—Carry me back to ole Virginny,

And now that she is dead she will have returned to Virginny and be walking through the cotton fields, with the sun shining on her frizzy hair that is like a ball of black cotton to be danced on or thistledown that birds take for living in if their world be black.

Calendars hang upon the wall and have bills pinned to them from the grocer and milkman and butcher; and somehow they contrive in hanging there to collect all the days and months of the year, numbering them, like convicts, in case they escape.

Which they do, always.

—Time flies, said Mrs. Withers. And it is calendar, not colander, you silly children. Francie, Toby, Daphne, Chicks, drink up your cabbage water or you shall lose two legs, like your grandmother.

the rubbish dump an’ find things.

Francie, Toby, Daphne, not always Chicks because she was too small and dawdled, found their treasure at the rubbish dump, amongst the paper and steel and iron and rust and old boots and everything that the people of the town had cast out as of no use and not worth anything any more. The place was like a shell with gold tickle of toi-toi³ around its edges and grass and weeds growing in green fur over the mounds of rubbish; and from where the children sat, snuggled in the hollow of refuse, warmed sometimes by the trickling streams of fires that the council men had lit in order to hasten the death of their material cast-offs, they could see the sky passing in blue or grey ripples, and hear in the wind, the heavy fir tree that leaned over the hollow, rocking, and talking to itself saying firr - firr - firr, its own name, loosening its needles of rust that slid into the yellow and green burning shell to prick tiny stitches across the living and lived-in wound where the children found, first and happiest, fairy tales.

And a small green eaten book by Ernest Dowson⁴ who said, in confidence, to Cynara,

—Last night ah yesternight betwixt her lips and mine.

Which was love, and suitable only for Francie who had come, that was the word their mother used when she whispered about it in the bathroom, and not for Daphne who didn’t know what it felt like or how she could wear them without they showed and people said, Look.

—You will drop blood when you walk, Francie said.

And not knowing how to answer her, Daphne said

—Rapunsel, Rapunsel,⁵ let down your hair;
quoting from the prince who climbed the gold silk rope to the top of the tower, it was all in the fairy tales they found at the rubbish dump. The book smelt, and it too had been eaten by worms which still lived in its yellow pages, and it was dusted over with ashes, and it had been thrown away because it did not any more speak the right language, and the people could not read it because they could not find the way to its world. It had curly writing on the cover, saying, The Brothers Grimm. It spoke of Cinderella and her ugly sisters with their cut-off heel and toe and the blood flowing black, the snow colour of every bean flower.

—But I don’t wanner go to school, Toby said. I wanner go

to the rubbish dump an’ find another book.

The lady doctor was coming to school that day. She wore a grey costume and because she was the school nurse and fierce, they had her mixed in their mind with the grey nurse shark that is deadly, creeping behind you when you swim, to swallow you in one gulp; though not found in these waters, only, I believe, near Sydney.

Every time she came the nurse took the dirty children to look at them and whisper at them through a roll of cardboard. Thirty-two, fifty-five, sixty-one, she would whisper; and the children, if they were the dirty ones and being examined, would have to echo, Thirty-two, fifty-five, sixty-one; and if they echoed correctly it meant they could hear and would not have their ears poked at and operated on. And the lady doctor would then take a stick like an ice-cream spoon and very very gently part the strands of the pupil’s hair, to look through it and find if it were inhabited.⁶ She would look at their clothes, too, and see how often they had been washed, and if they were hand-me-downs or new. And she would hold a square of cardboard in front of the dirty children and point to the letters printed on it, and expect to be told the alphabet, muddled up, and them to see small print, even smaller than the middle column of a page of the Bible where it says See Tim. Rom. Deut., and other mysterious words.

Toby did not like this. He feared it all. He had seen on a page of the doctor’s book that his mother kept on top of the wardrobe, a picture of the animals with many legs that walk through people’s hair; and the red spots that come on people’s faces, and the way legs turn crooked. Toby was a sick boy, himself, who took medicine, a teaspoon in water after each meal until his mother found out what the writing on the prescription meant. And then,

—Bromide, she said. Drugs.

So whenever the bottle of medicine came, in twos or repeats, Toby’s mother said

—No child of mine, no child of mine will drink this filth; and she broke the seal and popped off the cork and poured away the thick mulatto fluid.

Toby did not get better. He went to school and sat in the back row and put his head on one side, trying to know what was written on the blackboard and what the master, Andy Reid, was saying in the history lesson.

