We’d always had wayfarers at home. I don’t remember them all, only recall that there were hundreds of these men on the roads when we were kids, men walking the highways looking for work. They were men off boats who had jumped ship, or who had been sent to the colonies by wealthy families who didn’t want to own them. The latter were earls and dukes, we believed, paid to stay away from their own countries because of shameful incidents or because they were drunkards. Gentry or not, the swaggies would go from place to place in the hope of being given work, a meal and somewhere to sleep. They were from England, Ireland, Scotland, Italy, America or Australia, and apart from the ones we called ‘the silent ones’, who worked, ate, slept and were gone by morning, they all had stories to tell. Or they had deformities, bad habits, idiosyncrasies, bullet holes or other wounds that impressed us. Some had songs and music.

My parents would give them work, then my father would show them to the wash-house where there was a bed and blankets, and where they could light the copper for hot water and wash themselves and their clothes. At the end of the day they would join us for a meal and conversation.

One had card tricks. One had a monkey on his back that we could see hunching under his clothes. It moved sometimes, but though we watched and followed the man around, the monkey never poked its head out. Well, that was us as kids. Another had a frog in his throat. Most of them had newspapers, catalogues and comics stuffed about their bodies like underclothes. Some had books.

I used to think what great adventures I could have fighting off crocodiles, sharks, pirates and enemies if I, too, were a traveller. I planned how I could survive high seas, run away from having to go up and down chimneys, escape from bombs and plagues.

Once on an icy morning I cut my hand, sliced through the meaty bit of my thumb when I was splitting morning wood with a hatchet. That was embarrassing. I was nine.

Anyway, I took off down to the creek holding it all together, and swished the hand around in the water, but it wouldn’t stop bleeding. I went back to the house where I was told off by Mum for not watching what I was doing. She squeezed the bits tight and sent my sisters off to get cobwebs from under the outside windowsills. When they came back she bound the pieces of meat together with the spider web and told my sisters to make me a cup of tea. She was telling me off the whole time.