The Boy I Was - flawed memories of childhood

This is the story of the author's first 12 years, growing up in Newcastle and on a grazing property in the Hunter Valley; a noisy, active, scatterbrained boy learning through trial and error how to live a life. John is no angel, though we sense that he means well, most of the time.

As the Japanese mount air attacks on Australian ports in the early 1940s, John is born, a late addition to the family with children already in their teens. We see John grow and mature. On the property, he learns to ride his horse, Dusty, to muster sheep and do his bit at shearing time. In Newcastle, he makes shanghais, tries magic, writes a play, and crowns a queen.

The author struggles to recall his early life, examining the strangeness of memory and finding that nothing can be taken as fact. Could John have thought this way at his age?  Is this a memory that has been retold and remodelled? Why did this memory suddenly appear? Why are people in memories ill-defined? The more the mysteries of memory are examined, the stranger they become. 

John’s parents find it hard to cope with the young boy. His father, Albert, carries a burden from the Great War. As the older children leave home, John’s mother struggles with middle-class isolation. 

With his best school friends Tom and Alan, there are good times together, but as they grow older John cannot understand why Tom begins to withdraw and John is brought to the realisation that not everyone likes him and can be trusted.