There had been Maori Wars and the white people had taken a block of land—how big is a block of land, Toby wondered. They built houses with blocks and walked in the morning around the block, touching every second fence and plucking every third marigold. But this block of land in history, they say it held a forest of kauri⁷ that only a storm could walk round in a minute and pull out by the hair, every second and third tree.

—The government was good then, Andy would say.

And sometimes he said—The government was bad.

And he talked of peace and war that never seemed to happen at the same time in history. There were, say, six years of peace when Maoris and white people spent every day and night of the years smiling at each other and rubbing noses and exchanging greenstone and kumaras and kauri and marrying and going for picnics and boiling the billy⁸ and drinking tea and eating fish and laughing and no one was ever angry.

Until the six years finished. On New Year’s Eve, perhaps, with the white and brown people standing outside the New Year, the same way people stand outside theatres and cricket grounds waiting for the films or the shield match to begin; and the mothers warning their children, Remember you must not laugh or play or swap anything. We are killing for six years. It is War.

Toby could not imagine years of war, but Andy Reid told everyone and Andy Reid knew. He said also that there had been a Hundred Years’ War when some people’s faces must have been born angry and died angry without any smiling in between.

But history was hard to understand with its kings good and bad and their wigs and their white fitting pants for dancing a minuet; and then the two princes sitting in the dreadful tower and listening to the water dripping from an underground cavern on to their faces and down their necks and on their heads poked like flowers from their pretty petal ruffs. Toby felt sorry for them but he could not understand history and wanting to get more land and gold; nor, sometimes, could he understand what the master said, or read the words on the blackboard. And that is why he wanted not to go to school when the lady doctor came.

He was often sick and had to stay away from school. When he was sick his hand shook as if it felt cold and then a dark cloak would be thrown over his head by Jesus or God, and he would struggle inside the cloak, pushing at the velvet folds, waving his arms and legs in the air till the sun took pity, descending in a dazzling crane of light to haul, but, alas, preserve, where in all the sky, Toby wondered, this cloak of stifling recurring dream. And he would open his eyes and see his mother beside him, her big tummy and the map of wet and flour on her sack apron.

He would cry then.

The velvet cloak came over and over again so that whenever Toby moved his hand or arm too quickly, his mother would rush to his side and ask,

—Are you all right, Toby?

Or at school Andy Reid would say,

—You can go and lie down, Toby Withers, and you may be able to stop it.

—It?

Did Andy Reid understand what happened, and how the cloak came with its forest of a million folds? Did he know why some people are given a private and lonely night, with a room of its own but no window that the stars, called by the tattered woman at the show Zodiac, may look through?

So Toby did not go to school that day when the lady doctor came. He said goodbye to his mother and father and said,

—Yes, I’ve got a hanky and I’ll tell them if it comes on; and he ran on ahead of Daphne. Daphne was glad, for it made her afraid to be close to him in case it happened and she was alone watching him, and he would die or choke out of the terrible mulberry colour of his face and his hands twitching and his eyes rolled back, and white, like the eye, closed, of a dead fowl that Daphne had seen by the fowl house. And yet, standing there on the wet side of the street, with Toby gone ahead, and the African Thorn hedge, hung with berries like penny oranges, leaning over to jag her legs if she walked too close, she felt alone, and wanted to catch up; so she caught up and went with Toby to the rubbish dump to find things. They found a bicycle wheel and a motor tyre. Inside the motor tyre was a stack of ledgers full of neat writing and figures written carefully in a beautiful blue ink; and each page seemed, to the children, like something out of a museum, to be kept under a glass case, like the handwriting of a pioneer or governor.

Daphne gathered the books and put them in her lap, stroking them because they were valuable.

—These are treasures, she said. Better than silver paper, this lovely writing.

—They’re not, said Toby. They’re just sums, grown-up sums.

—But they’re made like treasures. Why do they throw them away? And when you’re grown-up you work at treasure, so it must be.

—No. It’s out of banks, said Toby. Where they wear striped suits and get red in the face when it’s hot.

And he tore some pages out of the books, though Daphne tried to hold on to them, and he made paper aeroplanes and wet on one to see if it changed to invisible.

And then they talked about the fairy tales that nobody had wanted and had put in the ashes to be burned. There was a little man, truly, the size of a thumb. He used to drive a horse by sitting in the horse’s ear and whispering Whoa or Gee-up. And there was a king who lived in a mountain of glass and could see his face in seventy different mirrors in one look. And a table that rose up through the earth the way the organ, they say, in the big theatres, rises through the floor and music plays before the people are settled and God Save the Queen⁹ begins.

And to make the table vanish the little girl in the story had to say only,

—Bleat goat bleat

Depart table neat.

