Street Sadness

     In the mid-1960s my mother had somehow found work on the evening shift at an old people’s home, in Eastbourne, Sussex, lifting the oldsters into their chairs, spooning-in their stewed apple, and wiping their chins and arses. I would later be traumatised by a visit that my family made to this home, in order to say goodbye to the residents before we embarked on our new life in Australia. We children had never met these people before, so it is baffling why my mother decided to present us to them. I recall being traipsed around the little bedrooms, each of which contained a bewildered old granny or granddad. We were surveyed by dimming, rheumy eyes and clutched and plucked at by gnarled witch’s fingers.      I had never seen a very ancient person before – my own grandparents having popped their clogs during my infancy – and the sight of all these toothless living-skeletons filled me with urgent panic. One old lady had only one eye and an em...

    When I was fourteen, my mother decided that she wanted an Old English sheepdog. The fact that she had five children, and no money, seems not to have entered her head. Perhaps she thought that such a symbol of middle-class prosperity would somehow act as a self-fulfilling prophesy and we would miraculously resume our rightful place in society, instead of languishing, as we were, in the open jaws of destitution.     And, so, a pedigree dog was purchased, at large expense. We had had the dog for almost a year when we were forced to move house. My father had been gambling the rent money for many months and the landlord had reached the end of his tether. We moved into a decrepit Victorian boarding house in the Dandenong Ranges, consisting of four rooms, arranged along a wooden platform, with a separate kitchen room, which was little more than a wooden box with a sink in it. There was no running water.     Even at the time I ...