When it comes to my earliest memories, the only one I concede to you is the one about Mother being enormous.

‘Owen,’ you say, shaking your head. ‘Your mother was not a large woman. She was peteet. Pe-teet.’ When you say this, you bring your thumb and forefinger together, like you’re pinching out a lateral from a tomato plant.

Yes, you’re right about her size, I give you that. In the one photo I’ve got of her from this time, she’s small and compact and wearing a chequered dress with buttons down the middle. I’m in a carry-cot but Mother isn’t holding the carry-cot, she’s holding a tiny leather suitcase. She isn’t going anywhere—not yet—and the suitcase is not full of clothes, it’s full of her poems. Unfinished mostly, but lots of them, on scraps of paper and half-filled notebooks. Her legs look long for a pe-teet person. But her hands are little paws; the fingers don’t properly wrap around the suitcase handle. They’re an embarrassment, those hands, those fingers. It makes me sad to see them now, even in a photo. She was supposed to have a piano-player’s fingers. ‘It doesn’t matter,’ said Papa, ‘it’s what they write that needs to be elegant.’

Soon after this photo was taken, Mother says I became her enemy. I didn’t mean to be her enemy. It was not something I planned on or decided. But I had discovered my arms and legs and I climbed onto couches and ripped pages out of books that were lying there. I did the same to those on the bottom shelves of the bookcase, chewing their corners til they were moist and soft. When Mother settled down to a quiet afternoon read, the only thing I wanted to do was eat her book.

Which leads me to Papa.

My early interest in eating, and the iron constitution that allowed me to digest, unharmed, seventeen pages of Balzac’s Cousin Bette (a book that goes on too long anyway, Mother always said), was a source of great pride to my Papa. He boasted of how he’d opened my mouth one day and pulled out a lump of orange rind, a three-inch-long piece of hessian, and a £2 note. After that, he removed the washing powder from the laundry floor, and put all his penny pieces up high on a shelf.

Papa kept my very first baby romper suit too. I don’t know why. It’s very dirty and not really worth preserving. It’s in a trunk with his father’s war medals and a miniature silver-plated soup-ladle he was given for charitable services ‘undertaken under the auspices of the Salvation Army, Bourke Street, Melbourne, December 1966,’ says the soup-ladle.