Yet no director or superintendent or inspector compelled me to enter the school. I was sent there by my mother and grandmother who loved me.

My mother and grandmother were strangely innocent. Their world was narrow and circumscribed; they were lost once they strayed from their familiar paths. My mother’s way was hedged with invisible briers that sheltered, as well as constricted: perplexing abstractions were made commonplace and concrete by the gold watch that ticked away the years, by the clink of coins in her purse on pay day. My grandmother’s way was bound by Reece and the house and the lady across the road, by the birth and death, engagement and approaching marriage announcements in the Advertiser.

Because they were innocent, they were unspoiled. Once they entered the house, and the front door closed behind them, the outer world was lost — drowned in the greenness of crinkled glass. The real world sprang into being as my grandmother, my mother, Reece, and I came close. It was a delicate world that waxed and waned; constantly threatened by my grandmother’s depressions and possessiveness, my mother’s materialism and secret longings, Reece’s stomach that rattled, my fits. It was nurtured and protected by the roses and the grape-vines, the ivy and the lavatory-creeper that clung to the fences; by the arching berry bush, the plant that bloomed once every seven years. The real world came into being round the dining-room fire, as we toasted bread on the crooked fork; it lurked in the porcelain basin as my mother washed my hair with rainwater from the well, bloomed in the fusty bedroom as Reece soothed my head with little pats when I was sick, rose from the earth when my grandmother stooped in the garden and coaxed withered seedlings to life. In these sequestered haunts — behind the crinkled green glass and the roses, the grape-vines, the ivy and the lavatory-creeper — my grandmother’s and mother’s lives blossomed secretly, unacknowledged even to themselves.

This innocence had its pitfalls: they did not value themselves; they did not realize their worth. Once they strayed from their familiar paths they were lost; their innocence tarnished. There was my grandmother’s marriage that marked my mother; there was my mother’s, made poetic by my father’s death, by the fact of me. They did not acknowledge that they were different — that they had made me different by my upbringing in that house of the red verandah, where beauty lay all about: in Reece’s ugly face, Tinker’s milky gaze, my grandmother’s wrinkles, the lilac shadows beneath my mother’s eyes; where life, under its sham layer of studied conformity was strangely original, strangely unworldly.