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The Godwits Fly

Chapter Two — Little Houses

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Chapter Two
Little Houses

Carly showed Mrs Hostler the doll's bed she was making as a present for Sandra, when Sandra came out of the hospital where Dr Porteous had sent her because she had shockin’-tonsils-andadenoids. It was only two halves of a cardboard box, the lid fitted into the bottom, but Carly had covered it with mauve sateen, and made little looped curtains; her stitches were so small that you couldn't see them on the right side. The penny doll between the sheets had white drawers that you could put on and take off. Mrs Hostler thought it was lovely. ‘My, what a clever big sister we have!’ she said archly. ‘Somebody will have to take lessons.’ Eliza said, ‘I think it's silly, drawers on when she's in bed,’ and ran outside down the steep path and into the orchard. This belonged to the Hostlers, and the Hannays, who shared the house, were supposed to have no part or lot in it. Mr Hostler had painted the apple-trees rough white. Loganberries grew between them, their little fruits still tart but edible, squashing into purple stains on the fingers. Eliza took some, knowing that Mrs Hostler would notice, and say when they met in the hall, ‘Now I know the little bird who's been stealing my loganberries.’

Carly was Mrs Hostler's pet, especially now that Augusta went down every afternoon to see Sandra in the Children's Hospital; Mrs Hostler taught her to cook, and Carly topped and tailed all the gooseberries for jam, and was called ‘the little housekeeper.’ Eliza would rather have liked to make big preserving-pans bubble and froth into scum, then clear, dark colours as well; but everybody took it for granted that she wouldn't, and she was too vain to ask. She was half afraid of Mrs Hostler, half-contemptuous. Mr Hostler was a carpenter, a meeklooking brownish little man, who spent most of his time underground, like a goblin, in his cellar workshop. Sometimes he let Eliza play with the peeled shavings, and called her Old Hostler's Beauty, but he seldom went against his wife. They were both very religious, and their house was hung with huge illuminated texts, saying, ‘Behold the Lamb of God’, and ‘Though thy sins be red as scarlet, they shall be washed whiter than wool’. (Scarlet… lovely word. Carly was religious too.) page 14 On the wall in Mrs Hostler's bedroom hung a pale-blue silk brush-andcomb bag, and net hair-tidies in which she collected the bits of hair that fell out, to make them into a switch. Her little Swiss clock ticked dark and stealthily, and had a painted cuckoo that stuck his head out when the hours struck.

Below the orchard spread the crinkly azure and cream shawls of Lyall and Evans Bays, with Island Bay right far away, a blue dent in the sky; a sheer drop of yellow cliffs and sultry-smelling gorse came in between, and Eliza could nearly pick out the strange house which had greenstone on its chimneys, and for its gate the white jawbone of a whale. The lions in Newtown Zoo gave their desolate yawning roar, a browny-gold sound that turned black as night came on. The house was so near the Melrose cliff-tops that the children weren't supposed to go out at the back, in case they should fall over. But now Eliza said loudly, ‘I don't care,’ and marched through the latchet gate into the wilderness where brown gorse arched above her head. Everywhere came the fusillades of the spitting, crackling seeds. Sometimes she could persuade Carly to come too, and they built whares, little secret houses among the gorse, and lined them with the soft flamy petals. And she ran such a fierce gorse-prickle into her finger that it had to have a bread-poultice two nights running, though Mrs Hostler had wanted to Christian-Science it, the same as she had with little Carol Kissin. The Kissins, who lived three houses away, were the only children the Hannays were allowed to play with. Loveday, who had silvery hair and was ten, older than Carly, went to Sunday School, and made herself rather superior, except when they lost themselves playing hide-andseek in the lovely dark green wilderness of Tonks’ old place, which had up a ‘Trespassers Will Be Prosecuted’ notice, but which nobody ever visited except the children and the footraces of undersized wild daffodils. Loveday's brother, Carol, was only two. His curls were beautiful, as pretty as Sandra's, but silvery instead of pale gold. But he was fat and stupid, and used to sit still like a little pudding, only laughing when you rolled something shiny at him—the lid of a tobacco tin, or a glass alley. Mrs Hostler and Augusta used to talk about him, in those hushed voices which at once made you want to listen. ‘It's pitiful, that's what it is,’ would say Augusta's voice-you-are-notsupposed-to-hear; and Mrs Hostler, ‘If only his mother would read the works of that blessed woman, Mary Baker Eddy!’ One day, Carol Kissin disappeared from his place in the melting sun; it was strange, as strange as if the top layer of garden, where the fowl-run used to be, had suddenly been transposed with the lower streak of wallflowers. At table page 15 the Hannay children were told they must be kind to poor Loveday, because her little brother was dead.

