Mrs Johnson had removed her fence altogether, which everyone in the street agreed was a strange thing to do. She’d filled the whole front yard with native plants, except for the crushed gravel driveway where Mr Johnson parked his Holden station wagon. Her front yard was almost like a forest and disguised much of the house from the street. She’d made a crooked sort of path from the pavement to her front door, so you couldn’t see the door until you had gone around a couple of little bends. She had taught me the names of many of the trees and shrubs; my favourites were the little bells on the correa and the flowers like tiny bunches of purple grapes on the hardenbergia. She believed we should all plant things that grew naturally in the area we lived in. Mum said the only good gardens were the English ones, that Australian plants were ugly and attracted wildlife, and that Mrs Johnson had no style.

Mrs Johnson’s back garden was a wonderland. It was full of windy paths where you had to turn and twist to find surprises around bends. She had built little grottos you would come across suddenly, with stone fairies or gnomes or cement animals in little frozen scenes from plays she called tableaux. These were regularly changed so that every visit offered fresh discoveries. She had a rabbit hutch, and a huge guinea-pig enclosure that used to be an enormous aviary so you could actually walk inside it. In her shed, she kept mice of several colours in a special mouse house so their little hearts wouldn’t die from the cold, and blue tongue lizards that had been attacked by cats and needed to be looked after because they couldn’t slither away quickly anymore. She had a magpie that wasn’t in a cage but had a sore wing and used to stay near her back door to talk to her. She fed it mincemeat and scraps of toast. It tried to talk to her in return, and sometimes you would swear they really were having a good old chat. For a while she had a sick baby kangaroo that lived in a sack tied to the back of her chair in her kitchen, and that she had to feed with a bottle every four hours, even in the night-time.

Mrs Johnson also unfortunately had two girls and a husband called Athol. I say unfortunately because I didn’t like them nearly as much, and they tended to need her attention, even when I badly needed to talk to her about something important. I particularly didn’t like Mr Johnson, who was a big man with tiny eyes and fleshy red lips that rested on a bushy beard. He had bad breath, and often leaned right into my face and sort of grinned at me, but in a way that didn’t seem that friendly. Ruthy said it was more of a leer than a smile, which felt right to me when she explained what leering meant.