AustLit

'Down at my grandmother’s house, near the river, the gypsies came by and sold us pigeons’ eggs. I don’t remember if we ate them. Maybe we blew them, pricking a pinhole in each end and blowing out the white and the yolk and keeping the shell to start a collection. It was called Diglis down there, because the land used to belong to the cathedral, d’église, in the language of our Norman conquerors. But by the time my grandmother lived there, the land between the old Victorian houses and the river was used as a garbage tip to raise its level so it wouldn’t flood each year. And along the riverbank were huge petroleum storage tanks.' (Introduction)