What’s something most people don’t know about you?
My first year at school was a blur of anxiety and confusion. I was only four, too young to understand what was happening. My best friend was still at home, nine months younger, and the playground felt like another planet. I hadn’t been to pre-school, so I didn’t know the rules of joining in.
Lunchtime was the hardest. I’d wander the asphalt pretending to look busy, hoping no one would notice I was alone. But of course, they did. A group of older kids saw me as easy prey and started circling. I can still remember their voices — half laughter, half cruelty.
Then, out of nowhere, another boy stepped forward. He was a year older, confident in a way I wasn’t yet. He told them to stop. They did.
That moment changed something in me — a moment of rescue and enduring gratitude. I don’t remember what he said exactly, only that it worked.
Years later, I learned that both my mother and father had terrible starts to school too. Their parents were told to take them home and bring them back when they were five. None of us knew that until they wrote their memoirs decades later.
Looking back, I see it now as the lasting power of unnoticed goodness. The boy who stepped in probably never thought about it again, but that small act has rippled through my life ever since. Perhaps it helps explain why early vulnerability often deepens later compassion — how our first wounds can become the ground of empathy.
Decades later, I found him on Facebook. I told him what he’d done and how much it had meant. He didn’t remember.
But I do. I always will.
And fittingly, he became a school teacher — now working in the NSW Department of Education and Training — impacting lives in ways he may never fully know.
The Afterword 
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