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almost always my reply would cause the eighth-grade girls to laugh. They laughed not raucously and overlong, as my own classmates laughed, but briefly and discreetly. A sort of whinnying sound rose from the girls and then ceased abruptly at a look from Sister Gonzaga. I would always leave the room not only baffled by my having amused the girls but hurt by their having rejected me, because my speaking frankly in front of them had been, in its own way, a declaration of love.
    Whenever I stood in front of the rows of eighth-grade girls, I was not bold enough to look at any one face. I was therefore spared the sight of some or another girl that I saw every day in the playground and disliked for her features or her manners. I looked always above the heads of the girls and towards the rear wall of their classroom, so that any one of the throng of pale blurs in the lower field of my vision might have been the face of the girl that I never saw in the playground because she stayed in a quiet corner with her few softly-spoken girlfriends or because she spent most of her lunch-hour reading in her classroom: the girl who was far too old for me to have as my girlfriend but who might have seen far into me while her teacher made fun of me, so that I could rely in future on her image in my mind. This image would have been of a tall girl, almost a woman in my estimation, who wore the same intimidating navy-blue tunic and white blouse that her classmates wore but whose face told me she did not resent my interest in her—my seeing her in my mind whenever I needed to look to a female presence for inspiration.
    I understood that the connection between the older girl and myself existed only in my daydreams, but I sometimes supposed that something might have developed between us if only her florid-faced teacher had not urged her girl-pupils often to look away from their shabby houses and their dusty streets and to dwell on the images that came to their minds whenever they read their books or said their prayers. When some of my classmates told me that children from the nearest State school used the nickname “Beetroot” for our Sister Gonzaga, I pretended to be shocked but I was secretly pleased.
    Several years after I had last seen the red-faced nun, and a hundred miles away from the provincial city where she had made fun of me in front of her decorous pupils, I would have been reading, in the first of the serialised excerpts of Brat Farrar , some or another paragraph in which the narrator hinted yet again at the virtues of the character Aunt Bee when I first gave to that character the nickname that I have used for her ever since: Aunt Beetroot.
    A bowl of beetroot stood on the table every Sunday afternoon in the kitchen of the comfortable house in the eastern suburb of Melbourne where an older sister of my mother lived with her husband and their children, my cousins, who were mostly girls or young women. Many other plates and bowls stood on the same table. My aunt and her family had a so-called roast dinner every Sunday at midday. The plentiful remains of the roast lamb or beef were left to cool on the table. In the early afternoon, the first of the regular Sunday-visitors would arrive at the house. My mother and my brother and I were occasional visitors. By mid-afternoon, all the women present would have begun to prepare in the kitchen the evening meal for the dozen or more persons present: the Sunday tea, as everyone called it. The women at the kitchen table talked continually, but if any of them saw me at the door trying to overhear them, the kitchen would become silent. My mother would tell me sternly to go outside and play.
    Many times during my childhood I was told to go outside and to play in some or another garden while my mother and her women-friends talked indoors. To play in such places was impossible. The sort of game that I played in my own backyard needed weeks of preparation: I had to set up a farming property under each shrub and