Before they walked on, the little one offered me a shell from her bucket. You can hear the sea, she said softly, and held it to her ear. Like this.

Ah, the things you remember. Sometimes you know why they hook in your memory, sometimes not. That conversation with the woman I recall because it seemed a source of wonder to me that this was a place whose Governor lived with prisoners and saltworkers and kangaroo-hares. Did that make it a level sort of place for all? Of course not. It was just one more thing that added to the strangeness of being a stranger here, the feeling of not understanding how things were and how they fitted together. And after that, I could never look across to that island without thinking of prisoners dying while the Governor sipped his tea.

I took the shell with me and set it on the mantelpiece alongside my hairbrush. I would pick it up, that shell, from time to time, run my thumb across the surface. I didn’t know the name of it, nor what manner of creature had lived in it, but it was some new thing to wonder at and to make me feel the distance between my old home and new, my childhood, not so long ago, and that of children of this time, this place. Shells there were aplenty in Roanhaven, leftovers from the baiting. Heaped up beside houses, along the paths to the boatie shore, up in the braes, everywhere. The idea of picking one up and taking it home! Like an ornament. Like something precious. How the Roanhaven child I was would have laughed at that.

I wrote to Clementina every second week and told her these things, and it soothed me, when I couldn’t sleep, to think of her reading my words and smiling and frowning and shaking her head. Sometimes she would write a letter in return, but not so very many. Gutting girls never had much idle time on their hands, and Clementina Slater even less since she’d become Clementina Ratter.

2

Fremantle in 1910—oh, it was a different place to the one you know, lambsie. I wonder, can you even picture it? A small port town of lime streets and bicycles and horse-drawn carts. The public buildings were made of limestone hewed out of the ground by convicts in the century before, but everything else was flimsy and brokendown—shops, cottages. There were sea baths between the jetties, and people often said Fremantle was like an English seaside resort. Well, I wouldn’t have known about that. We had plenty of seaside but no resorts where I came from, and I never did see such a thing but for the one time when Clementina and I walked to The Parade in Great Yarmouth on a Sunday afternoon, and it was November then, and bitter, so no-one was swimming or doing seaside things.