He gave me his copy of The Grapes of Wrath to read, and it was like no book I had read before. I hadn’t read a novel in years, filling my head with vacuous magazines instead. I fell into a real world of hunger and poverty, where the small lives of the characters showed the unfairness of it, the wealthy taking so much from the poor. Men with sunburnt skin and sun-whipped eyes. When I read, ‘The sun was setting when the truck came back, and the earth was bloody in its setting light,’ I thought about Dad driving us away to Sydney in his truck and how we weren’t so different from the Joads, just a little less poor. We’d always had just enough to survive.

The next time we sat together Jim and I talked about the Okies and the Joads and how it was that big farms threw away food rather than feed people who were starving. How it was that people could do a day’s work and still not be able to afford to feed their children. I’d never read a book which made me think so hard. Jim said he wasn’t red himself but he agreed with some of the ideas of socialism. I felt stupid having to ask what those ideas were. He had a way of explaining it, though, that didn’t make me feel dumb for asking.

At other times he asked me to explain things to him. He wanted to know how the political system worked in Australia and why it was we were still part of England. He wanted to know whether I thought he should look to move out when he got home or go on living with his mother. If it was cruel to his mother to turn down her efforts to fix him up with her best friend’s daughter, a girl who was pretty, according to Jim, but only interested in talking about hairstyles and which girls were better- or worse-looking than her.

‘I’d been on a few dates with her before this tour. I mean, she looks good in a sweater but I grew tired of having to reassure her of that fact.’

‘Imagine being married to her,’ I said, staring out the window. ‘It’s not as though she’s going to change. People only seem to grow into their worst selves.’

Jim rubbed the back of his neck. He had been to the train’s barber that morning for a haircut and shave. There was the red speckle of a rash beneath his chin and I could see the contour of his scalp. ‘That’s a positive view of marriage you got there, Sarah.’

‘Well, if your parents were happy, good for you.’

‘I’m guessing yours aren’t?’

‘You’re guessing correct.’