Free Towards Another Summer by Janet Frame Page B

built and we had scarcely time to get used to it when another ‘shift’ came: to Wyndham, the largest town we had lived in - with one Main Street and a few other streets, with ‘over the fence’ neighbours; a school, a river; and people, people everywhere. It was an exciting day when we moved (not forgetting to take Beauty with us) into the house beside the railway line in Ferry Street. There were houses all the way along the road to the river at one end and the main street at the other. From a world of snowgrass, snowberries, manuka, cattle, sheep, birds, with only sky and rabbits and paddocks for miles and miles, to streets with houses and people; people to know, to stare at, to poke faces at, to call names after, to be afraid of, to run from.
    I was four. We explored under the house and found it
‘good’. An open cow-bail was made for Beauty in the corner of the garden near the railway line. Down the end of the garden there was a pump for our water. Over the fence near the pump was another railway house where the Hadfords lived - Mr, Mrs, Mavis, Joan, Ronnie. Now that we were surrounded by people my mother seemed to lose her wistfulness; she became a busy neighbour accepting and giving hot scones, pikelets, jams; exchanging views; and, inside our home, expressing her opinion of the neighbours - the Hadfords, the Lyles, the Bakers. Although she talked to our father and not to us, we listened and learned. To our pride we learned that we had ‘strong little chests’ whereas Mavis Hadford was definitely consumptive and Ronnie was like a stick and the Baker children were like sticks and what they all needed was plenty of milk and cream. Their frailty, my mother said, came from their living ‘in the town’. If living in Wyndham was living in ‘the town’ then we children liked it, and however longingly and proudly my mother soon began to talk of ‘when we lived in the huts, six months in winter, in snow, when Dorry was a baby’ we wouldn’t have exchanged Wyndham for Glenham or Edendale or Outram. We played with the Hadfords and the Bakers. We played neighbours and visiting and school and I was the teacher and my mother looked from the kitchen door and I heard her saying to Mrs Lyles who had come to borrow some flour,—She’ll be a schoolteacher when she grows up!
    Life in Wyndham was full of excitement! Ronnie Hadford pushed a bead up his nose and couldn’t get it down again; Mavis Hadford broke her leg and was sent to hospital and when she came home she had crutches and we said—Lend us your crutches Mavis, and she was so mean about lending them, and we tried to use one of Grandma’s crutches for playing broken legs but hers were not the right size, therefore we made ourselves stilts instead, walking up and down Ferry Street on stilts until Isy slipped and a protruding nail tore her shin.
    —My shin, she said.
    Shin. Shin. The doctor sewed it, leaving a white scar, and for a time my mother talked of another accident which
happened to Isy before I was born.
    —When Isy was a baby and drank Jeyes Fluid and I gave her an emetic.
    An emetic?
    —I gave her an emetic and rushed her to the doctor.
    Oh my mother was so brave and so swift! Tommy Lyles was a ganger on the railway, and the train ran over him outside our house and my mother tore up sheets to bandage him, almost as if she had been waiting all her life for an opportunity to tear up sheets. It was always happening; the newspaper was always telling of people who ran to the scene of the accident and tore up sheets. After this accident my mother was not inclined to talk about it. She did not make it another occasion of her life - ‘When Tommy Lyles was run over and I tore up sheets and you were little’, because Tommy Lyles died.
    We avoided playing near the railway line where Tommy Lyles was killed, and we looked with awe at the house where he had lived, and we stared at Mrs Lyles because she had been his wife, and once in the night I pulled aside the