My abandoned father enjoys a good deal of sympathy from men and women alike. Everywhere he goes, his mates slap a hand on his shoulder and shake their heads. ‘You wouldn’t fucking read about it, Frank. Can’t fathom a woman doing a thing like that.’ And from the women: ‘She’s only kidding herself, Frank. Only kidding herself. Think she’s not going to regret this? Don’t make me laugh.’

Supported in this way, my father recovers. He finds the money to purchase a small Singer runabout with a fold-down roof, very perky. He begins to make trips to Melbourne, dashing along the twisting road that runs through Taggerty and Narbethong and over the Black Spur. He takes my sister Marion with him. Now that my mother is gone, my sister at fifteen is the prettiest girl in town, adored by everyone, but also the most wretched. She cries herself sick. The trips to Melbourne cheer her up. My father buys her gorgeous dresses in the city shops (with borrowed money) and takes her to shows at Festival Hall. She carries back souvenir programs that flabbergast me. Johnny Ray, Frank Sinatra, Guy Mitchell—legendary people.

Whenever my father and sister dash off to Melbourne, they make sure they visit the Myer Emporium. My sister cuddles me and whispers in my ear all that she has seen in the wonderful store. One day, she says, I will go with her and Dad. Oh, I won’t believe what I will see! Oh, Bobby, Bobby—the cafeteria has everything, just everything, and you can walk along with a tray and you can just choose whatever you want, I mean whatever you want! And there’s so many departments, which is why it’s called a department store, see, and everything, just absolutely everything is there, you can’t even believe it when you see it, just truly, Bobby, just true true truly!

I stay with a childless Polish couple while Dad and Marion are away. I have never met them before. I know that they are not amongst my father’s friends. They treat me with a grave and unfailing kindness, but rarely speak to me. I am baffled. I ask myself, in a blurry way, whether this is a normal thing. Mum there one day, gone the next, suitcase, red coat; Dad and Marion disappearing in the little blue Singer and returning with tales of a distant paradise, a store made up of departments; a couple of peculiar old people dressed in humourless grey left weirdly watching over me.

I am bedded down by the Polish couple in a painstakingly constructed nursery, bunny rabbits running in a frieze around the wall, a strange, foreign-looking cot. The brawny, gentle hand of the Polish wife strokes my hair, tears finding a course down her cheeks. Baffling.

Back home, an argument breaks out. I’m in my own bedroom without bunny rabbits, without the cot and the snuggly blue blanket. My father and sister are hissing in the passage. The words I pick up alarm me. ‘Yes, but he’ll be lonely, oh he will, Dad, he will, I promise you he’ll be lonely …’

Twenty years pass before this makes sense. Something jolts a cobwebby old file in my brain’s archives, the papers spill, I stoop to pick them up and find myself studying those words: ‘… oh he will, Dad, he will, I promise you …’ My sister explains, wrongly judging me old enough at twenty-seven to be placed in possession of the facts. It had been intended that the Polish couple would adopt me. I don’t know how. But Marion wouldn’t hear of it, and my father backed down.