at the thieving pigeons that would make off with her jacks when she tossed them. Another brother, Jack, lived up the road. On Saturdays Dennis and Budda would drink and play cricket with Jack’s kelpie as slip fielder, until Budda would start drunkenly singing and Jack would send him packing. Dennis moved with the family to Alexandria and later Stanmore. He was there to welcome Harry and Lynn’s two children, Shane and Kim, to the extended family. ‘There are times I’m lying in bed and I’d give anything to be back with that family’, he once told me.
Crossing paths Each time Tom and Dennis retold memories of their youth in and around Newtown, one of them would wonder aloud how many times they’d crossed paths without knowing they were brothers. We stood outside the Marlborough hotel on Missenden Road one afternoon. It was the place where Tom and his Sharpie gang would often start their nights out. In the same pub his Dadda – a drinker in his day – would knock back schooners. Shirl’s place on Longdown street, where Dennis and Jimmy had hidden out to escape the welfare, was only a few blocks away. Nowadays the interior of the pub was unrecognisable to the brothers, with its polished wood paneling and sparkling fairy lights. A few doors down was the Campos coffee shop. It amused Dennis that the people queuing for their fancy coffee had no idea the kinds of sordid things that used to be housed there. His Dadda had been a stand-over for the brothel and sly grog joint housed in the narrow terraces. Standing in the doorway of a closed Italian restaurant, Dennis told me matter-of-factly, ‘I was sitting on this step when Dadda was shot’. He was only a small boy when it happened – the memory lingered from before the nightmare of the orphanage. Dennis pointed to the spot where his father had stood. The story went like this: I can remember when they shot Dadda, cause there used to be a sly grog place – gambling and all that. Well Dadda used to look after that. And Dugan and Mears, they were tryin’ to take over.
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