Besides not being able to stay up late, I wasn’t allowed to answer the phone, which every other kid at my school was allowed to do, and that was because Mum couldn’t stand to hear kids on the phone. If she rang somebody’s house and their kids answered she’d say, ‘I don’t understand what possesses your parents to let you run to the telephone when it rings. Go and get your mother for me now,’ or else she would hang up. And sometimes a ball would come over the back fence and my mother was one of those who wouldn’t send it back.

I hardly ever had any friends come over because people just thought that Mum was mean, and so I mostly played by myself, which wasn’t fun anyway because I wasn’t allowed to make a mess or bang the door on my way out the house or get my good clothes dirty. I wasn’t allowed to touch ‘Mum’s station’ on the radio, and I wasn’t allowed to take posters out of TV Week and stick them on my schoolbooks or on the walls like everybody else in my class, because that was messy too.

I was sometimes allowed to walk to the milk bar on the corner, but only if Dad had given me twenty cents. And I was only allowed to buy milk bottles and lolly teeth and other white lollies, because chocolate made a mess on my fingers and so did Smarties if I held them for too long. Once I came home with one of those bubble-gums with the tattoos inside and I put the tattoos on my arm with the kitchen sponge, and when my mother caught me she grabbed me and said, ‘Let me tell you about the kind of girl that gets tattoos, Snow. Sailors and prostitutes – that’s who have tattoos.’ And she grabbed my arm by the wrist and scrubbed the tattoo off with the Ajax. The funny thing about that story, Jack, is that if Mum was still alive I’d be able to tell her, hey, Mum, you were right, all the hookers in here do have tattoos – blue prison tattoos on their boobs and around their ankles – and some of them look like they did the tattoos themselves with a pin and a Biro.

I haven’t told you yet that Mum was also basically an alcoholic, drinking gin every night, and while I’m at it you might as well know that she was also a racist. She couldn’t stand the New Australians that were coming to this country, and I know that because once, when I was about seven or eight and I was standing at the dressing table and Mum was trying to get the knots out of my hair with her big brush, I asked if I could have my new friend Gertrude over to play. Mum stopped tugging at the knots and said, ‘What kind of name is Gertrude?’ I didn’t know what she was talking about. She said, ‘Is Gertrude one of the New Australian families?’ And I didn’t know – how was I supposed to know? – but Mum said, ‘The trouble with all those New Australians that are coming, Snow, is how do we know where they’re from?’ She said, ‘Gertrude sounds like a foreign name to me.’ And if there was one thing Mum couldn’t stand it was foreign things, like people growing potatoes in the back garden like the Turkish people on the corner, and hard brown bread like the German people ate, and people who had concrete lions at the gate, and people who spoke languages that weren’t English. She’d say things like, ‘You’d think they’d at least try to learn English, but they don’t bother. I saw that poor little boy, Charlie Pasquali or whatever his name is, at parent–teacher night, having to translate everything the teacher was saying. His mum was sitting there with no idea what was going on.’