Letter from my Father by Dasia Black

and proudly showing me the tools he had used to make all that noise. I would be preparing meals or tidying up, as the sun streamed through the wide kitchen window, and would join in my joyous little Jonathan’s laughter.
    I rapidly learned about child development as I watched our little sons pointing to animals, people and objects in picture books, naming them correctly and showing understanding of relationships. As they grew, I came to appreciatemore fully their qualities as individuals. Simon was a beautifully-spoken well-behaved boy, not a particularly good sportsman, though he did excel in sailing his little Manly Junior at Woollahra Sailing Club. He was a peace-loving child. At age five he declared: I do not believe in violence . However, during one of the many mothers-and-young-children afternoon get-togethers at our home, a slightly older boy called Jamie kept taunting and shoving six-year-old Simon. Suddenly Simon lost his temper. Screaming with rage he ran after Jamie, who escaped and locked himself in his mother’s car. With a force and fury I had never seen in him, Simon hammered with his fists on the car door. My heart bled to see him so distressed, but I recognised that this was a boy who would set limits.
    A striking quality of Jonathan’s was an inordinate amount of physical courage. One summer when he was twelve, for days on end we heard a low-pitched, moaning sound which appeared to be coming from beneath his room. It was hard to identify. Was it a wounded bird? Was it something scraping against something else? Jonathan volunteered to crawl under the forty-centimetre-high space beneath the house and find out. The space was full of spiders and dirt and all sorts of scratchy plants and debris accumulated from the time it had been built some forty years before. He needed to move on his belly diagonally from the manhole at the north-western part of the house to the south-eastern and back again, in fairly dim light. He was gone for what seemed a long time, while we waited anxiously, blaming ourselves for letting him go under the house rather than getting a tradesman to do the job. But he crawled back, pulled himself upright and showed us that his mission had been a success. In his hand he held a tiny wounded kitten. We cared for it for a short time, but it died.
    Our little boys alternated between playing together happily and fighting. Partly this was due to Simon, a greatbuilder of blocks, and later of Lego pieces and Meccano sets, becoming really mad when his little brother, in his clumsy attempts to participate, unwittingly destroyed some great construction. I say unwittingly because Jonathan simply did not have any malice in his character. Once Simon threw a chair at him, breaking a tooth in half so that Jonathan had to have it pulled out under anaesthetic. He had a bad reaction afterwards, thrashing about in a state of arousal. We had to restrain him and put him in a cushioned cot so he would not hurt himself.
    This happened on the day of my graduation as a Bachelor of Arts from Sydney University. We left Jonathan with a babysitter and rushed to get to the ceremony on time. All through the grand occasion in the majestic Great Hall of the University, the congratulations and photos, I had a vision of my little Jonathan in that terrible semi-conscious state in his cot at home.
    In autumn we liked to go to Cooper Park, an ideal area for adventurous children to explore, with its caves and swings and leafy paths, brooks full of tadpoles and frogs, and logs for climbing. Richard and I loved seeing the two boys run ahead, Simon nearly always dressed in browns and olive green to match his hazel eyes and brown hair and Jonathan in red and navy to match his blue-green eyes and fairer hair. They were so good-looking. Spring and early summer weekends were spent picnicking in Centennial Park, often with other friends, while the children, mostly little boys, fed ducks, chased birds and resisted our efforts to