There was a frozen moment before Piggy Bacon moved. Then he bent and s.n.a.t.c.hed up the shotgun. "It's not loaded," Ida said quietly. Piggy broke open the gun and looked. I've never ever seen a man snarl like Piggy did then. You could see the beast in his eyes as he charged up the steps into the dormitory. He tried first to beat the flames out with a blanket. We could hear him choking and spluttering inside. There was more smoke now, but already fewer flames. My heart sank. The curtains were on fire, but nothing else seemed to have caught. Piggy Bacon yanked off the curtains, cursing loudly.

Moments later he came rushing out, and ran to the line of wash buckets on the verandah. At this point Ida tried to stop him, but he pushed her aside angrily and sent her sprawling. With a bucket in each hand, the water spilling out over, he disappeared inside again. There were no more flames to be seen after that. The next time we saw him he came staggering out bent double and coughing his lungs out. But when he stood up he was smiling. Ida was lying there crying on the verandah, sobbing as if her heart would break.

Suddenly Marty began singing, quite softly at first, but very deliberately: For She's a Jolly Good Fellow. Soon we were all singing, and singing it out loud. It had become in that moment our song of defiance. We sang it right at him to show him just what we thought of him, and just as much we sang it for Ida to make her feel better, to thank her for what she'd tried to do for us, to show solidarity. Piggy screamed at us to stop, but we didn't. We kept on and on, all of us fired with new courage, and new fury too. Then I did perhaps the bravest thing I ever did in all my life, before or since, I went up those steps and helped Ida to her feet. I got the strap for it, ten strokes, but then we all got the strap that day. Marty got fifteen, because Piggy said he was the ringleader.

That night in the dormitory was the worst I can remember. The whole hut still reeked of smoke, a constant reminder to us of how Ida had so nearly succeeded in her brave attempt to set us free. We felt completely deflated and defeated. Hopes had been lifted so high that the disappointment, when it came as suddenly as it had, was all the more cruel. I cried into my pillow. Outside the cry of the dingoes echoed my sadness. Very few of us didn't cry ourselves to sleep that night.

It was still night-time when I was woken. Marty was shaking me awake, his hand over my mouth. "Get up," he whispered. "Get up. Get dressed. We're getting out of here."

I was still half-asleep, still half-dressed, trying to gather my thoughts. "But the door's locked," I said. "Piggy always locks the door, you know he does." Marty shushed me, took me by the arm and we tiptoed towards the door of the hut, carrying our boots.

Only one of the others stirred as we pa.s.sed, he just sat up,and looked blankly at us. "You woke me," he moaned. Then he lay down, and went straight back to sleep again.

Marty turned the handle, and miraculously the door opened. Marty took great care as he shut it behind us. We crept out on to the verandah, sat on the top step and put our boots on. He answered my question before I could ask it. "Ida did it," he whispered. "I told her we were going to make a break for it tonight, but we needed the door unlocked. I thought she'd do it, but I wasn't sure. But she did, didn't she? Come on."

We ran then, but not out into the bush as I'd thought we would. Instead, Marty was leading me in the direction of the farmhouse. I was wondering what he was up to, where he was going, when I realised we weren't heading for the farmhouse at all, but rather for the stables. Big Black Jack jumped a bit in his skin when he first saw us. But he seemed happy enough when Marty put his halter on him and led him out. Ida's dog barked then from the farmhouse, which sent shivers up the back of my neck. "Shut up, dog," Marty hissed, and shut up he did, just like that. I knew then that Ida had done that for us too.

We climbed up on to the back of one of the farm carts and mounted Jack from there he was a big horse, it was the only way up for us. Marty rode in front, me behind, hanging on. Then we just walked him away into the night. We didn't go up the farm track, because we knew that way must lead to a settlement or a town of some kind, and we wanted to keep well clear of people. If anyone saw us, they'd be bound to take us back. So we deliberately went the other way, down a gully and out into the bush. We didn't look back. I didn't ever want to set eyes on that place ever again. But I did say a silent goodbye to those we were leaving behind in the dormitory, and to Ida who had risked so much to give us our freedom.

Neither Marty nor I spoke, not for a long time, not until we'd put at least half an hour between ourselves and Piggy Bacon. By then we were trotting, and we couldn't talk because we were laughing so much. We had done it; we had escaped! And Big Black Jack was huffing and puffing underneath us, laughing along with us, I thought, revelling in his new-found freedom every bit as much as we were. But after a while I got to thinking about all the others we'd left behind at Cooper's Station, that maybe we should have taken them all with us. (All these years later I still feel bad about that. Why is it you never forget what you feel bad about?) Marty started singing London Bridge is Falling Down then, softly at first, then I joined in, and soon we were bellowing it out over the bush.

I kept asking Marty questions, the most important first. "Where are we going? Which direction?"

"Away," he said. "Anywhere just so long as it's away."

"You been planning this? You never said anything."

