My father who never was, was once a child. (The child sits dimpling on a postcard in short skirts beside a wistful little girl and three sisters. The sisters wear pudding-basin hats and flowers with silver-paper stems. The sisters are Molly and Nell and Margaret. Margaret is the child’s mother.)

Margaret Collins married William Hanrahan in 1912. He was a blacksmith’s striker; she was engaged in home duties. They had two children: my aunt, Kathleen, who was the wistful little girl; my father, who was christened Maurice, but called Bob. The marriage was not a happy one, and soon the parents parted; not physically at first, although the distance they travelled was great — merely emotionally (that way no one knows). She retreated from his scepticism and lusts, his alcoholic hazes and race-course cronies, to the safer world of the Mass, where she breathed a more rarefied air: perfumed by swinging censers, punctuated by tinkling bells, nourished with wine and wafer and the poetry of bleeding Jesus. Eventually the withdrawal became complete — when the children grew up she moved away for ever. Kathleen married and lived at Linden Park; Bob stayed at Dew Street with his father.

My father who never was, was once a boy. (The boy goes on outings to the seaside in a linen suit, black stockings, a boater hat. He rides a tricycle holding a cat, marches with a kettle-drum, sits cross-legged in the Marist Brothers’ photograph.)

My father won a scholarship to the Christian Brothers’ College. He was sent letters of congratulation by Father Geoghyan and Miss Hocking who taught him and J. C. Stephens who trusted that the Divine Child would keep him well and shower him with all His choicest graces.

My father had a picture of the Madonna: blue robe, strawberry heart, rose garland, wicked dagger, pleats of light, limpid gaze, hooping halo. She held an Easter lily in Her hand; She lived safe in a celluloid frame and a cellophane square.

My father had a Child’s Manual of Devotion, presented to him by his mother, bought from Pellegrini & Co., Publishers to the Holy See. (Did he peruse this Table of Movable Feasts, these Angelical Salutations and Acts of Contrition; this Litany of the Holy Name of Jesus, this Prayer to the Blessed Virgin for the conversion of England?) He had a Garden of the Soul printed in Dublin, blooming with Immaculate Hearts of Mary and Sacred Hearts of Jesus, listing Ember days and days of abstinence from flesh meat and Acts of Hope and Charity and Faith.

My father had a friend called Paul who wrote him letters about Scout Camps at Tanunda with chaps and capital ideas and decent swimming holes and pine-needles for a mattress; and of Leo Ryan who got one hundred in history and maths, Jack Webster, Ron O’Connor, Brownie Brazel, and Tommy Reardon.

(Where are they all now? Where is my father who wore the badge with laurel leaves and Signum Fidei round a purple star?)