Mister Townsend’s Lion: A Baby Boomer’s Tale

By P Robinson Dunn

What was it like for a child in the 1950s to be part of an adventurous immigrant family in rustic Queensland, Australia? A bit like Swiss Family Robinson meets The Darling Buds of May – with Scottish accents.

Mister Townsend’s Lion ~ A Baby Boomer’s Tale tells, from a child’s point of view, of being transplanted from the relative comfort of charming Hampshire in England to a primitive place, not marked on a map, in rural Queensland, Australia. Born into a world recovering from the devastations of World War II, P. Robinson Dunn was one of the first baby boomers. Her father is a Scottish ex-Navy man. He is exuberant, philosophical, ready for fun and adventure, “a nomadic dancing man” suffering malarial nightmares of his war-time experiences. Her Shetlander mother is gorgeous, a practical nurse, a good cook and a fabulous baker – “a lightly-floured woman” with a penchant for inventions and old-fashioned gadgetry. They have a global outlook. They also have a bunch of children. And they’re hoping for an even dozen. This is the story of a happy family, as seen through the eyes of their daughter growing up in the 1950s.

Packing their trunks as well as their sense of adventure, cheerfulness and enthusiasm for a new life in a new country - far from the reminders of World War II in crumbling post-War Britain - this cosmopolitan couple and their children, a young family of Ten Pound Poms, climb aboard the S.S. Orion heading for Australia. Leaving behind the horrors of the 1940s and embracing the tremendous global changes of the 1950s, they make the best of things in the Queensland bush, which holds more than a few challenges for them... Creepy-crawlies and colloquial language bring bewilderment. Droughts and bushfires bring despair, hardship and sorrow.

They have also worriedly observed their wee daughter’s silence. She has been mute since leaving Great Britain aboard the S.S. Orion, and for more than a year after arriving in sunny Queensland. Later, the child’s barefoot school days are coloured by a heart-warming family background which encourages excursions of questionable merit into the bush, friendship, Saturday matinées, the circus, visiting glass-blowers and jugglers, radio serials, pets and farm animals: it also tolerates post-War bush telephones, jitterbugs, taddies and yabbies. And worse. All of these are variously punctuated with hilarity, fun and learning, gratitude and moderation, mistrust and insecurity, joy and happiness, sadness and revelation.
Geraldine Cox, AM, Country Director and President, Sunrise Children’s Villages, Cambodia and author of Home Is Where the Heart Is had this to say: Mister Townsend’s Lion – A Baby Boomer’s Tale takes the worrying situation faced by a child of the 1940s who is moved from a safe and comfortable village life in country England to a tent address in rustic Queensland and brings it to life with humour and real joy. The story moves along quickly and faithfully paints a heart-warming picture of the daunting challenges faced, and the delights of someone growing up in the midst of a loving family in the 1950s. A steady personal growth is clear as the narrator gains years and experience in her new country. Challenges are met and gradually the alarming becomes the common-place. The book is beautifully written and a real treat to read. As someone who works with children and adolescents facing life in another country, I enjoyed it immensely.

However, we read that, long before Mister Townsend’s Lion was born, one of Patricia’s Primary School Teachers had a different view of her abilities, writing on her Report Card: Patricia’s imagination must be curbed at all costs.
Written with radiating warmth and vitality by one of the first baby boomers, Mister Townsend’s Lion is proof that P. Robinson Dunn’s imagination is alive and well. It is a story about being a toddler in Britain in the late 1940s and growing up in Australia in the 1950s.

• Language: English
• Publisher: booksunleashed
• Release date: Jul 30, 2014
• ISBN: 9780987600172

P Robinson Dunn

Born just a few months after World War II, in beautiful and historical Hampshire in a little English village housing medieval Portchester Castle, P. Robinson Dunn was one of the first baby boomers. When she was a small child, she migrated to Australia with her family. Patricia has lived and worked in England, Canada, Switzerland, Germany, Jordan, France, Japan and Australia and has travelled the world extensively. She lives with her husband in Australia, planning her next trip. The flour, nomadic and dancing genes live on!

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Copyright © P. Robinson Dunn

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Cataloguing-in-Publication entry is available from the National Library of Australia

http://catalogue.nla.gov.au

Robinson Dunn, P., author

Mister Townsend’s Lion

A Baby Boomer’s Tale

ISBN 978-0-9876001-7-2 (ebook)

Robinson Dunn, P.

