Young Bradman

158 Thanks and sources Had it come easy to me I should not have done it so well. TE Lawrence to Basil Liddell Hart, June 26, 1933 I can take you to the spot in Burton library where, as a boy, I took Rosenwater’s biography of Bradman – a big, thick book with a green cover – from the shelves. Twenty years later, I stepped off a ‘plane in Sydney to begin living in Australia for a year. I knew an old colleague William Verity was living and working there but - before the internet became common – I only began ringing and visiting to find him after I landed. William was living in Bowral and editing its weekly newspaper, which shut the day I met him. Regardless, William and his wife Caroline took me and their first-born Joe, then a baby, to Gibraltar Point for a picnic. Like young Bradman, I was without nerves; I had gone halfway around the world without arranging anything, and was settling within days. Sydney, and Australia, were like that. I had enough interest in Bradman to enjoy the simple, two-platform Bowral station, much like the station of my hometown, as the very place where he set off and returned those Saturdays when he began first grade. Would I have written about Bradman if William had lived elsewhere? Life is not a computer programme we can play over and over to check such things; not yet. The Verity family was also hospitable to me when I returned to Australia in their winter of 2009, to research The Victory Tests . I dedicate this book to them and to all who gave me hospitality in Australia. The author in 1998 at Bowral station, since redeveloped.