‘What did he die of?’ asked Carly, awed. Her mother said, ‘He was just taken quietly away to Jesus,’ but John snorted behind a newspaper, and ejaculated, ‘Water on the brain.’

John was one reason why Mrs Hostler wouldn't ever be allowed to Christian-Science Eliza's prickle or Sandra's tonsils-and-adenoids. Lying on her stomach, with the brown hot earth beating up at her in little flakes of grass, little crawling stiff-winged things, jewel-flies and beetles, Eliza thought she wouldn't mind dying at all. She wished the ground would capsize in one great landslide, carrying her far down into the sea, whose blossoms of foam tossed and tossed on the scalloped beaches. She went as near to the edge as she dared—just to show them. But though she didn't mind the idea of being dead, the idea of pain terrified her. She cried all night when she had the gorse-prickle, cried at the top of her voice, until she hadn't the faintest idea where the pain left off and just crying began. Then John behaved, as Augusta said, like a raging lion, storming about the house and shouting: ‘You've got to get her something. You've got to stop that row. I don't care whether it's good for her or not, I won't have that howling. I have to get up in the mornings and work for your children. A man might as well be dead as live in this house, with a lot of damned women and lunatics.’

Old Mr Hostler was working in his cellar when Eliza climbed up the garden path. She slipped quietly through the cellar door, and shut her eyes for a moment before she looked at what he was making, half hoping that it would be, half that it wouldn't be; but of course it was—the Wonderful Dolls’ House. Mr Hostler was making it for his nephew, Young George, who lived in the country and had girly ways, owing to a weak chest which kept him home from school. The bathroom with the real little lavatory was finished, and now Mr Hostler was making the flagstaff. There was a penny Union Jack lying on the bench, ready to be hoisted. He whittled a little knob at the top of the flagstaff, and talked to Eliza without turning round. ‘Ah,’ he said, ‘don't seem natural for a boy, this don't, sickly and all as he is. But flesh and blood's flesh and blood, kith and kin's kith and kin, you can't get away from that.’ Eliza said, ‘What colour are you going to paint the tower room?’ She hoped it would be green, although Young George was getting the dolls’ house. The stair to the tower was a spiral, wonderfully made, some of its steps so narrow that even the feet of penny dolls would have a hard time edging up it. Mr Hostler's back, in its striped shirt and dingy waistcoat, looked almost humped as he bent over the plane. White sunbeams came down through the dusty window, queer, page 16 like potatoes that have just sprouted. She picked up a shaving-curl, and threw it over her left shoulder, making the initial of her future sweetheart. ‘It's G,’ she said, staring at it, ‘I hope it's not George.’

‘My name's George, as well as the young feller,’ said Mr Hostler. ‘Wouldn't you have me for a sweetheart? Who's old Hostler's Beauty?’ After a moment, Eliza smiled and said she was, but the spiral staircase and the unpinned Union Jack left a pain across her chest.

John in these days snorted more and more behind his newspaper. He disliked the Hostlers, because they were too religious; and besides that, he had to get up at six in the morning, cycle all the way to town, and push his bicycle up the Melrose hill again after dark. At first, when they left Oriri Street, he was all eagerness and plans, as he always was at a new place; but the cycling had worn him down, and he called Mr Hostler a damned old sanctimonious fool. He didn't mind Mrs Hostler's religion quite so much; but then, Eliza had noticed, Daddy always seemed not to mind women, while Augusta, though she gave young men the rough edge of her tongue, was inwardly tolerant towards them.

John's swearing started at Melrose. Carly said it was awful, but the children were fascinated by it, though Carly afterwards spent distracted hours warning Sandra, ‘You mustn't ever say that, or the Devil will get you.’

‘Damn and blast your bicycles,’ he shouted, ‘I'm sick of riding your damn-and-blasted bicycles. Damn and blast your hills. I won't go on living on a precipice to please you. We're going down to the flat.’

‘Before your own children…”

‘Damn and blast my children. I didn't ask to have children.’

Augusta changed her tack. ‘We can't live in town. You know perfectly well the rents are too high.’

‘Then we can live in Newtown.’

‘That slum… I suppose I can bring your children up in a hovel, with a public-house next door, and a lot of dirty, drunken loafers hanging over your gate. Or perhaps you'd like Haining Street? The hill air's healthy for your children.’

‘Then bring up your children on your damn-and-blasted precipice. I'm going out.’

Slam of a door, and John was gone; during these quarrels, Carly, Eliza and Sandra automatically became ‘your children’ to both sides. Augusta said dramatically, ‘You're responsible for bringing them into this world,’ and their father, darkly, ‘Oh, I am, am I?’

‘Where's Haining Street?’ Eliza asked Carly. Carly looked important and nervous.