Cover designed by Breakout Communications

This book is a memoir. It reflects the author’s recollections of her experiences and her parents’ experiences as told to her. Out of concern for privacy, some names and personal details have been changed; some sequences of events have been changed or modified; some dialogue has been recreated.

Part One

My little world

Blessed with a bell

Farewell – Australia ho!

Mermaids, pollywogs and shellbacks

A most leisurely train ride

A pocket full of shoes

The Beast

She speaks!

Rain?

Running with the herd

Bonnie and Bonza

Nil by mouth

Cocky and the dragon

Wail of a Christmas

Part Two

Water on the hoof

A reckless, disreputable affair

Fire and drought

Obedience and the value of keeping fit

Moving to town

Rain!

Friendship and snapdragons

The Green Bus

Dragonflies and other distractions

The difficulties of kissing a trout

A prickly business

Tapioca and hard-boiled eggs

Joey and Sunny

The good ship Lollipop

Part Three

Meetings and greetings

A lot of bull

Plummeting and climbing

Wee Scotties

The birds and the bees

The pony club

The untarnished Penny

Gentlemen’s hours

The Honey Man

Nightmares and violets

The thrill of motion pictures

Chocolate custard

A date with destiny

Part Four

Glass blowers and jugglers

A wildly interesting picnic

Tojo stays home

Sweet love

Lightning strikes

Buster

Fiddling on Sundays

Warts and all

Margarita’s wild and woolly walks

Fashionable cats

Here boy, Lassie

Part Five

Building a bonfire

Palaeontology and Harry Stottle

A mother’s determination

The assiduous widdler

Scheherazade

Unbearable suffering

Treasures of the earth

Head first

Look Mum – no hair

A furtive tipple or two

Red-letter days

Surf

Music and babble

New Year’s Eve and the new decade

My little world

"Come on! urged the district nurse. She was a no-nonsense, let’s-not-waste-all-day kind of woman. It’s time this child was born!" The veritable old boiler then gave the young woman a none-too-gentle shove in the stomach and a baby girl was propelled into the world, bawling her first notes. She was soon wrapped and consoled by her mother who lay warmly covered on a rubber sheet until the doctor, cold and worn, arrived at the house some three hours later.

During that time, the mother comforted and fed her infant, introduced her bright-eyed three-year-old son David to his baby sister, and wondered about her husband, a young Royal Navy Petty Officer who was somewhere in the Baltic Sea aboard HMS Frobisher teaching even younger men how to be midshipmen.

Damp with the sweat of her labour, the young woman’s fashionably cropped, dark and curly hair emphasised the colour of her creamy skin and the white linen on which her head lay. Her sooty-lashed, large and intelligent eyes were the same changeable colour as the deep green sea that she sometimes crossed between Aberdeen and Shetland. Her nose was small and upturned; her near-perfect teeth were revealed in a frequent smile and she was blessed with high cheekbones and a strong but utterly feminine jaw line. A jaw like Mussolini, and teeth like tombstones, she joked.

Despite her great discomfort, her eyes were quite dry when the doctor arrived. His task would be to stitch where the patient had been torn by the speedy arrival of the baby after being shoved in her stomach by the stumpy nurse.

Give her a hanky, growled the old Army doctor.

I don’t need a hanky, thank you, said the mother, who didn’t have a cold.

A hanky. To bite on, ordered the doctor, who proceeded to suture his reluctant patient. No painkillers. No anaesthetic. No words. The weary doctor sutured, a blizzard howled outside and mother and infant howled an unfamiliar duet inside. The sun had not yet risen on this bitter January morning. It was cold, despite the blazing fire crackling in the bedroom fireplace in Castle Street, Portchester. Here, merely a stone’s throw from Portchester Castle, on the south coast of England, I was born a Hampshire hog, a name people born in Hampshire have been called since the 1700s, and possibly even before then. The year was 1946.

I was propelled into a world recovering from the devastations of World War II and where global changes were taking place at breath-taking speed. My mother listened to the BBC World Service with utter surprise. In the course of a day or two, General De Gaulle resigned in France; the Greeks held mass meetings against the return of the King; the Belgian Government rejected a proposal by King Leopold to return to the throne; aeroplanes dropped leaflets of the cease-fire order along the north China railways to try to stop the civil war there; the Government sent our Ambassador at Moscow to Batavia to help solve the political conflict between the Javanese and the Dutch; Admiral and Lady Mountbatten announced they would pay an official visit in March to Australia; in Washington, President Truman dealt with the State of the Union and the Budget in a single document for the first time.

