Early memories

Here are the opening paragraphs of my memoirs. Do these grab and hold your interest?  After reading these do you want to read any more?

Dust. Red-brown dust, on the ground, in the sky, inside the house, outside the house, dust everywhere, on everything, in everything. 

It’s my earliest memory, from when I was about three or four years old, in the summer of 1929-30, or perhaps 1930-31. Once when I had been put down for my afternoon sleep I got off my bed, padded across the linoleum leaving footprints in the dust, and climbed on top of the couch under my bedroom window, pulled aside the curtain and looked out over a bare paddock from which wisps of dust whirled slowly, lazily up into the cloudless blue sky. Why, I wondered, did it fly up into the air like this? The back yard of our house was dusty, I kicked it up with every step. Roarey, our red setter, rolled in it and shook himself as if shaking off water after a swim, though he carried a lot of it into his doggy-smelling kennel too and my clothes got covered in it when I crawled in after him. Behind our car as my father drove over bumpy country roads, a brown smoke-screen of dust obscuring everything. It was always hot, dry, dusty. The rare and fleeting moments when it was cool, green, damp, and muddy seemed unnatural.  My fragmentary memories make my early life seem like the biblical myth of human beginnings.  I came from dust. 

South Australia is a scorched, brown country.   Inland, creeks and rivers are rare; many are just meandering traces,  sandy creases on the flat landscape with occasional stagnant or sluggish pools of murky water or nothing but hot sand,  the memory of water marked by sparse lines of scruffy gum trees. When rain falls it is sometimes monsoon-like in ferocity, and can transform these arid remnants into raging flash floods.  In 1955, I was lucky to escape one when I misjudged the depth and force of water as I tried to ford a creek in the mid-north of South Australia near Clare.  I felt my little car being lifted, floating, tilting alarmingly with the water lapping against the door only inches from my elbow.  Then miraculously the car struck land again, righted itself, and using the battery to turn the engine, I managed to get out of harm’s way up on the bank, where, shocked and shaking, I dried out the distributor and got the car started and on its way again. That was one of several early near misses when my life could have ended before it had even become interesting and worth-while.

One long river that never runs dry wanders westward across the south-east corner of the continent from the Snowy Mountains of New South Wales. It forms the border between New South Wales and Victoria before flowing on into South Australia. This is the River Murray. After a few hundred miles it ends its westward wanderings and turns south towards the sea. Rather nearer the end than the beginning of this part of its journey to the salt marsh shallows of Lake Alexandrina that separate it from the Southern Ocean, there are several little twists and turns. In the early days  the settlers came to the river bank here to crutch their sheep - to castrate them and cut off their tails. So this place on the River Murray got its name – Tailem Bend.

Here, in September of 1926, I was born, the son of Raymond Jack Last and Vera Estelle Last, neé  Judell. I’m told I was a sickly child weighing little more than three pounds, born prematurely and saved from an untimely death, my mother said, by the unseasonable heat which sustained me as though I were in an incubator. There is another story passed on to me by an attending nurse many years later, that I was one of twins, the other being stillborn. My mother died before I had heard this story so I couldn’t ask her. My parents were estranged  when I was born, my father absent from the scene, and when I asked him many years later he denied it - but he was not there and the nurse was, so who is to say? If it is true it might explain some unresolved longings I have felt all my life, a curious sense of incompleteness. 

Whatever the facts about this story, I carry a permanent reminder of my birthplace in Tailem Bend on the banks of the River Murray: My mother gave me my middle name, Murray, to commemorate the fact. 

My father graduated from the  University of Adelaide medical school in 1924 and, having completed his year of internship, was working at Tailem Bend as a locum tenens, a relieving doctor.  Soon after I was born, he settled in general practice in Booleroo Centre, a dusty little town in the wheat-growing district about 180 miles north of the city of Adelaide. My mother and I, joined a little over three years later by my younger brother Peter, lived on and off in Booleroo until the early 1930s when my parents'  faltering marriage finally failed altogether, and my mother took us away from Booleroo Centre to return to her parents' home in Adelaide.

