Between My Father and the King by Janet Frame Read Free Book Online

did not love or even like our new grandma, especially not after her suddenly expressed threat:
    â€˜If you were my children I’d take the belt off the sewing machine and whip you!’
    She meant it. Had she whipped her own children, I wondered; and had my mother forgotten? Surely the birds of the air would never fly down to perch on the shoulder of someone so cruel? Andthe music would refuse to come readily through the tiny holes of the reed or bamboo pipe? And the secret water not announce its presence to the hazel twig?
    Grandma’s threat was real. The belt around the wheel of the sewing machine was thin, with wire inside, and would sting and cut. Surely Grandma had never whipped her own children in this way? Grandma, who stood equal and sometimes above, in praise, the Pioneers, President Garfield, Lord Shaftesbury, Katherine Mansfield, Mr Stocker the dentist: between these and God, I reasoned that if Grandma did not deserve the praise, perhaps the others, including God, were equally undeserving. It was all inexplicable and strange. I did not like my grandmother; obviously, my mother loved her. I had thought my mother belonged to me, but how could she, looking through such different eyes at the world and the people. Even her daylight, her daylight and night did not seem to be mine anymore, and I thought they had been. Everything she said about Grandma must have been true but it was her truth and Grandma’s and it didn’t belong to any of us.
    The clock ticked. It had a long face with dragons painted at the edges. The fire roared because the damper was pulled out. I felt very lonely, as if I lived under a separate sky.

    We panicked. We showed our fear and hate. We used several words that could be described as ‘that expression’.
    â€˜Don’t let me hear you use that expression again. None of my other grandchildren have ever used that expression in front of me.’
    Our mother’s grief made our behaviour worse; we were helpless.
    â€˜Get the forks from the kitchen drawer.’
    â€˜Get them yourself.’
    â€˜Put on a shovel of coal, there’s a good girl.’
    â€˜I won’t.’
    â€˜I won’t!’
    This was called ‘outright’ or ‘downright refusal’ — a serious crime. Yes, I remember this as a bitter episode in the so-called ‘latent’ period of my life. It was a time of being judged and condemned. It was dramatically expressed by every grown-up who knew us that we had ‘broken our grandmother’s heart and our mother’s heart and brought disgrace on our father and the home’.
    There were no photos taken in the Town Gardens, though we wore our dresses and Mother wore hers and my brother wore his new serge pants; but my father did not blow his nose on his birthday handkerchief, and we did not feel at home in our new clothes.
    Grandma went home after two days and vowed never to return. My mother cried. My father talked of sending us to the Industrial School at Caversham.
    Shut up, I won’t, bum, fart, fuck — we had said them all, happily and unhappily rejoicing in their power. Shut your gob. Gob!
    Grandma kept her word: she never returned either in real life or in our mother’s spoken memory of her. Though we missed the stories we had loved and we wished it were as it used to be when we’d never met Grandma but had dreamed of her, we thought, in our turmoil, Good riddance, and buried our disgrace down a handy pocket in the ‘latent period’, and that was that.
    A few years later Grandma died, and when her home was sold my mother received fifty pounds and a ‘keepsake’, a grey and white oil painting of a lighthouse and a storm at sea which she hung in the passage by the bathroom door. With the fifty pounds she paid the grocer’s bill and bought my father a new fishing bagand herself a set of bottom false teeth which she could not wear because the gooseberry seeds hurt; and we