“I told you to leave that dirt alone.”

She twisted the child roughly by the arm until she dropped the clothes-peg and ran away from the garden. The woman grunted and continued on the path up to the whare. The yellow dog lay across the doorstep, biting fleas; the woman kicked at him as she approached but the creature flinched and ran off before her foot touched him.

“Gar-r, get away, you beast. The place ain’t tidy. I ’aven’t ’ad time ter fix things… Come right in.”

It was a large, dimly lit room, the walls plastered with old pages of English periodicals. Queen Victoria’s Jubilee appeared to be the most recent number. A dusty table with an ironing-board and empty wash tub on it, some old wooden forms, a black horsehair sofa, and some broken cane chairs pushed against the walls. The mantel-piece above the stove was draped in pink paper that had started to curl at the edges, further ornamented with dried grasses and ferns and a faded print of Richard Seddon. There were four doors—one, judging from the smell, let into the ‘Store’, one on to the ‘back yard’, through a third I saw the bed-room. Flies buzzed in circles round the ceiling and treacle papers on the windows blotted out any trace of sunlight.

I was alone in the room; she had gone into the store for the embrocation. I heard her stamping about and muttering to herself: “I got some, now where did I put that bottle…? It’s behind the pickles… no, it ain’t.”

I cleared a place on the table and sat there, swinging my legs. Down in the paddock I could hear Jo singing and the sound of hammer strokes as Jim drove in the tent pegs. It was sunset. There is no twilight in our New Zealand days, but a curious half-hour when everything appears grotesque—it frightens—as though the savage spirit of the country walked abroad and sneered at what it saw. Sitting alone in the hideous room I grew afraid. The woman next door was a long time finding that stuff. What was she doing in there? Once I thought I heard her bang her hands down on the counter, and once she half moaned, turning it into a cough and clearing her throat. I wanted to call out to her but I kept silent.

“Good Lord, what a life!” I thought. “Imagine being here day in, day out, with that rat of a child and a mangy dog. Mad, of course she’s mad! Wonder how long she’s been here—wonder if I could get her to talk.”

At that moment she poked her head round the door.

“Wot was it yer wanted?” she asked.

“Embrocation.”

“Oh, I forgot. I got it, it was in front of the pickle jars.”

She put a bottle down on the table, her red hands rough and shaky.

“My, you do look tired, you do! Shall I knock yer up some supper? There’s some tongue in the store, too, and I’ll cook yer a cabbage if you fancy it.”

“Right-o.” I forced a smile. “Come down to the paddock and bring the kid for tea.”

She shook her head, pursing up her mouth.

“Oh no. I don’t… I don’t fancy it. I’ll send the kid down with the things and a billy of milk. Shall I knock up a few scones to take with yer ter-morrow?”

“Thanks.”

She came and stood by the door as though waiting for me to say something.

“How old is the kid?”

“Six, come next Christmas. I ’ad a bit of trouble with ’er one way an’ another. I ’adn’t any milk till a month after she was born and she sickened like a cow.”

“She’s not like you—takes after her father?”

Just as the woman had shouted her refusal at us before, she shouted at me then. “No, she don’t! She’s the dead spit of me,” she shrieked in a voice resembling the shrill cries of the larks. “Any fool could see that. Come on in now, Elsie, you stop messing in the dirt.