I only turned my back for a minute, said my mother to her visitor, who had just dropped in. They were both intrigued to learn that the familiar chimes of Big Ben before the nine o’clock news were muffled in their initial strokes and the chimes were accompanied by a peculiar grating noise. The BBC announcer explained that this was caused by particles of ice flying off the mechanism and being crushed in the cogs of the chiming gear.

"Well, Patricia, my peerie bairn, you didn’t quite stop the clocks!" said my mother.

After her visitor left, my mother reflected sadly, Oh, Mother, I would love you to have met my two children, she murmured.

Each time a child was born to her, she grieved anew for her mother, Mary Helen Garrick. After being sick for years with Bright’s disease, which was incurable, her mother died of kidney failure. Her father was Adam Manson but my mother never took his name.

Three years earlier, in November 1942, while her husband was on a secret mission with His Majesty’s Royal Navy, she was twenty-two and heavily pregnant with her first baby when she took the train from Edinburgh to Aberdeen. A chill wind was blowing and it was cold when she reached her destination. Mother Nature had been industrious and most leaves had been stripped from the deciduous trees to lie in soft mounds or be tossed around in the autumn wind like pieces of crepe paper, in soft earth tones. Late autumn was previewing the first signs of winter. It will be a bitterly cold voyage, she thought, as she prepared to board the vessel that would take her over the wild, tempestuous, deep North Sea from Aberdeen to Lerwick, the port of Mainland Shetland.

Her intention was to spend some time with her mother in Shetland and give birth to her baby there. She hoped that baby and grandmother could be acquainted, and then mother and child would return home to Edinburgh.

In the little village of Tingwall, she was unable to get transport to where her mother was hospitalised so, despite the freezing cold and the bitter wind and because there was no choice, she walked the four tiring miles to see her. They had always loved one another very much. She had no siblings and her father was absent, so mother and daughter had been the centre of each other’s universe for most of her life.

When she arrived at the hospital, she was shocked to see her mother’s frail condition. She had been unaware that her mother was gravely ill and was grateful she was sleeping when she arrived, allowing her unchecked tears to flow. She planned to spend some hours with her mother, knowing that her mother was drifting in and out of consciousness. She gently stroked and warmed the backs of her mother’s cold milky-white hands and caressed her pale cheeks as she talked to her in a whispered monologue. Her mother’s darkly lashed eyes opened slowly. Bessie, you’ve come, her mother spoke softly, smiled weakly and said, and I see you’ve brought the baby with you.

In the warm and peaceful room, the young mother-to-be placed her mother’s hand on her very pregnant stomach and encouraged the quiet infant and the silent grandmother to commune.

The time passed; there was little conversation, as though mother and daughter were cocooned and relaxing the strong invisible gossamer threads that linked the heart of the mother to the heart of the daughter and connected them. Wordlessly, they knew that the precious connection of their souls could never be severed.

The young woman carefully stroked her mother’s rich dark hair, relishing its thickness and committing it to memory, and then with heart-breaking gentleness she kissed each of her mother’s cheeks. Marmy, you mean the world to me. And you always have, she whispered. Holding her mother’s hand to her own heart for a long and cherished moment, she slipped her mother’s hand under the covers to warm it. Then she left and her tears ran like rivulets.

The walk back on the icy road was bleak and the young woman felt utterly forlorn, as if all hope had drained out of her. There had always been such a deep love between them; they had always been so close.

She wrote an optimistic letter to her mother advising a date when she would come again to see her, this time with her newborn infant. A week later David was born, solemn and innocent, with soft downy auburn hair and an intelligent stare.

Thirteen days after David’s birth was the date Bessie had chosen to visit her mother again, but December snowfalls choked the roads and made them impassable. Eventually, mother and infant son were able to travel to the hospital.

The duty nurse handed her an envelope. The writing was familiar. It was her own.

Mary Helen Garrick, who lived forty-two years, passed away and was buried before Bessie’s first child David was born. Traditionally, women were not permitted to attend funerals in Shetland so relatives arranged to have Mary Helen buried in the grounds of the village kirk, surrounded by the old stone wall built to protect the headstones from the savage wind and the sea. They thought it prudent not to tell Bessie until after her baby was born because the snow storms had made travel impossible. There was a war on, and everywhere there was so much grief! So, for the time being, Bessie denied herself the important grieving process. Perhaps if there had been a ceremony for her to attend, a body to farewell, a good-bye! She grappled with this throughout her life, despite visits to her mother’s grave in later years.

