She was knitting fast and faster, not looking at him, watching the wool fly between her fingers, the needles four pieces of nail-wire, waxed and gleaming from the grease in the wool. And not long enough, so she had to keep her eyes on what she was doing so the stitches would not fall off the end. There was one of the blacks, had a splattering of English, she said, and stopped knitting to count the stitches. Anyway the upshot was, the Governor promised them, no more farms down the river, no more down from Green’s or Grono’s, round about there.

No more? No more farms on the river? All that good land?

He did not believe.

You don’t believe me, she said tartly, you ask my Da.

Why, he said. Why your Da.

He were there on the boat, weren’t he? she shot back. He were a lumper on the Liberty and he were coiling a rope, he sez, and listening.

She looked up at him and laughed so he saw the two yellow teeth stuck in her bottom jaw like nails round a hogshead from which the top had been levered.

No one sees a lumper, that’s what he sez. She shook her head.

No one sees a lumper, nor yet an old chook of an old woman.

At half the length it had some hope of working, although I was sad to lose those nail-wire knitting needles.

Blackwood, not taking his eyes off the cliffs, rode over Sagitty as if he had not spoken. There was a meeting, he said. Governor come up on the Porpoise, anchored off the point there. His head jerked to indicate the place. There was one of the blacks had a bit of English. His thick fingers were carefully rewinding the whipping on a bit of rope and he seemed to be talking to the cord rather than the people around him. Upshot of it was, Governor said there’d be no more white fellers downstream of the Second Branch.

You’re lying, Tom Blackwood, Sagitty shouted, but Blackwood calmly knotted up the whipping and snipped it off with his teeth. Shook hands, the lot, he said. That’s how it was.

As a kid, I had some decided ideas about how books should be written. I thought, for example, they should have toilets in them. People in real life went to the toilet, so how come people in books never did? And I thought that when people talked in books it shouldn’t be on a new line, indented, between quotation marks. Real life didn’t stop dead while people talked, so why should it in books?