The Good Boy Read Online Free Page B

home until nearly six months after my parents’ wedding. As a result, the new daughter-in-law had to share house and husband with her mother-in-law. My grandmother seemed to always regard my mother as an interloper rather than as a daughter, and the six months spent together were very difficult. It was not until a little over two years after the wedding that the first child, my sister, was born and 21 months later, at the height of the Great Depression, I put in an appearance, the first son.
    My mother once told me that I had barely stopped crying for the first six months of my life, and that a nurse friend had taken one look at me, had shaken her head sadly, and had declared, ‘You’ll never rear him.’ I can’t remember why I cried so much and indeed, unlike many others, I have no precise memories at all of early childhood, just those of a warm and loving existence with my parents and older sister. I would like to think that, if I was a total pain for my family for the first six months of my life, I made up for it by being a source of uninterrupted joy thereafter but, alas, that did not prove to be the case.
    My younger brother arrived when I was just on four years old. All three children were born at home and I recall being brought into my mother’s room and seeing her lying quietly there in bed with a baby by her side. Some people remember being wheeled around in the pram; I only remember the pram as the one in which my sister and I took turns at wheeling our baby brother. Some people even claim to remember suckling and being weaned; I recall the day on which my brother, then about two years old and sitting on my mother’s knee as we drove along in my father’s Hudson, accidently dropped his dummy while waving it from the car window. ‘Gone,’ he declared, philosophically accepting that that stage of life was over and, as far as I know, cheerfully accepting his subsequent meals of the meat and three veg type. He would sit in a high chair in the kitchen at meal times, enjoying his food rather than splattering it around and, on another occasion, he had a photograph taken which my parents framed and sat on the piano in the living room. Beside it were photographs of my sister and of me, but they were pale and sepia-toned while my baby brother was in glorious colour, a process just then being introduced. He was dressed in a skyblue outfit and seems to have been in his usual sunny mood. The laughing and smiling that may then have seemed to be the product of the skilful photographer’s antics were, I now believe, the outward expression of my brother’s sunny disposition and sound philosophy of life, a sort of ‘Take it as you find it’, a ‘Make the most of it’ and an ‘Always look on the bright side’ attitude that has served him well. My sister and brother were both shown smiling or laughing at the camera, whereas I had a pensive, rather wan look … the typical problem middle child, I suppose.
    Shortly before my fourth birthday I set off one day with our wonderful live-in maid, Vera, for a week’s holiday on her parents’ farm in south-western Victoria. I now realise that this arrangement had been made to get me out of the house while my baby brother was being born, as was my sister’s holiday at the same time (in her case, on the farm of one of Dad’s cousins near Tatura). Vera and I travelled by steam train and after four or five hours arrived at the tiny railway siding where we were met by her brother-in-law who, unlike most of the other small-scale farmers in the district, had a car. We were first of all driven to their place where Vera’s sister had a grand meal ready for us and then we went on to her parents’ farm, where they had a small dairy herd and grew a lot of potatoes. I slept on a bed behind a canvas blind on the front verandah of the little weatherboard farmhouse, discovering that a kitchen could also be a dining