Unlike the Noffeys, my family were newcomers, having moved to the area the previous year. The town had a timber mill, a plinth for the two world wars, and a swimming pool for use during the dry summers. Shop windows carried signs declaring ‘Greens Cost Jobs’, hippies were disliked, and a few weeks after our arrival my father shaved off his beard, collecting the clippings on the pages of the Sydney Morning Herald. At the red-brick primary school, my Year Five teacher was Mr Sedden, who peered at us like we were beasts and wouldn’t give me my pen licence. He didn’t give a reason and I felt it was unjust, being made to go on scratching resentfully in pencil long after the others were allowed to write in ink.

Why did we move there? Not many people did. The men in the town complained that the women moved away. But my parents, outdoor types, lived in fear of suburbia, and they moved every so often to some neglected backwater that butted up against the wild places of the state. On this latest move, we had decamped from the coast because development threatened, meaning specifically the building of a supermarket. My dad took a job at the high school, teaching science and agriculture. He promptly set about making improvements to our house, and for a time we had no front door, only a tarpaulin, and my mother cooked dinner wearing a ski jacket.

As for Mr Noffey, his wife’s departure was still fresh. She had left for good reason, people muttered, but they despised her for leaving Benny. They said it went to show the cruelty of the rich. The Noffeys were a notable family in the district, and if they weren’t as wealthy as they had been in wool boom days, they were still considerably better off than most. The idea that rich people were cruel was a widely held belief, fed by the fact that affluent farmers sent their children to boarding schools. ‘My mum says if you send your kids away you don’t deserve to have them,’ a girl in our class told Bea, knowing full well, as we all did, that at the end of the following year Bea would be sent away herself.

She got worse from a kid named Adam McDonagh, the son of one of the truck drivers who brought logs to the mill. He puffed up like a rooster and called her ‘the rich bitch with a big garden’.

‘It’s called a farm,’ Bea told him archly, because she wasn’t a weakling. As the year went on, however, I noticed the way she’d try to say ‘I seen’ for ‘I saw’, and ‘twenny’ for ‘twenty’, though sometimes she slipped and accidentally pronounced the ‘t’.