Memories of my early childhood at Booleroo Centre are like bubbles that form and burst, isolated from each other in time and place, not forming a coherent pattern of sequentially unfolding events.  Many of my memories are dark and unhappy – tears, shouting, tense silences, parents who ignored me, or used me, I now realize, as a psychological weapon in their domestic conflict of mutual hatred.  That toxic atmosphere left my childhood scarred with wounds that took decades to heal. Perhaps some of those wounds never healed, and the flaws  I can identify in my character are there in whole or in part as a result  There are some happy memories from that time too of course, and puzzling ones, some that lingered for many years until I forgot them or solved the riddles of misunderstood words and phrases.

Here are some of those memory bubbles and some of the puzzles.  

Ray and Vera Last with baby John Last aged about 9 months, 
probably in Booleroo, 1927

My bedroom was decorated with prints from the Gumnut Babies, an original Australian creation, a colour comic-book series that came out in large format with stories beneath a series of comic strips. I don’t remember seeing that book any time after I was able to read. (I saw one like it in an antiquarian book shop in Sydney in the 1980s, at an astronomically high price).  My walls held several large coloured pictures of the Gumnut Babies, chubby little elves with topknots and a stalk sticking up.  The sinister Bad Banksia Man lurked in a corner of one of the pictures on the wall.  I tried not to look at him or catch his evil eye.  The Gumnut babies were probably the inspiration for my imaginary playmates, Bee and Bay, who went everywhere with me.  I had to hold doors open for them to pass through, had to tell grown-ups not to trip over them.  Bee and Bay went away and never came back once I had a baby brother old enough to play with me.
                                                                                                                       

 The Gumnut babies, Snugglepot and Cuddlepie (sic) ensconced in gum nut cups.  They wore no clothes and their  chubby naked bottoms have an erotic quality, whether deliberate or  unintended I know not                                                                                                                                                                                                                  













(Below) The Bad Banksia Man running away with one of the Gumnut Babies whose fate can only be guessed in a nasty nightmare

We traveled in an open car with celluloid side curtains that were taken off on hot days so the air flowed through and ruffled my hair as well as bringing in dust that got in my eyes and up my nose. Driving from the house where we lived on the edge of the town to the main street of Booleroo Centre, to the bank, the post office, the hospital, I jumped up and down on the back seat, and was ordered by my father to sit down. Metal struts held the canvas roof in place, making convenient hand-holds for a little boy's fingers. I think it was a Chevrolet tourer, and that it was dark blue under the dust that I cleared away by tracing patterns with my fingers. 

John Last aged about 2

We drove from Booleroo along the winding Gorge Road to the seaside at Port Germain. Porch a-main. Why was it called a porch, where you went into a house? It wasn't a porch, it was a beach, a wide sandy beach where we sat in the shade of a big red white and blue striped umbrella or under the long jetty, with little pools of water at the base of the wooden pylons supporting the jetty, where the movement of the tides had gouged holes in the sand. These were times to paddle in the warm shallows, dig in the sand, and  recover from the carsickness that always marred those journeys from Booleroo to Port Germain. Why was the sand so white on top and black just below the surface?  My Uncle Lester told me it was rotting seaweed that made it black.  I have a vivid olfactory memory of seaweed drying in the hot sun, a pleasantly acrid antiseptic smell, rather like some of the smells from my father's surgery.

Driving from Adelaide up the Great North Road, another rough road; the heat got more intense as we drove north. Why "Great"? It was a long journey taking all day, on a bumpy narrow highway only intermittently paved, and with many ruts and holes, a far cry from its namesake in England – though that too I remember as winding, and not very smooth in the 1950s, before the expressway was built. Why so many memories of car travel? I suppose there must have been a lot of it, both locally in and around the town where my parents lived, and back and forth between there and Adelaide. I don’t remember many conversations though, and have an impression that often my father and mother were silent, had nothing to say to each other even on the longest journeys.

On a night-time trip back to Booleroo from the Mahood's property, a sheep station at Melrose in the foothills of the Flinders Ranges, I heard the words bush and ranges and thought they had said bush rangers, evil, violent men who robbed coaches and presumably cars too, and I was terrified under a rug on the back seat of the car as it bumped along. How old was I then?  Four? Peter was in a basket on the front seat so I must have been very young. How did I know about bush rangers at that early age?  Someone must have mentioned them in conversation, and this fragment of mis-heard information had stayed with me.