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‘It's the place where the Chinese dens are. Don't tell Mummy I told you. We're not supposed to talk about it.’

‘What's a Chinese den?’

‘Don't talk so loud. You always go and blurt everything out.’ Carly was on the verge of tears, so Eliza said, ‘Oh, all right,’ and sauntered away, trying to imagine the man who came round at the back door, selling French beans and wilted lettuces, sitting on a concrete floor like a lion with slim steel bars blackening his face. She found Carly's doll, Mrs Trimble, lying on the steps above the wallflower patch, and shook it gently, so that its round scarred head wagged from side to side. ‘Damn and blast my children,’ she said, ‘I didn't ask to have any children.’ But she said it softly; Augusta would use the hairbrush if she knew.

Strife among the Hannays made the illuminated texts rattle, and little Mr Hostler, in his meek and mild way, protested to John. That gave him the excuse he was looking for. He wouldn't stay another day under a roof where he'd been insulted. He looked fierce, all red and thin and flamy-eyed, when he was in this mood, and Augusta gave in.

Immediately John was charming again. Carly, Eliza, and Sandra were ‘the children,’ and even ‘our children,’ and he said happily that in Newtown he could take them to the Zoo and the pictures.

‘And bring home a lot of germs. And where's the money for pictures coming from, may I ask?’

‘Oh, look on the bright side for once,’ demanded John, impatiently. Again Eliza felt secretly that he was right, and hoped they were going to live in Haining Street, among the Chinese dens. But there were no Chinese at all in Newbold Street.

Rows and rows of grimy little streets and terraces, mostly very flat, crawled listlessly from the shopping centre and the big concrete block of the hospital to the green garment's hem of the bay. Newtown in its half-century of life had contrived to get itself very dirty: and it was static, nothing there would change. Always little houses, little shops, the tramway sheds, the Heddington Arms, with a tower on top and orange paper flowers showing through unwashed windows. Where it fused with Town, near the Basin Reserve which had been under water until an earthquake tossed it up, it was a melting-pot of Asiatic shops and quarters, narrow wooden houses in which old Chinese smoked opium and cut greasy cards, or thin-legged, great-eyed Hindoos carried on their business as small fruiterers, ripening bananas under their beds. The Orientals were merely Oriental, and too poor for elaboration; white slatterns had settled down among them, like a covey of gulls on ship's waste.

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Stepping down from the hills was a blow from which Augusta took years to recover. It used up all her softness, all she had in hand besides fortitude and pride. Whenever she won some little advantage, a neighbour who could be called ‘nice,’ a patch of lawn, a few yards of garden which John refused to dig, something went wrong; and the furniture-van, drawn by the sage old heavy-breathing horses, pulled up outside their doors again. Sparrows picked at the heaps of manure, children bright-eyed and feckless as sparrows ran past with bare legs and drippy noses, while Augusta stood on the pavement shrieking ‘Mind that table!’ John lost the bicycle, but on the flats caught rheumatism, bibliomania and politics, none of which he could afford. Augusta's children were never slum children: she dominated John where his pay envelopes were concerned, though it cost her her youth. They caught minor diseases, measles and scarlatina, and Eliza cried terribly at the slightest pain. But Augusta, usually severe with them, could not bring herself to shut Eliza's mouth with a strap. Once she said, ‘I believe it's because I made such a fuss when she was born that she goes on like this.’

Eliza neither knew nor cared. All she understood was that when she was in pain it hadn't any special place; it wouldn't stay in her tooth, or in the little finger Sandra broke with a cricket-bat, but spread in great waves, until it occupied every cranny of her. And she couldn't remember a time when it had not been, or imagine another time when it would have gone away. When it left her she sobbed and sobbed herself into exhaustion, and the pillows felt lovely, and the dark room with its blinds drawn was full of wavy blue light, rolling towards her like a sea; or sometimes the process was reversed, and the blue light-cords streamed outwards from her temples. At this stage she was very passive and obedient, never likely to blame anyone because she had been hurt, but looking up at them with swollen eyes, sure that they would bring relief. Her father, who was proud of her when she was gay, came in sometimes to stand at her bedside, muttering, ‘I can't make you out at all.’

The empty houses, when they moved, had a kind of fascination; shells, with sunlight rippling and fawning in oblong patches on their naked floors. Augusta's sticks of furniture never quite fitted the new place. There were days of paring and patching worn linoleum, and always another auction sale, where she bid in sixpences for odd chairs and tables; the auctioneer, stout and red-faced, seized the handle of the chamber, and shouted, ‘And what am I bid for this ‘ere jerry?’

