"Next door to us, crowded on the east and west by large houses, was the Mantles' narrow little brick place. It seemed to be subsiding crookedly into the earth like an ill-laid tombstone, and was a sunless warren, dim humidity in summer, dim moisture in winter. The laneway to its back door ran flush against our side wall, and beneath the Mantles' lounge-room window, a furze of moss grew a quarter of inch thick on the mortar." Sydney, 1942. The war, the Yanks, the eccentrics. The Fear.