"That's because I didn't think of it until punishment parade yesterday evening," he said. "It was while he was. .h.i.tting me. I knew I'd be next, that he'd go after me just like he did with Wes. If I'd stayed he'd have killed me. Sooner or later, he'd have killed me. I know he would. Then I just got lucky. I saw Ida by the stables just before lock-up, told her what I needed. She didn't even have to think about it. She did say one thing though: I had to remind you about your lucky key, to be sure you took it with you. Hope you have, because I'm not going back, not for all the tea in China."

My heart was in my mouth. I hadn't given it a second thought. But I felt in my pocket, and there it still was. "Got it," I told him.

"That's good," Marty said, "because we're going to need it. We're going to need all the luck we can get."

It was fear of getting caught, and sheer exhilaration that we were free, that kept us going that night. We knew that we mustn't stop, not for a moment, or even slow down, because Piggy would be sure to be coming after us just as soon as he discovered we were missing, and that would be at roll call at dawn. We had until then to get as far away as possible. Big Black Jack didn't want to trot for long, but he plodded on steadily, never tiring, and we sat up there the two of us, rocking our way towards the grey light of dawn. We were just so happy to be out of Cooper's Station. We talked a lot as we rode, and we laughed, laughed as hard as we could. I remember I felt coc.o.o.ned by the night, swallowed up in its immensity, protected. At one point we saw some lights on the horizon. It looked like a settlement of some kind, so we kept our distance. We sang to the stars, all the millions of them up there. We sang For She's a Jolly Good Fellow till we were hoa.r.s.e with it. They seemed so close those stars, close enough to hear us.

It was cold, very cold that night. We had no water. We had no food. But none of that worried us. Not yet. We were too happy to be worried. Not even the cry of the dingoes bothered us. Only when the sun came up, and the bush came alive all about us, only then did we begin to feel alone in this wild and unfamiliar place with nothing but scrub and trees for miles around in every direction. We'd been following a dried-up creek for a while when I felt the first heat of the sun. That was when I first thought I wanted to drink. We had stopped talking to one another now. There was no more laughter. I was beginning to realise just how vast this place was and just how lost we were. I didn't like to say it though. Big Black Jack was walking on, purposeful and surefooted as ever. He seemed to know where he was going, and that made me feel better.

When finally Marty did say something though, it just confirmed my own worst fears. "I don't like this," he said. "We've been here before, when it was darker. We were coming the other way then. And I keep thinking something else too, something Wes told me once, and Wes knew all about horses. He said that a horse will never get itself lost. It'll always know the way home. I think maybe Big Black Jack is taking us back, back to Cooper's Station."

Wide as the Ocean.

How easily we fell into despair, the two of us. As we left the shade of the gum trees how quickly the heat of the sun sapped our strength, and our spirits too. The desire for water was fast becoming a craving. The need to find it became obsessive. Within just a few hours all we could talk about, however hard we tried not to, was water. I didn't care any longer if Big Black Jack was walking straight back to Cooper's Station, right up to the farmhouse, nor if Piggy Bacon might be tracking us down and coming after us. Every shimmering watery horizon we saw raised our hopes, but we soon found we could not trust even the evidence of our eyes. Mirages mocked us time and again. We tried our best to ignore them. But a mirage is only a mirage once you've discovered it's a mirage. Until then it's a pool of cold clear water just waiting for you, a pool of hope. More than once this cruel hoax set Marty and me arguing with one another. But in the end we didn't even have the energy for that.

The deep gully we were following was sandy, but up on the banks there were patches of brambles and scrub, and here and there cl.u.s.ters of stringy bark gum trees. Where there were trees, we thought there must be water. Little did we know. So we rode down the dried up gully, hoping all the while to discover a hidden pool in the shadows, but everywhere we found nothing but earth turned to dust. There wasn't a sign of moisture. And all through this futile search the sun rose ever higher, blazed hotter.

Gathering enough thoughts to decide anything was so difficult. But we did manage to concentrate enough to make one decision between us. We invested in it all our last hopes. We could see the ground ahead of us on one side of the gully rising steeply into a granite cliff. From the top of this cliff we thought we must be able to see for miles around, that from up there we'd be bound to spot a river perhaps or a pool. But Big Black Jack refused to be diverted from the gully, and we knew already he was far too strong to argue with. He went where he wanted to go and that was all there was to it. So in the end we had to get off him and lead him up the slope to the highest point of the cliff.

The whole of Australia lay before us, it seemed, as wide as the ocean, and just as inhospitable too. We could see the gully winding its way through the bush, other gullies joining it to make one great swathe of sand through the scrub, but there was no glint of water anywhere, not a shimmer to be seen. Now I really was beginning to hope that Piggy Bacon would find us, and take us back to Cooper's Station. I didn't care about the beating I knew he'd give us. I thought only of the wash buckets on the verandah, of plunging my head in and then drinking all of them dry one by one.

