Grossmutter said that I was squealing like a tortured mouse when she pulled me from my mother's womb. One more squalling bundle in a crib in the dim parlour. It was Grossmutter who named me Frederick Joseph Heinrich Frank Fritschenburg. Over my cradle she sang of great ancestors and past riches. Told stories of Hansel und Gretel lost in the forest, of witches and goblins and Onkel Gustav and Tante Teresa singing Auf Wiedersehen. Of tears falling on her piano that last night in Magdeburg.

Rejected by his mother at birth and raised by his Grossmutter and Grossvater, Frederick Fritschenburg, a second generation Australian of German descent, is dying in hospital. At eighty years of age Frederick recalls a life torn by two world wars and the Great Depression - a life of uncertainty and anguish, of disappointment, human frailties and estranged relationships, where nothing seems as real as the special childhood bond that existed between him and his Grossmutter.

Left on the table in the front window