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beside them today, and in many cases less interesting. And yet my little world, the leafy suburbs of outer west London, was a largely innocent and even idyllic one, hardly changed from the day that I was born, Friday 7 October 1955, when the Victorian spirit was still more or less intact in England.

By the time we'd moved to Bedford Park, My father had a successful career as a classical violinist behind him, and so was in a position to ensure that my brother and I enjoy far safer and more comfortable lives than he'd ever known.

He'd been born Patrick Clancy Halling in Rowella, Tasmania and raised in Sydney as the son of a Dane, my namesake Carl Halling, and an English mother. She came into the world as Phyllis Mary Pinnock possibly in the Dulwich area of south London where her family had been based for many years sometime around the turn of the 20th Century, but she was always known to my brother and I as Mary. According to my great aunt and Mary' sister Joan, her maternal grandmother's maiden name had been Butler, name which allegedly links the family to the Butlers of Ormonde, a dynasty of Old English nobles of Norman origin which'd dominated the south east of Ireland since the Middle Ages, and so making it a lost or discarded branch.
Mary grew into a beautiful young woman, with dark hair, green eyes, high cheekbones and an exquisitely sculpted mouth. After losing her fiancee in the First World War, she married an army officer by the name of Peter Robinson, and they had two children in quick succession, Peter and Suzanne, known as Dinny. At some point between Peter's birth and that of his younger brother Patrick, she travelled with her husband to Ceylon, now Sri Lanka, with the purpose of working as a tea planter. There she met a Dane, fluent in Sanscrit, and with a deep love and knowledge of the spiritual traditions of the East, by the name of Carl Halling. What followed next I can't say for sure but through family sources, I've been led to believe that at some point after becoming pregnant with her third child, Mary fled with Carl to the island of Tasmania where my dad was born, although he was raised, as Carl's son, in Sydney, new South Wales.

It was in Sydney that Carl contracted multiple sclerosis, after which I believe Mary made some kind of living as a journalist and teacher. In the meantime, according to what Pat has told me Carl embarked on a desperate spiritual search taking in Mary Baker Eddy's Christian Science in the hope no doubt that this would

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