In the front room, at five o’clock every evening, Carol and I listened breathlessly to the latest episode of ‘Superman’ on the wireless. Here we played Ludo, Happy Families, and Fish; built houses of playing-cards and pondered the intricacies of jigsaws. We had drawing competitions, with Carol’s mother — who celebrated her artistry with a study of indelible-pencil gum leaves in a plastic frame — acting as the judge.

Curled up at our feet were any number of cats and their latest offspring. There were legions of them: ginger and tortoise-shell, roan and smoky-grey. Their smell mingled with all the others in the house; the back verandah was dotted with neat piles of excreta and saucers of stale milk. Ronald shed his apathy, and whistled as he drowned the new-born kittens in a bucket under the peach-tree, but paradoxically they still multiplied. Carol had her favourites: Velvet and Diamond and Star. She plucked the fleas from their ragged coats, soothed their torn ears and bleeding paws, gorged them with morsels from her dinner. I could not tell them apart.

We played on the back verandah when it was wet, with an assortment of balding plush toys. The cats romped about us, capsizing the saucers of milk, sharpening their claws on a silent German piano that looked as incongruous on the uneven brick floor as the London taxi did, abandoned to the nettles and rain in its hessian and iron shelter. In winter the verandah was webbed with clothes-lines — drops of water fell coldly on our heads from crutchless bloomers, snot-rimmed handkerchiefs, greasy tea-towels.

Here, too, Carol washed her hair in a chipped enamel bowl, and grimaced and shrieked as her mother combed its tangles. Then I was jealous; for with the shrieking over, and the dirty water emptied down the drain, she was a princess. Her hair, spread in crinkles over her shoulders, challenged, and matched, the sun. I felt better when it became two thin braids, and Carol was her goose-girl self.

The verandah kept watch over a tiny kitchen painted electric-green. The mélange of smells grew stranger: musk and urine and cats vied with coffee essence and cabbage and fish. On torn oilcloth, like an arrangement of holy relics, stood the tomato sauce and vinegar, plum jam and condensed milk that accompanied every meal — their glass and metal sides tattooed with congealing stigmatas. Disregarding the protests of mother and grandmother, clutching knife and fork and plateful of cooling food, I hastened to the kitchen whenever I could, to eat with my friend — drawn from cut-glass and damask proprieties by its feckless glamour.

In the yard full of weeds and dust and blistered earth we jumped ropes, bounced balls, traced whorls and emblems in the swirling dust. Sometimes we found witchetty grubs in the pile of Mallee roots by the door and contemplated toasting them — they were saved by their very helplessness.

Beside the water tank and the patch of rhubarb and a shrivelled little lemon-tree was a lavatory where we sat and meditated upon the newspaper squares that hung from a spiked hook. At the side of the lavatory, where the ground was mossy and slug-green, was another lavatory, long abandoned, that Carol’s father made for her when she was small. This wooden box with its evil hole proved unaccountably intriguing; I peered into it often, in the hope of discerning some ancient souvenir of my friend’s carnality.