SATURDAY MORNING AND I’m out of bed and running in the garden in my pyjamas. It is warm and Dad has made a wobbly pagoda from chicken wire and Mum has planted geraniums that have grown all over it. Nanna says that geraniums are common flowers. There are so many now that the wire barely holds them up and the pagoda is a solid block of white-pink coconut ice. The emperor camellias have been out for ages and a thick bed of their wax petals and whole fallen ones lie vanquished under the bushes. With the warmth the magpies have started to swoop in the lane and I will have to carry a branch over my head when I go down to Nanna’s after breakfast. Dad says don’t stay away too long because he will need me to help mow the front lawn, which is really just an old semi-tamed paddock left over from farming days long ago leading down to a pink hawthorn hedge. I wonder why my older brothers are never asked to help with the mowing.

I’m at Nanna and Pa’s front gate, two hundred yards from our house, and I pick a mirror leaf from the hedge bordering the drive, fold it in two and blow a farty tune from my piano lessons: