Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse’s widow and five children agree that Dad did something in the war, and that’s about all. Each of them seems to have a different 1950s B-movie, or 1940s Movietone newsreel, in his or her head, portraying a rather different set of events. There is not even agreement on whether he was in the Army or the Navy, which seems like a pretty fundamental plot point to Randy. Was he in Europe or Asia? Opinions differ. Grandma grew up on an Outback sheep farm. One might therefore think that, at some point in her life, she might have been an earthy cuss—the type of woman who would not only remember which service her late husband had been in but would be able to take down his rifle from the attic and field-strip it blindfolded. But she had evidently spent something like seventy-five percent of her waking hours in church (where she not only worshipped but went to school and transacted essentially all of her social life), or in transit thereto or therefrom, and her own parents quite explicitly did not want her to wind up living on a farm, ramming her arm up livestock vaginas and slapping raw steaks over the black eyes dished out by some husband. Farming might have been an adequate sort of booby prize for one or at most two of their sons, sort of a fallback for any offspring who happened to suffer major head injuries or fall into chronic alcoholism. But the real purpose of the cCmndhd kids was to restore the past and lost glories of the family, who allegedly had been major wool brokers around the time of Shakespeare and well on their way to living in Kensington and spelling their name Smith before some combination of scrapie, long-term climatic change, nefarious conduct by jealous Outer Qwghlmians, and a worldwide shift in fashions away from funny-smelling thirty-pound sweaters with small arthropods living in them had driven them all into honest poverty and then not-so-honest poverty and led to their forcible transportation to Australia.