Swan River by David Reynolds

the day of the week and the date written at the top. On most days she had written a whole page, and occasionally the day’s entry spread over to a second page. The handwriting was quite large, sloped at almost forty-five degrees to the right, with curlicues and flourishes on the capital letters. After we got used to it, Deborah and I found it quite easy to read, although we would frequently get stuck on certain words; Sis’s ‘e’s, ‘o’s and ‘i’s were very similar.
    The entry for 1 January 1886 described a New Year’s Eve party at the house in Norfolk Road, to which more than twenty uncles, aunts and cousins had come. It sounded very jolly, with plenty of food, drink and singing around the piano. Sis seemed to like most of her relatives, but there were one or two whom she described as bores. After a whole page about this, she wrote, ‘I will be nineteen this year. It is time for something else to happen.’
    Deborah and I read the first ten days of January together, helping each other with the words that were hard to read. Deborah usually finished the page first and waited for me before turning over. Except for Sunday, the days were very similar; her father and two brothers went out, while she and the two servants called Alice looked after the house. Every other morning she went to a grocer’s shop in Mare Street, which sounded a bit like Mr Brown’s in the High Street, to order food which would be delivered that afternoon. Monday was washing day and the basement area at the front of the house nearly always flooded. Everyone in the family would have a bath in the kitchen in a copper tub that evening. Sis seemed to find her life pleasant but dull.
    We wondered where they went to the loo, and at lunch we asked my father. He told us that there was a proper flush lavatory inside the house on the ground floor. ‘It was very grand, with a big square mahogany seat, and the bowl was decorated in Wedgwood blue, like plates, with pictures of flowers and birds. In fact it was more comfortable and more convenient than the WC in this house. We were lucky. My grandfather had it installed at great expense; most people in the street had WCs outside in the garden.’
    In the afternoon we read through the rest of January, the whole of February and some of March. Nothing much seemed to happen, except that Sis’s father went away on business twice for a fortnight and her brother Ernest occasionally brought friends home after school and made a lot of noise. We read about Uncle George, who was seventeen. It seemed extraordinary that this young man – who so long ago didn’t seem to do much except go to work at an office, come home, eat, read, sometimes play cards or the piano, and go to bed – was the same man, the one who had just died and whom I had always thought of as very old. On Thursday evenings, he and Sis would usually walk up to a park called Hackney Downs for ‘band night’; they would sit on seats outdoors listening to a brass band play popular tunes.
    My mother had to work in the shop that afternoon and when she got back we had a late tea in the sitting room. My father toasted bread with a telescopic toasting fork, holding it against the glowing coals behind the bars of the Cosy Stove. Deborah sat between me and my mother on the sofa, my father sat in his usual armchair, and we watched Six-Five Special while my mother knitted and read the Daily Telegraph. Irritatingly, my father swivelled his chair so that he could see the television, and I knew what would follow: ‘Look at his trousers! He can’t walk in trousers like that, surely!’ as Joe Brown shook his brush cut into a microphone. ‘Why do they have to call women “babies”?’ he loudly interrupted Adam Faith, and looked round at me and Deborah as if we would have an answer.
    â€˜Don’t know, Dad,’ I shrugged.
    When it was over, he switched the television