Marty was not lost in reverie as I was. He had not given up so easily. He was pointing excitedly at what he swore must be a place where there was water, and certainly in the distance there seemed to be a patch of much greener, lusher vegetation around some very tall trees. It was miles away and did not look at all promising to me. I didn't say so though. "If it's green, then there's got to be water somewhere," Marty said. "Got to be. Come on." Even if there had been a convenient rock from which to mount, I don't think either of us would have had the strength to do it. We could only manage to walk now with the greatest effort. So we led Big Black Jack down the hill and into the gully again.

We found Marty's promised oasis, but doing it drained us utterly of the last of our will power. There were trees, and it was green, but we could find no water. By now the sun had worked its worst on us. My head was swimming so much I often thought I would faint. I kept stumbling, and so did Marty. Breathing heavily now and lathered up, Big Black Jack wandered away from us into the deepest shade, put his head against the trunk of a tree and rested on three legs. Like us, he'd had enough. He could do no more. He was telling us in his own way that we should do it too, that we should never have ventured out in the heat of the day in the first place.

We lay down nearby. I curled up against Marty's back for comfort. "We'll be all right," he said to me, but I knew how far we were from all right. Even so it cheered me a little to hear him say it. I tried not to think that if I slept I might never wake up again, but I thought it all the same. Sleep, when it came, was so welcome.

It was evening when I woke and I knew at once we were not alone. They were crouching a few paces away, a dozen of them perhaps, bushmen, men and boys. They were studying us intently, as still as the rocks around them. I shook Marty until he sat up and took notice. "It's the same ones," he whispered, "the same ones that brought Wes back. I recognise them."

"Say something," I said. "You've got to say something."

"Drink," Marty mimed it as he spoke. "Water. We need water. Understand?" That was when the tallest of them came forward and crouched down close to us. I recognised him then. It was the old bushman who had come to Ida's house that day and treated my spider bite. He smiled at me like a stranger you've met before who is happy you've remembered him. He held out his cupped hands. His hands were full of fruit, red fruit, green fruit, like plums but rounder. We ate them. We drank them. We devoured them. I don't remember the taste, but I remember savouring the juice of each one, sucking out every drop of it. They gave Big Black Jack some too, which he snuffled up eagerly.

Then they motioned to us to stand up, to mount up. We tried, but they soon saw we couldn't do it without their help. I was lifted up effortlessly and sat astride Big Black Jack. So was Marty, who was sitting behind me now and hanging on. One of the bushmen took the reins, and led us along the gully. They were all around us, the children among them smiling up at us now. When I smiled back they laughed out loud, and I knew they were not laughing at me, but out of sheer delight. It touches me even now when I think of it. It was a little moment, and at the same time a great moment, one I have treasured always.

"They're taking us back," Marty whispered in my ear, "like they did with Wes."

"Only we're not dead," I said.

Within an hour or so they brought us through some scrubby trees to a hidden pool, a basin of dark rock. A cool evening breeze rippled the surface of the water. We needed no invitation and nor did Big Black Jack. He trotted to the edge and was drinking even before we managed to tumble off him. We were alongside him then, all three of us, one muzzle and two mouths drinking in all we could. Then Big Black Jack was shaking his dribbles all over us, and the bushmen were laughing. They drank too, but they were in no hurry. They did not gulp greedily as we had. Instead they scooped it up one-handed and sipped. In no time a fire was going. They speared some fish and cooked them. I tried to eat slowly as they did, but it wasn't easy. And there was more fruit afterwards, more berries. Big Black Jack browsed nearby. We could hear his jaws grinding, his teeth crunching. He was eating well too.

I expected we would sleep then because night was coming on fast, but we didn't. Instead they lifted us up again on to Big Black Jack, and together we moved on into the gathering dark. When I looked up I found that the stars were up there again filling the sky from end to end. I thought then of the night before, of how happy we'd been to be free, how we'd sung to the stars. And now we were being taken back to Cooper's Station, and there was nothing whatsoever we could do about it. I wondered why the bushmen were doing it, whether Piggy was paying them for hunting us down and bringing us back. But I thought that couldn't be right, that after all these were the people I'd seen him driving away from the farm with his horse whip when they strayed too close. I did whisper to Marty that we could try to tell them we didn't want to go back, but he thought it was pointless.

"They wouldn't understand a word we said," he told me. "So what's the point?"

All night long I dreaded the morning and the first sight of Cooper's Station, dreaded the thought of standing there on punishment parade, hand outstretched, trying to hold back the tears. The more I thought about it, the more I feared the coming of morning. That was why I took my lucky key out of my pocket and clutched it tight, so tight that it hurt me. I wanted to squeeze the luck out of it, to have all of it now because I needed it now more than ever before in my life.

But I began to worry that maybe even my lucky key would not be enough. So I prayed as well. I thought of Ida, then of all she had done for us, of the trouble she'd be in if Piggy found out she'd unlocked the door for us. I felt for the little wooden cross I wore around my neck. I touched it, remembering her. And then holding it I prayed for her. But if I'm honest, I think I prayed mostly for myself. Whether it was the key or the cross that did it I shall never know. I've been trying to work that one out ever since. I still am.

