a parent, indeed I may say he was a lamentable failure as a parent, and you can be under-fathered just as much as you can be over-fathered. But he was a great character. He was very handsome, much bigger than I am, and I get my colouring from him. He was on the stage as a young man, with Brough and Titherage, and then he met with an accident that badly lamed him. So they made him advance agent for the Brough Company, and he was with them till he died. He began taking me round with him when I was about six years old, and for years I travelled with him all over Australia and in Africa and India. He was very well known, fortunately for me, for as a kid I was a lot alone. I was really awfully lonely.” He paused, putting down his pipe in the sand beside him. “I say, do you really want to hear this?”
“Oh, please, I do.” She opened her eyes very wide at him.
“Well, my parent was not exactly fitted for the job. He used to forget about me. He’d leave me in a hotel in charge of a porter or anybody who happened to be around, and he would go off for days and nobody would care whether I ate or ever went to bed, and the porter might be sacked, and then there’d be nobody responsible for me. I used to hang round the bars and billiard saloons and drop asleep watching the play and listening to the tales. Eventually some man would find out who I was and go to the office about me, and somebody would come and wake me and tell me to go to bed. Sometimes I went to bed alone, but not often, I didn’t like it. Occasionally there’d be a boy in the place I would take to, and like you, when I began to read it was much better. I didn’t care much for roughing it then. I wasn’t very, strong physically, and I shrank from ordinary boy brutality. Well, I was always being left somewhere, and
