Free Towards Another Summer by Janet Frame

destroyed the red rubber ball how should we have known that the swamp in the next paddock had weed identical with the inside of the ball?
    It seemed that, like the ‘magazine’, the swamp was a forbidden place. There were so many places and things forbidden and to be feared - the flood, the war, the magazine, the swamp, bulls, rats in the wall, drunk men, swaggers, the strap, uncles and aunts who threatened, ‘We’ll put you in a sack and throw you in the sea.’ ‘The gypsies will steal you.’ Also, there were our own little knotted handkerchiefs which held our treasured collection of childhood beliefs and superstitions - mixtures of truth and fantasy, of words misheard or misunderstood, of half-solved perplexities, of desperate questions given desperate answers rather than be left with no answer at all . . . my eye was hurt . . . the doctor made it better, the doctor and the pixies whom I called the ‘pitties’. Who were the ‘pitties’? Why did my mother smile when I talked of them? Why did she keep asking me, as if she didn’t know,—Who made your eye better? and when I answered, preferring the stranger explanation,—The ‘pitties’, why did she look so pleased and sly?
    I could not speak properly; words were confused. One of my
favourite toys was a kerosene tin with a piece of rope tied to it, which I pulled along the lawn under the walnut tree and over to the fence for the beasties to share my pleasure in it. There was a song which I sang about my tin, but why did everyone laugh when I sang it?
    ‘God save our gracious tin,
God save our noble tin,
God save the tin.’
    Words were so mysterious, full of pleasure and fear. Mosgiel. Mosgiel. Up Central. Taieri. Waihola. Ao-Tea-Roa. Lottie. Lottie. That was my mother’s name, yet we never called her Lottie, it was only aunts and uncles who were allowed to use her name.
    My aunt, who had her goitre out (goitre, goitre), stood at the door, in the passage, and called,
    —Oh Lottie, one moment, Lottie.
    Or she said to my father,
    —What does Lottie think? Does Lottie like living in Outram?
    Sometimes when visitors came the word would come strangely from my father’s lips and with a feeling of shock I would try to believe that he had said it.
    —As I was saying to Lottie only this afternoon . . .
    The word was strange and frightening; it gave my mother a new distinction which seemed to separate her from us, which implied that she did not belong to us at all. It made me curious about her and jealous of her; her name was a way of saying No to us - but weren’t we her babies, hadn’t I been her special baby until Dorry was born? And when the next one was born wouldn’t it be her special baby too? A terrible panic overwhelmed me when I heard her name; I saw her moving farther and farther away; I knew it was true, she didn’t belong to us at all and we didn’t belong to her, and I was myself, only myself and nobody else.
    Sometimes I repeated her name softly. Lottie. Once I called her name aloud and she became angry and my father said, —Don’t be rude to your mother. Lottie and George. Lottie-and-George.
They were my mother and father. No one but us called them Mum and Dad.
    I played by myself, near the fence, while the beastie stood looking at me. As beasties do, it was weeping, a tear running down the thin dark track upon its cheek. I spoke to it.
    —Lottie, I said.—How you do you like living in Outram?
    Then very boldly I called out,—Lottie-and-George, Lottie-and-George!
     
     
     
     
    —I’ve had a shift, my father said.—We’re going to live in Glenham. People ‘on the railway’ were always ‘shifting’, and when my mother talked to the neighbours somewhere in the conversation there would be reference to ‘being on the railway’ and ‘shifting’. Yet I think my mother was pleased when we were settled in Glenham for it was not as close as Outram had been to the Main Trunk Line, and my father did not have the responsibility of being