"Couple of Raggedy Little Scarecrows"

It wasn't until a few more days had pa.s.sed that Marty and I could begin to hope that the bushmen weren't taking us back to Cooper's Station after all. Neither of us could believe these people were lost. They seemed to know every root, every tree, every gully in this maze of a wilderness. The fruit they found was never a surprise, nor the roots they dug up, nor the pools they led us to. They knew exactly where they were. They belonged in this place.

They found their way through the bush with such obvious ease that it was quite impossible to think they could ever get lost here. So if they were not lost, and we were not being deliberately led around in circles, and if after all this time we had still not yet reached Cooper's Station, then it stood to reason we weren't going there. So where were they taking us then? Marty and I asked each other that question more than a few times. But we had no answers.

With every hour that pa.s.sed, the bush around us looked less and less familiar. We were in much greener country. There were hills about us, and more farms and settlements in the valleys which the bushmen seemed to want to avoid as much as we did. We knew now, for whatever reason, that they were not taking us back. And the longer we were with them the more sure we became that these people were absolutely no threat to us. They might not talk to us. They might keep their distance. They might still stare at us more than we liked, but there was never the slightest hint of hostility towards us. On the contrary they seemed very protective of us, and as fascinated by us as we were by them. And the children found us endlessly funny, particularly when we smiled, so we smiled a lot. But then we felt like smiling. They shared their food with us: berries, roots, fruit and baked wallaby once. We had all the water we needed.

Marty did try once or twice to ask where we were going, but was simply given more fruit or berries as an answer. So he gave up. But up on Big Black Jack, as we rode through the night, or resting in the shade, the two of us speculated at length. Maybe we weren't being taken anywhere. I mean, they never looked as if they were going anywhere in particular. They just looked as if they were quite happy simply going, simply being. Or maybe they were adopting us into their tribe and we'd wander the bush with them for the rest of our lives. Maybe they were still making up their minds what to do with us. Perhaps we'd just wake up one day and find them gone. We really didn't mind. All we could be sure of was that we were a long, long way from Cooper's Station now, and further every day. Where we were going wasn't important. Sometimes at night we'd see lights in the distance, more settlements probably, but we never once thought of running off. We were safe with them. We had no reason to leave them.

I can't say exactly how many days and nights our journey lasted it could have been five or six days perhaps. I do know that it lasted long enough for Marty and I to begin to believe it might be permanent, that we had indeed been adopted in some way. I certainly was beginning to feel comfortable among them, not because they became any less reserved they didn't. Distance seemed to be important to them. The children though were a different story. We very soon got beyond just smiling and laughing. We splashed each other in the pools. We skimmed stones, threw sticks, ambushed one another. One took to riding piggyback on Marty's back, and the smallest of them would often ride up with us on Big Black Jack loving every moment of it. We were finding our place among them, beginning to feel accepted. That's why, when our journey finally ended, we felt all the more abandoned, even rejected.

We had been travelling through hilly country for a day or two now, and Big Black Jack was finding it very hard going, and not just because of the hills either. We knew already that kangaroos made him nervous, but there hadn't been many of them until now. Now they were everywhere, and he was not happy. In the half-dark we could see their shifting shapes, and so could Big Black Jack. We could feel him tensing beneath us. We'd talk to him to try to calm him, smooth his neck, pat him gently, but nothing seemed to work. His ears would be twitching frantically. He'd toss his head and snort at them. Worst of all, he'd just stop without any warning. Falling off was all too easy. It amused the children hugely, but was painful for us. In the end Marty and I decided it would be better altogether, and safer too, to give Big Black Jack a rest, and walk. So during the last couple of nights of our journey we walked with the bushmen, one of us leading Big Black Jack. He seemed happier that way. He puffed less and snorted less. The last night we were with them I felt as if I really was one of them, sharing the silence and the stars.

The next morning at sun-up we were coming to the top of a high hill. It had been a long steep climb. Below us was a wide green valley with a stream running through, and trees, more trees than I'd ever seen in my life. In front of us on the crest of the hill the bushmen had stopped and were talking among themselves. I thought we'd be resting here for a while, and was only too happy about that because my legs were tired, and I was longing for food and for sleep. I sat down to investigate a thorn in my foot which had been troubling me. Beside me Big Black Jack was cropping the gra.s.s contentedly.

Suddenly Marty called out. "They're going! They're leaving us!" Sure enough, the bushmen were walking away from us back the way we'd come, the children looking over their shoulders at us from time to time as they went. We called after them again and again, but they didn't stop. Then they rounded the side of the hill and were gone.

"Why?" Marty said. "Why here? Why did they leave us here?"

We stood there in silence, each of us trying to make some sense of what was happening to us, of why they had treated us this way. We felt utterly bewildered. The parting had been so unexpected, so sudden and strange. No goodbyes, not even the wave of a hand.