At the auctions Eliza was allowed to wander about, to see the restless unhappiness of old houses turned inside out, like the baby octopi page 19 fished up by swart Italians at Island Bay. They were turned inside out like gloves, and their stomachs were cream bags.… There were things she wanted, ticketed on round red labels—cabinets whose curly drawers shot out at pressure on a lacquer knob, a rocking-chair creaking dimly as if ghosts sat in it, queer-titled books done up in bundles. Once she saw a dark-varnished thing, like a little towel-horse, but with a wheel attached.

‘What is it, Mummy?’

‘It's a spinning wheel.’

‘Oh.’ The idea of spinning-wheels dipped back into fairy books, into the tower of the Sleeping Beauty, with thorny white roses nodding through her windows. ‘Can you spin, Mother?’

‘My mother could,’ Augusta said; then, as if unawares she had entered the sleeping forest herself, she added softly, ‘Her christian name is Leonora. She had lovely little hands.’

Eliza wanted to ask if her grandmother had any other romantic qualifications. Augusta said, defensively, ‘When I was born, she had only one neighbour within twenty miles, and that was an old Irishwoman, ignorant as Paddy's pig, who smoked a black pipe. To this day I remember her with her black pipe in her mouth. Once she took me to a wake. That was near a great lake, with thousands and thousands of black swans. You never see them in such numbers, except in Western Australia. And the boys used to be called “the Mallee Giants".’

They didn't buy the spinning-wheel, but took home a wringer. ‘It'll be such a mercy,’ said Augusta, stopping in the garden, out of sight of red faces and red labels, to scoop up a root of migonette. Stealing plants from derelict gardens, or pods and clippings when they swarmed over her fences, was her only form of dishonesty.

But when a municipal edict changed the shape of their world, transferring them from Newtown to Oddipore,1 Augusta broke the law. Carly had been going to school for three years, and Eliza had just started. Their headmaster, Mr Forrest, was a quiet man with a pointed grey beard, and Augusta pinned her faith in him. She said, ‘At least he's a gentleman,’ and the children knew that this meant he could do almost anything, if he liked, without being permanently in the wrong. He could even drink.… Not that Mr Forrest ever did. Of the new district and its mandatory new school, she would hear no good. What prejudiced her was a tramwayman's poem, published in the evening paper:

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But the thing that makes me sore,
On the tramcar—’lectric tramcar—
Is the kids from Oddipore;
Wipes their noses on the windows,
Licks the glass—that makes me sick.…

‘It's bad enough living where we do,’ she said, ‘but to that school they're not going.’

John protested lazily about the Truant Officer, but she said sharply ‘Hold your tongue. It's you who dragged us here, but whether you like it or not, my children won't be brought up with gutter-brats.’

Carly and Eliza got up at seven, their usual hour. It was pitch dark in the winter-time, and so cold that they slept with John's old coats thrown over their beds. But they washed with yellow soap in cold water, and Carly helped Eliza to dress—combinations, knickers, bodices, flannelette petticoats with herringbone stitch around the necks, and finally their frocks. All the other children in the district still wore long white drawers, and when Carly, bending over, accidentally revealed that she had red knickers, matching her frock, she was mortified by yells of ‘Red Trousis, Red Trousis,’ from the rough Macartney boys. Carly's straight brown hair was tied behind in a pony tail, but Eliza's had to be curled round somebody's finger. They blacked their boots, which did up with twenty buttons to each boot; Carly helped Eliza with the silver buttonhook. At table John, though already at the beginning of his atheistic stage, bowed his head and said rapidly, ‘For what we are about to receive the Lord make us truly thankful, for Christ's sake, Amen. ‘Gusta, for the love of Mike, can't you change to another oatmeal? This porridge is full of lumps.’ ‘It suits the children, and the children come first,’ Augusta retorted. The children, their porridge sprinkled with brown sugar and channelled with thin milk, ate silently, Carly thinking of the day when she would have a shilling a week pocket money and buy nothing but chocolate Teddy Bears. After cocoa (Eliza's in a lustre mug which showed the face of an angel when she had drunk the last sugary brown drop), they stood up for final grooming, and said, ‘Please may we leave the table?’ Augusta kissed them gravely, saying, ‘Carly, mind Eliza doesn't lose those mittens. And see you go straight off to school.’ John, who had rushed to the bathroom and was making sandpaper noises against his goldenbrown bristles, shouted, ‘So long, kiddies!’

At school the Hannays went to Mr Forrest's office, and, gazing timidly at their old headmaster, asked, ‘Please, Mr Forrest, may we stop at school to-day?’

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The law was the law. They were none of Mr Forrest's any more. He could only jut out his sharp little beard, and say gravely, ‘I'm afraid not. You see, you have been transferred to the Oddipore roll.’

