I grew up the fourth child of Maude and Lawrence Smith in Albury. Albury-Wodonga is a thriving city of over 100,000 people, but in the 1940s it was a rustic road-and-rail junction, population 15,000. One of the few things that hasn’t changed about my hometown is that it is a place of climatic extremes. Its summers are blistering and its winters are icy with relentless rain that makes the Murray overflow its banks and flood the streets. I’ve come to believe the wildly fluctuating weather I experienced in Albury helped me tremendously in coping with all the weather conditions we found in tennis.

Mum was a devout Catholic who prayed morning, noon and night. She was scared of life to the point of paranoia, and always prayed to the Lord to keep her and her family safe from the harm she believed might be lurking around every corner, waiting to strike us down. Years later, when I travelled the world playing tennis, Mum begged God not to let me die in a plane crash.

Lack of money was a constant source of worry in the Smith household. Our bungalow at number 61 was a rental, a humble grey fibro with a green tin roof located at the Murray River end of Ebden Street, South Albury. It only had one main bedroom. It also had built-in verandahs at the front and the back of the house, and this is where we children slept, my brothers out the back and June and I at the front.

It took something important to get Mum out from under our roof, something like the terrifying prospect of my father spending his weekly wage in one night at the pub. Every payday she’d ride her bicycle the five kilometres to the ice-cream factory where Dad worked to claim his pay packet before he could put it on the bar of the local hotel. Sometimes he beat her to it. My brothers told me that when I was in Mum’s womb, Dad kicked her in the stomach. I can also remember, when I was young, one of my brothers hitting my father because of his drinking.

After dinner and homework, I’d lie low in my bed saying Hail Marys and the Lord’s Prayer to block out the angry noise as Dad berated Mum and accused her of all manner of terrible things while she protested her innocence. When Dad sobered up and was contrite, Mum would then seize her chance to nag him about his alcohol abuse. He would sit silently behind his newspaper, slowly working himself into a fury, and then he’d explode at her all over again. Dad was a good man when he was sober.

From them, I learnt early what damage alcohol could do to a family. Because of its effect on my father, I promised at my Confirmation that I’d never drink until I was twenty-one, and I kept my word.