A party of grown-ups went bird-nesting, climbing up the trunks of bare trees – ring-barked, to kill the trees, making it easier to clear the land. Someone took my hand, pushed it into hollows too small for a grown-up’s hand, to feel for nestling budgerigars, rosellas, galahs, and sulphur-crested cockatoos. I was scared that a spider or worse still, a snake, might bite my fingers. We had a galah and a sulphur-crested cockatoo in the yard at Booleroo as well as the red setter, Roarey. The birds had names too, but I have forgotten what they were.

"Garpie" (Grandfather) Last with John and Peter in wheelbarrow, Booleroo, 1930 or early 1931

The limestone track from the road to the garage had mysterious bits of metal that glinted on the surface.  One was shaped like the outline of a large toy soldier on horseback, and I tried unsuccessfully to dig it out, leaving there eventually without ever discovering what it really was, probably a flattened piece of a kerosene drum that may have originally been put there to fill a pot-hole. Until years later, I wanted to go back to find out. I wanted to find out so many things!  That was the time of greatest curiosity in my life, as it is in every small boy’s. How much we would know, if only all those questions could be answered and the answers stored in busy small children’s brains!

John with Roarey our red setter, about 1930

The inside of Roarey's kennel smelt doggy and was as big as Dawdie Mahood’s doll's house. We   went often to the Mahood’s spacious homestead near Melrose. It was from there that one cool day when the grass was green so it must have been late winter or early spring, August perhaps, we went on a snake-killing drive, which I watched in fear with grown-ups from a safe distance while a group of young men and teen-aged boys thrashed at the long grass, driving snakes out to be killed. My father killed a snake in the driveway of our house, blasted its head off with a loud explosion from his shotgun, a great black snake, deadly poisonous, its body writhing and twisting it seemed for hours after it was dead and harmless. The little son of the local Methodist minister, a child about my age at the time of his death a year or so earlier, had died from snakebite. The whole district hated and feared snakes. That little boy’s toy train set, a memorial icon of sorts, was high on a shelf in one of the rooms in their house, but although I could look at it I wasn’t allowed to play with it.

Yabbying was a seasonal country pastime. We caught yabbies, freshwater crayfish, in a little stream somewhere in that part of the world where streams are rare.  Probably that too was on or near the Mahood's palatial property. Something nipped my fingers as I trailed them in the cool creek water and they stung for hours but I didn’t complain. I felt brave keeping my suffering to myself.

Once I awoke at night and the back verandah of the house was alive with big blue crabs, rustling skittering things that crawled across the cement floor of the laundry from a large wet hessian bag, then were gathered unceremoniously but with great hilarity by raucous grown-ups, and dumped into a boiling copper cauldron in the laundry. These crabs came from Port Germain or Port Pirie, the smelting and mining town that also was within driving distance of Booleroo Centre.  That night somebody gave me a glass of beer to sip, a frothy bitter drink that put me off beer until I was in my twenties. The crabs were blue, but their shells were red or pink next day when I saw what remained of a mighty feast attended by who knows how many friends and neighbours. How had that happened? Later I saw the same thing with crayfish. Ah! crayfish!  That's a whole series of other memories from later in childhood when I was old enough to know, or to work out for myself, that cooking induced chemical changes which made the shells change from blue or purple to red.

Family group on Henley Beach, 1929; L-R: Doris Judell, Elsa McRae, Katie Saunders, Vera Last (pregnant with Peter) John in front of her, Olave Judell, Malcolm McRae. The women were 5 of the 6 Judell sisters; 2 never married, probably because potential husbands died in the slaughter of the Great War of 1914-1918

Under my bedroom window was a piece of furniture that remained with us for many years, a set of three wooden crates nailed together, with a hinged lid, the whole covered with bluish paisley patterned linen. This was the box-couch. Later in childhood it was the repository for small boys’ treasures, my Meccano and toy cars, Peter’s train set, lead soldiers, stuffed animals, comics. Dividing the compartments between Peter and me led to quarrels, when Peter complained that I had more than my fair share. Peter often complained that I had more than my fair share, but I don’t think it was so. Anyway, I was older, had been there longer and logic dictated that I was bound to have collected more things in my three and a bit extra years.  At Booleroo when I was a toddler, the box-couch was high enough so that when I climbed on top of it I could look out the window, over wheat paddocks towards distant blue hills..

