The Boy I Was – flawed memories of childhood

A young boy grows up in post-was Australia, so different to today. As the Japanese mount air attacks on Australian ports in the early 1940’s, John is born, a late addition to a family with children already in their teens. This is the story of his first twelve years, growing up in Newcastle and on a grazing property in the Hunter Valley, a noisy, active, scatterbrained boy learning through trial and error how to live a life. John is no angel, though we sense that he means well – most of the time. We see John grow and mature. On the property he learns to ride his horse Dusty, to muster sheep and do his bit at shearing time. In Newcastle he makes slingshots, tries magic, writes a play, crowns a queen. As the author struggles to recall his early life, he examines the strangeness of memory. Nothing can be taken as fact. Could John have thought this way at his age? Is this a memory that has been re-told and re-modelled? Why did this memory suddenly appear? Why are people in memories ill-defined? The more the mysteries of memory are examined, the stranger they become. John’s parents find it hard to cope with the young boy. His father Albert carries a burden from the Great War. As her older children leave home, John’s mother struggles to cope with middle-class isolation. With his best friends Tom and Alan, there are good times together, but as they grow older John cannot understand why Tom begins to withdraw and John is brought to the realisation that not everyone likes him and can be trusted.