The boy had just got back to his improvised bunk in the tunnels under the gun when the second alarm was raised.
The first had been a false alarm, but there was no mistaking it now. The shells were whistling overhead.
It was all, suddenly, so real. Until that point, militia service had been relatively relaxed. The guns had been put in years ago - a pair of 32 pounders initially before the bigger bores were added - but even then, there would have been few who expected to ever actually fire them. They were meant only as a precaution in case the Russians, who had been fighting the British in Crimea, decided to turn mercantile against the empire's allies. And even then, it would have been a long trip to the bottom of the world for the argument.
In any case, he wasn't even meant to be here.
The kid (for he was barely 19) had joined the local militia as a kind of introduction to military life. Soldiering ran in the family; his ancestors had served all over England, including in the Scots Guards, but his father had wanted him to figure out whether the uniform was really suited for him. A few shifts with the quiet local outfit would sort him out, the old man had expected, and surely, even in wartime, he would be a long way from any real danger.
There was a certain camaraderie at the fort, too; a sense of looking out for one another. He could learn the ropes and, at the end of the day, come home to his own bed - at least, that was the theory. Wartime cuts meant the buses and trains stopped early, and it was too far to walk to get home. More often than not, the boys who lived in the outer suburbs camped in the tunnels if their shifts ran long.
But now, there was a submarine sitting just beyond the arc of the searchlight, just out there in the dark off the coast, absolutely peppering the city.
Richard Robinson leapt out of his improvised bunk. He wasn't far from the Mark VII on the crest of Flagstaff Hill, and, being one of the first to report, he was put among the gun crew. They couldn't see the submarine firing seemingly at random at the city, shell after shell, whizzing overhead.
Later, they had reasoned that the enemy guns probably didn't know where their target - the city's famed steelworks - actually was, so instead battered the place erratically hoping to get a lucky shot off. The historian David Jenkins wrote of the attack in the small hours of June 8, 1942, that it was more likely that it was intended to simply terrorise the east coast rather than to target any particular asset.
The home guns, in any case, gave the answer, taking aim at the muzzle blasts and firing a pair of salvos each. None managed to hit the submarine, which fled three minutes after the first response from the fort.
Richard Robinson went on to serve at Townsville and Magnetic Island. He went to Papua New Guinea and ultimately earned the rank of Sergeant before he returned home to Wallsend. He married, inherited his father's few acres in the suburb, and had children.
"He could have quite easily stayed in the Army," his son, Neil Robinson, said, "But he had a reason to stay."
Neil was, by his reckoning, one of the first Robinson sons in generations not to follow in the family business. His brother, Gordon, served in the 1st Battalion in Townsville and toured Vietnam. But despite his father's encouragement - even arranging an interview at the Royal Military College, Duntroon - Neil wasn't a natural soldier.
He saw both his father and brother scarred by their service. Both died young; Gordon didn't see his 50th birthday. And war was not something that Neil aspired to.
"I think I indicated in the psychological assessments my point of view on war being a little bit silly," he said, "They probably thought they didn't really need me."
The elder Mr Robinson was the same in many respects. He rarely attended an Anzac Day service and had little interest in valorising things.
If he was asked about the fateful night on the guns at Fort Scratchley, he would say that he did his job; he followed his instructions and did what he was expected to do, and that was all.
Neil was studying economics at university when his national service number came up. He was excused from the draft, but as he set the fuse in the fort's historic 80 pounder for its ceremonial firing on Monday, June 10, he perhaps thought that's what makes his attachment to the historic fort so unexpected. All those years of tacking away from his family's military tradition only to find himself, years later, volunteering on the same guns his father helped to fire in the city's historic wartime moment.
His is one of any number of stories that the small army of volunteers who maintain the fort share. Flagstaff Hill caps a goldmine of stories like his, but as Mr Robinson says, "it's trying to keep the gold mine from falling apart".
"It's fragile," he said, running through a litany of issues that will need to be addressed if the fort's trove of local history is to survive another generation; guns need maintenance, there's concrete cancer in the fortifications, volunteer numbers are dwindling.
"I found myself with a group of people that are just marvellous," Mr Robinson said, as he and the volunteers took a quiet moment around a morning tea table and the tide of visitors flowed in and out of the fort at the long weekend, "It's a good team. But we need to spend money on it. I know it's a big job, but if we want to keep it, we can't continue to ignore it."
Mr Robinson was on the 80 pounder's volunteer gun crew on Monday when this reporter was invited to fire both the historic guns as part of the fort's King's Birthday observances. It came as the fort's historical society president, Frank Carter, sought the next generation of volunteers to take up the mantle of preserving the city's heritage.
- Volunteers keen to lend a hand can contact fortscratchley@bigpond.com