That was when Big Black Jack began snorting again. I looked around for kangaroos. There were none, not that I could see anyway. But Big Black Jack had stopped eating in mid-chew. He had his head up now and his ears p.r.i.c.ked. He whinnied loud and long, so that the valley rang with it. He was lifting his nose, sniffing the air, and listening. We could hear kookaburras and galahs, all the cackle of the bush at daybreak, but certainly nothing out of the ordinary. But then we heard the sound of whistling, of someone singing, a woman singing, and with it the tread of a horse in among the trees below us, of a saddle creaking. Big Black Jack whinnied again.

A great bay horse was coming out of the trees and up the hills towards us, on its back a rider in a wide-brimmed straw hat. But it wasn't the horse or the rider that we were looking at so much as the cavalcade that was following along behind, a cavalcade of creatures, all of them infants: wombats, wallabies, joeys. And as the rider came closer I could see there was a koala clinging on round her neck, looking at me over her shoulder. She rode right up to us, let the horses touch noses and check each other over. Meanwhile she took off her hat and looked us up and down. I haven't forgotten the first words she spoke to us: "Strewth," she said. "Look what the cat brought in. But maybe it wasn't the cat, right? How'd you get here?"

"It was the bushmen," Marty told her.

"I thought as much. Are you waifs and strays then? They only bring me waifs and strays. They know I collect them, see. They don't eat the little ones, not unless they've got to. Good people they are. Just about the best, I'd say. Where are you from?"

"England," I said. There was a wombat rooting around my feet now.

"S'all right. He won't bite," she told me. "You've come fair ways then."

"We were at Cooper's Station," Marty said. "We escaped."

"I know Cooper's Station. Mr Bacon's place, right? Where's he's got all those orphan kids." She looked us up and down.

"He used to be the preacher in town before they moved out there," she continued. "If there's one thing I can't abide it's fanatics of any kind, and religious ones are the worst of all. Running away from that place seems a pretty sensible thing to do. You'll be looking for somewhere to stay then."

Marty and I looked at one another. She was turning her horse now and walking away from us, her little animals following her. "Well, are you coming or aren't you?" she called out. "If you are, then bring the poor old black horse with you. He needs feeding up by the looks of him. Come to that, so do you. Couple of raggedy little scarecrows, that's what you are. I'll soon fatten you up. Come along if you're coming. Don't spend too long thinking about it. Haven't got all day."

Marty and I didn't need to think twice about it. We followed along behind the cavalcade, and like us Big Black Jack had a new spring in his step. "That lucky key of yours," said Marty. "You still got it?"

"Yes," I replied.

"Just don't ever lose it, that's all," he said.

Henry's Horrible Hat Hole.

Big Black Jack knew it too, just as we did. We all knew we were coming home. He stepped out with new heart, snorting in his excitement all the while at the procession of creatures in front of him. Clearly size mattered to Big Black Jack when it came to kangaroos the little joey hopping alongside the lady on the horse wasn't a worry to him at all. Nothing worried him now, nothing worried any of us. If we had been in h.e.l.l at Cooper's Station before, now we were riding into paradise.

We were looking all the while for a house of some kind. But all we could see were trees and green paddocks, and beyond them the winding river, and in the distance the bluest mountains I ever saw. Suddenly there it was, a long low shack of a place, a chimney at one end and a verandah all around. There was a pond nearby which cackled with geese that came out to greet us as we arrived, followed by a flurry of hens and chicks. This was to turn out to be our home for the next seven years, the first real home I ever had, the home of my childhood. And I've been grateful all my life ever since, to Ida and to those bushmen who brought us there, who must have sensed all along what we needed.

She called it the Ark, and it didn't take much to see why. The place was alive with every conceivable domestic animal: goats, sheep, a couple of pigs, a mournful-looking donkey called Barnaby, three milk cows and their calves, and of course, her entire family of wild creatures. The domestic animals all had names, but I only remember Barnaby and a cow called Poogly not a name you easily forget.

She didn't give names to the wild ones, she said, because they were just pa.s.sing through, except for one. Henry was a wombat. Henry, she said, was probably still asleep, and didn't much like strangers. He'd been with her for seven years. He'd come and just stayed. He lived in a hole under the verandah steps, and collected hats. In fact he stole hats, any hat he could find, which was why she kept her hat on all the time. Henry slept on his h.o.a.rd of hats down there in his hole and was very happy, probably the happiest wombat in the entire world, she said, which wasn't difficult, she added, because wombats generally are not the happiest of creatures.

"You can have a look later for yourself," she told us, "just don't breathe in while you're doing it. It's horrible down there. Stinks to high heaven. Not a great one for personal hygiene, our Henry."

She introduced her entire menagerie of animals before she even introduced herself. She did that over a glorious breakfast of eggs, and toast and jam, and milk, which we wolfed down, still unable to take in our extraordinary turn of luck. She waited until every last crumb was gone, every last drop. We discovered soon that this was always the thing with her. She could sense intuitively the needs and fears of us all, of all her "children," which is why, from the very first day, we always felt so at ease with her, why we came to love and trust her as we did, whether we were boys or joeys. She'd saved all of us. We didn't love her because we owed her, but because of the kind of person she was.