Ray Last equipped for golf, with John aged 3, Booleroo

There were golf games at Booleroo and at Melrose with Gar Mahood, and garballs - golfballs - that he made disappear behind his ear or mine, then plucked out of my nose. A photo shows that I first held a golf-club in my hands in those days, learnt how to hold it when young enough so that I have always had an easy, fluent swing that made me better at golf than any other sports. (In the late 1950s Gar Mahood , retired by then to a seafront flat at Henley Beach, was my patient during his terminal illness, and was bewitched by my likeness to his friend, my father). 

My father made a huge kite of brown paper. Huge to me anyway as I knelt at one end of it while my father, the only time I remember that he played with me, tinkered with the struts and anchored the paper at the other end, fully six feet away in my memory, perhaps not quite so big in reality, but large enough so that with the string stretched taut it required all an adult’s strength to hold it in check when the kite was flown in a strong wind in the paddock behind our house. We sent messages up the string, pieces of paper cut out and slipped over the string and carried up by the wind. Then the string broke and the kite flew far away out of sight. I tramped with others across a field of stubble in search of it, and we found it, torn and broken, far away beyond a dam at the other end of the paddock. This must have been in winter; it was a drizzly bleak day, there was muddy water in the dam and nobody wanted to get wet. This was when I was 4 or 5 years old.

John, aged about 4,  towing the Express Wagon

There was a four-wheeled trolley, the Express Wagon, made of wood with metal wheels, and the words "Express Wagon" painted in yellow on its shiny red sides. Those words, "Express Wagon" painted on the side of the little trolley, barely big enough for me to sit in and be pulled along, have even now for me after 70 years, the emotional resonance that "Rosebud" had for Citizen Kane. There is a photo of me sitting on a tricycle pulling the Express Wagon in the yard of our house in Booleroo, when I was about 4 years old.. 

I was learning words voraciously then, and wondered about the connection between Express Wagon on my little red trolley and State Express on red tins that had held cigarettes and had the hypnotic tang of tobacco, sometimes also layers of fine silver foil and tissue paper when opened while I inhaled the aroma as somebody taught me to do - preparing for the future time when like everybody else I would be smoking cigarettes instead of merely inhaling the aroma of tobacco. Express and red are permanently linked by these associations. The Express Wagon, or one like it, remained part of childhood for years, through the later years at Brighton where it was certainly a different one, but still called the Express Wagon.

Those were hard times, the "Dirty Thirties," the years of the Great Depression. Years of drought too, with storms of red dust filling the air, the nostrils, making Roarey rust-coloured. My mother tried to seal the house against the dust, but it got in anyway, covering the cream carpet in the living-room, a carpet that followed us to later homes at Brighton and Glenelg. On windy days, the dried leaves of date palm trees rustled. Twigs and dead branches, sometimes bigger than I was, tumbled down from the gum trees at the entrance to the driveway from the road in front of the house.

Men came to the door begging meals, were willing to do any sort of odd job for a crust of bread - chop wood, clean the car, shift heavy loads. Their faces were weather-beaten, lined and dirty, their eyes angry, or, I now realise, sad, defeated. Some carried their belongings in a roll slung over one shoulder, the traditional Australian swagman's style. They smelled stale and sweaty, a different kind of body odour from that of a maid who took me one day when she was off duty to visit her girl friend, and was joined by two men – young men, I suppose, as the two girls were also, but seeming old to me like the swagmen, and more wicked, talking of and doing something I didn’t understand but that seemed a bad thing to do, though I didn’t see clearly what it was.  

There is an association in my mind between swagmen and my father's consulting room ("surgery") and his massive (to my small person) Xray machine, with sparks that shot out of it. Swagmen and that sparking Xray machine are linked memories for some reason. Perhaps there was once a swagman patient whom I accompanied into the surgery for an Xray. I remember chanting "Nux Vomica" - the name of a drug in prescriptions my father dispensed, and I remember handling shiny surgical instruments that had mysterious uses. Eighty years later I have two or three of those instruments, including a pair of small curved surgical scissors, never discarded despite multiple moves around the world, that I use to trim my finger-nails.  

