But the city is an island surrounded by hills and sea. And one day I cross the road, and stare at Hook the bootmaker’s from the other side, and see that the silver ribbons stretch in another direction too.

They nibble, as surely as Nan’s sewing-machine, through the cement — away from the city, towards the sea and the sand and the tired mothers I see returning with red-faced children; towards the Gulf of St. Vincent that laps the boot that kicks at Kangaroo Island in the atlas; towards the blue that is the Indian Ocean, edged with the names of seaside towns that sound of England and poetry: Semaphore and Tennyson, Grange and Henley, Glenelg and Brighton, Seacliff and Marino Rocks.

And then I was on the tram, and it sailed down the Beach Road towards the Plaza Picture Theatre, collecting passengers at every stop. We left St. Ives behind, and raced market-gardens blooming with cabbages and crouching figures, jungles of bamboo and lanes of beans, roadside stalls where Italian women with faces like the Madonna and handkerchiefs round their heads sold gladioli and tomatoes, red-brick houses waiting to blaze with Virginia creeper, and the Kooyonga Golf Links where retired executives meditated over bright green grass. Then the tram lurched and stumbled over a bridge, and I saw the river coiled beneath us; watched it — smaller, thread oily marshlands. And then the tram went faster, the back-yards pressed closer, and we peered unashamedly at asbestos bungalows and ragged gardens choked with alyssum, lobelia, and orange marigolds — tufted French ones and frilly pompon giants. And we surveyed coldly, rotting bicycles and wash-tubs hidden on roof-tops, fowl-houses improvised from bedsteads, limp clothes-lines strung with bathing suits.

Suddenly I caught my breath, leaned forward — and sure enough, caught a glimpse of leaping blue. And lost it behind a hill of tamarisks. Then, as we rounded another hill, before us appeared a basinful of sea, brimming and lurching a pale rim. As the tram surged down Seaview Road, the blueness was everywhere, and so bright that my eyes pricked with pins — I looked away. Then we stopped with a shudder; got off at Main Street, and there were people all about — chattering and gleaming like satiny monkeys, smelling of salt and ice-cream and sun-tan oil.

We walked down to the Esplanade and its row of boarding-houses called Laurel Mount and Coastal Court, The Anchorage and Green Lawns; each house guarded by a stone wall carpeted in purple noon-flower; each front garden rampant with identical clumps of red-hot pokers and hydrangeas and Iceland poppy borders.

We went on: turned our backs on Laurel Mount and crossed the road, passed under a horseshoe of fairy-lights snuffed out by the day, mounted the blunt-nosed jetty. And as I held Nan’s hand tighter and looked about me, it seemed that there were two beaches.

Behind us was Peter Pan’s Playground where the merry-go-round horses pranced on barley-sugar columns and the Grand Dipper curve sliced the sky. There was the notice warning: 438 persons were treated FOR CUT FEET LAST YEAR — TAKE CARE, the kiosk that sold ice-cream dandies and Bush biscuits, the stalls dealing in peppermint rock and saveloys. There were the twin fortune-teller booths hung with testimonials and film star photographs and enlargements of letters from England and the Queen, where Madame Alicia and Gipsy Rosalee waited to prophesy on grubby velvet cushions.