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two in the front.
    Was my daughter my doll? Perhaps. Only she can say. But I was my mother’s doll in many ways and it did me nothing but good.

CHAPTER SEVEN
The Night my Mother Turned Black
    M y mother said that the event of the year in Tumby Bay during the war was the Red Cross Ball.
    For one of these balls, my mother turned me into a fairy. She made wings edged with tinsel and gave me a wand she had made with a star on the end.
    I was taken to the ball by friends of my parents. After I had gone, a neighbour, May Carr, whose husband was away at the war, called in and asked my mother to dress as an Aboriginal woman and come to the ball with her. The person who had planned to go as May’s partner was ill. ‘May begged me,’ my mother wrote in her autobiography, ‘and said no-one would know us. I said, “Well, if I can blacken Billy, my baby, I will go.” I woke him up and started to blacken his face and hands with shoe polish. He cried and I put him back to bed. [There must have been nobody at home for my mother to have insisted on taking Billy.] I put on a long coat, pulled a hatover my eyes and wore sandshoes. May then came back dressed as an Aboriginal man – she had a dead lizard on a string.
    ‘I am terrified of lizards…I said, “May, I won’t go if you take that lizard.” She said, “Look, it’s dead and I won’t let it get anywhere near you.” So I gave in. I still felt awful and didn’t want to go. I said to May, “Wait a minute.” I ran down to the fowl house and grabbed a couple of Rhode Island chooks. I felt like a thieving gypsy. I put them into a bag, cut a hole and pulled their heads out and threw them over my shoulder.
    ‘When we got to the hall, I didn’t want to go in. May said, “Come on, no-one will know us,” so I went in. I sat on the floor fondling the hens’ heads. I had to do something with my hands as I felt nervous. In the parade I accidentally trod on the dead lizard. I got such a fright I screamed and jumped into the air. Everyone shrieked with laughter, thinking it was an act. I noticed people nearly falling off their seats laughing.
    ‘We were awarded the-most-humorous-couple prize.
    ‘Mrs Wibberley [our doctor’s wife] was a judge and had presented Jill with her prize and told Jill that the black woman was her mother. Jill cried and cried. She thought I was black for life. Mrs Wibberley laughed until she nearly cried. I have an upturned nose and when blackened it looked so funny she told me she has never seen anything so funny.
    ‘I grabbed my prize and ran all the way home and forgot about May. I got into a bath…I wanted to be clean when they brought Jill home. It was days before I got all the black off and Jill would point at a bit and start to cry again.
    ‘Well, it made many people laugh but I was not too popular with Jill or Brink.’
    And where was Brink, my father, during all these high jinks? There is no word on that.
    And where was Tucker, their other baby? Were Billy and he left at home for this quick trip to the ball? There is nobody left to ask and it doesn’t matter.
    I remember seeing my mother leaping around to avoid the lizard being dragged on a string as the contestants paraded in a circle around the hall. It could not be my mother and yet they said that it was.

CHAPTER EIGHT
The Fighting Temeraire
    O n hot days we went in the late afternoon to the beach to wait for our father and Tucker to sail home. While Bill and I swam and played in our woollen bathers, Peter, the baby, remained with our mother on the sand and learnt to crawl. Salt-white daisy bushes lined the bay. Two jetties stretched out to sea and, while we played, our mother scanned the horizon for the little yacht.
    Finally, when we had come in from the water and were either fighting or making sandcastles and building moats around them, filling these with water from buckets of seawater, we were told to sit and to try to see if we could find the yacht coming home. Other yachts were