—But, talking of tables, I’m hungry, Daphne said to Toby.

What’ve we got?

They had nothing. Dinner time must be close, they thought, so they took one page of the blue writing of sums, in case it was really treasure for a glass case, and they walked home, passing the fruit shop on the way.

Daphne went into the shop that seemed always wet and being washed and the cabbages turning yellow and the fruit specked; and before the shopkeeper came (she was a Chinese woman with different funerals and weddings and churches from Toby and Daphne) Daphne sneaked an apple under her arm and crept out, so that she and Toby had half an apple each, dividing it fairly because it really belonged to Daphne, Toby having the green sour part with thick skin, and Daphne the rosy-cheeked side; though to emphasize the fairness of their venture and the importance of not telling, she agreed to let him walk on the sunny side of the street and be warm while she continued in the shade.

And in the afternoon they both went to school. The lady doctor had been. She had collected people and ticked off their names on white cards, with red ink, and given Norris Stevens a note to take home to his mother, about his tonsils. He was to have his tonsils out, he said, and everyone felt envious.

—Why were you not at school this morning, Miss Drout said to Daphne.

—I was sick, Daphne said.

And

—It came, was Toby’s answer to Andy Reid. And Toby was told to lie on the sick bed and they gave him a drink of milk at playtime, through a straw.

—Traveller, the writing said, Stop here. You are now

What did it feel like to be standing at forty-five degrees?

It felt no different.

Waimaru was a respectable town with the population increasing so quickly that the Mayor kept being forced to call special meetings of the borough council, which were reported in the local newspaper, the rag, it was called. To decide if the reserves where grew native trees and shrubs should be offered for sale as housing sections, and the shrubs, and also the children who played near them after school, be rooted out and planted somewhere else; but the Mayor’s suggestion was defeated and letters to the paper followed, threats of resignation, a special meeting of the afraid beautifying society who had given many shrubs; a defiant meeting of the Build Your Own Home Club; after which, calm fell like a sweet mantle, and the shrubs and children (including the Withers family) remained happily planted on the hills surrounding the town.

And the young Councillors shook their heads, saying,

—This is not progress. The northern towns go ahead,

They were afraid.

—We shall be left behind, they said.

Left behind from going where?

Among the letters to the paper were some by Mrs. Withers who called herself Tui, the native bird, to show she wanted the native bush left on the hills. And sometimes she called herself, if she were writing about bush, Miro, the little red berry. She showed her children the letters, and though they could not understand them, they knew their mother must be Someone, so they could say it in school, with the others who said,

—My father owns a car.

—My uncle can chop down trees faster than anyone.

—My mother writes letters to the paper.

—Yes, Mrs. Withers would say, as she licked the envelope

for closing,

—I’ll blow them up.

And Bob, her husband, would make a rude remark to her.

—Yes, I’ll blow them up. I’ll put my foot down. We women

Sometimes, instead of signing herself Tui, she became Mother of Four; and instead of Miro, the little red berry, she changed to Disgusted, or, merely and universally, A Mother.

—I see Mother of Three has answered me, she would say.

Oh, as if gentle Amy Withers could settle anyone!

And then her husband, going to a lodge meeting, would call from the bedroom,

—Where’s my best tartan tie? I haven’t all the time in the

And Amy Withers would pick over shirts and socks till she was hit by a cascade of tartan tie.

—Here’s your tie, Bob.

She was afraid of her husband. She said Sh-sh to the children when Bob came home from work or parliament was on the air.

—Honorable gentlemen, Bob would say.

Honorable gentlemen.

He was Labour.

But, about the town. You should read a booklet that you may buy for five shillings and sixpence, reduced at sale time to five shillings, increased at Christmas to six shillings. This booklet will tell you the important things about the town and show you photographs—the town clock saying ten to three (the correct position of the hands for driving, says the local traffic inspector); the begonia house at the Gardens, and a perplexed-looking little man who must be the curator, holding a begonia plant in flower; the roses in the rose arch and the ferns in the fernery; also a photograph of the Freezing Works, the outside with its own garden and fancy flower-beds, and the inside with rows of pegged pigs with their tiny trotters thrust out stiff; of the Woollen Mills, the chocolate factory, the butter factory, the flour mill—all meaning prosperity and wealth and a fat filled land; and lastly a photograph of the foreshore with its long sweep of furious and hungry water, the roll-down sea the children call it, where you cannot bathe without fear of the undertow, and you bathe carefully, as you live, between the flags; and beware of the tentacles of sea-weed and the rush of pebbles being sucked back and back into the sea’s mouth each time it draws breath. Certainly, inside the breakwater is a little shovcl-scoop of bay, Friendly Bay, where you paddle and sail shells and eat ice cream bought from Peg Winter, the mountainous woman who moves like faith from town to town, leaving behind her a trail of sweet and ice-cream shops, almost as if they dropped from her pocket, like crumbs or seeds springing into red and white painted shape, with cream-coloured tables and chairs inside, and other high swivel-chairs as the dizzying accompaniment to a caramel or strawberry milk shake.

