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James K. Baxter Complete Prose Volume 2

1

1

I began my life within sight of the sea. Looking out through a gap in the brushwood fence I could see the blue-grey waves where currents moved like great serpents, and at night the swell of the sea was in my nostrils when I fell asleep. Through the half-open door the steady whiteness of a kerosene lamp, page 111 burning in the kitchen, threw shadows on the wall of my room. I could hear the voices of my father and mother. On the ledge above my cot stood a doll of coloured cloth. If you turned it one way up it was a boy in a jacket and trousers, if you turned it the other way up it was a girl with black painted eyes. All night the sea moved in my blood. Sometimes in the daytime a whirlwind seemed to leap down from the sky and seize me and lift me up from the yard behind the house and set me down again, after a journey through a whirling tunnel, in the mud of the cowsheds. I did not know who I was. It seemed I lacked a human heart. But the sadness of the sea carried me always on its breast like a floating bundle of kelp.