Father told me quietly, ‘We'll discuss it later.'

And we did. About a year later, when it was established that I sometimes drove Father on country calls, unbeknownst to Mother he started taking along in the back of his buggy under gunny sacks a little single-shot .22... and Maureen was taught to shoot... and especially how not to get shot, all the rules of firearm safety. Father was a patient teacher who demanded perfection.

Weeks later he said, ‘Maureen, if you will remember what we taught you, it may cause you to live longer. I hope so. We won't tackle pistol this year; your hands aren't yet big enough.'

We young folks owned the whole outdoors as our playground. We picked wild blackberries and went nutting for black walnuts and searched for pawpaws and persimmons. We went on hikes and picnics. Eventually, as each of us grew taller and began to feel new and wonderful yearnings, we used the outdoors for courting - ‘sparking', we called it.

Our family was forever celebrating special days - eleven birthdays, our parents' wedding anniversary, Christmas, New Year's Eve and New Year's Day, Washington's birthday, Easter, Valentine's Day, the Fourth of July (a double celebration, it being my birthday), and Admission Day on the tenth of August. Best of all was the county fair - ‘best' because Father drove in the harness races (and warned his patients not to get sick that week - or see Dr Chadwick, his exchange). We sat in the stands and cheered ourselves hoarse... although Father seldom finished in the money. Then came Halloween and Thanksgiving, which brings us up to Christmas again.

That's a full month of special days, every one of them celebrated with noisy enthusiasm.

And there were non-special days when we sat around the dining table and picked the meats from walnuts as fast as Father and Edward could crack them, while Mother or Audrey read aloud from the Leatherstocking Tales or Ivanhoe or Dickens - or we made popcorn, or popcorn balls (sticky all over everything!), or fudge, or we gathered around the piano and sang while Mother played, and that was best of all.

There were winters when we had a spell-down every night because Audrey was going for it seriously. She walked around with McGuffey's speller under one arm and Webster's American Spelling Book under the other, her lips moving and her eyes blank. She always won the family drills; we expected that; family competition was usually between Edward and me for second place.

Audrey made it: first place in Thebes Consolidated Grammar and High School when she was in Sixth Grade, then the following year she went all the way to Joplin for the regional - only to lose to a nasty little boy from Rich Hill. But in her freshman year in high school she won the regional and went on to Jefferson City and won the gold medal for top speller in Missouri. Mother and Audrey went together to the state capital for the finals and the presentation - by stage coach to Butler, by railroad train to Kansas City, then again by train to Jefferson City. I could have been jealous - of Audrey's travel, not of her gold medal - had it not been that by then I was about to go to Chicago (but that's another story).

Audrey was welcomed back with a brass band, the one that played at the county fair, specially activated off-season to honour ‘Thebes' Favourite Daughter' (so it said on a big banner), ‘Audrey Adele Johnson', Audrey cried. So did I.

I remember especially one hot July afternoon - ‘Cyclone weather,' Father decided, and, sure enough, three twisters did touch down that day, one quite close to our house.

We were safe; Father had ordered us into the storm cellar as soon as the sky darkened, and bad helped Mother down the steps most carefully - she was carrying again... my little sister Beth it must have been. We sat down there for three hours, by the light of a barn lantern, and drank lemonade and ate Mother's sugar cookies, thick and floury and filling.

Father stood at the top of the steps with the slant door open, until a piece of the Ritters barn came by.

At which point, Mother was shrill with him (for the only time that I know of in the presence of children). ‘Doctor! You come inside at once! I will not be widowed just to let you prove to yourself that you can stand up to anything!'

Father came down promptly, fastening the slant door behind him. ‘Madam,' he stated, ‘as always your logic is irrefutable.'

There were hayrides with young people of our own age, usually with fairly tolerant chaperonage; there were skating parties on the Marais des Cygnes; there were Sunday School picnics, and church ice-cream socials, and more and more. Happy times do not come from fancy gadgets; they come from ‘male and female created He them,' and from being healthy and filled with zest for life.

The firm discipline we lived under was neither onerous nor unreasonable; none of it was simply for the sterile purpose of having rules. Outside the scope of those necessary rules we were as free as birds.

Older children helped with younger children, with defined responsibilities. AI] of us had assigned chores, from about age six, on up. The assignments were written down and checked off-and in later years I handled my own brood (larger than my mother's) by her rules. Hers were sensible rules; they had worked for her; they would work for me.

Oh, my rules were not exactly like my mother's rules because our circumstances were not exactly alike. For example, a major chore for my brothers was sawing and chopped wood; my sons did not chop wood because our home in Kansas City was heated by a coal furnace. But they did tend the furnace, fill the coal bin (coal was delivered to the kerb, followed by the backbreaking chore of carrying ir a bucket at a time to a chute that led to the coal bin), and clean out the ashes and haul them up the basement stairs and out.

There were other differences. My boys did not have to carry water for baths; in Kansas City we had running water. And so forth... My sons worked as hard as my brothers had, but differently. A city house with electricity and gas and a coal furnace does not create anything like the heavy chores that a country house in the Gay Nineties did. The house I was brought up in had no running water, no plumbing of any sort, no central heating. It was lit by coal-oil lamps and by candles, both homemade and store-bought, and it was heated by wood stoves: a big baseburner in the parlour, a drum stove in the clinic, monkey stoves elsewhere. No stoves upstairs... but grilles ser in the ceilings allowed heated air to reach the upper floor.

Ours was one of the larger houses in town, and possibly the most modern, as Father was quick to adopt any truly useful new invention as soon as it was available. In this he consciously imitated Mr Samuel Clemens.

Father judged Mr Clemens to be one of the smartest and possibly the smartest man in America. Mr Clemens was seventeen years older than Father; he first became aware of ‘Mark Twain' with the Jumping Frog story. From that time on Father read everything by Mr Clemens he could lay hands on.

The year I was born Father wrote to Mr Clemens, complimenting him on A Tramp Abroad. Mr Clemens sent a courteous and dryly humorous answer; Father framed it and hung it on the wall of his clinic. Thereafter Father wrote to Mr Clemens as each new book by ‘Mark Twain' appeared. As a direct result, young Maureen read all of Mr Clemens' published works, curled up in a corner of her father's clinic. These were not books that Mother read; she considered them vulgar and destructive of good morals. By her values Mother was correct; Mr Clemens was clearly subversive by the standards of all ‘right-thinking' people.

I am forced to assume that Mother could spot an immoral book by its odour, as she never, never actually read anything by Mr Clemens.

So those books stayed in the clinic and I devoured them there, along with other books never seen in the parlour-not just medical books, but such outright subversion as the lectures of Colonel Robert Ingersoll and (best of all) the essays of Thomas Henry Huxley.