The front garden, which the window overlooked, was on the shady side of the house, but even there the soft turf had died in the drought and been replaced by crisp, resistant buffalo grass, which also grew on the more exposed sides of the house. The steps were bordered with pink and blue hydrangeas, and with beds of fuchsia and daphne. Palm trees stood on the lawn. At the end of the short drive were red hibiscus and trees of wattle and frangipani. At the side, a wall covered with wilted Dorothy Perkins roses separated this house from the Armstrongs’. Sometimes the Armstrong boys, Rex and Leslie, came to play. Rex was eleven and enormous, and quickly got bored with Ida because she was so little. He wore gray knickerbockers, and a blazer with a crest, and a straw boater circled by a broad, striped ribbon. The Armstrongs had kept Rex in a good school—“in spite of everything.” The Armstrongs had lost all their money.

It was 1935, and Ida was four years old.

She would have liked to go into the garden, but her mother would be annoyed if she didn’t sleep, and in any case the back of the house was more amusing. The back garden was huge, and had beds of flowers and vegetables and an orchard. A swing had been built in the orchard, and if you were swung high enough you could touch the mandarin trees by extending your feet. Beyond the orchard was a field of high grass forbidden to children because of snakes. The snakes occasionally came into the garden and had to be killed with a heavy stick that was kept in the garage for the purpose. The grass of the field was cut down from time to time by Alfie, the man who did the garden, and lost cricket balls would turn up then, or an old kite, or singed rocket butts left over from Empire Night. The grass was never burned off now, because of the danger of fire.

Even the orchard and the garden had their perils. There were bees in the grove of Buddleia. In the mornings, kookaburras perched on the lowest branches of the trees, looking for lizards or worms, and would burst out laughing right over your head. And there was a gray goanna, like a short, thick snake, harmless but horrible, that came to the kitchen door to be fed by the maid, Marge, with raw eggs.