And that’s when he said, ‘You have to give her half, or at least you have to offer her half and see if she wants it.’

Did your mother ever to tell you to close your mouth or you’ll catch flies, Jack? Well, that’s what somebody needed to say to me. My jaw was on the floor.

I said, ‘Half?’

Doug said, ‘Half.’

And I said, ‘Of the whole lot?’

He said, ‘Of the entire estate, yes.’

I said, ‘Which is how much?’

That’s when Doug dropped his second bombshell. ‘Oh, well, we need to get some estimates on the value of the various properties, but I’d say it’s somewhere in the order of two million dollars.’

There isn’t a way for me to even describe how I reacted to that, Jack. I must have gone into shock. Not that it mattered because good old Doug was happy to keep talking, going on about how Dad had invented this special thing for computers in the eighties and how he’d sold it to some computer company and how he’d put the money into land at Ocean Grove and that land was now worth a fortune.

My head was spinning when he was telling me all this, mainly because none of it had ever been communicated to me before. Maybe some time in the eighties Dad had showed me an old computer with some tennis game called Pong on it and he’d said something like, ‘This is going to be the next big thing, Snow.’

I knew that he had an old Atari computer, because he was one of the first to get one, not to use but to take apart in his shed. But he never said anything about inventing anything that anyone had given him money for, and even now I don’t know how much he got paid, although I take it that it was enough to buy three blocks of land, beachfront at Ocean Grove, which wouldn’t have been cheap even back then.

I told Doug, ‘That makes no sense. Dad never had any money. He’s been living in that old house in Deer Park forever, or else in the bungalow he rented when Mum threw him out. Why wouldn’t he have sold that land and lived a bit better?’

I was remembering how I couldn’t even talk Dad into taking down the wallpaper in the old house, wallpaper that had turned yellow. I couldn’t talk him into trading in the old Hills hoist for a nice dryer.

‘Why would I pay money to dry my clothes?’ he’d say, ‘when the sun’s out there, 365 days a year, and completely free?’

I’d say, ‘Because you’re old, Dad, and it’s hard for you to throw a sheet over the clothesline.’ But he was one of those blokes who didn’t believe in paying for things he could get for free, and maybe, looking back, if people had said, ‘He’s so cheap, he’s probably hoarding a fortune somewhere,’ they would have been right.