She wanted to hear our story. So Marty told her everything he was always better at words than me. I watched her as she listened, saw the sadness and anger in her face. I could see she was older under her hat than I'd first imagined. When you're young you can't work out the age of an adult they're just quite old, old, or very old. She was old, and (I'm guessing now because I never asked her of course) about fifty-five. Her hair was long to the shoulders, and grey, going to white around her temples, and this belied the youth in her face. She was quick to smile, and when she did her whole being seemed to light up. She laughed easily too. I've forgotten so much about her, so much about everything, but I can hear her laugh still. It warmed me then. It warms me now when I think of it, because there was love in her laughter, never mockery, unless it was self-mockery. And there was a directness about the way she looked at you, and the way she spoke to you.

"Well, you've told me your little tale," she began, "so I'll tell you mine. Then we'll know one another better, won't we?

And so she told us who she was and what she was doing living there in the Ark with all her creatures around her, and Henry down his hat hole. We listened agog, because she was a wonderful storyteller. She could paint pictures in your head with words, and she could touch the heart of you too.

"Megs Molloy, that's me Margaret really but Aunty Megs will be fine. Just call me that, everyone does. I do a little of everything, a bit of farming, write a bit of poetry love that and I make boats too in my shed, because Mick made boats. You'll see photos of him about the place. He was my husband, but I lost him in the war, which was sad for me, but sadder still for him. His ship was sunk in some convoy, so he's part of the seabed now. It's as good a place to end up as any, I reckon. He made model boats all his life, sailed them too, all kinds, a destroyer in the end. Boats were his life, boats and me. So now I make boats because he taught me how to do it, and I love it. But I don't get all maudlin about Mick, not often anyway. Life's too short.

"Besides there's too much needs doing round here. Years ago when Mick and me first came here, he discovered a dead wallaby up on the road knocked down and killed by some stupid truck. He saw a little head sticking out of her pouch, and alive, alive o! So he brought it home. That was near enough twenty years ago now. That little fellow was the first of hundreds, thousands now maybe. From that day on one of us would check the road every morning at dawn, and whenever we found an orphan, a possum, a joey, a wombat, we'd bring him home. And in time the bushmen must have got to hear about it, because they would bring along little fellows they'd found and leave them with us. They don't say much, but they've got their hearts in the right place.

"But we wouldn't ever keep them. We wouldn't cuddle them either. None of that. We'd just feed the little fellows and look after them. Tried never to tame them, never even touch them 'less we had to. Once you tame them they'll never go back to the wild. So we just kept them till they were strong enough. Then we'd all take a hike together up into the hills, and if one or two stayed up there, that was fine with us, that was just what we wanted. They were back where they belonged.

"When the war came along and Mick joined the navy, I went on doing it just the same. And when he didn't come back, I carried on. Seemed the right thing to do. So here I am writing my poetry, making my boats, looking after whoever or whatever I find out there that needs me. Then this morning, I find something I've never found before a couple of raggedy little scarecrows left behind for me by the bushmen. So I said to myself: they've done that for a good reason. And now I know the reason. So I know why you were there, and now you know why I was there. Just like all the little fellows out there, you can stay as long as you need to."

The two of us walked out afterwards to see Big Black Jack in his paddock. He was trying to make friends with Aunty Megs' horse and with Barnaby. But Barnaby wasn't having any of it, and he didn't much like it either when Jack started checking out Aunty Megs' horse. I could hear Aunty Megs singing from inside the house and I felt I was the luckiest person alive. I didn't pinch myself, but I wondered more than once that first day whether Marty and I were living inside some wonderful shared dream, that maybe we'd wake up and be back at Cooper's Station again.

But when I woke up the next morning, I woke up to see Marty still fast asleep in the bed opposite, and high on a shelf all around the room models of sailing boats, and I knew the dream was not a dream at all. I heard a shuffling under my bed then, peered underneath and saw a wombat looking back up at me. He had one of my socks in his mouth. Aunty Megs was at the door then with a gla.s.s of milk for each of us. "I see you've met Henry then," she said. "Forgot to tell you. He steals socks too."

I Must Go Down to the Sea.

It turned out that Henry didn't just pinch hats and socks, he'd steal just about anything that he fancied. So we never left our clothes lying around, nor shoes, nor towels. Aunty Megs told us to shoo him out of the house whenever he came in; but somehow, sooner or later, he'd always find a way back in again. And Aunty Megs was right, he did smell. If he was in the house we'd smell him before we saw him, and the stink of him lingered long in the air after we'd put him out. But we loved him all the same, just as Aunty Megs did. I think it was because of the way he looked up at you. His eyes said: "OK, so I stink. OK, so I'm a thief. But n.o.body's perfect, are they? So give me a break, will you? Deep down you know you love me, everyone does."

