Don’t get me wrong, Dad would tell her off. He’d say, ‘Oh, come on, Ros, you love being a mum! You don’t have to go to work, you can stay home and lie on the couch all day reading The Women’s Weekly.’

Mum would get stuck into him, saying, ‘That’s what you think it’s like, Jim? Sitting around reading magazines? You have no idea.’ And then it would be on for young and old.

You made it seem like my dad had plenty of money when I was growing up, but that’s not true. He worked at the railways and that was a good job until I was born, but then he got laid off and he opened the shop, Olarenshaw Electrics, and he couldn’t charge high prices in Deer Park because the customers were what we called the New Australians and they had no money. Or else they wanted things on credit and wouldn’t pay. So we might have had food on the table but we never went out to a restaurant for dinner or anything like that. And if we did my mother would take a bottle of cordial in the boot of the car and I’d have to have a drink from a cup before we went inside because ‘bought drinks’ cost too much.

If I got a special treat it was lollies in a white paper bag and that was only on the days that Dad got paid, when he brought his pay home in an envelope with the coins rattling around in the bottom. My mother would count every cent and she’d know if Dad had been short-changed by even one dollar. This was in the days when mums would take all the money and give dads maybe a two-dollar note and a one-dollar note and that was supposed to last a fortnight, including smokes. I don’t know what your idea of luxury is but we had no luxury when I was growing up. Like, if we had holidays at Christmas, it was in the caravan park at Ocean Grove. And I never had a TV in my bedroom or anything that other kids had, I just played hopscotch with bits of plaster board we scabbed from building sites. We didn’t eat fancy at home, we had chops and peas and mashed potatoes, and if I got dessert it was jelly or tinned peaches with one scoop of ice cream from the tub.

I know what you’re thinking – that that’s still better than my sister had in the orphanage, but my mother wasn’t a nice person to live with, Jack. She was strict with me – maybe as strict as people in the orphanage – making me go to bed early and do all my homework at a desk in my bedroom, and not because she wanted to teach me manners or to be good at school but because she didn’t want to play with me or talk to me or do anything with me. So, seven o’clock would come around and it didn’t matter if it was light outside – and it was sometimes light until nine o’clock in Melbourne – I’d have to go to bed. Once I said, ‘Other mums let their kids stay up later than seven o’clock,’ and Mum said, ‘But I’m not other mothers, am I, Snow?’ So basically it was about getting me into bed.