Free The Dressmaker's Daughter by Kate Llewellyn Page B

68.6
    I was rebellious and we did indeed live in a parched land so that one must have struck a nerve.
    Or,
‘Come now, let us reason together,’ says the Lord.
    ‘Though your sins are like scarlet,
    They shall be as white as snow
    Though they are red like crimson,
    They shall become like wool.’
    Isaiah l
    We had never seen snow, although we had seen pictures of it in our books. We certainly had seen a mighty lot of wool. Often a sheep lay bound and mute on the back seat of our car on its way to becoming hogget for our dinners. And we saw wool aplenty when we watched the fleece flung high in the air like a carpet that failed to fly and fell instead onto the table in the wool shed. The bales in their hessian binding were piled up like great khaki bricks, ready to be built into a cathedral of wool. Children, we had heard, sometimes fell into the wool bin and were crushed by the machine as it bound the wool into a bale. They fell, too, into bins of wheat and died there. They died in dams on farms when they wandered away from their parents.
    Crimson we saw as our father slit the sheep’s throat, the beautiful river rushing out of it.
    Another white card hanging from its silver cord in our hallway read:
Ask, and it will be given you;
    Seek, and you will find,
    Knock, and it will be opened to you.
    Matthew 7.7
    One day in Sunday school, I was asked by a stout teacher in a navy floral dress what it was that I did to help my mother at home – this being, I suppose, to suggest goodworks and kindness. I said, ‘I comb the fringe.’ A baffling reply to my questioner, who kept on asking the question as I went on answering the same way, over and over. Had Mary, Jane or Gertie been there they could have explained, but they were not.
    The woman abandoned her questions but I remember her determination to find out what it was that I did and to have me explain it exactly. But I could not. During the next week, my mother was asked what I had meant and she explained to the teacher that what I was doing to help was combing the fringe of the carpet in the living room. I was straightening it with an old comb that was missing many teeth. This was my domestic work.
    I did not help with the washing-up; my parents washed up together – her washing, him drying. They did not want interruption to this. He sang love songs to her. ‘Come, come, I love you only…’ He polished the glasses with the tea-towel and sang as he worked. Sometimes he put his arm around her and she said, ‘Don’t be silly, Brink.’ They made their bed together. They were having a love affair and we were interruptions.
    Our family said grace at meals, but only on special occasions. Sunday’s roast dinner, birthdays, Christmas and when friends came over. Grace signalled special food and a special event. Our father said grace by bowing his head and saying, ‘For what we are about to receive, may the Lord make us truly thankful.’ We sat with bowedheads and clasped our hands together. We did not hold hands around the table as Americans – and as my children, with their American stepmother – do. We clasped our own hands. When grace was over, we passed the gravy and began to eat. The baby in the high-chair had his food cut up and he began to eat with his little oval-handled spoon and silver pusher (an implement in the form of a rake, without tines but with a right-angled slab at the end of the handle used to push food onto the spoon) that we had all, in our turn, used.
    The homilies from church that hung in our rooms seeped into my consciousness. The language became part of me. One day, when I was about ten, I was invited to go with a friend and her family to the pictures. My mother agreed that I could go. For some reason, when the evening came around, perhaps because she did not have the money or did not want to be disturbed by having to wait up for my return, my mother changed her mind. I was distraught. I lay on my bed sobbing and could not be stopped. My mother came