A telegram arrives, informing Janine’s family of her grandfather’s death and they travel by train to Colombo with Mother. Father does not want any of them near him. He feels grief but he does not want their comfort. He has lost a young son too and the earth is still too fresh in the newly-dug grave. Janine watches him step forward from among his brothers and sisters and place a wreath upon the mound of piled-up earth. What is death? She does not even know that it is like sleep. She has never seen the body of someone who has died. Only the shape of the coffin, like a flower-covered boat moving slowly on a dark ocean.

She remembers Jock Young, the Scottish scoutmaster, who had come with his scout troop to which her brother belonged, to their home in Kadugannawa. They had gone up the hill where Janine used to wander alone, the preserves which she knew so well. She liked his gentleness, his lean wiry body, his fine featured face. She had watched him hold up his binoculars to gaze at the vistas before him—Dawson’s Tower, the hills of Belungala, the small township with its railway station, turn table, siding shed and scattered bungalows. It was a small world and he tried to look beyond it. What did he see? A world that could not contain him? He had gone away to fight in the Second World War and no one knows in which battle he had died or even where he was buried.

And Jem Smith, the foreman platelayer who brought them toys at Christmas time, had also gone back to England where he had died in the Blitz. This was the beginning of her awareness of grief and sorrow, loss and bereavement. Some months later she had stood and watched from afar as her father carried the dead Belle, the Airedale which he loved, in a gunny sack to be buried under the chow-chow creepers; and Timmy, the long-eared black Cocker spaniel had to be put to sleep, with her beautiful black velvet-furred litter, because she had been bitten by a rabid dog …. And she thinks of how the tails of new-born puppies are cut. They are a special breed that her father rears and the little stumps are bound in iodine stained bandages. But when she falls down and bruises her knees, she makes a salve of wild herbs to staunch her blood, the wild hulanthala crushed between her fingers, the green juice mingling with the redness.

She wanders up the hill alone among the scented tea bushes with wild flowers and wild strawberries. She has no fear of being alone; the snakes coiled in the deep undergrowth of ferns and leaves. It is the season of her growing.