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in the following year. Elizabeth soon found herself in the role of nanny/nursemaid to her young stepbrothers and stepsisters, and in later life confided that Daniel’s proposal of marriage had been readily accepted, as she had felt that she might as well be washing the nappies of her own babies as those of her stepmother. Although hers does not seem to have been a romantic marriage, Elizabeth became a sad and even bitter woman on her husband’s death. Cousins who grew up with my father said, ‘Everyone was frightened of Auntie Lizzie’. I remember my grandmother as a tall, thin woman always dressed in black, of few words and never smiling; as a child I could never understand why our house seemed to be more serious and less gay when she was visiting.
    On her husband’s death, my grandmother leased and then sold the farm and moved in to Tatura, the nearby country town, to raise her children. When my father was fifteen she again decided on a move; the elder daughter, May, joined the Sisters of Mercy in the newly established local convent and my grandmother sold the Tatura house, moving with the younger daughter and son to Ballarat so that Dad could attend St Patrick’s College as a day boy and complete secondary school. My father enjoyed his years at St Pat’s and always spoke of the Brothers, who had taught him there, with great respect and affection. On completing his studies he joined the Victorian Public Service and once again my grandmother sold her house in the interest of her son’s career, this time moving the little family to Melbourne and purchasing a house in an inner suburb so that it would be convenient for Dad to travel to his work in the city. Five years later he enrolled as a student in the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Melbourne, with my grandmother continuing to provide financial support through the study years ahead.
    After graduation, my father worked for a short time as a locum in suburban practices and then set up his own practice in Oakleigh, an outer working-class suburb. My grandmother sold her house and the proceeds were used to purchase a larger place on the city edge where the little family lived, my father running his surgery in the front rooms and my grandmother and aunt keeping house. My grandmother must have been very happy as her little family settled in to the new house, a brass plate at the front door announcing the rooms of ‘Dr J. E. Mulcahy’. Alas for her, within a few short years, my father met and married my mother and my grandmother’s dreams had come crashing down. My grandmother and aunt moved to a new house in nearby Caulfield, but even the birth of three grandchildren did not reconcile her to the marriage or to her daughter-in-law. She rarely spoke to us children and almost never to my mother. From childhood my sister, brother and I were always aware of her aloofness and seeming disapproval. Once my father had died, at the age of 55, my grandmother sought no further contact with us. As her daughter Margaret had predeceased my father, a nephew stepped in to the breach and helped my grandmother to move to a retirement home where four years later, having lost all interest in life, she died. I visited her the day before death came and for once she smiled and faintly spoke my name.

Two: Beginnings
    I began life not under a cabbage but at home, in my parents’ bed, where I was born. But before that happened my parents had to meet. My mother, Athen Millane, was a nurse and trained midwife and, along with a friend who had completed similar training in the same large Melbourne hospital, she had in 1927 opened ‘Mildon’, a small private hospital in a nice old house in the comfortably middle-class Melbourne suburb of Caulfield. It was more a convalescent home than a hospital, there being no operating room or serious surgical equipment, and the biggest medical events of any week would have been the births of the many local