Rather His Own Man

Fifty years later, I was able to recite it back to Barry, our neighbour in north London, on the occasion of his eightieth birthday.

And chundered in the Old Pacific Sea.

gave a Technicolor yawn,

When I swallowed the last prawn,

And a bucket full of prawns upon me knee.

With a tube of ice-cold beer,

was down by Manly Pier

A few nights before the results, we went to the theatre, to laugh manically at a young comedian from Melbourne, whose Edna Everage (long before she was made a dame) resembled all our grandmothers. To open the show, Barry Humphries came on stage with a long flaxen wig and a surfboard, singing:

cannot now remember what causes I attributed to World War I, or my answer on the economics of autarkies, although I do recall mentioning the rape of Miranda and analysing the scansion of Prospero’s injunction to chastity.

There was no time to gloat: we had to hunker down for the Leaving Certificate – an external examination, the result of which would be the key to winning a scholarship to Sydney University. Your future depended on how much memory you could cram into three hours of speed writing, and how well your teachers had tipped the questions.