In the late summer of that year we lived in Caulfield and the street sloped down to where the creek had been, and the houses on the upper side of the street had gardens which went down to the front fence. There was a drive down the side of the house where it did a bit of a twist by the chimney and then it straightened up a bit as the drive went past the wood heap. In the autumn of that year I noticed the leaves dropping and the neighbours swept them up into little piles and burnt them, and I noticed all of this. And I noticed the temperature dropping as well, and how the leaves had changed their colours on the trees, and I saw this as well.
I reckon I was about eight when we came there, and this would have been 1943. And there were puffs of white smoke in the sky on clear mornings and they told me these were ack-ack guns so I had to believe them. And the man next door, Mr Stewart, was an air raid warden. He had a tin hat, a little bucket, with some sand, and if you asked him nicely he would tell you what to do when a bomb dropped on your head. I never quite figured this out. Over the back fence there lived an Italian man with the biggest air raid shelter you have ever seen. I threw an egg at it, with Mussolini written on it.
