They’ve given Peter one more chance, a month’s trial at home – I promise I will not run away again and I will go to school, he says, and tries to mean it. But a week later he’s escaped the schoolyard and is found that night at Collaroy station. His father is furious and the police have lost their patience. When he hears the magistrate say the words ward of the State and Weroona, Peter’s stomach flips with a mix of relief and fear. And the confusion of his ragged love for his father, his yearning for somewhere to belong. A home, but different from his own, which is measured in misery and heartache, blow by blow.

So Peter is unsettled by his first institution, surprised by safety. By belonging. It is like the home he has in dreams: there is order here, discipline, but there is also kindness. A sense of the world as fair. Schoolwork and pot-scrubbing and cricket and marbles. The gift of a prayer book, never to be lost. A trip to town every fortnight with a shilling to spend. For the first time he can remember, there is nothing to run away from, no reason to steal.

‘Weroona’, in the clean air of the Blue Mountains, is comparatively benign. We might be grateful for institutions like this one – though it’s a prison of sorts, a child’s prison – but for this: what they say about the world outside them. Weroona will be the first of several institutions to shelter Peter through his turbulent adolescence – not all so modest in their approach – but if he feels safe in them, no longer alone, surely this indicts us all. That we live happily knowing a child feels better and safer in a prison than he does in the houses and streets outside it.

The above-mentioned lad has been at Weroona for the past eight months. During this period he has been a good type of lad who appears very contented here. He is well mannered, keeps himself clean and tidy and mixes well with the other boys . . . If he is restored to his father in the near future it will have to be impressed on his father that Peter is still a child and that he is too immature to be made to accept the responsibility of looking after any of his business ventures . . . although Peter is nearly twelve he still looks for a lot of guidance from adults when he attempts any undertaking or task . . . (November 1960)

Since his committal Peter has settled down very well. He has never absconded or indulged in any thieving which was his main failing whilst he was living with his father and stepmother. He has gained self-assurance, but still looks to adults for guidance in many respects. He is a boy who shows interest in the home and likes to carry out many little duties in the garden . . . (June 1961)

The manager feels that the lad could now be restored to his father provided that home conditions are suitable, as the lad has reached the stage of self-confidence that he previously lacked. When the father called at Head Office he was warned of the lad’s inability to work weekends and nights in the shop. He then suggested he would defer his application until the end of this year. Although Peter is only twelve and a half years of age, it could be that his father sees in him a source of cheap labour . . . (July 1961)

But Michael does not defer his application, and Peter is home late in August, 1961. By the first week of October, he is truanting again, a few shillings from the till and he’s off to Luna Park, or just riding the trains, around and around. Somewhere in his head he is looking for another Weroona. He didn’t really want to leave; he liked everyone there and they liked him. He even liked the schoolroom. But at the state school in Liverpool, as at home, he is a wog, and a cripple, a peg-leg – though he craves inclusion with the boys who taunt him, almost grateful for the attention. Better not to go to school at all, he decides, to stick to the streets. Here he may not feel loved, exactly, but he finds that everyone is like him: misfits, drop-outs, the sad and forgotten. They recognise him as one of their own. It’s true that occasionally he’s nervous but he’s never angry and hurt, the way he is at home. His father tells him he’ll be found dead on the streets one day, but that doesn’t deter him or scare him. He would never tell his father if he was scared.

There is a brief period of calm when he pretends to the visiting authorities that everything is fine, he won’t run away again and he tries, truly, to be good. He works hard in his father’s hamburger shop, standing on a crate to reach the milkshake machine. But he can’t bear the violence that erupts like a ripe boil in the house, and when he feels its approach he flees. It’s back to the old pattern. Police, courts, disappearances, the fury of his father and stepmother. There are warnings and reports and beltings, nights sleeping in sheds and trains and the protective arms of shrubs under the Harbour Bridge. When the police and social workers ask him why, he doesn’t have an answer. Especially if his father is there. There’s the cruelty of home and school but sometimes, as he walks alone at night or hauls his calliper up into a train carriage, he feels he’s not so much running away as running towards.

This is what he doesn’t know: that even before polio condemned him to pain and humiliation, his body was imprinted with his mother’s, and with her absence. Unconsciously, his body registers all that is missing: any feeling of love or attachment from his father and stepmother, every bruise and cruelty they inflict as they project the anger and pain of their own lives. He is a child, still. An adult might understand the actions of other adults, or try to, but to a child already suffering emotional deprivation and rejection, as his psychiatrist writes, the abuse at home and at school can only confirm his solitary station in the world, his otherness.

The one notion that pulls him through, like a bright thread he can follow in the dark, is that somewhere, he has a real mother. A woman just like those he sees with other boys, someone a bit like his aunt, Adriana: someone warm, kind, someone who cooks cakes and sings in the kitchen and who smells good, of talcum powder and eau de cologne. Who waits for him to come home from school, who ruffles his hair and jokes with him as Sophia does with George, and helps him with the spelling he still can’t seem to do, and still kisses him goodnight, even now that he’s big.

He knows this other mother, this real one, exists somewhere, though his father refuses to speak of her, dismissing Peter’s questions with a wave of his hand or a slap and she ran away, she didn’t want you. But Peter knows better. He doesn’t believe any of the insults Michael and Sophia fling around about her. He knows. It all adds to the vague picture forming in his head. From somewhere, he has no idea where, he has heard the name Yvonne. He imagines a young, pretty French girl with a chignon and dainty hands. Even if she did run away, he refuses to believe she ran away from him. From Michael, perhaps, and from the miserable life they lead, he can understand that.

He begins to see they have much in common, his lovely French mother and him. One day he’ll get away for good too.