Close by the house at Booleroo was a wheat paddock. One day three of us squatted in the middle in a place where we had flattened a shelter amid the tall wheat sheaves, away from inquisitive adult eyes, and shared secrets. The others were two girls a few years older than I, one called Nancy, the other her friend or perhaps her sister. The secret we shared was as old as children's curiosity. They were very firm with me. I had to take down my pants and show them what I had between my legs; they in turn would show me what was between their legs. This we all three did with great solemnity and so far as I recall, no touching of each other's parts. My pants were attached to my shirt by buttons that held me together, and at this time I was too young to manage buttons so Nancy did it for me. Nancy occasionally took me to school with her when I was about four years old.  I sat on a seat in the back of her classroom; but the seat had no back-rest, and when I leant back, the seat tipped me onto my head on the floor, a frightening and painful experience that made me cry; Nancy had to take me home, sobbing, and she was crying too. Years later when I was a medical student, Nancy was the staff nurse in charge of one of the wards at the Royal Adelaide Hospital; we knew each other politely as grown-ups by then, not having met since I was about 5 and she about 8 or 9. I never reminded her, nor she me, that we had seen each other's private parts long ago. She had become a fine handsome woman, a dedicated nurse. 

Peter and John Last,  Booleroo, 1930

Some varieties of carbonated soft drinks came then in bottles that were sealed with a rubber ring and a clear glass marble stopper; one broke the seal by pushing the marble down a little, then the contents could be poured into a glass, frothing excitingly. I coveted these shiny marbles. In my innocent curiosity, I formed the notion that all bottles contained marbles, and I could collect as many as my heart desired by breaking enough bottles. There were crates of bottles in a shed behind the house, medicine bottles that my father used for the potions that he dispensed for his patients. One day when I was perhaps 5 years old, I had an orgy of bottle-breaking, discovering to my disappointment that none of these bottles contained marbles after all. But I kept on trying to find one that did until a whole crate of bottles lay scattered around the yard in shards of glass. I got a terrible beating for this mistaken attempt to accumulate a collection of marbles. My father didn’t listen to my explanation, instead commanded me to find a suitable stick to be flogged with. I found a thick, heavy one; and he gave me a thrashing such as I have never had again, all the while misunderstanding my motives for breaking the bottles.  Perhaps he believed that it was an episode in the smouldering warfare with my mother. Towards the end of his life I asked him one day if he remembered giving me that beating, or the time I ‘helped’ him make a kite. But he remembered neither of these events that loom large in my memories of early childhood.

His anger at me for breaking his medicine bottles seemed to persist for a long time, erupting periodically when I did other clever things. I discovered that I could use the length of a picture book held in my hand to extend my reach far enough to turn off the light switch and plunge his den into darkness. He cuffed my ears for that, and perhaps swore at me. My mother seized me and ran out of the room, crying, clutching me to her breast. There must have been many other episodes of tension, for that entire period of my life is shrouded in feelings of anger, rage, tears, unhappiness. Some memories of that period date back to before I was toilet-trained.  I remember soiling myself one day at the hospital, walking bandy-legged, uncomfortable, smelling of shit and feeling horribly embarrassed when my father shouted angrily at me from where he was slouched on a sofa, sharing a cigarette with a woman not my mother – perhaps I had  caught them in flagrante. But all those unhappy memories are blurred, jumbled and mostly incoherent.

I have no recollections of the final breakup of my parents' marriage. For a while we lived at my maternal grandparents' home, a gracious old place on Northgate Street, Unley Park. We had been there earlier to stay when I was only three, before Peter was born. That was in the Unley Park Private Hospital, where I was taken to visit my mother. I remember walking along Unley Road, just around the corner from Northgate Street, with two women, one my Auntie Elsa, on the way to see my mother in hospital, though I don’t know whether that was  when she was there with toxemia of pregnancy and high blood pressure, or after Peter was born. I was sent away about then to stay with the Methodist minister's family who had moved from Booleroo to Clarendon in the hills south of Adelaide. At that time I was not yet reliably continent, or had become incontinent because of the emotional stresses, and I suffered acute embarrassment when I wet the bed.  

