Going to the Sunday night meeting with Dad was great. Sometimes we talked, but sometimes we didn’t, and even if we were quiet, it was a kind of cosy, friendly quiet, and he smiled at me a lot. When we did talk, it was about all sorts of things. Sometimes he asked my views on world events if I’d heard about them. Because of this I tried to remember to look at the Sunday Mail before the Memorial Meeting to see if I could think of something intelligent to say about what was happening. Sometimes he told me about his work, which I always found interesting. And sometimes he told me about how to be a good person, which I paid a lot of attention to and tried to remember. He told me that life was like a game of snakes and ladders and I had to enjoy going up the ladders, but be just as joyful when I slid down a snake because it would teach me how to be a stronger person. He said all experts had to practise and fail many times over, and I had to develop persistence if I was going to be good at anything. He said I should always be reliable, and that he tried hard to be reliable for Mr Bednarski even though it made Mum upset sometimes, but he believed it would work out best for the family in the end.

If I was lucky he would tell me stories about Mum. He told me once that, even though the ecclesia didn’t approve of it, when he and Mum were first married they would go to dances at the local RSL, and that Mum was the most beautiful woman and the best dancer in the whole room. He said that because she didn’t grow up in the Christadelphian Truth, the way we lived was hard for her sometimes, because she loved to go to parties and dances in Scotland, and never went to church. He said he was very lucky she had accepted Jesus as her saviour, but every now and then having a house and children and a routine at church could get her down a bit, and we had to be patient with her because she’d given up so much for us. I asked him if having us children felt like a punishment to her, and Dad said, ‘No, no. Not at all. She loves you dearly. But every now and then she misses her old life too.’

One night I told him I knew Ruthy would be a famous writer one day, but I couldn’t see what I would be famous at. I asked if he knew what it would be. He said it wasn’t important to be famous, just good. I thought about that a lot but decided famous would be better. I hadn’t heard about a lot of famous vets, but I bet there was one, and perhaps I could have a television show and teach people how to look after their animals. That would do the trick.