Title: Starling

Author: Elizabeth Knox

In: Sport 28: Autumn 2002

Publication details: Fergus Barrowman, March 2002, Wellington

Part of: Sport

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Sport 28: Autumn 2002

July 1984

July 1984

Professor Robinson is quelling, or worried about me because of my enthusiasm in tutorials for Jane Eyre. Maybe every year he has to revive female students into their ‘studentness’. But my ‘studentness’ isn't who I am in relation to my reading. Must I learn to be clever, and never eager?
Saturday at the museum shop. The door is flapping. I'm reading Angel at My Table in instalments at the counter. Customers are clustered in the foyer by the revolving door like sheep at a draughting gate. Don't come into the shop—on Saturdays I read.
Frank Sargeson's kindness—capital kindness—and advice to Janet Frame. Reread the Classics. (Should I mind having a mind like a junkyard?) He comes tapping on her door, and announces lunch. When I was at home at Paremata writing One Too Many Lives at lunchtime I'd get up dreamily and make lunch for Dad. Then I'd wash the dishes. I remember staring at my own hands against the stainless steel, through the bubbles and the steam, Chapter Seventeen cooling and hardening in my head. It felt like a blessing, as if the world was there with me, as if the future was. I know better now and I'm still doing it. I think of Fourth page 129 Form science lessons—kinetic and potential energy. One moment I'm with my soldiers in a tropical downpour on the deck of the troop ship—the rain rebounding to wet our legs up to our knees. Next I've finished the scene and it's still, but it can be read, coaxed into motion again by the pressure of attention on the pull-cord of a line. (Novel #3 is a lawnmower! With a pull-start, and two-stroke motor!)