To the man, as he awoke, the song of the magpie reminded him of the morning just out of Melbourne on the road to Berwick, where he awoke beneath some trees in the corner of a paddock with black-eyed, long lashed jerseys blinking slowly at him and rolling cud between their jaws. This was the morning after he had left his wife and daughter in their Port Melbourne terrace. What had she thought when she woke on that morning and found him gone? Had she been relieved or just more bitter? Certainly there would have been no less money coming in. Then it was 1939 and he had been out of work for nearly a year. The priva­tions of this period had ruined a marriage based on the occurrence of a child and a drunken promise.