We turned into King William Street, and over my shoulder I saw we had been followed by the hills. They were bigger now, yet still blurred and distant — dwarfed by the clock-tower and cupola of the grimy Town Hall where the City Fathers plotted, where they held the Messiah every Easter, where the big girls at school sang in white dresses in the Thousand Voices’ Choir.

We hurried on, then paused to sniff the spiciness of moss from the florist’s by the arcade, and Nan stroked the drooping heads of pansies; admired the artistic window-display of eucalyptus branches sprayed gold. We crossed the road, and I remembered to look to the left — look to the right, as Uncle Dick told us on the wireless on ‘Kangaroos on Parade’; blinked, as we stepped into the shadow of iron verandahs; stopped, as Nan nipped into the Country Provisional Stores to get some of their cheese. The traffic lights changed, and we were there with all the others — under the clock, on the Beehive Corner.

We gazed at Parma Violet creams, rum-flavoured truffles, silver cachous, and crystallized rose-petals (there is no beehive). At last Nan succumbed, went in and came out guiltily with a bag of her favourite chocolate roughs. (She loved chocolate: boxes of Black Magic and bars of Old Gold are hidden in her bedroom, once she ate an Easter-egg I was given and was sick; yet still her eyes turn dreamy and her voice drops away as she tells me of the chocolates she ate before the War.)

All I remembered of the War was marching in a practice-line to the Kindergarten shelter; standing important by the front gate and telling a girl who trailed case in hand as usual that there was no school because it had ended. Yet the War surrounded me still: in the sheets made from parachute silk, the necklace of seeds Joan Stott’s father brought from New Guinea, the games we played with the dusty gas-mask, the nasturtium-draped mound that marked the air-raid shelter in the garden. I saw still, the figures of uniformed heroes and lovely ladies that danced blackly on the windows of the Air Force building. (The dead are all about: they walk resurrected wearing Returned Servicemen’s League badges in their lapels at the Anzac Day march I watch in the rain; they sit disguised in dressing-gowns and slippers, with rugs over their knees, on the verandah of the Hospital by the sea; they mock on Remembrance Day from scarlet poppy-faces in the middle of tiny crosses — as we pay our threepence and climb the ladder to see the carpet of flowers the ladies of society have sown beside the War Memorial.)

The Beehive Corner was Adelaide’s unofficial meeting-place. On Saturday nights it was crowded with nervous girls in net and satin ballerinas, rhinestone necklaces and fur-fabric capes; with legs freshly-shaven, corsages of violets pinned to their collars, they waited — off to the Palais de Danse. During the day a coy mass of ladies in gloves and hats and white shoes took their place, each with a straw shopping-basket stitched with raffia flowers over one arm; each passing the time by studying other ladies doing the same.