Of all the poetry he read, it was Wordsworth’s The Prelude, the early sections in particular, that best captured who he wanted to be. He longed for solitary walks through the English woods and fields; he dreamed of the delights of being a young poet in Cambridge surrounded by like-minded friends. The Prelude brought him respite from his ill-fitting life.

Who knows the individual hour in which

His habits were first sown, even as a seed?

Who that shall point as with a wand and say

‘This portion of the river of my mind

Came from yon fountain’?

At times of confusion, or irritation, or dissatisfaction, Leonard would recite these lines, convinced that one day being a misfit in Perth would either make sense to him or cease to matter. It would help if he knew exactly what it was he wanted. If asked — and now that Terrence was gone, no one did ask — he would say he wanted LIFE and he wanted FREEDOM, and yes, writ large. But as to the content of that life and the expression of that freedom, he could not say.

His first job on leaving school was not the electrical apprenticeship at Morrow & Sons his father had argued for, but an usher at Perth’s Capitol Theatre. He managed to convince his parents that this was a short, albeit indulgent detour on his journey towards a proper job. He believed it himself; if not, he would not have found the strength to oppose his father. He loved the job, not for the ushering but for the films and musical theatre he saw for free. And he liked the nightlife, the streets after dark, and the days to do whatever he fancied. He burrowed into the poetry shelves at the State Library, discovering passionate and anguished Europeans — Rilke, Rimbaud and Baudelaire, and the New Yorkers, Robert Lowell and Frank O’Hara. These poets revealed the life he wanted, la vie passionelle, peopled with poets and painters, actors and intellectuals, blacks and Jews.

In Perth, to refer to someone as an intellectual would be as insulting as calling them a fairy. As for knowing blacks or Jews, this was the sort of not-quite-respectable notion he could toy with only in the privacy of his mind. And New York? It was no more likely than the moon, or at least not yet. He felt himself to be in training for the real life to come. He read a little fiction, he read a lot of poetry, he devoured an enormous number of biographies, and he wrote poems. He liked to walk and daydream, he loved films and Hollywood musicals, and he harboured vaguely defined ambitions to be a proper poet.