Poll married Will from the jam factory. They lived at Houghton in a house with a balcony and the scent of eucalyptus all about. I saw a spaniel and a lavatory starred with ash and a centipede surprised me from a tree. I saw Jack, who was a bachelor I had to kiss, and a little strange, but harmless — just toy tanks in a bedroom. Mill was a brittle ghost who got engaged but broke it off and straddled a Colombo rickshaw. Annie was but a name. Elizabeth was my great-grandmother.

She went, vanished utterly — leaving behind four children that do not exist.

Once I clasped the creased fingers of one of them and walked to a cemetery. We crossed a railway line and tramped on parklands between cows. Murmuring voices, flickers of pink from the willows meant lovers were about.

I wanted to stop, but she pulled me on to a strange landscape where Jesus and all His angels and the Lamb of God faced convolvulus and waist-high grass. The fight was almost over — but the lovely angel smiled, flourished her Turk’s-cap lily. And there were rusting tin leaves and china garlands and glassy domes.

When we reached the baker and his Stella, they were further from us than ever. There were no eyes to see, no ears to hear, not even a mouth — just silence, and the child who was my grandmother looked sad. We turned away (she couldn’t look sad for ever), and marched on past the dead tended with watering-cans and lonely fingers. And there was another plot and other sterile hopes and expectations. But it hurt more this time, for it was my father. And we celebrated him with loose-petalled roses. And the poet that lived on dangerously said things about heedless marble.

I stood before the slab that bore his name — and it was my name. I gazed at the letters and they were grimed with dirt (the railway was very near). The willows were too — and was he ever a lover, ever my father? But I swept away abstraction — made it bearable and related him to me. For by being my father he lived a life — didn’t he? He did that anyway — didn’t he? But died.

And the uneasy poet quoted raindrops and milky skies — for it was September then, when I was born. An Australian September — therefore the spring. And the poet let him have it too. For the rains and skies were there for him as well — one year later at his death.

TWO

As a child and ever after, the minute, hidden facets of things intrigued me. I was for ever walking with my head bent, looking at the ground. I saw an ant picking its way across the earth, the moss at the base of the wall, the wings of the bee in the hyssop. I watched the shadow-play the rose leaves made on the fence. I saw the ant run under a leaf, over a stone, past seed-pods into a hole. I peered into the clipped stems of the valerian and saw greenness. I saw bulbs slit by greener spears. I saw the red geranium turn black and clenched dots turned mauve and into lilacs. And the ant came out of its hole, clambered over a pebble, a needle of grass — was lost amongst the ivy.