And glass cases packed with chocolate, dark or milk, fruity or plain.

Everything in a glass case is valuable.

It was the last day of the term and Francie’s last day at school though she was only twelve, thirteen after Christmas. She could count up to thirty in French. She could make puff pastry, dabbing the butter carefully before each fold. She could cook sago, lemon or pink with cochineal, that swelled in cooking from dirty little grains, same, same, dusty and bagged in paper, to lemon or pink pearls. She knew that a drop of iodine on a slice of banana will blacken the fruit, and prove starch; that water is H₂0; that a man called Shakespeare, in a wood near Athens, contrived a moonlit dream.

But in all her knowing, she had not learned of the time of living, the unseen always, when people are like the marbles in the fun alley at the show; and a gaudy circumstance will squeeze payment from their cringing and poverty-stricken fate, to give him the privilege of rolling them into the bright or dark box, till they drop into one of the little painted holes, their niche, it is called, and there roll their lives round and round in a frustrating circle.

And Francie was taken, on the afternoon of the play, like one of the marbles, though still in her silver helmet and breastplate and waiting to be burned; and rolled to a new place beyond Frere Jacques and participles and science and Bunsen burners and Shakespeare, there I couch when owls do cry,

when owls do cry when owls do cry,

To a new place of bright or dark, of home again, and Mum and Dad and Toby and Chicks; an all-day Mum and Dad, as if she were small again, not quite five, with no school, no school ever, and her world, like her tooth, under her pillow with a promise of sixpence and no school ever any more. No black stockings to buy and get on tick with panama hat and blouse and black shoes, with the salesman spearing the account sheets in a terrible, endless ritual, licking the end of the pencil that is chained by a worn gold chain to the counter, carefully writing the prices, totting the account in larger than ordinary figures so as to see and make quite sure, for the Withers are not going to pay yet. It is all on appro.¹⁰ With the deliberation of power then, the salesman plunges the sheet of paper through the metal spear that stands rooted in a small square of wood; then he moves the wood carefully aside, with the paper speared and torn but spouting no visible blood, and the total unharmed and large, and Francie (or Daphne or Toby or Chicks) staring sideways, afraid, at the committed debt. The Withers are under sentence. It is likely they will be put in prison. And the salesman smooths the sheet of account slips with the power of judgment and fate in the pressure of his hand.

—Will it be all right, the children ask, till the end of the month?

—Certainly, till the end of the month.

But rooted in his mind is the shining awl, the spear to pierce sheaves of accounts and secure them till their day of judgment, to the Last Trump,¹¹ when the dead spring up like tall boards out of their grave.

But how shall there be room for the dead? They shall be packed tight and thin like malt biscuits or like the pink ones with icing in between that the Withers could never afford; except for Aunty Nettie passing through on the train.

So for Francie now, no black stockings to find and darn or uniform to sponge or panama hat to be cleaned with whiting and water and the time saying, Will you walk a little faster? And the marks not coming off, and Francie crying because Miss Legget inspected the hats and pointed to the ones not clean and floppy and said,

—A disgrace. Now quick march, girls, toes meet the floor

Francie Withers is dirty. Francie Withers is poor. The Withers haven’t a week-end bach¹² nor do they live on the South Hill nor have they got a vacuum cleaner nor do they learn dancing or the piano nor have birthday parties nor their photos taken at the Dainty Studio to be put in the window on a Friday.

Francie Withers has a brother who’s a shingle short. She couldn’t bring the fuji silk for sewing, she had to bring ordinary boiling silk that you shoot peas through, because she’s poor. You never see her mother dressed up. They haven’t any clothes and Francie hasn’t any shoes for changing to at drill time, and her pants are not real black Italian cloth.

She hasn’t a school blazer with a monogram.

But Francie Withers is Joan of Arc, and she sang at the garden party—

But not any more there I couch when owls do cry. There are owls in the macrocarpa and cabbage trees and they cry quee-will, quee-will, and sometimes at night because of the trees you think it is raining for ever and there will be no more sun, only quee-will and dark.

