Free Towards Another Summer by Janet Frame Page A

on the expresses. He had not long been promoted from Fireman to Engine-driver and here, out in the country, there was little danger of his driving head-on into another train or running over some of the thousands and thousands of people who lived near Dunedin. My mother calmed her fears and sang to us at night when my father had gone to work (carrying his handmade leather work-bag, his engine-driver cap, his blueys, his salmon sandwiches)
    ‘Daddy’s on the engine,
don’t be afraid.’
    So it was all right. We were not afraid. And if my father were driving the engine near our house he always blew the whistle to let us know that all was well.
    I slept in the cot now; it was still my size. Dorry, the baby, was getting bigger and would soon be ready to leave her petrol-box and join my sister and brother and me in our new world of
Glenham and the Glenham railway, among the old twisted rusty lines, the piled sleepers, the disused turntable . . .
    Soon it would be time for the stork to bring another baby, but it was not quite time, for Dorry still fed at my mother’s titties and slept between my mother and father in the ‘big bed’. Perhaps on our next shift, my mother said, there might be a new baby, but I was not interested, for Dorry belonged to me, my mother had told me so, and it wasn’t likely that I could have two, so soon; there were my sister and brother to think of, and dividing had to be strictly fair.
     
    Sooner than my father expected he was given another transfer - to Edendale, not far from Glenham. The surprising and exciting novelty about this ‘shift’ was that our house was to accompany us; it was to be dismantled, carried to Edendale, and rebuilt, and while we were waiting we were to live in railway huts in Glenham.
    It was winter, and it snowed, and because Glenham was inland the snow stayed and became deeper and deeper. Our huts were set in the snow. One hut belonged to my mother and father and the baby, one hut was our bedroom, another a kitchen, sitting room, another a wash-house.
    My father dug a dumpy about fifty yards from the huts and built a tin shed to cover it. We lived here for six months. We had colds that did not get better, we were ‘steamed’ with Friar’s Balsam, my legs ached and I cried and cried, and the aunt from Dunedin visited and said Lottie how can you put up with it, and the world was full of beetles, beetles crawling up the wall and along the ceiling and the floor and I said Look at the beetles and my mother said Where, and I pointed to them, and the aunt from Dunedin said,
    —She’s delirious.
    It snowed and snowed. There were rats whispering in the wall; there were strange shadows creeping up and down the wall; if we were afraid in the night or had toothache we could not get to our mother and father, for it was dark outside and the snow was too deep. The baby had a funny little cough like
a sheep’s cough and her face was red and shiny; my mother’s arms and hands were red with washing clothes and nappies. Sometimes my mother would talk wistfully to my father or to us of the time in Outram when she had her ‘arm up’ for six weeks and ‘your father did the washing and milked the cow’. I couldn’t remember about my mother’s hurting her arm and having it bandaged, but I sensed that it was an important occasion in her life, almost as important as the flood, and rivalled only by the now legendary time that my father had his ‘ankle in plaster’ following an accident at football in Dunedin.
    —When I was off with my ankle, my father used to say.
    I was always disappointed to learn that my father’s ankle had been hurt at football; it seemed unworthy. And I was always sad when my mother talked of her arm, she talked so wistfully, as if it had been a time of great freedom that she would never again experience - yet how was it freedom if her arm had been in a sling?
    —When you were little, and I had my arm up for six weeks . . .
     
     
     
     
    Our house was