On the other hand, she barely gave her father a thought. After all, I doubt that he ever gave me much of a thought, she considered bitterly, as she turned her attention back to her newly born infant.

Blessed with a bell

My baptism took place on Sunday 1 December 1946 aboard HMS Frobisher with the upturned ship’s bell, which had been filled with water and blessed by the Royal Navy Chaplain at the Church of St Martin. It was a naval tradition to use the bell as a baptismal font and it was customary to engrave the details of the child’s baptism on the bell.

Soon after this event, we moved to the Isle of Wight. Accustomed to island life, my mother was in her element and she and Dad soon made lifelong friends there. Much, much later my parents told me some stories about that time. They had a friend with the unlikely name of Daisy Pink. Daisy had a son and she was eagerly awaiting his return home on a break. His parents named him after his Dad, but Daisy called him Little Harold.

Oooh David, you’ll love my Little Harold, she often said.

Four-year-old David, my big brother, was dreaming up all manner of games he would play with Little Harold. And they could play with each other’s tip-trucks!

Eventually, after weeks of waiting and hearing stories about Little Harold, he arrived home. Auntie Daisy invited my parents, David and me to her house. David was very excited and looking forward to meeting Little Harold. Clutching his tip-truck David looked up with sheer amazement and downright awe, and with a hoarse little whisper asked, This is your Little Harold? Six feet five inches of Harold stood before him.

On Sunday, David was dressed and ready for Sunday School but my mother told me I made such a fuss that my parents allowed me go with him, although I had only just learned to walk. David arrived home frowning so my mother asked him what was the matter. He said, Why would anyone give such an odd name to a bear? What name is that? she asked. Gladly, he replied. Not understanding what he meant, my mother asked David what he had been learning at Sunday School. My brother replied that it was about Easter and the story was about Gladly, the cross-eye bear" — Gladly the cross I bear!

If I stretched my body and put my head on top of the tulip then my toes seemed to be exactly at the end of the stem. We were the same length! The tulips were placed end to end—a flower at this end, a flower at that end—and worked in soft, varied purple and burgundy colours with green leaves. My father hooked this little rug with a bodkin and strands of wool in his rare, free time at sea. I cherished that rug and, when he was away, I loved to bury my face deep in the fibres to find his musty smell, the particular Scent of My Dad, which came from his hands as he fashioned the little rug. It is my first memory, when I was about fifteen months old.

According to the family scriptures, I sped through baby talk, although I called the cat a tussy-tat at an impressively early age and pleased the family almost as much as myself. While we were visiting Granny in Glasgow, we saw a wagon, ancient but sturdy, being drawn noisily along the cobbled street by a magnificent honey-and-cream-coloured Clydesdale. As the spectacle clattered and rattled along, I raised my small and dimpled hand and pointed at the horse—Tussy-tat? I questioned, beaming, and lost all credibility.

Like most little boys, David was a great climber and he loved to climb my high chair while I was in it. He was keen to hone this skill, especially at mealtimes. I had not uttered a syllable since the infamous and entirely regrettable tussy-tat affair, but on this particular day I raised my chin and with absolute conviction said, Get down, Doddo! And, wearing an expression of sheer astonishment, he did. Immediately. Apparently worn out from this verbiage, I had nothing to say for weeks. And it seems the refreshment gained from those tranquil weeks was beneficial as I then began to speak in whole sentences.

Granny was born in Glasgow on 21 November 1877 and named Jeanie Ewart. A diminutive woman with a pale peach complexion, her sparkling blue eyes betrayed a wild and passionate, sky-larking nature prone to favour table-thumping discussions about politics, religion and other unwise subjects. Despite her lack of stature, her physical energy was monumental. Transported by a cloud of red-blonde hair, she was born to entertain, ever the actress, frequently the singer—sometimes of the bawdy ballad. And in a playful way, she loved my equally bright-eyed father who was cast in a similar mould as far as personality and Celtic colouring were concerned. In all her long lifetime, she was unable to irritate my father, and vice versa for that matter. They forgave each other everything and their open, unconditional love was a rare thing.

