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By Root 345 0

– but to me it was all in slow motion – towards the trunks of the poui trees. The baby Austin model had its points, though. We went straight between the tree trunks without touching. A series of soft grassy bumps, and the car came to rest, slightly on its side. The engine cut out and there was silence until my sisters remembered to scream again. Abandoning modesty, they scrambled out of the car as fast as they could and climbed up to the road, getting such purchase as they could out of grass and weeds. They said they had no intention of driving back to the city with my father; they would walk until they found a bus or a taxi. My mother called them back, not to make them change their minds, but to give them money for the journey. Her manner indicated that it was her own duty to stay with the Austin, come what might.

It didn’t take much to right the Austin. And presently we were pulled out by a passing lorry, with whose driver and driver’s family – all brilliantly dressed, all in the cab: their Sunday afternoon outing as well – my father exchanged the lightest of banter. We picked up my sisters. They had already begun to wilt a little and scarcely needed to be persuaded; they also welcomed the opportunity to abuse my father. My father ignored them; he sang all the way back. But as soon as we were home he became morose. His face was drawn; the pouches under his eyes went dark; and the unusual mood of the day now showed itself to have been a type of hysteria. He locked himself in his room, answered none of my mother’s calls, and didn’t come out even to have a cup of tea.

So our first and last Sunday family outing ended; and so our Sunday lunches ended as well. My father withdrew once more. The baby Austin ceased to be comic and became to us a symbol of indefinable terror. We were happier when it was garaged with some defect. Since then, I might add here, I have looked upon the little-man type in his little car with feelings which, to say the least, are mixed. My sisters and I began spending our week-ends freely again with my mother’s family. The suspicion came to me that between Cecil and one of my sisters there existed an incestuous relationship. I had nothing to go by, but with these things one just suddenly knows.

I was walking home from school one rainy afternoon. They were laying cables and the roads were dug up. The bright red clay ran like paint in the gutters. Here and there on the pavement were enormous cable bobbins. The cables were dusted with a white powder and looked like mass-manufactured pastry, a type of strudel, produced in enormous lengths and conveyed in this way – on the bobbins, pushed through the streets by straining barebacked men – to the retailers, who would chop it into small pieces. I heard a fresh shower of rain coming and I began to run. At a corner, as though he had been there a long time, expecting me, was my father. He was sitting on his bicycle with one foot on the pavement; the Austin was in some mechanic’s garage.

‘Hop on,’ he said. ‘I think we can take a chance.’

To me towing on bicycles was one of the deep, tempting illegalities. It ranked with cycling at night without a light or riding an unlicensed bicycle; it ranked, in illegality if not yet in temptation, with driving an uninsured motorcar or driving without a permit. It astonished me that my father, a government servant, should choose on a main road so openly to break the law. But his arm was outstretched in invitation, and it was raining.

I sat on the crossbar. I felt the awkwardness of my protruding limbs and the burden of my weight. His arms imprisoned me. We went off shakily. I could hear his tremulous breathing and was aware of the difficulty of every manœuvre on the muddy, slippery asphalt. I concentrated on the road. The rain was heavy and stinging; we were soon both soaked. People sheltering under the eaves of shops – as still and as meditative as people in the tropics appear when they shelter from a downpour – stared at us. We didn’t take shelter ourselves. We didn’t say a word to one another. We went on, concentrating