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blandness. Here was a world of prejudices, perhaps, but one entirely lacking passion—or so it seemed. Its prejudice against us, who had strayed into this Arcadia from another planet, was essentially unmenacing. The crone who screeched obscenities at us over the picket fence of her tumbledown cottage was much too decrepit to offer any threat of violence and, besides, she had the reputation of being off her rocker—the children of the neighbourhood were convinced she was a witch. Passions, and indeed hatred, were reserved, as we came to learn, for others.
    Our street was a broad roadway running for several miles bordered by the obligatory unmade verges and miniature fields of paspalum. It was, however, sealed as far as the point, a few houses beyond our place, where it took an abrupt ninety-degree turn. There the dirt road began. I do not know what bureaucratic decisions determined this highly symbolic frontier, but the distinction was very real. Beyond the curve, along the dirt, the houses were smaller, meaner and in even greater disrepair. The families living in them were larger, their front yards showed none of the care over clipped hedges and neatly swept driveways that distinguished the world of the bitumen.
    We were too ignorant to read these signals. I made friends at school with two boys called Dunnicliffe, victims of scatological jests which, at first, I could not understand. They were the youngest in a large family that lived beyond the curve. I do not think we had much in common—how could we have had?—but no doubt we were drawn together because they too were shunned by the other children, just as I was after the initial impact of my arrival in 5B had worn off. This desultory friendship advanced a step or two when the Dunnicliffes arrived unannounced one Sunday afternoon. This was something quite beyond our experience. In my very early childhood when social life of a sort was still possible in a Hungary largely protected from the worst effects of war, social contact with other children was governed by a strict protocol of invitations and supervision. The Dunnicliffes said that they had come to play. We went into the paddock at the back, and played—as far as my still very limited command of English and of the mythology of Australian children’s games permitted. They reappeared the following Sunday and then spasmodically throughout the summer holidays.
    My friendship with these boys led to an incident which was our first significant insight into Australian society. Until then our relationships with our neighbours, with Australia as a whole, had been fleeting and sporadic—a halting conversation here, a hastily flung insult there. We had been living in a dream. People, places, events floated in and out of our experience without much impact. We observed the world of Epping from the outside, separated from it by an almost impenetrable screen. My father used later to say it was like watching a film you couldn’t entirely follow. But the confrontation brought about by the Dunnicliffes’ visits began to lead us inside a world from which we had been until then almost entirely isolated. There occurred, in short, some form of interaction between us and the people among whom we lived. Their world demanded a response from us, and consequently, for the first time, we found ourselves in a relationship with this society, and in a situation where, in theory at least, we were required to exercise some choice. Here was, in other words, our first real step towards assimilation, even towards becoming ‘Australians’. But at the time the incident was merely an embarrassment, an awkward situation, and also an alarming recognition of the complexity of a world that had seemed until then quite simple and untroubled.
    Our landlord was a mild-mannered man, a second-generation Australian of solid Lancashire stock, bearing a distinct resemblance to the King according to the women of his family. He