Monday morning Maeve wore her extra-stompy shoes to music class, hoping for a couple of reprises of “Bear Goes over the Mountain”.

(The bear did not go over the mountain, we later heard, but a new song was learned. Maeve sang it to us later, as CC carried her up the slope, past the fine-flowered rose bush leaning seductively over the picket fence, to the bus stop on Rowntree Street. It went a little something like this: Naughty pussycat, / You are very fat. / You have butter on your whiskers, / Naughty pussycat. It is sung with prim accusation. If you are Maeve, you sing it while also wagging a condemnatory finger.)

While the kid and maybe eight or nine of her contemporaries wiggled and chorused their way through rhythm and rhyme in the Scout house, CC and I waited across the street, on the grass in Mort Bay Park, reading, writing. Just after eleven-thirty, we heard Maeve’s high-pitched, “Mummy, come and get me!” amid the other eager cries. Like so many squidgy-cheeked jailbirds clinging on to the aluminium rails of the Scout house balcony, the hullabaloo of three-year-olds jumped and squirmed and stuck their arms out towards freedom and sugary treats. It had not gone unnoticed that one mother had baked cupcakes with pink icing.



Adventures call on a sunny and cloudless day, to me and CC and the bundance kid shaking her moneymaker to the techno thumps blasting out of Jet Bar Café.

We meandered through the Botanical Gardens marvelling at the cactii collection and the ingenious, impossible webs of the trapeze-artist spiders. Above our heads, the bats swooped and called and settled battily upside-down on any available tree branch. Longtime residents of the city centre, these grey-headed flying foxes have fed on the sweet, sweet nectar of Sydney’s fruit trees and native eucalyptus flowers for a hundred and some years; inspired, we sat in the garden café for iced chocolates and lemonade ice creams on sticks. Just outside, fat pink blooms broke the leafy green surface of the lotus lily pond every here and there, and bright-eyed ducks paddled in the shade of the large, nodding leaves.

Later, the kid skipped and ran under the spreading branches of a fig tree as old as stones. She was a supergirl with flying powers, and with an invisible wand she turned us into supergirls as well. The sound effect of transformation, in the whizzbanger cartoon series that is her life, is: “Turn!” Similarly, when she is the boss lady of an imaginary cake shop, the sound effect for putting a pretend cake in a pretend box is: “In a box!” You will perhaps not be surprised to hear that the sound effect for closing said box before handing it over to a customer is: “Close!”



The sunny promenade along Farm Cove took us past the Opera House to Circular Quay, and to the 5:10 ferry pulling up at Wharf 5. Just across the harbour at Milsons Point, the wondrous, terrifying carnival mouth of Luna Park waited to welcome us in. In the late 1930s kids rode the Big Dipper and the Coney Island for ninepence a spin, and during the war servicemen sauntered down to the fairground on their time off. Half an hour to closing time on Monday, we mugged in front of the funny mirrors while the Tango Train ran backwards, and then the kid picked out a painted horse on the merry-go-round. The carousel carnie leaned against a pillar with spacey eyes, but our grins were wide for all to see.