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returning too, but the one we looked for had a small red dot on it, visible from a long way away. It was the red beret our brother wore and the yacht stood out amongthe others as ours, ours alone, holding our father and our brother. Our mother would call, ‘Look! There they are. I can see Tucker’s beret.’
    We would sometimes walk down one of the jetties to wait for them to row in with the dinghy after the boat had been left swaying at anchor a little way out in the bay. When the dinghy was tied to the jetty, a washing basket of fish, if it had been a good haul, would be lifted up the steps onto the jetty and our father and our small intense, quiet brother would follow. Together we’d walk back to the beach where Peter and our mother waited. Unpacking tomato sandwiches from greaseproof paper, our mother passed them round as we sat in a semicircle trying not to drop them in the sand. I can only remember having tomato sandwiches on these hot evenings, never any other kind. It may have been that it was the height of the tomato season and we’d had a good crop, or just that they seemed the most delicious food to take to the beach. White bread, butter and tomato with salt and pepper and a little bit of sand.
    When we had finished our meal, the fish, which was mainly King George whiting and tommy ruffs, was loaded into the boot of the car, parked on the esplanade. We’d drive home, have the sand rinsed off our feet and be put to bed while our parents sat in the peace, talking over whatever it was that parents talked about.
    Although it was years before I saw a reproduction of it, and years after that when I saw the painting itself, Turner’s ‘The Fighting Temeraire’, Britain’s most loved painting, reminds me of the red dot of my brother’s beret that we searched for on the sea’s horizon.

CHAPTER NINE
Carrying a Can
    Y allunda Flat is a district that lies a short journey inland from Tumby Bay. There my family visited their friends the Puckridges. Mr Puckridge was the manager of a famous sheep station owned by a wealthy bachelor, Mr Mortlock, who also owned Martindale Hall near Clare, north of Adelaide. Many years later, to everybody’s astonishment, Mr Mortlock married his secretary. When he died, Mrs Mortlock gave Martindale Hall to the University of Adelaide and I stayed there once on a camp held by the Department of English with my married lecturer boyfriend, thereby sullying a story of nobility.
    Mrs Puckridge was my mother’s closest friend. They met when my mother arrived in Tumby Bay as a recent bride. Mr Puckridge was my father’s client and, being a stock-and-station agent, he often needed to visit the station to inspect sheep and to discuss business.
    Sometimes we were invited out to the station to have lunch with the Puckridges. There is a photograph of us fourchildren with an old hand-driven lawnmower, and a screen of trees behind. Peter, the smallest, is sitting on the lawnmower and we are ranged by size along the handle. The boys are wearing overalls with white short-sleeved shirts. I am wearing a white blouse and what may be shorts. All these clothes were, of course, made by our mother. Our white hair reflects the sun like salt pans. The lawn beneath our feet added to the air of luxury and opulence that always seemed to me to be the essence of the station with its huge cool house, Mrs Puckridge within, waving away the flies, and Mr Puckridge at the head of the dining table. There must have been a well or a bore because the lawn and the exotic tree and the whole air of green fecundity was a contrast and a delight to me. I loved going to Yallunda Flat to visit the Puckridges.
    We always had roast mutton for lunch. The sheep was killed from what was called ‘the ration paddock’. Because it was wartime, there was a feeling that every sheep had to be accounted for and only sheep in the ration paddock could be killed for the family to eat. It may be that I just got that idea from the name ‘the