ssmaking. Uncle was a small
contractor, who had a hard time of it, and his wife was a woman who'd got
frozen about the heart, although she was as good as gold when it melted a
little. She was always preaching about the need for working and saving
and the folly of wasting money in drink and ribbons and everything but
what was ugly. She said that there was little pleasure in the world for
those who had to work, so the sooner we made up our minds to do without
pleasure the better we'd get on. Mary lived with them a couple of years,
coming home once in a while. Then she got the chance of a place where
she'd get her board and half-a-crown a week. She couldn't bear aunt and
so she took it and I went to live at uncle's and to learn dressmaking,
too. That was six months after you went off, Ned. I wasn't quite fifteen
and you were eighteen, past. Seven years ago. I was so sorry when you
went away, Ned.

"Aunt wasn't pleasant to live with. I used to try to get on with her and
I think she liked me in her way but she made me miserable with her
perpetual lecturing about the sin of liking to look nice and the
wickedness of laughing and the virtue of scraping every ha'penny. I used
to help in the house, of course, when I came from work and I was always
getting into trouble for reading books, that I borrowed, at odd minutes
when aunt thought I ought to be knitting or darning or slaving away
somehow at keeping uncomfortable. I used to tell Mary and Mary used to
wish that I could come to work where she did. We used to see each other
every dinner hour and in the evening she'd come round and on Sundays we
used to go to church together. She was so kind to me, and loving, looking
after me like a little mother. She used to buy little things for me out
of her halfcrown and say that when she was older aunt shouldn't make me
miserable. Besides aunt, I didn't like working in a close shop, shut up.
I didn't seem to be able to take a good breath. I used to think as I sat,
tacking stuff together or unpicking threads that seemed to be endless,
how it was out in the bush and who was riding old Bluey to get the cows
in now I was gone and whether the hens laid in the same places and if it
was as still and fresh as it used to be when we washed our faces and
hands under the old lean-to before breakfast. And Toowoomba is fresher
than Sydney. I don't know what I'd have thought of Sydney then. I used to
tell Mary everything and she used to cheer me up. Poor M