Hilda and the two boys, but there is a young piano teacher called Alys who piques his interest.  Alys has a vague ambition to go to California, but she lacks the initiative to get herself there.  She's got the money, because her father left her plenty, but alas -- this novel is set in the late 1920s -- she has invested it in shares instead.  (Her adviser at the bank is Mr Belper, and I featured his wife -- she of the pups and the pools -- in a Sensational Snippet) . Hilda wants to get away too.  Happy Valley is bitterly cold in winter and she needs to be somewhere warmer, though that's not the only source of her discontent.  Her son Rodney longs to escape from school, and although I need to read David Marr's biography Patrick White: A life to be sure, there is an authenticity about the bullies who torment him that suggests an autobiographical element to this writing.  It's quite heartbreaking, and so is the scene where lonely little Margaret Quong becomes a surrogate for her teacher's rage.  Mr Moriarty is a weedy schoolteacher whose wheezing and snoring repels his wife Vic.  She's looking for some fun, and Clem Hagan, a blow-in overseer at the Furlow Station is just the fellow to provide it, she thinks, though Hagan, the sort of bloke who always has his eye on the main chance, fancies Sidney Furlow -- mainly because she's a challenge. Sidney- the most interesting character