To this Carly's strategic move was, ‘Please, Mr Forrest, our mother said to give you this note.’ Mr Forrest read the unvarying contents.

Dear Mr Forrest,

I do not want my children to be transferred from your school, as I am satisfied that they are well off where they are. I hope you will arrange for them to continue with you.

Yours faithfully,

Augusta Hannay.

When Mr Forrest dismissed them, like a couple of privates strangely sent off to fight for the wrong Emperor, they didn't have to present themselves at the new school, that profane institution where kids wiped their noses on the windows and licked the glass, making tramwaymen sick. Nor were they to go home, because the Truant Officer might catch them. Within the bounds of the Museum, the Park or the Zoo, they were free.

The Museum was upstairs, above the Children's Library, to which Carly belonged. At the foot of the staircase sat an old man in a skullcap, with white whiskers, red cheeks, rheumy blue eyes—a Union Jack face. A notice against his severe profile read ‘Children Not Admitted Unless Accompanied by Adults.’

Carly, holding Eliza's mittened hand, remarked in her deferential way, ‘Please, we won't touch anything.’

Pale eyes peered out under bushy brows, like whelks from their shells.

‘Can't you read, Miss?’

‘Please, we'll be very careful, and not touch anything.’

‘Passel of children romping.… Up you go, up you go, and just listen to this. Don't let me find any dirty fingermarks on my glass cases, or I know who's going to catch What For.’

Carly loved the gold-painted chunk of wood that pretended to be the biggest nugget ever found. She didn't know why, but love it she did. Eliza stared at the bird; albatrosses strung on wires, their great wings snowy over the arches between room and room. In one case two olive-green birds hung over a baby lamb, its woolly back all thick and sticky with painted blood. They had torn its kidneys out. The notice read, ‘New Zealand Keas and Lamb’. But the humming-birds set among mossy branches were the littlest things in the world, some page 22 soaring through space, some drinking with needle bills. On bodies small as sovereigns, the wonderful plumage, purple, green, rose, sparkled and shone. Wherever you stood to look at them, they sparkled afresh, sparkled behind your eyes and in your heart. As you went down the stairs, they flew in a wreath after you, little and calling to one another. This was well; for at the stairhead stood the Reconstructed Moa, higher than a tall man, tailless, almost wingless, but mighty, and armed with striking spurs broader than a man's hand. Eliza was scared, though the notice said, ‘This Bird Is Extinct’. It was hard not to run down the dusky stairs, but running and noise were forbidden, so they crept like mice past the old man, who mumbled, ‘No messy fingerprints on my cases, that I do hope.’

Outside, the wind took ragged bits of paper and threw them up like a boy flying kites. The streets ran flat and straight to Newtown Park and Zoo. They could play in the cricketing grounds, and in the Zoo on weekdays, when it was free, but not in the pine-tree part, or the wilderness of grasses beyond the rosery; because there they might meet a man.

Eliza asked why they shouldn't meet a man, and Carly replied, ‘Because he might be drunk.’ But when they really did meet a drunken man, crossing a stile in a permitted stretch of the park, Eliza liked him at once. He couldn't climb over the stile, and stood bowing and wobbling on the top step.

‘Come on, let's run,’ breathed Carly, The drunk man bowed from his middle, and shouted, ‘L'il girl, like half-crown?’ He flung silver on the path—not one half-crown, but a whole pile. ‘Come on,’ urged Carly. Eliza said, ‘Wait a minute,’ and picked up the half-crowns. The drunk man called, ‘Good-bye, l'il girl!’ and she waved her hand at him. Half-way home, she saw a wonderful rainbow, dipping like silk over dusty Newtown, and stopped in her tracks.

‘Carly, look. It's a rainbow. It's lucky to see a rainbow.’

‘Will you come on?’

‘But it's such a lovely one, rose and green; wouldn't you like to have a silk dress that colour?’

‘You're always stopping,’ said Carly, the tears beginning to trickle, ‘You just do it to get me into trouble, because I'm the eldest.’

When Augusta saw the half-crowns, she seized Eliza's hand and and dragged her back, at a rapid trot, to the Park. For an hour she hunted about, looking for the drunken man, but he had vanished like the rainbow. Eliza thought then that they might keep the half-crowns, but Augusta dropped them in a coldly gleaming little pool beside the stile.

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‘I wanted a rocking-horse,’ sobbed Eliza.

‘I want you to be a good little girl who doesn't talk to horrible drunkards.’ Their points of view didn't fit in. Eliza whined, ‘Don't go so fast, I've got a stitch in my side.’

‘You should have thought of that before. My dinner's on, and I've no time to loiter.’

