Show me the way to go home,

I’m not too tired for bed.

I had a little drink about an hour ago,

And it put ideas in me head ...

Suddenly Mum Whalley began belting into young Gary – or was it Barry?

‘Wadda you know, eh? Wadda you?’

‘What’s bitten yer?’ her husband shouted. ‘Can’t touch a drop without yer turn nasty!’

She didn’t answer. He could tell a grouse was coming, though. The little boy had started to cry, but only as a formality.

‘It’s that bloody Lummy,’ Mrs Whalley complained.

‘Why pick on Lum?’

‘Give a kid all the love and affection, and waddayaget?’

Wal grunted. Abstractions always embarrassed him.

Mum Whalley spat out of the window, and the spit came back at her.

‘Arrrr!’ she protested.

And fell silenter. It was not strictly Lum, not if you was honest. It was nothing. Or everything. The grog. You was never ever gunna touch it no more. Until you did. And that bloody Lummy, what with the caesar and all, you was never ever going again with a man.

‘That’s somethink a man don’t understand.’

‘What?’ asked Wal.

‘A caesar.’

‘Eh?’

You just couldn’t discuss with a man. So you had to get into bed with him. Grogged up half the time. That was how she copped the twins, after she had said never ever.

‘Stop cryun, for Chrissake!’ Mum Whalley coaxed, touching the little boy’s blowing hair.

Everything was sad.

‘Wonder how often they bury someone alive,’ she said.

Taking a corner in his cream Holden Councillor Hogben felt quite rakish, but would restrain himself at the critical moment from skidding the wrong side of the law.

They were driving and driving, in long, lovely bursts, and at the corners, in semi-circular swirls.

On those occasions in her life when she tried to pray, begging for an experience, Meg Hogben would fail, but return to the attempt with clenched teeth. Now she did so want to think of her dead aunt with love, and the image blurred repeatedly. She was superficial, that was it. Yet, each time she failed, the landscape leaped lovingly. They were driving under the telephone wires. She could have translated any message into the language of peace. The wind burning, whenever it did not cut cold, left the stable things alone: the wooden houses stuck beside the road, the trunks of willows standing round the brown saucer of a dam. Her too candid, grey eyes seemed to have deepened, as though to accommodate all she still had to see, feel.

It was lovely curled on the back seat, even with Mum and Dad in front.

‘I haven’t forgotten, Margret,’ Mum called over her shoulder.

Fortunately Dadda wasn’t interested enough to inquire.

‘Did Daise owe anything on the home?’ Mrs Hogben asked. ‘She was never at all practical.’

Councillor Hogben cleared his throat.

‘Give us time to find out,’ he said.

Mrs Hogben respected her husband for the things which she, secretly, did not understand: Time the mysterious, for instance, Business, and worst of all, the Valuer General.