In 1948 she was already 27; over the hill, as her American-slang-talking buddies might have said, jokingly; or not. Some of them had actually married American soldiers during the war. Years later, when I was writing a history of the college she had attended, a clear-memoried ninety-year-old who knew every stitch in her darned woollen gloves told me one or two had returned to Melbourne after the war accompanied only by a child. Kathleen was an amateur thespian; local theatre companies, play-reading groups, poetry recitations, that kind of thing. She was tall and willowy, and had a face that smiled crookedly; she was no beauty. She lived with her parents and wrote diaries. She worked in a city office and wore fawn gabardine coats in winter on the tram into town and home again. The house was an untouched Edwardian, of the kind you expect still to be lit by gas, on a triangular corner block below the rail bridge in Ascot Vale, and from the east window of its heavy-sofaed sitting room, you ...
This old house has no built-in wardrobes, so we ordered a new freestanding one from the furniture store to replace an old one that was too small for a teenager's fashion ambitions. The new wardrobe came flat-packed in three huge packages, like the monoliths in 2001:A Space Odyssey . The monolith packages contained innumerable pieces of particleboard, some main strut-type wooden beams, scores of shiny metal items that looked like pieces of hinge, and hundreds of tiny metallic screw-like objects. Attached, and nicely protected inside a ziploc plastic bag, was an authorless book entitled—I think— Instructions: The Seque l. I might have embellished that last bit, but the book is gone; it could have been A Long Day’s Journey into Night or Ulysses . There was an option. By paying an extra fee you could have the million pieces magically transmogrified into an actual wardrobe, 'magically' because the assembler would not need to read Instructions: The Sequel or A Long Day’s Journe...