‘We’re looking for the lady who lives here, do you know her?’ I explained.

He shook his head. ‘I don’t, but my wife sometimes says hello. I’m pretty sure she’s a nurse.’

Chapter Seven

Dear Jack,

I really don’t understand you. At first you were all, ‘Tell me where I went wrong with my stories about you.’ And then I write back and tell you and you don’t even bother to reply.

Maybe I shocked you too much telling you about how my own mother drove me to get an abortion. Maybe you’re Catholic and you think people who have abortions have got to be sinners. That’s what they thought at the Catholic College in Deer Park, and I know for certain that some of the nuns knew that I’d had an abortion because when I went back to school they avoided me in the halls.

I didn’t care, and pretty much from the time I turned fifteen, I just wanted to finish school and move out of home as fast as I could. But first I needed to get a job and I had no idea what I wanted to do, other than leave school. We had a careers teacher who was supposed to help, but the only big ideas she had was: finish year 10 and go and be a teller at the State Bank, which would have been boring, or else learn to type up to a hundred words a minute with 85 per cent accuracy and there might be a job as a secretary somewhere. Or go and give your resume to the local hairdressers and see if they need an apprentice.

That might have been fine for some of the girls I went to school with, but I couldn’t see myself standing at the bank window taking cheques from old ladies and I couldn’t see myself sweeping hair up from salon floors, both of which would have meant I probably would have had to stay in Deer Park when what I wanted was to get out of Deer Park.

Just so you know, I did think of being a journalist, maybe at the Sun newspaper, which had the comics I liked, or else at the paper Dad liked to read in the afternoons – The Herald. But the principal at the Catholic College said, ‘Oh, you wouldn’t be able to do that, your English isn’t good enough. If you don’t want to go to the State Bank, why don’t you try out for nursing instead?’

I can’t say I was that interested, but I also had no other ideas, so I got the pamphlets from the careers teacher and put in an application form for the nurses’ college at Coburg, and they said, sure, you can start training in January next year. So that was basically how I decided to be what I am.

I don’t know what nursing training is like now but in those days it was pretty easy. There was a bit of learning from books and then six weeks of what they called the ‘prac’, which was basically being a nurse but not getting paid the full wage because you hadn’t graduated.