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the last of the light before turning to the mirror to tie my tie. Below me the wide lawns ran down to the river, with the formal flower gardens upon the right and the screen of oaks, gums, wattles, and pines upon the left that hid the station buildings. Beyond the river our pastures stretched over and beyond the rise a couple of miles away, and far on the horizon the long ridge of the Grampians stood black against the last of the sunset light. There was contentment here, with no war and no threat of war, no aircraft, no tanks, and no soldiers. This was a place to which a man might come when he had had the great world and its alarms, to do a good job in peace. Some day a war might come again and I would have to leave my peace and go and do my stuff as my father had before me, but for the moment I was glad to be out of it all and back at Coombargana as a grazier.
    I finished dressing and went down to the drawing-room. My father and mother were both there waiting for me and wanting to know if everything in my room had been all right. Tine,' I said. 'I might have walked out yesterday instead of five years ago,' and I laughed. Actually, in five years one changes and there were things in that room that I would alter as soon as I could. There were things there that I now had no need of, like the stick from my crashed Typhoon, or the compass from the first Me 109 I got, over Wittering. These things had solaced me in 1946, but that was eight years ago; I did not need them now, and they were better out of the way.
    I had another pink gin with my father, and then dinner was announced. Mrs. Plowden put her head in at the door. She was untidy as ever with a wisp of grey hair falling down over her face; her sleeves were rolled to the elbow and she wore a coarse apron of hessian. She said brightly, 'It's all in, on the table, Mrs. Duncan.' My mother thanked her, and she withdrew.
    I saw my mother glance at my father, and caught his glance in return. Things must have been different in the days of the parlourmaid, and they had to adjust themselves to new ways and new manners.
    33
    We went into the dining-room. To me the bare, polished table with the lace mats and the silver was well laid, but to my mother everything was in the wrong place and she hobbled about, rearranging salt cellars and wine glasses, moving dishes from the table to the sideboard, till the arrangement was as she was used to having it. 'I'm afraid everything's a bit higgledy-piggledy tonight, Alan,' she said. 'We'll get things organised in a few days.'
    I said, 'It looks all right to me, Mum.'
    She said quietly, 'I suppose the fact of the matter is that we've been spoiled for the last year or so. I'd almost forgotten what it was to have to train somebody to do things nicely.'
    'She was good, was she?'
    My mother said, 'She was an educated girl, so one only had to show her how to do a thing once. I think she must have come from a good home, where they lived nicely.'
    My father said, 'She used to work the radiogram.'
    'The radiogram?'
    My mother said, 'Whenever your father and I had a little celebration here, on my birthday, or when we heard about the wool sale, we used to have a bottle of champagne with dinner, and music. Your father would put on a long-playing record in the drawing-room, Oklahoma or South Pacific or something nice like that, and we'd leave the doors open so that we had music during dinner. And then we found that Jessie knew how to change the record, and she knew most of the records that we liked, so after that we didn't have to bother.'
    'She got to know our ways,' my father said. He turned to my mother. 'Remember when we heard Alan was coming home? She finished handing the entree and asked if she should put on a record.'
    My mother nodded. 'It will be a very long time before we find another girl like Jessie.'
    We seemed to have drifted back on to the difficult subject. I cast about hurriedly for something fresh to tell my mother that would take her mind off