I don’t know whether the Sarah Sands Hotel is number one, but it is certainly the first building you encounter in Sydney Road, which, unusually for road names in Melbourne, actually goes where it says it does. These days freeways and by-passes create diversions and there are many name changes, but still it heads generally northward, toward Sydney, 500 miles away. It was also first and last stop for soldiers heading to and from Puckapunyal, and if you needed a ride back to the base you only needed to go there in uniform and stand in the bar and someone would come and collect you.
    There, that fateful night, we encountered four girls sitting at a table, but there were five of us so guess who ended up leaning against the bar while the others joined their table, doing their best for one final score.

...Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show....
…“Barkis is willin’.”...
…”Take care, he bites.”...
…“Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen nineteen six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds ought and six, result misery.”...
…“We are so very ‘umble.”...
…“It was as true,” said Mr. Barkis. “as taxes is. And nothing’s truer than them.”...
...“Accidents will occur in the best-regulated families.”...
…“I’m Gormed—and I can’t say fairer than that.”...
…‘Among the eyes elevated towards you from this portion of the globe, will ever be found, while it has light and life,
            ‘The
                ‘Eye
                    ‘Appertaining to
                ‘Wilkins Micawber,
                      ‘Magistrate.’…
…“Oh Agnes, oh my soul, so may thy face be by me when I close my life indeed; so may I, when realities are melting from me like the shadows I now dismiss, still find thee near me, pointing upward!”...
     It is one of the truly great sentiments—to be the hero of your own life, rather than merely the most interesting character. Not many people achieve that. Charles Dickens did. He thought this work, David Copperfield, was his best but I cannot agree—he must have forgotten that he had already written Pickwick Papers, A Christmas Carol and, I think, Dombey and Son.  And that is to assume that, at the time he spoke, he was not to know that he would soon write A Tale of Two Cities, Great Expectations and Bleak House. True, Copperfield is his most autobiographical work—so it pleases the LitCrit brigade most but that means nothing—and Heep and Micawber are two of his finest characters, but really most of us expect that of Dickens all the time. No one should ever ask a writer to judge his own works—they are the only people who never had a chance to read it without knowing what happens next.