One evening in winter, riding his bicycle to work for the night-shift, my father got wet in the rain. He caught cold; refused to take care of himself. The cold got worse — went from influenza to pneumonia to tuberculosis. He was taken to the Adelaide Hospital. He seemed to get better — asked for a newspaper to read the race results. The next day he was dead. My mother remembered his face.

My father died on the seventh of September, 1940 — the day after my first birthday. He was twenty-six.

My mother had a nervous breakdown. She sat in the sun in a canework armchair; her feet on the red-brick path, her eyes raw from crying. Three months later I ate an ice-block and she woke to find my body burning, my feet cold. I was taken to a hospital, like my father before me. They thought I would die.

My mother and grandmother came to watch me through the glass. I was better. I sat up and there was a pink hand and bananas and jelly in a little dish. The hand came closer and then it went away. It went to the next bed — I cried, and my mother cried too.

She went back to work. She went each day in a tram and a creaking lift to an office on a fourth floor. She sat there, from nine to five (with an hour off for lunch). And there were waxen dummies like pretty ladies and bias-cut dresses and satin underwear and other dresses that were patriotic in red and white and blue. She forgot herself at a drawing-board; dedicated herself to cigarette cases, vases, snoods, mirrors with sunrays, compacts with flying-fish.

Death only happened in newspapers. And it was nice to read of other people’s husbands killed for ever in a war so far away. Death was clever, but she knew tricks. And beat him with price tags that said take me and wicked tilted hats. And with gossip in the lav with Norma and frog-cakes at lunch with Melveen. And there was Frank the office boy, and Janet the typist, and Des the copywriter, and Wilf — only he died.

My mother was a lark whose tongue was cut; a gull with clipped wings. She learnt to expect nothing that she did not strive for. (She keeps her eyes to the ground and sees the dog shit and the old men’s phlegm — that way she doesn’t trip).

Gardenia wrists and coffee-coloured underwear, Glory Box and Ella Wheeler Wilcox disappeared. Their places were taken by chocolates in bed and a single cigarette, by Vogue and Vanity Fair, by Madame Weigel patterns; by things the same, but different.

The same, in that they were fanciful means of escape; different, in that unlike gardenia and Ella Wheeler they led precisely nowhere — promised nothing.

(The fancies turn into fetishes, and she doesn’t even know it. Just washes the gloves and pats them dry with love. Does her nails and rinses out the stockings, curls her hair and wishes the lines away. The names of Rubinstein and Arden are honoured in our house; little satin labels stud her clothes. Cold cream is rubbed in slavishly, elbows raped with pumice. She puts up her hair in a Victory Roll.)