Before we went to sleep we looted the little refrigerated bar in our room one last time, and toasted each other, our journey so far, and Perth. The extraordinary precautions that had been taken to keep the town alcohol free today, in respect to the memory of a martyred and highly articulate Semite; a distraught man pointing rifles at himself high above the Swan River; the living dead, a long way from their native England, bearing their national spirit of deprivation with them; senior policemen frothing with vitriolic righteousness – ah, it was good to be back in a Christian country again.

7 Et in Arcadia Nos

Seven
 
Et in Arcadia Nos

The first thing Ros saw through the windows of the Parmelia Hilton when she opened her eyes the next morning was the church tower of St Columba’s, the Catholic primary school she had attended, with faith in her little heart, from 1948 to 1954. She sat up in bed, pointing, unable to speak, with tears streaming down her face.

Taking everything into account, I envied her. There was no impossible Moorish tower, picturesque in itself and capable of unloosing a flood of exquisite associations, mixing God and infancy and friendship, in my past. It does not harm to grow up in a blissfully clement climate, amid bells and poetical rituals, even if that means that you never fully quit your childhood. I buried mine, in Cheetham Hill, with alacrity, long before I had any business wanting to chime in with the grown-ups. Judaism doesn’t encourage you to linger amongst childish things. And neither does the North of England. Had I possessed Perth it might have been different.

I stood at the window and picked out the tower as Ros directed. It rose above the white houses and apartment blocks of South Perth, on the opposite bank of the Swan River, on a hillside which, with the smallest latitude, it was just possible to imagine as Spanish or dream-Moroccan. Perth has never got around to deciding what style of architecture it should embrace, but, with so many natural advantages and such Divine Good-Will, that indecision can hardly be said to matter. It looked wholly benign to me, a metropolis and a seaside resort all at once, a city which enjoyed the furthest distance from its nearest neighbour city than any in the world, and I decided there and then to fall in love with it, since one has to be in love with somewhere, and to adopt Ros’s earliest memories of it as if they were my own.

Out on the city streets it was a bright, cheerful, airy Saturday morning. Enthusiastic if not exactly exhilarating. It reminded me, in its warmth and country-town bustle, in its adolescent civic gaucherie, of a mini-Sydney – Sydney as it was when I first clapped eyes on it in 1965. So suddenly I was carrying a double burden of melancholy remembrances: Ros’s and my own.