Feeding Henry his bottle of milk was the ch.o.r.e that was never a ch.o.r.e. Marty and I would often squabble over which of us should do this last task of the day. Whoever won would sit on the verandah steps right above Henry's hole. He'd climb up on to your lap, roll over on his back and wait for it. Aunty Megs said he'd just never grown up, that she'd tried and tried to break him of the habit, but he'd hang around her feet making her feel so guilty that she couldn't resist him. So Henry still got his milk, and it had to be out of a bottle.

We did have tasks at the Ark. We milked the cows, and the goats learned to make b.u.t.ter and cheese too. We chopped wood, we fed the hens, got chased by the geese when we tried to shut them up in case the dingoes came in the night. But now it was work we wanted to do, because we wanted to help out, and because both of us loved being with Aunty Megs. Our hands blistered, our backs ached, but we didn't mind. Every morning she'd take us down to the main road a mile or so away, and we'd walk along the verges, one of us on the right, one of us on the left, looking for any casualties. Most days we'd find something but more often than not they'd be dead already. But from time to time we'd get lucky.

I remember the first time I discovered a joey crouched trembling by the side of his dead mother. I couldn't contain my excitement, and yelled for Aunty Megs, who came running over to pick him up. She was very strict about handling them. She never allowed us to feed them or handle them. If they were very small she'd keep them for a while in a box by the stove in the kitchen. We could crouch over them and look, but not touch. But as soon as they were old enough they'd live outside in the compound with the others. Marty and I would spend hours out there watching through the wire, but Aunty Megs was the only one allowed in. And she never talked to them, never stroked them. She just fed them.

She'd never let us come with her either when she went off for her rides into the bush, the orphan animals, her "little fellows," trailing behind her. If we came, she said, we'd only confuse them. There was no point in saving them at all, she insisted, unless they could be returned back into the wild again successfully. She made it perfectly clear that this wasn't an exercise in sentimentality, wasn't just to make herself feel good. It was to give them a second chance of life, a chance they all deserved. It was a chance everyone deserved, she said, animals and people alike.

Aunty Megs had a station wagon she kept in the farm shed, which was half hen-house and half garage. And because the hens liked sitting on the station wagon it was just about the messiest car I've ever seen in my life. But we loved it. Going into town, ten or so miles away, was a real treat. She often sang when she was driving. She used to sing a lot it made her feel happy, she said. She'd teach us all her songs, and we'd sing along, all three of us making a dreadful racket, but we loved it. She knew all the words and all the verses of London Bridge is Falling Down, which was more than I did before I met her.

We didn't go into town often, just once a week or so. She'd stride down the street in her straw hat, and we'd follow along behind. Everyone knew her and she knew everyone. They were all rather curious about us at first. She didn't explain who we were or where we'd come from. She just said we were her "boys" and that was that. And it was true. We were her children, and she was our mother the only mother we'd ever known anyway.

It was on the first of those trips into town that she took us into the police station. She'd been thinking, she told us on the drive in, and it was time someone did something about it. She wouldn't say anything else. She led us up to the desk and said we had to tell the sergeant right there and then all about Cooper's Station, everything we'd told her. So we did. The policeman wrote it all down and shook his head a lot while doing it. Aunty Megs told us sometime later that the place had been closed down, that all the children had been found other homes to go to. I was pleased about that, c.o.c.kahoop that Piggy wouldn't be beating any more children. But most of all I was very sad for Ida. I remember feeling that I really didn't want to know anything to do with that place, I wanted to forget all about it. Just the name, Cooper's Station, was enough to make me think about it, and I didn't want to have to think about it ever again.

But what you want to think about isn't necessarily what you do think about. The truth is that the memories of all that happened at Cooper's Station have come back to haunt me all my life, even during those happy, happy years we spent with Aunty Megs. They were happy because I was as close then as I've ever been to carefree. I know when I read what I've just written that it sounds as if I'm wallowing in nostalgia, making an idyll of the Ark. It's difficult not to. After Cooper's Station anything would have seemed like heaven on earth.

Aunty Megs may have been the kindest person in the world, but she could be firm we soon discovered that. She was appalled when it became clear as of course it very soon did that neither Marty nor I had been to school, and so neither of us could read properly nor write. So from then on she'd sit us down every morning at the kitchen table and teach us, regular as clockwork. I won't pretend that either of us were willing pupils we just wanted to be outside messing around, climbing trees, riding Big Black Jack, making camps, talking to Henry or Poogly or trying to cheer up poor old Barnaby. It took hours sometimes to get an ee-aw out of Barnaby. An ee-aw we reckoned was as good as a laugh, so we always stayed with him till we got one. And when it rained we'd far prefer to be out with Aunty Megs in her big garden shed where she made her model boats, where we'd make them with her she taught us that too.

But lessons, she said, had to come first. We didn't argue with her, not because we were ever even remotely frightened of her, but because both of us knew that she always had our best interests at heart. She made no secret of her affection for us, nor her wish to give us the best upbringing she could. "One day," she told us, "you'll have to leave here and go out into the big world out there and earn your living like everyone else. To do that you need to learn. The more you learn now, the more interesting your life will be." So the two of us buckled down to our lessons, often reluctantly perhaps, but without protest.

