Sometimes I knelt on the chair at the window; stayed there for hours: elbows out, eyes glazed — sucking and gnawing at the sill, incised already with toothy crescent moons. I looked across the redness of the verandah and the pebble-dash wall blurred by roses. I saw the rockery and the gravel, and the geraniums the colour of blood, the tinsel cinerarias and the lamb’s ears. I ignored the ugliness of the gas-box, gazed past the cyclone trellis of fence — to the house across the road.

This house intrigued me. Sometimes a girl who had the same surname as I (although she was no relation) stayed there. She could tap-dance, do the splits, walk on her hands, turn cartwheels. She showed me how to make whistles of bamboo shoots, how to suck honey from the convolvuluses.

And behind me was the room.

Beside the bed stood a dressing-table inlaid like a coat with herring-bones. It had a scalloped looking-glass and a cut-glass powder-bowl, doilies rimmed with tatting, a scent-bottle, a hand-mirror stamped with leaves.

There were matching herring-bone wardrobes. The big one held my mother’s clothes. I liked to totter in her high-heeled shoes, pluck hats from their tissue-paper nests, peer into handbags — fascinated by handkerchiefs and hairpins and forgotten sixpences. I stepped inside the wardrobe — pressed my face into satin and lace and tweed, the lovely smell of Blue Grass and lavender and camphor — came out drunk.

The small wardrobe had been my father’s. The thought that once his clothes instead of mine had hung there made me feel solemn. Ties and blazers and double-breasted suits that were only worn in dating photographs reproached me as I struggled into my best velvet dress. I felt guilty; the same as I did at school when we stood before the flag and remembered the Anzacs.

Nan and Reece’s room was different: without mystery. The beds were draped chastely in candlewick, the chest-of-drawers and wardrobe painted white. My grandmother had a cupboard where she hoarded Vick’s Vapour Rub and friar’s balsam and Irish Moss Gum Jubes. In the drawer above I found slabs of chocolate, bags of liquorice allsorts and ju-jubes. Under her mattress were the confession magazines she pretended not to read.

Even the sun was kept out of the sitting-room — waylaid by shutters and curtains that reduced it to pale dapples on the sofa that swallowed handkerchiefs and pennies. There was a sideboard carved with flowers, a fire-place tiled with poppies, a carpet strewn with Paisley fern. On the mantelpiece, between two glass swans, my mother in broderie anglaise and I in Swiss cotton challenged Blue Boy and Red Boy reduced to china plaques on an opposite wall.

I liked the dining-room best in winter when we turned the light off and there was just the fire. We sat in a circle and the flames made the fender gleam, turned the Mallee roots to faces, cast shadows on the wall. Roses bloomed in the grate; blue gum filled the room. I lay on the rug — lulled by Reece’s knitting, Nan’s newspaper, the murmuring wireless. In the morning my grandmother knelt stiffly in the cold before dead ashes; swept away the powder from the hearth.