The children are told not to go to the reservoir by their parents, but no one explains why. Is it too far? Is it dangerous? Inevitably it exerts a fascination, over a long, hot, boring summer.
“It was said to be four or five miles along the gully, past orchards and farms, paddocks filled with cattle, sheep, wheat, gorse, and the squatters of the land who were the rabbits eating like modern sculpture into the hills, though how could we know anything of modern sculpture, we knew nothing but the Warrior in the main street with his wreaths of poppies on Anzac Day, the gnomes weeping in the Gardens because the seagulls perched on their green caps and showed no respect, and how important it was for birds, animals and people, especially children, to show respect!”
Frame’s linguistic brilliance glitters from the very first, long sentence of the story which starts with naturalistic description and standard metaphor – the squatters are rabbits – and then turns strange, the rabbits are eating like “modern sculpture” – changing the shape of the landscape. But the phrase is jarring as the narrator immediately admits, introducing a subsequent self who sees differently.
Frame is one of my favourite writers, fusing psychological complexity with a quicksilver imaginary. Her take on the growing-up story explores childhood knowledge as an ever-shifting threshold. The children wander around Woolworths looking at condoms that might be finger stalls, no one is sure. The same goes for the iron lung that afflicts some of the children. Is it a site of glamour, something akin to the iron mask of the Count of Monte Cristo, or is it something to be terrified of?
First published in The New Yorker in January 1963. Collected in The Daylight and the Dust: Selected Short Stories, Virago, 2015. Read online at the Internet Archive here
A Personal Anthology 