And I did nothing. Not that year and not in the thirty-nine years after it.
I had his name. I had the farm school's name. For the last twenty of those years I had the internet.
And the honest reason — which took a long walk on a beach in Winnamurra and about six months of thinking since — is that doing anything about it meant finding out what my letter had done, and I preferred not to know.
My children.
I rang all four of them from Australia.
Stephen and Lorraine answered. Yvonne and Col were still blocking me, so I wrote, on paper, which it turns out they both read.
I told them about Alec and the frame and the letter. All of it, including my own eleven lines.
Lorraine cried. Stephen said, "Mum, that's a lot," and then rang back two days later having clearly thought about it, which is the most he has done in about a decade.
