We sat at a table on the verandah and painted pictures with crooked brushes while our tongues hovered worriedly at our mouths. I heard the clear ping of the brush as I swilled it against the glass, and at its signal the water turned cloudy. My tin paint-box was full of slabs of bright colour that changed to bitter greens and acid yellows, turgid violets and washed-out pinks as my picture neared completion. We had scrap albums too, and spent long afternoons licking the sticky backs of nigger-boys and angels, crinolined ladies and Father Christmases we bought from the stationer at the corner.

Joan had a cousin called Claire whom I admired, and one day the three of us were taken by Mrs. Stott and my grandmother to picnic in the Botanic Gardens. We walked past the stone lions that stood guard at the gates, and circled the pond where ducks paddled warily through brown water blossoming with sodden bread. We saw brick-red fish threading glooms of star-grass and crowfoot. We walked in a dream under trees studded with labels, past wistaria pagodas and rose arbours, hothouses of ferns, pools dotted with green saucers and lily-pod cups. There were rustic bridges and sun-dials, a Japanese tea-house and a statue of Peter Pan.

I left Rose Street to go to birthday parties that were always the same. (See me dressed in a bunny-wool cardigan over voile and pin-tucks proffering the requisite parcel, all cellophane and satin ribbon, on a certain doorstep.) Once inside, there were the usual subdued children in their best clothes; the usual proud mothers lingering behind them. (See us eat sandwiches spread with hundreds-and-thousands, sausage-rolls, messes of ice-cream and liquid jelly. Witness our unconcern as we trail from empty lemonade bottles and fruit peel and lolly papers for photographs in the garden.) When it was five o’clock we sat in an awed circle about the wireless and heard the galloping hoofs of Gandhi the 5AD studio horse come closer, and Uncle Dick read the birthday messages, and revealed the hiding places of the chocolate frogs. (Come with us as we scramble in the deep grass at the bottom of the garden for our booty.)

There were birthday parties that were as predictable as the others, but different.

There were the same hundreds-and-thousands and chocolate frogs, but we ate them under the gum-trees at the Koala Bear Farm and slid down a slippery-dip that was never-ending, rode on a camel, were photographed holding a leather-snouted koala. There were outings to the Zoo where we saw the gorilla expose his private parts under a hail of peanuts; watched the poor black panther pace his cage.

I ventured from Rose Street with my grandmother.

I sat on the bed and watched as she ran about in the pink petticoat that clung to her flesh and the hard ridges of her corsets. She climbed grunting into stockings and hooked them to the pimples of her suspenders. A white cloud of talcum floated from her armpits; the familiar pearls encircled her neck. She sighed as she squeezed her bunions into too tight shoes and plucked bobby-pins from her snail-curled hair; as she slipped into best navy tussore and pinned marcasite elephants to her breast. She powdered her face with a swansdown puff, rubbed a clown dab of rouge into each cheek, smoothed her eyebrows with spit, applied discreet mascara with a little brush, painted her lips with Kiss the Blarney lipstick, put dabs of April Violets behind her ears.