Miss Monk was the basketball coach, and umpired all the games. We laughed at her as she ran backwards in her long dresses on stiff legs, blowing her silver whistle. I longed to be picked for the team — to wear the blue tunic with gold bands around the hem, to suck oranges at half-time. I saw myself at centre, but only the smallest girls were picked for that; or as the goalie, but I could not get the ball through the hoop. Because I was tall I was always chosen to be defence, and somehow my arm was not strong enough — I could not throw the ball. I was put there when Miss Monk picked the B team to play at Mount Barker, and Miss Monk blew her whistle and sent me off. I ran as fast as I could to the lavatories and locked myself in at the end and couldn’t stop crying. I came out with a blotched face, and everyone looked. (And I remember for ever the spiked fence about the lavatory and the bitter prickles on the thorn-bush at one end.)

I was given pennies to spend on chocolate frogs and liquorice straps at lunch-time, and one day as I was walking back from the Daisy Dell Milk Bar I was swept suddenly with the same longing I felt at the Kindergarten, that made me run to seek my mother. The same bird with ruffled feathers fluttered in my chest, the same stones choked my throat, the same needles pricked my eyes. For my grandmother.

I ran all the way home. I crept in without her hearing, and it was funny to watch Nan and Reece without them knowing. They ate their scraps of cold roast beef left from Sunday’s joint, and Nan scooped up the puddle of tomato sauce with her bread, and rested her leg that ached in Reece’s lap. And Reece’s belly rattled and she did not care, for she thought I couldn’t hear. And I saw the little lines on Nan’s face, and the red verandah was so cold and the roses were all dead.

(It is a foreboding of a time when my grandmother will be gone, and the Rose Street life will be swept away. It is a foreboding of a time when I will dream always of finding my way back to the house with the pebble-dash and the red verandah, where a bread tin stands always in readiness by a front door that does not open, for a baker who does not come. And pink roses climb for eternity up a pebble-dash wall, and cast their petals onto tinsel cinerarias and icy gravel down below.)