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The three neighbors' homes in Randwick in southeast Sydney were identical: single-fronted, built from red brick, with hallways to the left that ran along three main rooms on the right and then opened to a kitchen, with a laundry and bathroom via a trip out to the back veranda. If the women were like peas in a pod, so were their homes.

"Hello, dear," Violet said with a warm smile. "Had a good day?"

"I did." Martha smiled back as she stopped on the footpath and looked up at the women. She could set an alarm clock by this scene.

"You're too late for any biscuits." Mrs. Tilley tut-tutted, checking her wristwatch for added dramatic effect. "We've been here for an hour waiting for you to walk up the street, and in the meantime your mum's eaten 'em all." Mrs. Tilley chuckled and patted Violet's hand.

"Get that bony thing away from me, Nance!" Violet burst into laughter and pretended to shove her friend.

Mrs. Ward rolled her eyes and set her cup on the tiled veranda. "These two are worse than schoolboys"—she winked—"fighting all the time."

In weather both good and bad, Violet, Mrs. Tilley, and Mrs. Ward gathered every afternoon—in that brief period of respite between preparing dinner and cooking it—to watch the world go by.

Mrs. Tilley and Mrs. Ward weren't blood relatives, but they were the closest thing Violet had to sisters. They had always been surrogate aunts to Martha, with their children more like cousins than her own. Martha had never really had the real thing, the blood kind. There'd been one uncle who moved to Brisbane after he served in the First World War and whose untimely death and small inheritance had enabled Violet and Martha to buy the house they'd lived in since. While her father had two brothers, Martha didn't know them and they had no interest in knowing her or Violet. Sometimes a person just didn't warm to their relatives. And if it wasn't estrangement, it had been the First World War and the Spanish flu. Those twin horrors had left a generation of Australians with missing branches on their family trees.

Martha still remembered the fear that swept through Sydney when the flu was detected, spreading almost faster than the contagion itself. Public places had been closed. She'd particularly missed the library and her precious books. Their neighbors and friends remained at home behind locked doors, and if they did have to venture out, they covered their faces with white handkerchiefs. Looking back, it seemed every second person had caught the flu in 1919, including Violet. Thank god she had survived it. Martha was only thirteen years old and, with her father already dead, she had never forgotten her bone-shaking fear of being left an orphan.

"If you didn't want me to eat all the biscuits, you shouldn't have baked them, Mrs. Tilley!" Violet laughed.

"If you didn't eat my biscuits, you'd have wasted away by now. We know you can't trust Martha's cooking." Mrs. Tilley winked at Violet and all three women laughed again with Martha joining them. It was no secret she lacked something vital in the kitchen department: interest.

Martha understood how important this afternoon routine was to her mother. It was the comfort of the familiar. She knew her daughter was on her way home, that Martha would prepare dinner—even if it was a simple meal—while they chatted about her day, that it wouldn't be long before they both retired to the living room, where they would bask in that lovely and comforting radio hour while the sun was setting and familiar and friendly voices from the wireless filled their living room and their hearts. Mother and daughter would sit in companionable silence, sipping their tea, hanging on every word of the action and drama and romance of Blue Hills and the other serials Violet loved. After, they would dissect the characters' dramas as if they were real people, neighbors perhaps, instead of actors in a studio playing pretend. And later, when the music programs began, the orchestral strains would lull Violet into drowsiness, and after she'd urged her mother to bed, Martha would return to the living room, pluck the bookmark from one of her beloved worn volumes, and immerse herself in George Eliot or the Brontes or Jane Austen all over again until she, too, had to go to bed.

Violet and Mrs. Tilley and Mrs. Ward were a willing audience to life on the street. They were there for the slow and then hurried trickle of children hauling their satchels and cases home from school in groups of twos and threes, stopping to play marbles on the footpath, shouting in horror when one of them veered its way toward a drain before being rescued just in time by someone's nimble fingers. Girls played hopscotch on hastily scrawled grids on the road, knowing that nothing would remain permanent with Sydney's rain and car tires smudging their chalk-marked squares. In waves behind the children came mothers pushing prams, calling out, "Just on my way back from the shops, Mrs. Berry." Or "How are you, Mrs. Tilley? You baking, Mrs. Ward?" And the women would answer, "No complaints" or "Melting moments today," and they would exchange waves and smiles and the pudgy-cheeked babes in their prams would stare up in awe.

"Did you get some of the rain today? There was a downpour in Kings Cross." Martha opened the low gate and stepped onto the path bordered by beds of neatly trimmed lavender. Mrs. Tilley sewed the seeds into cloth bags to keep moths out of the wardrobes of every bedroom on the street. Martha smoothed a hand over the leaves and breathed in the wafting scent.