As Janine grows up, her mother feels her weight grow heavy on her lap as she flings herself onto her. ‘Child, you’re too heavy,’ she exclaims and shakes her off impatiently. She is a small-boned woman with ivory white skin through which the blue veins show. Almost always stockinged, gartered, corsetted, her flesh and spirit held at bay. She is a soft, gentle-mannered woman who listens to reason, unlike Janine’s father who is volatile and impulsive. She allows her children a great deal of freedom. She does not impinge on Janine’s world of fantasy, lets her sleep till late on a school morning so that Janine often goes off absent-mindedly, leaving her books and pencils at home, rushing to catch the train still half asleep. The train flies past on the tracks, cinders blowing into her eyes.

Janine’s companion is Milroy who goes to the same school. He is a quiet boy but one day he turns cruel and punches her black and blue, cuffing her on the ears as she cowers helplessly, unable to fend him off. She is enraged at her own helplessness …. One day, sitting on the rocks of an abandoned tea estate with Milroy and Menike, Mungo’s daughter who is a servant in Milroy’s family, looking down on the railway tracks, Janine has a sudden impulse to hurt. She wants to hear the hollow boom that echoes from the cave of the human body, like the echoes of voices that strike the hills of Belungala. She gives a short sharp blow on Menike’s back …. And she is punished for something she cannot explain. This feeling of aggression, all dammed up within her. She cringes with guilt as she is called a wicked, cruel girl. ‘You have been naughty,’ Mrs Jones says, ‘it was cruel of you.’ Janine cringes and bends over the food that had lost all its savour. She does not understand her own aggression. She knows that she has done something wrong. Isolation is her punishment.

Janine also quarrels with her sister Elsa when they play together on the verandah. All her precious dolls which the aunts have brought from England are being petted and cosseted by her sister, so she holds Elsa by her hair and starts knocking her head hard against the wall, until she howls and Mother comes running out to stop her. There are no words to express the blind rage within Janine.