I thought about his words and felt warm and good inside. ‘Amoral little wretch -‘Father knew me so well.

‘What code should I follow, Father?'

‘You have to pick your own.'

‘The Ten Commandments?'

‘You know better than that. The Ten Commandments are for lame brains. The first five are solely for the benefit of the priests and the powers that be; the second five are half-truths, neither complete nor adequate.'

‘All right, teach me about the second five. How should they read?'

‘Not on your tintype, lazy bones; you've got to do it yourself.' He stood up suddenly, dumping me off his lap and almost landing me on my bottom. This was a running game with us. If I moved fast, I could land on my feet. If not, it was one point to him.

‘Analyse the Ten Commandments,' he ordered. ‘Tell me how they should read. In the meantime, if I hear just once more that you have lost your temper, then when your mother sends you to discuss the matter with me, you had better have your McGuffey's Reader tucked inside your bloomers.'

‘Father, you wouldn't.'

‘Just try me, carrot top, just try me. I will enjoy spanking you.'

An empty threat - He never spanked me once I was old enough to understand why I was being scolded. But even before then he had never spanked me hard enough to hurt my bottom. Just my feelings.

Mother's punishments were another matter. The high justice was Father's bailiwick; Mother handled the low and middle - with a peach switch. Ouch!

Father spoiled me rotten.

I had four brothers and four sisters - Edward, born in I876; Audrey in'78; Agnes in i88o; Tom,'8i; in'8z I carne along; Frank was born in I884, then Beth in'92; Lucille,'94; George in I897 - and I took up more of Father's time than any three of my siblings. Maybe four. Looking back on it, I can't sec that he made himself more available to me than he did to any of my brothers and sisters. But it certainly worked out that I spent more time with my father.

Two ground-floor rooms in our house were Father's clinic and surgery; I spent a lot of my free time there as I was fascinated by his books. Mother did not think I should read them, medical books being filled with things that ladies simply should not delve into. Unladylike. Immodest.

Father said to her, ‘Mrs Johnson, the few errors in those books I will point out to Maureen. As for the far more numerous and much more important truths, I am pleased that Maureen wants to learn them. "Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free." John, eight, verse thirty two.'

Mother set her mouth in a grim line and did not answer. For her the Bible was the final word... whereas Father was a freethinker, a fact he did not admit even to me at that time. But Father knew the Bible more thoroughly than Mother did and could always quote a verse to refute her - a most unfair way to argue, it seems to me, but an advantage he needed in dealing with her. Mother was strong-willed.

They disagreed on many things But they had rules that let them live together without bloodshed. Not only live together but share a bed and have baby after baby together. A miracle.

I think Father set most of the rules. At that time and place it was taken for granted that a husband was head of his household and must be obeyed. You may not believe this but the wedding ceremony in those days required the bride to promise to obey her husband - in everything and forever.

If I know my mother (I don't, really), she didn't keep that promise more than thirty minutes.

But they worked out practical compromises.

Mother bossed the household. Father's domain was his clinic and surgery, and the barn and outbuildings and matters pertaining thereto. Father controlled all money matters. Each month he gave Mother a household allowance that she spent as she saw fit. But he required her to keep a record of how she spent it, bookkeeping that Father examined each month.

Breakfast was at seven, dinner at noon, supper at six; if Father's medical practice caused him to need to eat at other times, he notified mother - ahead of time if possible. But the family sat down on time.

If Father was present, he held Mother's chair for her; she thanked him, he then sat down and the rest of us followed. He said grace, morning, noon, and night. In Father's absence my brother Edward seated Mother and she said grace. Or she might direct one of us to return thanks, for practice. Then we ate, and misbehaviour at the table was only one notch below high treason. But a child did not have to sit and squirm and wait for the grown-ups after he was through eating; he could ask to be excused, then leave the table. He could not return even if he discovered that he had made a horrible mistake such as forgetting that it was a dessert night. (But Mother would relent and allow that child to eat dessert in the kitchen... if he had not teased or whined.)

The day my eldest sister Audrey entered high school Father added to the protocol: he held Mother's chair as usual. Once she was seated Mother said, ‘Thank you, Doctor.' Then Edward, two years older than Audrey, held her chair for her and seated her just after Mother was seated: Mother said, ‘What do you say, Audrey?'

‘I did say it, Mama:

‘Yes, she did, Mother.'

‘I did not hear it.'

‘Thank you, Eddie.'

‘You're welcome, Aud.'

Then the rest of us sat down.

Thereafter, as each girl entered high school, the senior available boy was conscripted into the ceremony.

On Sundays, dinner was at one because everyone but Father went to Sunday School and everyone including Father went to morning church.

Father stayed out of the kitchen. Mother never entered the clinic and surgery even to clean. That cleaning was done by a hired girl, or by one of my sisters, or (once I was old enough) by me.

By unwritten rules, never broken, my parents lived in peace. I think their friends thought of them as an ideal couple and of their offspring as ‘those nice Johnson children'.

Indeed I think we were a happy family, all nine of us children and our parents. Don't think for a minute that we lived under such strict discipline that we did not Nave fun. We had loads of fun, both at home and away.

But we made our own fun, mostly. I recall a time, many years later, when American children seemed to be unable to amuse themselves without a fortune in electrical and electronic equipment. We had no fancy equipment and did not miss it. By then, i89o more or less, Mr Edison had invented the electric light and Professor Bell had invented the telephone but these modern miracles had not reached Thebes, in Lyle County, Missouri. As for electronic toys the word ‘electron' had yet to be coined. But my brothers had sleds and wagons and we girls had dolls and toy sewing machines and we had many indoor games in joint tenancy-dominoes and draughts and chess and jackstraws and lotto and pigs-in-clover and anagrams...

We played outdoor games that required no equipment, or not much. We had a variation of baseball called ‘scrub' which could be played by three to eighteen players plus the volunteer efforts of dogs, cats, and one goat.

We had other livestock: from one to four horses, depending on the year; a Guernsey cow named Clytemnestra; chickens (usually Rhode Island Reds); guinea fowl, ducks (white domestic), rabbits from time to time, and (one season only) a sow named Gumdrop. Father sold Gumdrop when it developed that we were unwilling to eat pigs we had helped raise. Not that we needed to raise pigs; Father was more likely to receive fees in smoked ham or a side of bacon than he was to be paid in money.

We all fished and the boys hunted. As soon as each boy was old enough (ten, as I recall') to handle a rifle, Father taught him to shoot, a .22 at first. He taught them to hunt, too, but I did not see it; girls were not included. I did not mind that (I refused to have anything to do with skinning and gutting bunny rabbits, that being their usual game) but I did want to learn to shoot... and made the mistake of saying so in Mother's hearing. She exploded.