‘Daddy got drunk once, and I hit him over the head with my hobby horse,’ said Eliza. Augusta's profile went bleak and set, though she only said, ‘Trust you for remembering.’ Eliza wondered, ‘What is the little jumpy thing that makes you talk out loud when you promised you weren't going to?’

On Sundays, where the pines sloped towards turf and bandstand, the Highlanders came marching up the Park road, and the pipes, far away, started a dancing feel in one's body. The bandstand was a wooden octagon; so many people had sat on its plank seats that they sagged at both ends. Rusty, rusty needles, and the blowing pipes mixed up, and the lions roared yellow. Children weren't allowed by themselves in the swinging-boats, but if John was in a good temper, he climbed into the boat and worked it up until they were the highest, higher than any of the other children, glancing down on a floating green and brown world, with lions roaring in great sagging voices on the other side of the barbed-wire fence. Their mother stood by, saying, ‘Be careful when you get out—there was a little girl who got her head cut open, running under one of these wretched things.’ John only laughed, and pulled the creaking iron stays higher still, and freckled light, in tiny rainbows, streaked through the lashes of tightshut eyes.

Then they went to the Zoo, where the camel had moulted in patches, and mangy lions rubbed their galled sides against the bars, and stared out with blank desert-coloured eyes. Eliza didn't mind old King Dick or Queen Mary, but always wanted to run away from Blackmane in the other cage. He roared so, and the bars were so thin. But when the keeper dragged great purplish shanks of dead horse up to the trapdoors, and thrust them through with an iron pole, she pressed close with the rest, and pretended to be pleased as the lions pawed and growled. It was a great attraction at the Zoo, special notices told the feeding-times; and nobody would ever know that she hated it. ‘If I could only do something awfully brave,’ she thought, knowing that she never would. The lion cubs were ginger footballs, to be rolled over and cuffed; they had silly, knowing, pathetic faces, like Louis Wain kittens. Sometimes when the big lions were feeding, the keeper went into the cubs’ den, and held them up, grinning from ear to ear. He was a thin boy, sickly page 24 pale under a peaked cap, but Eliza thought him braver than Dr Livingstone.

Often Carly and Eliza wandered off together, while Augusta sat on a bench and sewed, and John took Sandra walking among the Sunday crowds. She was dispossessing Eliza, in public, anyhow; always some woman remarked, ‘Oh, hasn't she got the sweetest little curls?’ and John beamed. Sandra's solemn eyes were like bluebells. She was dressed in cream, short little corduroy velvet jacket and kilted skirt, and when Grandmother-Hannay-in-China sent money at Christmas to buy the children muffs, Carly and Eliza got commonplace brown ones, but Sandra's was silky white, like Polar bear.

Carly pulled at her sister's sleeve and said, ‘Come along. You're not to stand looking at the monkeys, Eliza.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because monkeys are dirty. Besides, if you do, people look at you. Come and see the bear.’

‘But I don't want—’

‘Mother says so,’ pronounced Carly. There were several other things at the Zoo that mustn't be looked at. If they saw men coming out of the Gentlemen's Only, they must look the other way; then there was the Fire-Bellied Newt, which lived under a soggy green mass of reeds and branches in the stone caves called ‘The Aquarium.’ ‘Mother says belly's a rude word,’ said Carly simply. ‘Come and see the sea-lions.’ They saw the sea-lions, which gulped down live gleaming fish and waddled about on amusing flippers, but had no fiery bellies. When they got back, John was encouraging Sandra to roll down the grass bank, heedless of the dark-green stains she made on her white pants. ‘It's Mother who has to wash them,’ said Carly. Over and over flashed Sandra's fat legs, their short cream socks crumpled. A lean man at John's elbow said, ‘That's a proper little hard case you've got, Hannay,’ and John laughed his best-pleased laugh. The daisies had the primmest of shocked blushes on their round faces, and the air smelt of bitty grass. Eliza, furiously jealous, climbed the stone pillar at the foot of the steps, and sat down in the sort of jampot left for geraniums, a hard weedy square. Her legs stuck out over the sides. It was quite a long way down, and she thought, ‘I might fall and break my arm, I might easily.’ But John was too much taken up with Sandra to notice her, and it was Augusta's voice that said tartly, ‘Get down, and don't show off.’

There grew up a difference between Carly and Eliza. First it was only that Carly was the eldest, but then it grew wide and authoritative. Carly liked doing the things she was told; Carly didn't see little pictures page 25 in the dark. She would play, but she had to be told, she didn't originate; and she was far happier left alone with her dolls, or helping Augusta.