The large garden of the Northgate Street house was overgrown with weeds. A horse-trough of stagnant water contained many wrigglers – mosquito larvae – and close by was a small pond with tadpoles. There was a tennis court, but I think perhaps not in use at that time though it had been earlier when my parents were courting. My grandfather Leopold Judell had died in 1927, and my grandmother Rebecca died in 1931 when I was about 4 ½ years old. I remember her as a tiny lady clad in black who once gave me a very hot peppermint that I spat out as soon as I could. There were frequent large family gatherings at the Northgate Street house, though I seldom knew who was who. They all seemed very old to me, like Auntie Rae, my grandmother’s sister, who wore a black ribbon around her neck to disguise her wrinkles, and I seemed to be in their company much of the time, except for rare occasions when I mingled with  pre-adolescent cousins like Betsy and Ross Ragless, and Barbie Saunders and her sister Peggy, who was already sick and soon died of Hodgkin's disease. 

John and Peter Last with grandmother Rebecca Judell, Northgate Street, Unley Park, 1930

At Northgate Street the grown-ups sometimes read aloud to me: Peter Pan, and a childhood abbreviation of Robinson Crusoe which I still have today, illustrated with colour plates that prompted my cousin Betsy Ragless to dress, or undress, as one of the pirates with her pink bloomers puffed out to resemble the buccaneer's pantaloons in one of the pictures in the book. I hadn't started school then, but knew the alphabet and puzzled out the meaning of words under the plates in Peter Pan. This was when I was about five years old.  I had begun to read for myself before I was six, and another pair of books from that period, the two volumes of poems by A. A. Milne, When we were very young and Now we are six were a precious part of my childhood, still safely stored in the bookshelves reserved for my most valuable books.  Who read them to me?  I don’t remember my mother ever reading aloud to me, but several aunts and cousins did, and soon I was puzzling and sweating my way through the verses on my own. I was always asking questions that often the grown-ups didn’t or couldn’t answer. Except for Uncle Lester, who was not often there but when he was, always bent down to my level and patiently replied to my eager inquiries – why did the dust rise in the air, how did a magnet, a motor-car work. He more than anyone else recognized my hunger for knowledge and understanding. I am forever in his debt. 

John Last and Janet McRae, 1929 or 1930

I had quite a lot to do with several cousins then, most of all with the cousin closest to me in age, Janet McRae, who was just three months older than I (her birthday was the same day as then little Princess, now Queen Elizabeth). Janet and I went together to a kindergarten in a church hall at the end of Northgate Street, run by two sisters, the Misses Fleming (I recall the name after all these years!). Others who attended that kindergarten included three boys who like me later went on to St Peter's College and the Adelaide Medical School, so our lives were intertwined from early childhood. The most fun at kindergarten was playing in a sand tray, or cutting out paper shapes with scissors that had rounded ends so we couldn't stab ourselves or each other, or making plasticine models, a pastime that I got quite good at later, copying another cousin, Alan Saunders, whose models seemed to us to be magnificent. 

The interlude at Northgate Street was early in the Great Depression, a time of desperate hardship and an ominous time with rumblings of political troubles and threats of war. The conversations of the grown-ups in this partly Jewish household were full of foreboding, and some of their fears and dread unspoken thoughts communicated themselves to me. From a very early age I had a haunted sense of bad times coming, a feeling that has remained with me all my life – and sadly has been proved only too true on several occasions as the world entered on successive downward spirals of tension, confrontation, hostility and warfare. The household, like all others with sons old enough to fight in the Great War, was still in mourning in the early 1930s for "Lidie", Elias Judell, the favorite son who had not come back. He had been killed at Gallipoli in 1915. The youngest son, Ceddie (Cedric) had come back, bringing with him a wife, Dorise, a foreigner in ways, values, religion, disrupting the cohesion of this otherwise close-knit family. None of these nuances were comprehensible to me then (some still aren't) but they coloured the atmosphere of the Northgate Street house.

I don’t remember our final departure from the Judell family home and the sale of it and most of its contents at sacrifice prices in the depths of the depression early in the 1930s, after my grandmother Rebecca died. The house sold then for about £1300. It changed hands again in 1991 for over three quarters of a million dollars - a reflection of inflation as well as of rising land values as Adelaide turned from a small town into a city.

The stressful events of that time, a time of bereavement and mourning, and of financial crisis for the entire family, like other painful experiences of early childhood, are at least partly suppressed. There were tears, hushed voices, whispers. Something bad was happening.

Then, rather suddenly it seems to me now (or maybe I had been sent away again to stay with friends), my mother had left there and taken my brother Peter and me to live near the sea at Brighton, a seaside village some distance in those days from the suburban fringes of the small city of Adelaide. It was the beginning of a new and happier life.