As part of her teaching Aunty Megs told us stories, tales she'd learned from the bushmen, folk tales from England. She'd read us legends. By the stove in the evenings she'd read us a novel, a chapter a night, Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson (we asked for that again and again). There were the Just So Stories by Rudyard Kipling, Little House on the Prairie and Heidi. She loved Heidi, and she was going to read it to us, she said, even though she knew it was a girl's book. But our favourites were the William books by Richmal Crompton. Sometimes she'd be laughing so much she couldn't go on. (Later when we could read properly, we read a bit of one of them to Barnaby, but he didn't find it funny at all. Not a single ee-aw.) But most of all Aunty Megs loved poetry. It was Mick, she said, who had given her a love for the sound of words. He'd read to her often, usually poems about the sea. Sea Fever and Cargoes, and The Yarn of the Nancy Bell, which always made us giggle, and Mick's favourite The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. She'd sit back in her chair and read them to us, and every time her words would take us again down to the sea. Fifty years or more later I still love all of them, and The Rime of the Ancient Mariner is the one I love best. I know it by heart, start to finish. Every time I read it, and I read it often, I can hear her voice in my head. She wrote her own poems too she told us, but that she did in private, and however much we badgered her to read them to us, she never did. "My poems are like a diary," she said, "and for no one's eyes but mine."

Aunty Megs was an intensely private person. You always knew when you'd asked one question too many, like when Marty was looking at the photo on the mantelpiece of Mick in his sailor's uniform holding the hand of a little boy. When he asked her who he was, she didn't reply. When he asked once more, she said. "No one you know, and no one I know either." And the sudden coldness in her voice made it very clear she was going to say nothing more about it. We always thought it must have been her son of course, but we never dared to ask her ever again.

There really was so much that was wonderful at Aunty Megs', so much that changed my life. For a start we'd found a mother, and maybe as a result Marty and I became like real brothers there. We learned together how to build boats, only model ones maybe, but these model boats were the beginning of our lifetime love affair with the sea. We'd listen to Aunty Megs reading her sea poems, and talk long into the night about how we were both going to go to sea and be sailors like Mick had been. And I learned The Ancient Mariner by heart and recited it for Aunty Megs on her birthday. She listened with her eyes closed, and when they opened after I'd finished they were full of tears and full of love. Marty said it wasn't bad, but that I'd made a mistake and left out a verse. So I threw the cushion at him and he threw one at me. We both missed, and then all three of us were laughing. Henry came bustling in then to see what the noise was all about, took one look at us, decided we were mad, picked up the cushion, turned and walked right out again. I was happier in that moment than I'd ever been in all my life, happy as Larry.

Scrambled Eggs and Baked Beans.

We'd been living at the Ark for about four or five years when Aunty Megs had her accident. Marty and I had been swimming in the river. We did that most days, when the weather was right, if there was enough water in the river. Swimming was something else Aunty Megs had taught us. "Almost as important as poetry," she'd say. "Best exercise there is. Could save your life one day too!"

We came wandering back up to the house, but when we called for Aunty Megs she wasn't there. A quick look at the empty compound told us what she was doing and where she was. She'd gone off on one of her rides into the bush, hoping to release some of her little fellows, her family of animals. Normally she'd be gone for an hour or two, no more. But after several hours there was still no sign of her. We decided we shouldn't wait any longer, that we had to go out looking for her.

I was leading Big Black Jack out of the paddock when we saw her horse come galloping riderless down the track from the hills. We didn't waste any time then, but rode back up the way her horse had come, calling for Aunty Megs as we went. We knew roughly where it was she usually went to release her animals the same area she'd found us all those years before. So that's where we headed now, both of us on Big Black Jack, Aunty Megs' horse following along behind. After a while we heard her singing, singing out loud later she told us the singing helped to take her mind off her pain.

We found her out in the open beyond the trees, sitting with her back up against a rock, her family of animals scattered all around her. She was holding her arm tight to her chest, and had a nasty gash down one side of her face. There was so much blood all over her. Her shirt was soaked with it, both hands and her neck. She smiled up at us. "Am I glad to see you," she said. "Don't worry about the blood. Got plenty more where that came from. Just get me up and take me home, there's good boys."

She was already too weak to walk very far, so we knew that somehow we had to get her on to her horse. It wasn't at all easy. We had to find the right tree stump to use as a mounting block, then help her up into the saddle. I could see her shoulder was paining her dreadfully. I led the way on Big Black Jack while Marty rode up behind Aunty Megs, holding her steady in the saddle all the way home. Then I rode on into town for the doctor. It turned out she needed a dozen st.i.tches in her face and that she'd broken her collar bone. He put a sling on her, and told her also that she'd lost a lot of blood and had to rest up for a while, a month at least, maybe more. She said, "Phooey."