THE EARLY YEARS

My mother was a columnist. When we were children, she regularly wrote a column called Our Family for the Sentinel, the monthly paper for the Catholic Maitland diocese and later for the Sydney-based Catholic Weekly. I think she would have liked to become a journalist full time, but full-time work for a married woman was hard to come by in those days. Having seven kids didn’t help either.

My brother has collected all these columns for the family. Mum did not use our real names. The name she gave me was Anthony/Tony. When he sent us our copies, my brother said, ‘Anthony should have been strangled at birth – how goodie-goodie can a child be without becoming detestable?’

Anthony is 6 years old and the ‘gentleman’ of the family – he does just the right things instinctively. ‘The decent thing’, Uncle Charlie calls it whenever HE comes to stay. He washes his face and hands without having to be chased to the bathroom; and he says his prayers – without prompting – like a dear little angel.
We tried to imagine sometimes what Anthony is going to ‘be’ later on – oh, very much later on. But Tony is unperturbed – he faces the future with his calm serene confidence unshaken. ‘I don’t know yet’, he will answer to Dom’s probings, ‘but I will MOST PROBABLY be a just ordinary baker!!!”

That was published in 1947. I was born in 1941. I think it is probably an accurate description of me at the time. Have I changed over the following 74 years? I’m not prepared to say. However, I never became a baker. My wife won’t trust me in the kitchen.

Although two of my brothers have become published authors, they concentrated on non-fiction. It seems I am the only one in the family to have picked up my mother’s love of creative writing. She wanted to write a novel, but with seven kids, you just never seem to have the time.

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