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)

'As I climbed the station steps to the platform, automatically I looked at the girls coming down, wearing their straw boaters and swinging their bulky satchels on their shoulders; automatically – because the age differential was now somewhat important, in one’s home town, automatically because it was the conditioned reflex of ten years’ growing up looking at the same girls on the cycle ride into school. I’d been looking at them that morning as I cycled into the station and when I became aware of it, I was surprised at my unconscious reaction. I hadn’t cycled down at that particular and reflex-promoting time for quite a while. It was a forgotten routine, and to be reminded of it in some way made up for cycling in the suit I’d pressed the night before.' (Introduction)

'As soon as he saw the house, the father said the fir trees would have to be cut down. They were dying, going an ugly brown; and planted too close together, their sides rubbing against each other, they had no light or air. But they had to be cut down because they were unproductive; even if they had been all green and flourishing, they would have been condemned; their dying was an excuse, not a reason. And when, because of its view and its village, he bought the house, he said the first thing we’ve got to do is to get down those fir trees. Because they were taking up space and producing nothing. And they were taking the goodness out of the soil; and he could grow nothing next to them; and he couldn’t afford to waste land. And as they were dying, the son didn’t defend them.' (Introduction)