Augusta said tragically over the back fence to Mrs Protheroe, their really nice neighbour, ‘I don't know what to do with Eliza. She finds old men behind bushes in the Park, and asks them home to tea.’ ‘A good, hearty smack,’ said Mrs Protheroe, and indicated where. John roared with laughter. ‘Yes,’ said Augusta, ‘but you'd be the first to carry on like a lunatic if anything happened to her.’ ‘Oh, ‘Gusta,’ inconclusively replied Eliza's father, and left it at that. To Eliza, who was playing in the backyard, their queer talk only made her old men seem more interesting.

Old Mr Boad started behind a bush in the Park, a pink escallonia with sticky little rose-pink flowers and dark, poisonous leaves. But he was such a quiet, inoffensive old man, and rambled so much about the England he had known in his youth (Augusta's beloved, unattainable England) that he was not only allowed to stay for tea, but became for a brief while a domestic pet. Then, one day, Augusta said, ‘If you meet that old Mr Boad in the street, don't you go talking to him.’

‘Why mustn't we talk to him?’

‘Run along, and don't ask questions.’ The children never met old Mr Boad in the street; but once, when he was first ill, and begged to see them, Carly and Eliza were allowed to visit him together, just for five minutes. He didn't seem changed, except that when he was saying goodbye he kissed them, and told them to grow up like their dear mother; and he gave Carly a tiny white-and-gold cup, marked ‘Souvenir From Brighton’, which Eliza thought unfair.

When he was dying in hospital, he sent for Augusta in the middle of the night, and she got up at once. They heard her saying, ‘Give me my stole, John,’ while their father grumbled, ‘Might wait till morning.’ With the clipped astrakhan stole pinned round her shoulders, she marched off to the hospital, and old Mr Boad told the nurses she was an angel of God, and died quite peaceably. Years before, his wife had divorced him for adultery: and someone had passed the story on to Augusta, after he began to visit their house.

Adultery was a fantastic and disgraceful disease, like ringworm. It was all very well to cry and be sorry, but if you had it, then you must be isolated. Old Mr Boad, at the bottom of his heart, not only respected Augusta's point of view, but shared it. It gave him a melancholy satisfaction to be an incurable sinner, not merely a lonely old cancerridden man with a walking stick, trailing about the streets of Wellington. Sin is better company than none at all.

There were still Eliza's drain-men, who came every week, halting page 26 their blue dray outside the windows. They lifted the gratings of the street sewers, and dug down with long-handled shovels, making plopping sounds and a horrible, penetrating stench as they splashed dollops of mud into their dray. Once Curly Adams’ bag of marbles, glimmers and chalkies, came up on the shovel, and the drain-men gave them to Eliza. ‘Here you are, Topsy.’ She wished they would take her for a ride on the blue dray, out and out, trundling into nowhere, past the rim of little dusty streets. But when she asked the drain-man, he only turned to his mate and laughed.

‘Here's a little'un wants to come along of us, Bill. What price the Missus?’

Bill said, ‘Aw, I'm tired of me missus, anyhow,’ but they never took Eliza, and the dray rumbled off, leaving the drains clean and empty. Augusta bobbed her head out of the window. ‘Eliza, come away from those smelly drains this very minute. Do you want to catch a fever?’

The Hannays never caught a fever, but the Macartney children did, which according to Augusta was no wonder, for the way they lived would have disgraced an ordinary, decent-minded pig. They lived three doors down the street and had great brown freckles, running together all over their splayed features; and Katrine Macartney had Things in her red hair. When they took the scarlet fever in a batch, and were sent off in the ambulance to be isolated at the Tin Shed—the fever hospital—Augusta sent them custards and jellies, though ordinarily she didn't talk to Mrs Macartney, who stood with shiny red arms akimbo, talking about Holy Jasus and the Blessed Mother of God. When the Macartneys came back from the Tin Shed, they were thinner and temporarily cleaner, but wilder than ever. Katrine had holes in her bloomers, which oppressed Carly with deep vicarious shame. All day long they skipped on the footpath, singing:

‘Handy-pandy-sugary-candy, French-almond-nuts,
Bread-an’ butter for me supper, that's all ter put in guts,’

or:

‘House ter-let, apply within,
People turned out fer drinking gin,
I saw Peter hanging out the winder,
Bang, fire, pop.’

Sometimes what they sang was much worse, so Carly gave them a wide berth, dragging Eliza at her heels.

Augusta, the Truant Officer, Mr Forrest and John were all getting weary of the change of schools war, though Augusta, having started it, page 27 wouldn't give in. For a whole month the Hannays had been outlaws. Once they were stopped in the street by a tall, serious man, who wrote their names down in a black book. When they told Augusta, the frown between her eyebrows grew deeper, and she said, ‘That was the Truant Officer.’ The children were awed, though Eliza played an after-dark game in which they danced round the Truant Officer and put out their tongues, like the Macartneys.

