If Mother got hold of a bunch of flowers (and Papa did buy them for her, regularly, guiltily), she clipped the string off and jammed the whole lot straight into a vase. She had a ceramic ‘basket’ with holes in it that you could wedge flower-stems into, and another receptacle made of oozy green sponge that performed the same function. But if the process involved cutting, trimming, attentive placement of any kind, Mother would not bother. So it was very curious to me, the way Mrs Parish thought and reflected and removed from and added to and straightened and bent her flower arrangements. While she worked, she became quite still and, though I thought her extremely old, almost young looking. Her nose was very straight, I noticed, and when you looked at her in profile, nothing was too big or too small. When her hair hung a little loosely on her neck at the back, when it came out of its pins, she looked like an old-fashioned picture illustrating a particular feminine virtue: Charity in Repose, Honour at Home, The Noble Gentlewoman. Mother had these, hung on the walls where her desk was.

Mr Parish spent the days in his study if he was at home. He had frequent lunches in town with painters and businessmen and editors and he talked about his ‘club’ sometimes and berated me because Papa wouldn’t go there with him. ‘Bloody foolish bloody socialist,’ he said, but fondly, because for whatever reason—and I never knew why—he loved Papa. ‘Don’t let your father indoctrinate you, Owen! Let him run himself ragged with charity, but you listen to me: I help the poor in a much more meaningful way than your father does. Once a year I write them a big bloody cheque!’ Then he would put out his glass and Mrs Parish would fill it with more Scotch and soda.

Another time, he mused, slightly drunkenly: ‘There should be a charity for poets, Owen. They need all the help they can get.’ This was after we’d had a large, evil-smelling man called Raymond Sermon over for lunch. Mr Parish called him ‘Ray’ and Mrs Parish called him ‘Mr Sermon’. He wolfed his food down, drained his glass multiple times, had three servings of pineapple upside-down cake and then went to sleep for two hours on the Chesterfield. When awake and in good form, Ray Sermon held forth on everything from the retired prime minister Bob Menzies to the proper way to set up a gin still in one’s backyard. And though he looked like nothing so much as a pig farmer (or what I imagined a pig farmer to look like), he had a way of speaking that transfixed me. ‘Unforgiveable muck again in Foment this month, Parish,’ he said. ‘I could take a tray of words and trip over it and come up with better.’ Or: ‘There’s about as much talent in Meanjin these days as there are daisies in a combine harvester. More entertainment had in a commie on a donkey. Give me a flying windmill and an idiot and I’ll come up with better.’