I’d never met Mrs Bannerman before that. Mark had told me he lived with an old lady called Mrs Bannerman, and that she had been a friend of Mark’s mother from the Snowy Mountains days. He said that whenever old Mr Friedgut beat Mark’s mum up too much, she’d take Mark and the other kids and they’d go to Mrs Bannerman’s because she had a boarding house, and they’d stay there until he sobered up and came and got her.

Mark liked it at Bondi: there was a milk bar on the corner where he could get a milkshake and he liked the beach, so when he found himself with nowhere to live after his mum went into Caloola, he gave Mrs Bannerman a knock on her door and explained the situation, and offered to do odd jobs around the place. She took him under her wing and let him live with her, and that was in the 1960s so he’d been there more than twenty years before I arrived on the scene.

I remember walking down the hill to the house – it was so humid my clothes were sticking to me – and I remember Mark saying, so here we are, and the place looked like it was falling down. People say it was huge but I had come from Caloola, remember, and Caloola was that much bigger so it didn’t look ‘huge’ to me – just big and old and ugly.

Mark had a key to the front gate so we went through and down this path toward the back of the house, and there was a huge crater in the back yard big enough to sink a car in. I asked him what that was about and he said it had been there since some Japanese sub had shelled Bondi, and if you don’t believe me go and look it up, it actually happened, the Japs did bomb Bondi.

I said, ‘But why did it just get left like that?’ And Mark said that Mrs Bannerman’s husband had gone on for years about how he was going to fill it but the lazy bastard’s idea of filling it was to fill it up with junk. And it was filled with junk.

I was standing pretty close to the edge of the crater. Mark said, ‘You want to be careful you don’t step too close. The sides give way.’

I said, ‘It’s like a tip in there,’ and it was, with old metal and washing machines and everything all strewn together.

Mark said, ‘You think there’s a lot of stuff now, back when I moved here, there was ancient stuff that you don’t even see any more: an old ringer, for getting water out of clothes, and the old wash bowls with jugs that have flowers and shit painted on them.’ And he said a lot of that stuff only got taken away because some people from that show, The Sullivans, came and knocked on the door one day saying, ‘We heard you have things from before the war, and can we have a look?’