But the day, for Francie, left school, will be forever, with them all having breakfast and their father going to work, smelling of tobacco and shaving soap and the powder he sprinkles on his feet to stop them from becoming athletic.

—What shift, Bob?

—Late shift, Amy. Home at ten.

But very often he did not call her Amy, only Mother, or Mum, as if she really were his mother.

And she would call him Father, or Dad, as if in marrying him she had found another father.

Besides Francie’s grandad.

And besides God.

—Yes, late shift, Amy. Home at ten.

—Oh Dad, you’ll never get your sleep in.

—If I’m off tomorrow I’ll fix the waste pipe.

—It needs fixing.

—Of course it needs fixing. Haven’t I told you time and again not to put grease and

—I’ve been emptying the dishwater outside, on the roses,

—You didn’t last night.

—I forgot, Dad.

—Good Lord, is that the time? Make sure you keep those

—Yes, Dad.

He almost kisses his wife then, and is gone, wheeling his bike around the corner, and Amy stands looking after him. She wipes her hands on her wet apron, it is always wet, a wide patch of wet where she leans over the sink to wash the dishes.

She thinks for one moment, because she is romantic, of herself and Bob and the time he courted her and sang to her, what was the song—

And when they walked down Waikawa Valley, as close to the moon as possible, they met the old maori running from the ghosts and he called out, Goodnight Miss Hefflin, only he said it like Heaven, and she laughed.

Perhaps Amy thinks for a moment of this, or is it only in books, where cried-for moons are captured, that they think this way?

And then the children are off to school and the littlest one plays in the backyard, that’s Chicks, chicken because she’s so small and dark; and Francie’s there, who’s not small but twelve, thirteen after Christmas, but left school now to make her way in the world and get on.

And be part of the day that is forever.

And it is quiet now for Francie. She thinks, now the girls at school will be marching in for prayers. A new term has begun. The headmistress will be standing on the platform and raise her hand, not for silence because it is hushed already but because she likes to raise her hand that way. She is big, with a head shaped like a bull and no neck to speak of and you can never see what she is wearing under her gown because it wraps her close like a secret. She is standing, in majesty, before the school and saying Good Morning, girls.

And then it is the National Anthem and the headmistress welcomes everybody for a new term, singing with them, or opening her mouth like singing,

—The Lord, the headmistress says, after the Amen, is very

And she wraps her gown more secretly about her body.

She opens the Bible then, and reads about the Sermon on the Mount.

—And seeing the multitudes he went up into a mountain.

—And, she says the Beatitudes. Blessed arc the peace-

They repeat then, the Lords Prayer, not looking, with a special word added in case there is War, to make the soldiers not afraid; and they sing a long hymn, conducted by the music mistress who is deaf and lipreads and is related to Beethoven; and the hymn has so many verses that if it is a hot day some of the girls faint or have to walk out into the cool air and are able to boast about it afterwards,

—I fainted. I walked out of Assembly, when they sang the

O give me Samuel’s ear, they sing. His watch the little child the little Levite kept. A real watch, a ticking kind that slices and doles out day like best cake, or the looking watch that you live, sitting your life in a dark house like a box, in case an enemy should come?

It is a sad hymn, the little Levite one, and some of the girls, even the ones with two-storied homes and cars and caravans, will cry; yet when it is finished everything is school again, and the headmistress not any nearer to God; as if there had been no Bible or Jesus going up to the mountain where the air is cool, tasting of snowgrass that grows all the way up; and He passes a dead sheep that the hawks have eaten, and some live sheep sitting side-saddle upon the grass and chewing their cud. And it is a most beautiful mountain out of geography, a Southern Alp, but lessons never teach you how to write it; you only make shading like featherstitch.

So it is all gone in a cloud, and the headmistress is crossing her gown over her bosom and saying

—Girls, there were a number of navy coats and panama

—Girls, some of you have been seen in the street and not

The headmistress is very stern.

The Invercargill March then, and soon the hall is empty.

And Francie is at home caught in a forever morning where every sound is loud and strange. The kitchen clock, the old one that belonged to her grandfather, ticks with a nobbly loudness, staring with its blank dark eye where you put the key to wind it. The front of the clock opens and inside are kept for safety, receipts and bills, art union tickets, and all things that must never be lost or the Withers will be up before the court or bankrupt.

Yet the clock is time, and time is lost, is bankrupt before it begins.

Francie sits in the kitchen. The fire burns with a hissing sound, then a roar until the damper is put in. Sometimes the coal makes a pop-pop.

—It’s the gas, Mrs. Withers explains. The coal we buy never

—Does he pay for it?

—No, Francie, he just brings home what we need.