My dad wasn’t Jim Olarenshaw, he was James Olarenshaw and he got called Jim because that’s what everyone does with the name James, but if you’re going to be writing people’s life stories you should at least get the basics straight, which means you should have said he was James and not Jim.

You said he was born in London and that’s not true. He was born in Jarrow and that’s hours away from London, and the reason I know that is because my father was one of the Jarrow marchers, and if you don’t know what that is, look it up on the internet. It means he was one of those guys who marched from Jarrow to London when the ship company he worked for in Jarrow got closed down in the Depression and people were starving. He was only sixteen when he did that and he had to sleep on the ground in the freezing cold and there was nothing to eat.

You said that Dad joined the navy to get out of the Depression, but like I just told you he was only sixteen when he arrived in London and you can’t join the navy when you’re sixteen. Dad was supposed to go back to Jarrow, but what would have been the point of that, when his family had no money? So he decided to stay in London and work on the railways or do whatever work he could find, and he was in London when the war broke out and that’s when he joined the navy. He was gone for four years and when he came back he married Mum, so that’s something that you got right at least!

You said Dad came to Australia as a Ten Pound Pom and that was right, and you said he got given a house when he arrived but, just so you know, it wasn’t a posh house, it was a railway house, which means a fibro house. And from what Dad told me, it hadn’t even been painted when he and Mum tried to move in. They hadn’t put down any footpaths in Deer Park and it was all mud. Mum couldn’t walk across the mud because she only had one pair of shoes, so they had to go and find planks of wood and put them down so she could at least get in the front door.

You made it sound like my parents just stayed in that fibro house for free but that’s not right because my dad had to buy the house off the railways and it was nothing fancy, it was three bedrooms with Venetian blinds like all the other houses in the street. You said that Mum and Dad were living here in Australia for a long time with no children and Mum must have been rapt to find out she was having me because she was already forty when I was born, but that’s not actually the way it was, Jack. There are some people who just don’t like having kids around, and did it ever occur to you that Mum might have been one of those people? Maybe she wasn’t trying for years to have a baby. Maybe she was trying hard not to have one and maybe I was a big mistake. Because if you want to know the truth, that was how Mum made me feel when I was a kid, Jack. Not like I was some lovely surprise like you said but the big mistake. Maybe she never said that in so many words, but she would say, ‘Oh, I used to have a very nice job with the Postmaster-General, with my own desk and my own telephone and everything, but of course I had to give all that up when you came along, Snow,’ and stuff like that.