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as now. A favourite escapade was to jump on the rear platform of the red, horse-drawn, double decker, open-top buses which plied between Woollahra and the railway station. These had no conductor, the driver collected the fares before the bus moved off, but usually some adult "nark" on the footpath would cry "whip behind" and the driver would flick his long whip around the side of the bus in an endeavour to dislodge the non-paying passenger.
As a survival of the late night shopping times, nearly all suburban shopkeepers lived on the premises, and provided a bell to be used by customers entering the shop during their lunch hour. Another boyish prank was to sneak in and ring the bell or cry "shop", and then run to mingle with the crowd of other school children going home for their midday meal.
Boys sent on errands by their parents or employers, invariably ran all the way frequently bowling high steel hoops along the footpaths or streets until they became breathless. I was very expert at bowling my hoop in and out between pedestrians on the footpaths, and one wet afternoon when these were very crowded outside the shops, I was displaying my skill in this diversion when I suddenly felt myself arrested in mid-air by the scruff of the neck and twisted around to meet the disapproving glare of a huge sergeant of police; the hoop went running on narrowly missing several people.
A third sister, Jane, was born in November 1902, and our parents now had a black-haired son and three redhead daughters. Earlier that same year, Sydney suffered a ghastly epidemic of Bubonic plague spread by flea-infested rats coming ashore from the many ships now berthing at Circular Quay and Darling Harbour. There were many deaths and in a desperate effort to stem the rat invasion, the Authorities resumed all the property along and within this waterfront and evacuated and fumigated it; many of the older slummy dwellings were demolished, whole terraces of them. The Maritime Services Board owns all this area to this day, and rents or leases the buildings to a multitude of tenants.
At the beginning of the new century, Sydney's population