Which is what my youngest sister exclaimed - I'm the youngest of five; my parents kept having children until they found one they liked - when she discovered me amongst the crowd waiting at the bus terminal.
I was going to drive her down to newly-acquired "Riverbend" where she was to spend Christmas 1993, but this was no sentimental journey: she had flown all the way from Germany to Sydney and endured the bus trip to Canberra to get me sign over my share of our father's inheritance which she and the other children were fighting over with my stepmother (our parents had not been of the until-death-do-us-part persuasion).
I had left a dysfunctional home when I was fourteen, and I had left a still starving Fatherland when I was nineteen (no one ever says, "Well, I have a happy home life, I'm rich and I have many friends - so I'm off to Australia!"), and I wanted no part in this desperate fight. I signed whatever she put in front of me, after which I never heard from her again (although I did hear from her lawyers who demanded I pay them for my share of their legal fees for the share I had signed over to her).
I was forty-eight years old then, and approaching my father's age when his photograph was taken. Being almost the spitting image of him had prompted my sister to exclaim "Genau wie der Alte!", a reminder that we are a product of our genes, and those first few years of our lives.
My father had been injured during the war, and after the war we eked out a miserable living on his "Kriegsverletztenrente", reluctantly doled out by a still very much struggling government of the new Germany. My resentment of all kinds of government hand-outs and a determination to look after myself have stayed with me ever since those early years.
With this total lack of money, receiving any sort of pocket-money was totally out of the question. I managed to earn a few coins from little jobs around the neighbourhood which never amounted to much, which made me resort to "crime": as the youngest in the family it was my job to daily collect a pint of milk from the dairy shop, which I did in an old battered aluminium can (no bottled milk then!) and which on this one occasion I ask to be filled up only half, pocketing the price difference.
Back at home, I made up the shortfall with water, but, not yet being a "hardened criminal", I failed to mix it enough because my step-father (that dysfunctional family again!) spotted the deception immediately. The subsequent questioning and the involuntary blushing of my face the very moment I tell a lie have stopped me from telling lies ever since.
My next brush with "crime" had to do with my passion for philately (although at that early age I was better at the German habit of compounding nouns than at Greek and French, and I simply called it "Briefmarkensammeln"). Germans are a nation of stamp-collectors which perhaps has something to do with those long winter nights, and I was no exception. Even big department stores like the then KARSTADT had a philatelic section with assorted stamps in small cellophane bags hanging from hooks on display carousels on the counter. One quick tug removed the bag containing the stamps of your desire, after which you would present it at the cash register for payment - or not, as a more worldly-wise schoolmate demonstrated to me by deftly dropping it in his pocket.
My schoolmate promptly vanished into the crowd while I finished up being taken through a door marked "Staff Only" where a senior person reduced me to tears with a very stiff dressing-down. Luckily, I was only ten years old and he took pity on me, and I haven't stolen anything since - with the only exception of quick glances at some pretty girls perhaps.
As Ernest Hemingway once said, the seeds of our life are there from the very beginning - if we bother to look. And which my greedy sister had so clearly recognised all those thirty years ago with "Genau wie der Alte!"