Henry Thomas Robinson, my grandfather, had married Granny before the new millennium in the late 1890s. He was as tall as Granny was not. His dark and curly hair, penetrating deep blue eyes and a smile loitering with intent were his most obvious features. When he threw back his head and laughed, his eyes sparkled spontaneously as though they were just waiting for the opportunity. A softly spoken and gentle man, he had a passion for poetry and was known for his quick wit, his kindly nature, and for never having raised his voice in his life. His character and personality transcended his good looks but he would say that his appearance had nothing to do with him and for that he could thank or curse his ancestors.

A member of the Highland Light Infantry, my grandfather perished on 15 June 1917 on blood-drenched French soil during the Great War and lies buried in unfamiliar ground at Villers-Guislain in northern France alongside his fallen comrades. In July, the month after he died, his broken-hearted widow gave birth to their third son, my father Henry David, whose happy nature would help to heal her pain. She knew her soldier husband would not be coming home. She knew because, with his eyes full to the brim, he told her so. I’ll no’ be home, Jeanie, he told her, "for I canna kill a man. I canna do it." He was a Highland Light Infantry runner, racing between trenches across open ground in all weather to deliver messages for the officers in charge, while the men in the trenches did their best to offer protective rifle cover from the enemy. By some strange quirk of fate, my grandfather had avoided being killed until that grey day.

A well-maintained, stark headstone on foreign soil, a ten-line card-paper commemoration scroll, a hand-written line in a heavy volume housed in Edinburgh Castle, a bronze relief the size of a bread-and-butter plate depicting a soldier of the Great War beside my grandfather’s name: these are the meagre mementoes of a good man, a kind and loving man, but miserable consolation for a woman whose man, like so many others, was wasted in the prime of his life.

We moved to Fareham during my mother’s pregnancy with her third baby. My parents were in the process of fulfilling a dream. They made and kept important appointments while crested letters travelled back and forth in the mail.

In August 1947, Douglas Ewart was born at home in Fareham (another Hampshire hog!) to ecstatic parents. His father was ecstatic as he was present and able to hold his son even before his wife had a chance. A father’s presence at a birth was extremely unusual for the times. Oozing with love and tenderness and holding Douglas with great care, his father gently kissed his face, and then blew soft kisses on his neck with glistening eyes. The baby was beautiful, with a halo of blonde curls and big round eyes fringed with ridiculously long dark lashes.

Farewell – Australia ho!

Gradually my parents’ dream developed and became a clear plan which had a date. As the date approached, we said our sombre farewells to Granny and the rest of the family in Scotland and took a train to the south coast. With a combination of mounting excitement, trepidation and our well-packed trunks, we climbed aboard the S.S. Orion and set sail for Australia.

From his earliest school days, my father had corresponded with his siblings, brother Jim, who had lived in Australia for many years, and sister Janet, who lived in upper New York State. It had been a big decision by Dad to remove himself, his wife and his children from relative comfort and embark on an adventure to the other side of the world where he had a brother whom he barely knew. Dad had not seen his brother since he was five years old and Jim was an idealistic youth of seventeen, determined to see the world and to own a farm in Australia.

The Orion left Southampton in calm waters and soon negotiated the rough waters of the Bay of Biscay. Not long after that, my parents took us on deck to see the Rock of Gibraltar. Dad said authoritatively, Algeciras and Cadiz to port-side and Tangiers to starboard. The Rock is port amidships. And The Rock gradually became bigger as we got closer. Now we’re in the Med, said my father, wearing a very happy face. But he didn’t say that he knew the sparkling blue waters of the Mediterranean Sea intimately.

My mother had a talent, which became more obvious as time ticked by, for being able to make something special out of scraps and seemingly useless bits, and this stretched to clothing, food, and various other fields of endeavour. I enjoy the challenge, she said modestly as she dressed six-year-old David in a splendid Greek military costume she made for the children’s fancy dress ball aboard the Orion.

On 1 April we celebrated All Fools Day and Mama explained its origins to us. She told us that in France in 1564, when New Year’s Day was changed from 1 April to 1 January, the people who refused to make the change were ridiculed and tricks were played on them. And so we played innocent tricks on each other, with David and my parents calling April Fool!

Best of all, I remember the Gully-gully man. He boarded the ship with the other entertainers and traders at Port Said and stayed aboard while we sailed the length of the Suez Canal. My father held me up so that I could see the Gully-gully man produce chickens and eggs from children’s ears and two doves from my bewildered brother’s head. I was agog! But that’s not all that impressed me. The Gully-gully man did not seem to care that he wore a long dress to his shoes and a funny brimless red hat with a short black silk tassel swinging from the middle of its flat top. He made everyone laugh until they were wiping their eyes. I was mightily impressed and also sure he was the magician he claimed to be because he was so sparklingly amusing despite having to wear a dress and a little red sand bucket on his head.

