IF

From Nicholas Shakespeare's review of Murray Bail's Fairweather (Sydney: Murdoch Books 2009) in today's ALR -

when he was six months old, his father was recalled to India as medical adviser to the maharaja of Kapurthala. With reluctance, his parents left Ian in the care of two pious, alcoholic spinster aunts. He would not clap eyes again on his mother until he was nine.

The aunts took him to live in Brechin, Sydenham and Jersey. It is likely that he experienced the same traumatic incident as his siblings. One morning, says Geoffrey [Fairweather's nephew], the aunts thought that the world was coming to an end and dressed the children in Sunday clothes. "The blinds were drawn and they had to wait for the end of the world, and it didn't come." When one of the aunts fell out of a window, Ian's mother made him go and see her body in its coffin.