BEING the youngest of Nellie Darby's grandchildren combined with the fact that both his parents went out to work meant Peter Clarke got to spend a lot of time with his grandmother.
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One of the pleasures of staying at her Marrickville house was the big chest in the spare room which he was sometimes allowed to open.
It contained his grandfather John Raymond Swain Darby's World War I "treasures".
Mr Clarke, of Penshurst, was especially fond of the copper and brass bugle with its silver mouthpiece which he loved to blow for the haunting sound it made.
The grandfather he had never met, known as Jack, had blown this very same bugle at Gallipoli in 1915.
He reckons he was 11 when his grandmother said he could keep it.
"I went to a private school and wanted to be in a band," he said.
"I told my grandmother I needed an instrument and she opened the trunk."
Mr Clarke now believes he has a national treasure in his possession.
Jack Darby, a groom in one of the many stables in Sydney at the time, signed up on his 19th birthday, in March 1915.
By June he was in Egypt with the 19th Infantry Battalion with the assigned job of bugler — probably because he was too small and boy-like for heavier duties.
He was shipped off to Gallipoli with the reinforcements for the August offensive.
"His diary tells he was bugler for all Catholic Masses and burials on Gallipoli," Mr Clarke said.
"He also was part of the Anzac evacuation diversion enabling all troops to leave Anzac Cove [almost] casualty free.
"He probably played the Last Post as they were being evacuated."
Jack Darby was sent to England, where he trained as a cook and was assigned to the Australian Flying Corps, the forerunner to the RAAF, spending the rest of the war on the Western Front. He was wounded twice, and gassed.
While in England he met and married Birmingham girl Nellie Lovel, who was dispatched home to his family in Australia while he continued his war service.
Mr Clarke said there was talk that his "Nanna Nell" did not get much of a welcome when the ship berthed at Woolloomooloo.
The staunchly Catholic Darbys weren't prepared to open their arms to a Protestant.
Jack Darby survived the war but was an invalid until he died in 1930.
Nell raised the three surviving children — Mr Clarke's mother Doreen and his two aunts — to be good Catholics although she preferred to stay home to tend the roast, watch wrestling and study the form guide when they were at Mass.
