014 I travelled to Australia. I visited a few libraries and archives in Canberra and Sydney to look up the diaries and letters of men who had served in Robert's battalions in the First World War. Then I flew from Sydney to Coffs Harbour. On the flight, I chatted to the man in the seat next to mine about why I was visiting the area, and he volunteered to trace some ‘old-timers' from Nana Glen on my behalf. Within a couple of days, he had put me in touch with several men in their eighties and nineties who had seen Robert riding about with his vegetables when they were boys.