There's very little that I remember of those years before I was five or six because it was that time before I would have cognitive memories.
Most of whatever I knew was from others who delight in telling you how precocious you were, all the naughty things you did, but never the good stuff.
But, oddly enough there are some things I do remember those I suspect were reinforced later on by being reminded of those events by my parents.
Like falling off the front gate and hurting myself. I think I face-planted the ground and finished up in the hospital.
Like sleeping in a cot that must have been at the end of my parent's bed.
Like playing with the children who lived in the house behind us, the parents of whom were very good friends of our parents, and we visited them off and on long after we left the neighbourhood.
I remember they had a daughter my age, and she had the nickname 'gigglo' because of her infectious giggle. I last saw her when we were about 10 and often wondered how like had life turned out for her.
As it happens I ran into her 55 years later, and there was nothing we had in common to talk about, our lives being so different.
That time at Warren Road was to me a lost period, mostly spent at home with my mother, awaiting the birth of my younger brother, a period fraught with medical issues for my mother suffering first a miscarriage and then a difficult delivery.
It was the year before I had to start school, and if there was anything to remember, it was going on the bus to the shops.
Something else that came to mind, was my father coming home with goodies from the petrol stations of the time, like cardboard cut-out buildings.
And, heading off into the paddocks behind our house to pick daffodils. I was never quite sure why that memory remained.
We had a photo of the three of us taken when Raymond was a baby, and it was the only time any of us smiled when together.
That time was the end of an era for us. Something happened and we moved to Dandenong, the place called Bess Court.
My father stopped working at Lucas's, a car part manufacturer and started at General Motors, the company that built Holden cars, as a paint buyer. Yes, he knew every colour of every Holden car.
Cool eh?
Oh, and that was the beginning of a very dark few years.
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