.
‘I am . . . the rust on railway lines . . .
cows called to milking . . . the magpie’s screech’
So I, a migratory bird, am suffering from the need to return to the place I have come from before the season and sun are right for my return. Do I meet spring summer or winter? Here I live in a perpetual other season unable to read in the sky, the sun, the temperature, the signs for returning. Is it homesickness - ‘I know a place whereon . . .’ the matagouri, the manuka, the cabbage tree grow . . .
I know a place.
Grace said to herself, I found my first place when I was three. It is a memory that is so deep in my mind that it is always and never changing. I went by myself into the dusty road. It was late summer, the gorse flowers in the hedge were turning brown at the tips of their petals, crumpling and dropping. The sky was grey with a few white clouds hurried along by the wind. There were no people anywhere, not up or down the dusty road. I looked up and down and along and over and there was no one. This is my place, I thought, standing still, listening. The wind moaned in the telegraph wires and the white dust whirled along the road and I stood in my place feeling more and more lonely because the gorse hedge and its flowers were mine, the dusty road was mine, and the wind and the moaning it made through the telegraph wires. I cannot describe the sense of loneliness I felt when I knew that I was in my place; it was early to learn the burden of possession, to own something that couldn’t be given away or disowned, that had to be kept for ever. I remember that I didn’t stay long in my place: I cried and I ran home, but my place followed me like a shadow and it is always near me, even here in Winchley, and I do not even need to close my eyes or call for silence before I am there, and once there wanting to escape from the message of the wind for there is no one up or down along and over and it is dust, not people, that whirls its busy life along the road.
I remember that a year later I found another place which was mine. I found it, that is, I set out to look for it; it was given to
me; I took possession of it. We had moved to a new district in the south (as ever) - a wilderness of sheep, cattle, the dark damp growth and precipitating water of gullies; swamps, tussock; few people. The railway house was there on the hill waiting for us to move in. We children had stomped about in every room making the wooden floors echo with our heavy rhythm of occupation. Men were carrying the furniture up the hill; my mother was ‘seeing to’ cups of tea for everybody; there were bursts of excitement, temper, tears, as we planned the first night when we always slept, in a new house, in a mattress bed on the floor with the blackpainted and scraped iron bedends with their screw-on brass knobs (in which we placed our communications in code) and the rusty wire mattress leaning against the wall, ready to be hammered together the next day.—Mum, have you got the bed-key? Where’s the bed-key? Why can’t we always sleep on the floor?
I’ll tan your bottoms the lot of you . . .
Suddenly finding myself alone and dissatisfied with the possession of a new house, I went down the front steps through the grass-overgrown garden into a paddock (sheep looked at me, their heads on one side, their long noble faces thoughtful, their eyes narrow, slit with bits of licorice; their bodies were bunched and overclothed like Mrs Daniel, one of our neighbours in the last town we’d lived in). I walked a short way into another paddock, along a gully until I came to a clump of silver-birch trees, some dead, or dying, with new leaves sprouting from their sprawled trunks. I walked into the green and silver darkness their leaves made. I scuffed the deep pile of old leaves, my shoes sinking through the fresh layer of whole leaves, through last year’s, through those of the year before and the year before until I uncovered the decayed leaves of any year or
‘I am . . . the rust on railway lines . . .
cows called to milking . . . the magpie’s screech’
So I, a migratory bird, am suffering from the need to return to the place I have come from before the season and sun are right for my return. Do I meet spring summer or winter? Here I live in a perpetual other season unable to read in the sky, the sun, the temperature, the signs for returning. Is it homesickness - ‘I know a place whereon . . .’ the matagouri, the manuka, the cabbage tree grow . . .
I know a place.
Grace said to herself, I found my first place when I was three. It is a memory that is so deep in my mind that it is always and never changing. I went by myself into the dusty road. It was late summer, the gorse flowers in the hedge were turning brown at the tips of their petals, crumpling and dropping. The sky was grey with a few white clouds hurried along by the wind. There were no people anywhere, not up or down the dusty road. I looked up and down and along and over and there was no one. This is my place, I thought, standing still, listening. The wind moaned in the telegraph wires and the white dust whirled along the road and I stood in my place feeling more and more lonely because the gorse hedge and its flowers were mine, the dusty road was mine, and the wind and the moaning it made through the telegraph wires. I cannot describe the sense of loneliness I felt when I knew that I was in my place; it was early to learn the burden of possession, to own something that couldn’t be given away or disowned, that had to be kept for ever. I remember that I didn’t stay long in my place: I cried and I ran home, but my place followed me like a shadow and it is always near me, even here in Winchley, and I do not even need to close my eyes or call for silence before I am there, and once there wanting to escape from the message of the wind for there is no one up or down along and over and it is dust, not people, that whirls its busy life along the road.
I remember that a year later I found another place which was mine. I found it, that is, I set out to look for it; it was given to
me; I took possession of it. We had moved to a new district in the south (as ever) - a wilderness of sheep, cattle, the dark damp growth and precipitating water of gullies; swamps, tussock; few people. The railway house was there on the hill waiting for us to move in. We children had stomped about in every room making the wooden floors echo with our heavy rhythm of occupation. Men were carrying the furniture up the hill; my mother was ‘seeing to’ cups of tea for everybody; there were bursts of excitement, temper, tears, as we planned the first night when we always slept, in a new house, in a mattress bed on the floor with the blackpainted and scraped iron bedends with their screw-on brass knobs (in which we placed our communications in code) and the rusty wire mattress leaning against the wall, ready to be hammered together the next day.—Mum, have you got the bed-key? Where’s the bed-key? Why can’t we always sleep on the floor?
I’ll tan your bottoms the lot of you . . .
Suddenly finding myself alone and dissatisfied with the possession of a new house, I went down the front steps through the grass-overgrown garden into a paddock (sheep looked at me, their heads on one side, their long noble faces thoughtful, their eyes narrow, slit with bits of licorice; their bodies were bunched and overclothed like Mrs Daniel, one of our neighbours in the last town we’d lived in). I walked a short way into another paddock, along a gully until I came to a clump of silver-birch trees, some dead, or dying, with new leaves sprouting from their sprawled trunks. I walked into the green and silver darkness their leaves made. I scuffed the deep pile of old leaves, my shoes sinking through the fresh layer of whole leaves, through last year’s, through those of the year before and the year before until I uncovered the decayed leaves of any year or
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