A COUPLE OF years before her death, I took my great-grandmother, Gabi, to St Vincent’s Hospital in Melbourne. She’d developed cataracts on both eyes and was finding it impossible to play bridge.

“I haff a present for you,” she said when I arrived at the door of her St Kilda flat. She fumbled for my hand and pulled me inside. The flat was neither flash nor modest. On the walls hung a couple of dim seascapes in plain gold frames. On the mantelpiece, above a small gas heater, sat a china vessel of hard lollies. “Iz immaculate, my place, no?” she was fond of boasting. Until her eyesight failed it was, but now crusts formed on crockery and toilet edges.