FAMILY SKELETON
Prologue by the Storyteller
Imagine you have a talking skeleton in the wardrobe. That’s me. I
still have my own teeth.
Once upon a time, in the years between the great wars, there was born
a baby girl named Margaret. This
happened in the artistic atmosphere of Eltham in the shire of Nillumbik, twenty
kilometres to the north-east of Melbourne. Margaret’s childhood was happy,
although during some of it the whole world was at war for the second time. When
Margaret grew up she married Edmund who was a very distant cousin, and she went
to live in the wealthy atmosphere of Toorak in the city of Stonnington, five
kilometres to the south-east of the Melbourne Town Hall. And lived happily ever
after. You think so? There was happy and there was sad. Life’s like that. Even
Cinderella died in the end. Margaret and Edmund had four children, and in the
way of things, before he was quite seventy years old, Edmund died. So Margaret
lived alone in the lovely old house built by Edmund’s father. She was known as
a philanthropist and patron of the arts, and people from the news media would
sometimes come round with various recording devices and would then tell stories
about her and her good works and her pretty family life in Toorak. These
stories didn’t get very far beneath the surface. How could she possibly be as
good as she seemed? One morning she said to her faithful housekeeper, Lillian:
‘I think I’ll write my memoirs.’
Now we’re getting somewhere.
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