It was John who settled the war. One night, after supper, he opened fire from behind his newspaper.

‘Well, ‘Gusta, I hope you like the new house.’

‘New house? What are you talking about?’

‘Number Nine, Calver Street. I've rented it for a year. It's nearer the children's new school.’

‘John, my children aren't going to that school.’

‘Their names are down on the roll. I had a chat yesterday with the head—Bellew. He's a perfectly decent fellow, and the building's up-todate. There's been no occasion for all this ridiculous fuss. Besides, there's too much din about the house. I won't have the children brought up like street arabs.’

‘That's like you, after all the trouble I take, slaving day in, day out, over your house and your children.’

‘Well, look at Eliza.’ ("That was mean,” Eliza thought; “there was no need for her father to look at Eliza, when half the time he had a hand in Eliza's doings himself.”)

‘They're not going into that dirty street.’

‘Then settle yourself where the rent money's coming from. I gave notice here a week ago, and I've paid down a month's rent at the new place. You should have married a millionaire, while you were about it.’ John folded his paper, and strolled out. He didn't have to argue any more. Money always had the last say, with £1/19/- a week to keep three children, and nothing to help out but occasional packages or postal notes from Grandmother-Hannay-in-China.

For a week Augusta returned white and tired from the Calver Street house, firing off little strings of questions at supper.

‘I suppose you know the bottom's nearly out of that kitchen sink you picked at Calver Street?’

‘Not a chimney fit to use, except the one in the kitchen, and that smokes. No fires this winter. We can sit over a stove.’

John, puffing his short pipe, said, ‘We'll see.’ Until he got really uncomfortable, he would stand by the new house, because he had picked it behind Augusta's back. Parents, parents were funny people.

Mrs Protheroe came in to help with their packing, while the page 28 children sat on boxes in the hall. Sandra had been crying with toothache. Her short fair curls glistened wet, and her cheek smelt of vinegar. The little glittering ice-ship, sent by Grandmother-in-China, still hung on the gas-bracket. They had often used it for playing Explorers, and nobody had the heart to take it down. Augusta, outside in the back garden, scraped at her stolen ice-plants and pansies. Her voice came through the door, odd and choky.

‘It's no use. They'll never grow again. There's no garden, only an asphalt yard.’

‘There, dear; have you remembered to butter Tam's paws? Such a nice gentlemanly cat.’

‘I used to sit up in the old fig-trees, with a vineyard in front of me a mile long. And the birds. Little did I think I'd ever come to this. Why did I get married?’

‘You wouldn't be without the children, dear.’ When Augusta came in, the lines between her brows looked as if they had been carved with a sharp knife, but she tidied the children's coats and bonnets without a word.

They were sent to the school that was no longer theirs, to knock on Mr Forrest's door. ‘Please, Mr Forrest,’ Carly recited, ‘Mother said we were to thank you for all you've done, and we're very sorry to leave your school.’ Mr Forrest shook hands with them. His face looked grey and solemn.

On the way back, Eliza tried hard to remember she was very sorry; she liked to be sad, except when she actually was; then it was unbearable. But she could think only of the time Laurie Helmer accidentally cut a little girl's head open with his cricket bat, and the wound had to be stitched. And that other day, when three of them cheated, and she was one. Standing out in front of the class, with ‘I am a Cheat,’ chalked up on a slate; standing all the afternoon.

It was harder for Carly. She was older, and worshipped Miss Calman, whose hair blew into little light-dusty rings as she hurried across the playground. Carly sniffled as she walked. She was sure she would never like any other teacher so much. Perhaps the new teachers would be men; she hated men, and was afraid of them.

The house in Calver Street was square and empty. It looked little as a matchbox. The sun had gone, and no patch of white light rippled laughing on the floor. Augusta said, ‘You children will sleep in here,’ and opened a door. The bedroom was ordinary in every way, except that outside its window leaned a wattle tree—not the Australian mimosa kind, but the powder-puff tree, its greenish-gold brushes heavily laden with pollen.

page 29

Eliza plumped down on the bed. ‘This is my tree,’ she said.

‘You always want everything.’

‘I said it first. It's my tree.’

‘Oh, I don't want your old tree. You can have it. I don't like wattle trees, anyhow. I'm going outside to help Mummy unpack.’

Carly ran out of the room. Eliza, left to herself, felt curiously lonely. She wouldn't follow Carly, but she wished she had thought of unpacking for herself. Opening trunks was fun.

On the opposite side of the street a lamp suddenly went on. It was electric, though the houses had only gas. The light clung on its wooden post, like a cold little luminous bug; she peered through the window, and could see nothing but dusk and one great daisy-bush. Beyond that ran Calver Street.