‘I’m a-thinken about the geography book, Tessie’s other book, an old one all torn at the corners and spotted where somebody left it out in the rain some time long ago. London Bridge across the Thames. The Cathedral and Plaza, Mexico City. You could see yourself a-liven in the brown house, a-walken up big stairs and a-looken out that-there tower window, a-sitten down in a tower to look out all day, a-sitten back cool. Or you could flip the page over and there – elephant a-drawen a load of coconuts in Ceylon. High palm trees, black men with white hippens on, wagon made outen sticks… Town Hall, Leeds. Wide stairs, flat-topped roof and a tower with a clock to tell the time of day. A fountain a-drippen out in front. You could see yourself live in that-there house, a-looken out the window at sunup to see if the fountain is a-goen yet… City Hall, Brussels. Slant roof with a tall steeple up high. Yourself a-walken down long halls inside. Yourself a-walken up stairs with a gold pitcher in your hand, a-goen down a long room with a chequered floor like the one in the Ewington post office.

‘It was a good book, a learned book. I read it a heap here and yon and I looked a heap at the pictures… I remember Tessie… And I didn’t forget one time we saw who could sing the most songs, first one and then the other a-singen one… I recall the Carolina dove. Little-headed, he is, and a-walken on the ground, and once a boy down by Cherry Creek in Tennessee told me every dove has got one drop of human blood in his body somewheres. For sure, he said, one drop.

‘One of the books mine. Tessie gave me one to keep, but it’s safer with the balance, I said, along under the quilts… It would be the dearest thing in life if I could find my book some day and have it in my hands or in my room hid under the bed to get out when we’d have a rainy spell of weather.’

Before autumn Ellen was fifteen. During the summer there had always been food and she had grown less thin. Her bones had withdrawn under the flesh and her eyes were no longer hollow. Signs of woman begun to appear on her meagre body; woman took possession of her although she was hard like spines and sharp like flint. She looked at herself in the mirror of the creek, for she dared not unrobe herself in the house before the eyes of her mother. She thought that with the change of one or two externals everything might change – a room to sleep in where there would be pink and blue, herself reading a book by the window. Things to put in drawers and drawers to put things in, she would like, and people to say things to. Her mother would sit in a gay chair on a gallery sewing a seam, the little stitches falling up and down, her mother saying gentle things. Or even suppose they were poor, then she would be sitting with her hair clean and combed, and she would call out, ‘Ellen come see the sparks, they’re in the chimney a-flyen like geese here and yon,’ or ‘Come look at the cherry tree; it’s like a little girl dressed up for summer.’