‘Mummy!’

Kathleen O’Grady could usually tell which of her five children was trying to get her attention by the particular tone of the screaming coming from one room or other of the square-edged weatherboard house in St Kilda, not so far from the streets she’d walked as a child and the frightening, gigantic leering face of Luna Park’s clown.

But not today.

She hadn’t had enough cups of tea to decipher which child was bellowing. Their house wasn’t big—three bedrooms, a kitchen, a living room, one bathroom and an outside laundry—but it was going to be fully theirs one day and that made her a very happy wife. Mr and Mrs Peter O’Grady had secured a loan from the Commonwealth Bank, back in March 1951, on the strength of Peter’s wage as a car mechanic. Each year since he’d been busier than ever, now that the hardest days of austerity after the war were over and everyone was buying new cars, and the more cars on the roads, the more cars needed fixing. Back then, when they’d bought their house, there had only been two children and one on the way. Kathleen sometimes looked back on those days with a sense of wistfulness. The whole family had been able to fit in one car back then, the baby in a Moses basket on the back seat and the other two squeezing into the space on either side.

Now there were five little O’Gradys, almost exactly two years apart: Barbara, James—although he’d always been called Jimmy—Robert, Mary and Little Michael, who was two years old and still in nappies.

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