I can certainly remember the long bicycle ride to the teacher’s house and the steep upwards slope just before I got there. I remember the rush of pleasure as I whooshed back down the hill at the end of the lesson. I also recall the music teacher’s house, double-fronted, with a long corridor to the back room, where the piano stood. And the musty cabbagey smell of the place. And the boredom. Other than that, nothing. I can’t even recall the gender of the teacher, never mind supply a detailed dental report.

When I think of my childhood it’s like a broken wine bottle smashed on the floor. The memories are shards of glass, all messed up. It’s impossible to know what fits where.

        •      A teenager comes over with his parents and sings all eighteen minutes of ‘Alice’s Restaurant’, while strumming along on his guitar. I’m about nine or ten and I’m very impressed.

        •      Cicadas. Collecting them. From a tree over the road.

        •      A dead dog lies on the roadside. It’s been hit by a car and left there, its eye hanging out.

        •      Me beating an upholstered pool chair with a stick, bored in the late afternoon after school, pretending I am ‘teacher’ and caning the pupils.

        •      Cycling to the home of a boy my mother wanted me to like, but I had my doubts about. He had a weird big head.

        •      My parents hosting a party at home and me being told to stand and read a short story for the group. It was The Loaded Dog by Henry Lawson. Mortifying.

        •      A bet with a boy at school called Robert Evans. ‘I’ll never like girls,’ he says. ‘Well,’ I reply, ‘I agree that girls are yuck, but we’ll both change our minds. All grown-ups are married. I bet you fifty cents that one day you will be too.’ (I have the urge, all these years on, to try and collect.)

        •      My mother whacking me on the legs with her shoe, which had jewels on it.

        •      Cycling down to the creek that ran through some scrub not far from home. A hazy memory of other children and a raft and some 44-gallon drums. I remember the smooth surface of the very steep road – white concrete when most roads were tarmac.

Is this what most people’s memories are like? Do we all miss the important bits – who were these kids with the raft? – while having really sharp recall of the colour of the road surface upon which we pedalled?

My parents might seem eccentric but at least some of their oddities were in keeping with the time. Parents in the 1960s were often quite uninvolved in their children’s lives. Most didn’t attend weekend sporting fixtures in the way that’s common today. Back then, children would cycle to the ground, play a round of football or cricket, and then cycle home. Most primary-school children would travel solo to school and head home again at the end of the day. And the whole project of engaging with your children – praising them and cheering them on – was not even considered. Worse, the merest flicker of praise was condemned as something that might produce a child ‘with tickets on himself’ or ‘too big for his boots’.

Five decades on, parents are criticised for being too upbeat about their children’s achievements – the ‘culture of unearned praise’, it’s now called – yet the earlier generation of parents took it to the opposite extreme. The parents of the 1960s and 1970s acted as if it would kill them to say something positive.

In most households, you’d have had variations on this discussion:

‘Hey, Mum, good news – I scored 99 out of 100 in the French test.’

‘Oh, what a shame. You’d better work on the word you messed up.’

‘I also got 99 out of 100 for mathematics.’

‘That’s why you should have studied harder the night before.