Together with David and a small band of children pressed against the rails, I waved tentatively and blew shy kisses to the Gully-gully man when he left the ship.

The Orion continued its journey through the Red Sea. The family was enjoying the warm sun on the deck and David was playing a game with his own shadow when, apropos of nothing obvious to me, Dad stretched sleepily and launched into a philosophical monologue. He spoke more to himself than to anyone else.

Thales was the first documented philosopher and he believed that water was the source of all things. No-one really understands what Thales meant, but water has incredible power—the power to shape coastlines, the power to grow all living things. He mused and gently shook his head as if he didn’t quite believe it himself. All kinds of odd things pop up in the ground and in streams and lakes and ponds after the rain. Thales was a great wanderer. He travelled to Egypt, he pointed lazily, over there, starboard, and he figured out the height of a pyramid.

How did he do that? asked my brother, who had been hanging onto every word.

Well, he measured its shadow, said my father, stretching noisily and climbing to his feet. Like this. Come here, Son. Father and son stood side by side on the deck and looked at their shadows stretching before them. When your shadow is exactly the same as your height, well Thales calculated that if he could measure the pyramid’s shadow at exactly that moment, then he would know the height of the pyramid.

And did he? asked my brother.

Well, yes, he did, said Dad as he yawned and flopped back into the deck chair.

Mermaids, pollywogs and shellbacks

In mid-April we sailed across the Equator—an event enthusiastically celebrated by passengers and King Neptune alike. With his splendid green tresses, his blue-green beard and his cloak adorned with silvery scales and rainbow fishtails, King Neptune presented me with a document which read:

Aboard Ye Goode Shippe Orion

To all whom it may concern let it be known that

I, Neptunus Rex, Ruler of the Raging Main, Director of Calm Waters, Typhoons, Monsoons and Hurricanes, Lord of all Mermaids, Sea-Serpents, Sharks, Whales, Eels, Pollywogs and all other things that live in the deep, do hereby certify that Miss Patricia Robinson has entered my Royal Domain, and has been numbered as one of my Trusty Shellbacks, and I hereby demand that wherever ye shall meet her, thou shalt shew due honour and respect to her, as befits one who has become one of my Loyal Subjects. So in compliance with my Ancient Tradition she is herewith accorded the Freedom of the Seas. And further, she is exonerated from attending any other of my Initiation Ceremonies.

Signed this 13th Day of April in this Year of Grace, One Thousand Nine Hundred and Forty-Eight.

Davy Jones

His Majesty’s Scribe                         Neptunus Rex

In answer to David’s question, my mother explained to us how the Empire of the Sea became Neptune’s. Jupiter was known to the Greeks as Zeus. His father was Saturn, who tried to slay Jupiter but he was unsuccessful. When Jupiter grew up he removed his father from the throne and became the King of Heaven. As soon as he became King, he gave the Empire of the Sea to Neptune.

Why did he do that? asked David.

Jupiter and Neptune were brothers, said my mother. Jupiter shared the whole realm with his brothers.

When the Orion docked in Ceylon, my parents derived great pleasure in buying a pair of fabulous, heavy, carved elephants which still grace their mantelpiece and face the door so they can escape in case of fire. One of my mother’s charming ideas.

Long days followed with nothing to see but the rolling Indian Ocean. Eventually we sighted land and the ship buzzed with excitement and anticipation as we had our first glimpse of Australia. Then the Orion docked at the port of Fremantle in Western Australia, where a little boy named Toby and his family disembarked. I was sorry to see them go. Nearly every day of the voyage, Toby said to me, They’ve got others, so they don’t need you. I’m going to keep you and I’m going to marry you, which is hardly surprising: I was mute. I suppose it caused my parents some consternation that their tiny child hadn’t spoken a word since putting foot on the Orion and it would be another year before they heard her speak.

The Orion continued on, docking at the Port of Melbourne for three days. Our arrival in Melbourne coincided with the six o’clock swill, the slang term for the last-minute drinks rush at a public bar before closing time at six o’clock. An unattractive culture of very heavy drinking took place after work at five o’clock until the bars closed at six when men