My mother told me how my grandmother prophesied over my cradle like a Good Fairy that I should be too sensitive for this life; that I should have a thorny path to tread. My father was her favourite, and when he died she was heart-broken; locked herself in her room, refused to come out. She was a shadowy figure who faded early. When we went to visit at Linden Park my mother showed me the nursing-home she died in.

Linden Park had nothing to do with Dew Street. It was an outer suburb, its wide streets lined with Tudor houses and lawns and crazy-paving paths and goldfish ponds and prunus-trees.

My mother and I went out there in the tram, past the Victoria Park Race Course where Grandfather Hanrahan worked in the Tote. We met Catholic relations with Irish names: cousins, who went to schools called Star of the Sea and Loreto and the Convent of Mercy; aunties and uncles gossiping after Mass, sucking down sweet weak tea, eating Pavlova, picking out passion-fruit seeds.

There was a telephone, a latest model Vanguard, Raphael’s nicest Madonna in a bedroom that smelt of sandalwood. There was a fir-tree at Christmas with glass balls and a tinsel star, a money-box nigger-boy who ate the coins, a walnut piano, a real chandelier.

They spent holidays at Victor Harbour, Port Noarlunga, and sometimes Christies Beach; they prayed to St. Anthony for things that were lost. My uncle owned two butcher shops and three racehorses. My cousins attended the flashest Catholic schools in Adelaide, and he wore a blazer with a Platignum fountain pen and red braid, and she had a felt hat and lisle stockings like Reece. I knew I wasn’t as good as them.

Grandfather Hanrahan did not speak to Great-grandfather Collins. He contented himself with a wry comment about his father-in-law’s peculiarities as he lifted me over the fence to the glum little housekeeper on the other side.

My mother told me that the grandfathers hated each other. She told me that one night Grandfather Hanrahan came home drunk and went into St. Teresa by mistake; climbed the curtains, pulled them down in a frenzy.

My grandfather spent most of his time in the sleepout. It was dim there, with screens of wire-netting to keep out the flies. Sometimes he was still in bed and I sat amongst the dirty sheets and explored the prickles on his red face with my fingers, and felt the soft cushions of his flannel stomach.

He whispered that we should live together always when I grew up; he would have a little housekeeper then. He gave me Tote tickets with magic numbers, a silver mug he made himself, a pink bank-book, a purple ink-pad and a rubber stamp with my name on it backwards. He gave me bags of oranges until one Sunday I got caught coming home with them by the girl from the corner: she dragged me to the air-raid shelter in the nasturtiums; took off my clothes, folded them neatly, stuck pins in me — ran away with the oranges.