Your “drunk his license away” and “kerosene” made me smile… things that always happened with one of my next-door neighbour’s back in the UK of the ’50s, but never with the next-door family on the other side. Sort of reminds me of the differences in families of that post-war era… the Irish Catholics were wild — the Protestants too proper… the adults never spoke together, but their offspring were inseperable.

However, your tale also reminds me of my late wife’s three-year stint with RTZ in Melbourne more than half a century ago… she thought nothing of driving a hundred miles to have dinner with friends, so great were the distances, and some of odd things she described seeing on those jaunts are somewhat more believable now.