And mists came and veiled the garden, lurked in the quince-tree at the back. The last chrysanthemums glowed, and some mauve asters, a mop of rose, a poker of larkspur. I saw the rose hips, lights along the lane. As I looked, the sky was peppered with birds.

I thought the spiders and the mists and the brightness would go on for ever.

Winter came.

I left the garden and entered the house. The kitchen was warm, suffused with smells of cooking. My grandmother’s arm cradled china as she beat eggs for a cake, Reece’s spit sizzled on the iron, my mother sewed on. Once more the tinsel roses shimmered in the grate, once more we sat in a tight circle about the evening — lulled by murmuring wireless, Reece’s needles, the newspaper, the scratching pen.

I thought it would go on for ever.

Yet when the red-brick path is pricked with rain, when the asters are tipped with mildew, and the flowerbeds sleep, all my life changes. As the chrysanthemums lurch, their petals stained with mud, my mother tells me she is to marry the man with the moustache and the R.S.L. badge who is her friend. As the last leaves fall from the trees, she tells me that we will leave the house in Rose Street. My mother and Nan and Reece and I will live with the man in a new house in a new suburb. And the chrysanthemums are sullied, the earth is hard, rain falls on iron.

Once the words were said, they radiated through the house. They resounded in the passage, hung in corners, sunk into the verandah, floated in sullen puddles on the lawn. Everything was changed. The house belonged to others. The spring that budded already in fruit-trees, the bulbs that waited in the earth, would flourish for them.

And because the garden shrank from me, I shunned it — went only to pluck a root from here, a branch from there; to dig for chrysanthemum and agapanthus, iris and rose. The old wild world was no more. The garden contracted to pot-plants on a sill: four geraniums — white and salmon, pink and rose; scraps of green that were forget-me-not and noon-flower; twigs that held promise of privet hedge and fuchsia. There was no other garden — just trees I used to climb, a clothes-line, a path that led to a lavatory.

We took down curtains and painted walls, coaxed tables from corners, found pencils and sixpences and handkerchiefs lost for years. And strangers plucked at furniture, robbed the specimen shelf, sheathed with newspaper. Charles Ebenezer came down from the wall, the harvest festival dinner-set made islands on a floor.