Free a Breed of Women by Fiona Kidman

forbidden fruit and what she should probably try to avoid, seeing little future in Ailsa’s pleasures.
    Her own future was still very uncertain. One day she discussed it with her mother.
    ‘I’m not staying on the farm, Mum, and that’s that,’ Harriet said.
    ‘I didn’t expect you would,’ Mary replied quietly.
    ‘Didn’t you!’
    ‘Not really. I wish you could, but we can’t give you a very full life here. We can’t afford to pay you if you stay on the farm. We could go on keeping you if you helped, though.’
    ‘Helped? Do what you do?’ Harriet thought of her mother’s daily toiling with fence strainers, encroaching gorse and cows in all weathers.
    ‘Or you could go back to school for another year,’ said Mary quickly.
    ‘A lot of good that would do me,’ said Harriet scornfully. A sixth form of one. Great stuff. And who’d teach me? They’ve never had a sixth form at that place.’
    ‘Do you want to go teaching, then?’ said Mary.
    ‘Me, teach? Good God, no.’
    Mary blanched slightly at the blasphemy.
    ‘Sorry,’ Harriet muttered.
    Mary wrinkled her forehead. ‘You could go dental nursing, they’ve got a hostel you could go to, but the head said you were too intelligent for that.’
    ‘The head! You’ve been talking to that old idiot?’ Harriet asked.
    ‘Well … I wanted to know what your chances were.’
    ‘I don’t want to stay on the form, and I don’t want to go teaching, and I’m damn sure I’m not going to go dental nursing. Bzzz, bzzz, bzzz, no thank you.’
    ‘You can’t have everything you want in life,’ said Mary rather acidly.
    Harriet looked at her mother. ‘Some people can.’
    Mary looked back at her daughter strangely. ‘Yes, some people can if they try hard enough, and …’ she tailed away.
    ‘If they’re selfish enough?’ said Harriet instinctively. Silence fell between them.
    Finally Mary said, ‘First you have to decide what you want.’
    The girls at school were equally incredulous when she announced that she had no intention of going teaching. Wendy and Marie, who both desperately wanted to go, treated her as if she was a weird specimen that they had viewed under a microscope in biology lesson.
    ‘What’ll you do then?’ Mary asked. ‘You can’t leave home if you don’t go teaching.’
    ‘You mightn’t. I will,’ said Harriet, though secretly she was beginning to wonder how she’d manage it herself. ‘Anyway, would you go teaching if you didn’t want to leave home?’
    Wendy sat back on her heels, suddenly blushing scarlet. ‘I’ll be awful trying to teach physical education. And music.’
    ‘You’re scared, aren’t you?’ said Harriet.
    ‘And you’re hard as nails,’ said Wendy.
    ‘Why, because you don’t want to face up to the fact that you’ll probably be a lousy teacher?’
    ‘Do you really think I’m that stupid?’ said Wendy.
    ‘No,’ said Harriet, who hadn’t really thought about it before, but could suddenly see Wendy much more clearly than she had ever done. ‘I reckon you should paint and draw all the time. It’s what you like doing best of all.’
    ‘But I can’t go away to do that. I’d starve.’
    ‘Why can’t you? Lots of people in Europe do. Anybody who’s talented over there gets taught to do what they’re good at properly and they get famous … and rich too.’
    Wendy’s temporary interest vanished. ‘This isn’t Europe,’ she said shortly. ‘It’s New Zealand. You do what you can.’
    ‘Even if you know you’ll hate it?’
    Wendy got up and walked away.
    ‘You’re pretty hard on her, really,’ said Ailsa, momentarily distracted from her own concerns.
    ‘It’ll be pretty hard on the kids she teaches, too,’ said Harriet.
    ‘My, aren’t we public-spirited?’
    ‘I shouldn’t let it worry you, your kid’ll probably be too dumb to care,’ said Harriet, nodding in the direction of Ailsa’s waistline, and stalked off.
    In the end, the headmaster and the history teacher came out