A Knight Without Armour

Every so often a life gets a second chance, though it rarely arrives with any warning, and it rarely looks, at first, like a chance at all.

In the spring of 1976, Bill Knight drove out of Sydney with four suitcases, a cardboard box of books, and nothing much left to lose. He was forty-five, a ward of the state before he could walk, a soldier before he could vote, a furniture salesman for twenty-one years, and a husband in name only for twenty of them. He did not know where he was going, only that it had to be a long way from where he had been.

What he found, at the end of a red soil track in the north-west of New South Wales, was a garden gone to weed and a widow who needed it tended. Neither was looking for what came next. But that is often how the second half of a life announces itself: quietly, in ordinary work, long before anyone notices it happening.

This is Bill’s story, and Janice’s, and that of the household that gathered around them: Gillian, Emma, Bernie and Joyce, Betty, and a good many more. It is set in a corner of Australia still finding its feet in the late 1970s, changing its currency, its measurements and its music, much as Bill was changing his life. The setting is real in every particular I could make it, but the people and their days are invented.

Running under it all is the moment he was told plainly that he had been given a second chance at life, and that he should make the most of it. He did. Not by escaping his first forty-five years, which never quite let go of him, but by building something new alongside them: a garden, a marriage, a family, a place to belong, one ordinary day at a time.