Dad was out fencing, which was what he did in winter if he could get a contract. He’d leave home in the dark and come home in the dark. But before night I took off to Grandfather’s house because I didn’t want to explain anything to my father.

Grandfather shook his head at me when he saw my spider-webbed hand, but he didn’t say anything except to tell me to sit down and have a feed. I said to him, ‘What’s blood made of?’

‘Air, rain and horseshoes,’ he said, and he laughed, throwing his head back. He only had every second tooth. One of them stuck right out, horizontal, and held his pipe in place.

All Dad said when I arrived home was, ‘Not much use around the place with a hand like that,’ which brought to mind Onehand Alf, a wayfarer who had returned to us several times. He’d been aboard a ship which ran aground on the coast of Africa. After heaving himself out through a porthole, he’d had his hand bitten off by a shark. Sometimes he said crocodile. What remained was a docked limb with a purple stub which, when he was carrying water or the milk bucket in his other hand, would thrust and pull like the jointed metal shafts that drove the wheels of trains. He could do most things, including making three cigarettes at a time by laying his tissue papers, already licked, on his blunt arm, threading his tobacco along and rolling them. He couldn’t go back to his own country because the coppers were on his tail. I didn’t know what that meant then.

Anyway, I decided that what Alf could do with one hand, I could do also. I’d show my father I wasn’t useless. And that’s what I did – milked the cow one-handed, split the kindling, carried the buckets, fed the dogs and chooks, lit the copper. My father didn’t say anything. The cut soon got better, leaving a scar like a white hair.

And then there was Sharpo, who came along once a year with his steel and whetstone in a sugar bag. Though my grandparents and parents wouldn’t let him anywhere near our knives and axes, which they always sharpened themselves, he was so shrunken and withered that my parents felt sorry for him and wouldn’t turn him away. They gave him food and a bed and let him hang around until he decided to move on. Money was a problem for us in those days, but we were never short of food.

Chapter 3

Aki