The school had no classrooms, just a church hall next to a red brick house with a front porch and a central hallway. The teachers were nuns in black and they lived in the house when the children weren’t there. The main rooms were used by the older classes while the little ones sat on the floor in the wooden hall.

I started prep late in the year and knew no one because we still lived in Richmond, the inner city, in my grandmother’s house. My grandfather would drive my mother and me out to the new suburb where dad was building our house. Then Poppa would pick me up at three o’clock and we’d stop in a muddy street near a creek. To check on progress. Sometimes they’d let me play on the framed walls while they talked and I’d become a pirate climbing the mast, up high to the lookout. You could see across the valley in those days and because it was spring the orchard blossoms on the far hills became rolling surf and I knew we were safe because no other galleons were in sight.

Again the longest day was past. The days were getting shorter - it was still barely noticeable but we knew it was happening, this summer too would pass.