converse lightly and easily. Indeed, she told me more than once not to be such a dullard, and seemed, as that journey progressed, to grow ever more gay the further we went from all we had known.
I was ten when I first saw the country that was now to be our home. The ship had sailed into a sparkling blue harbour surrounded by dark, densely forested, grey-green hills, and I could at first see nothing of the town that was our destination. The only thing I could see, I took to be some sort of industry, half veiled in red smoke. The ship brought us here and we came ashore to crooked streets of red-brown earth and houses made of wood and to a bustle of horses and carriages and people whose movements raised the perpetual rust-red blear – a strange, rough factory of life. I breathed in the bloody dust, appalled and stumbling because my feet could not immediately adjust to the lack of cobbles underfoot, but when I said as much, a crewman told me gently that it was only that I had not yet got my land legs back. A carriage awaited us and it carried us away from the dusty town and up into the forested hills I had seen from the deck of the ship. I ought to have been pleased to be in the midst of what was certainly untouched wilderness, but the colours were all wrong, both too drab and too garish, as if exaggerated by the exaggerated sun. It beat down with such relentless fury that I cowered in the shade of the awning, unable to imagine baring my skin to it.
I wondered if it was the sun that made the men and women who inhabited this place so heavy and vague in their movements. Their eyes and expressions seemed to me both exhausted and bewildered. Mama had said many of them came from across the sea, like us, but it was impossible to imagine either of us being so reduced.
I soon took to calling them the clay people, for their skin seemed as rough and muddy as their voices and minds.
All of our furniture and most of the servants had been sent in advance, and were waiting to greet us in a house so similar in dimension and ambiance to the one we had left behind that I had to assume Mama had chosen it for that reason. Yet why had we come here, if nothing was to change?
But of course everything was changed and much that we had brought with us did not fit our new lives. In particular, all of our lovely winter coats and muffs and boots were put into storage, for it never snowed here. That Mama had allowed them to be brought, gave me a nugget of hope that she did not mean us to stay here forever, and in those first days I analysed her words and tried desperately to find in them a confirmation of my hope. I was desperately unhappy. If I had felt estranged before, here I found myself a pale-skinned, over-delicate freak full of irrelevant complexities of manner. I did not like the heat nor the clothes one must wear to endure it. I did not like the light, which stabbed into my eyes like little blades and exposed everything so mercilessly, or the way the heat dried all that was green to brown. I did not like the untidy look of the trees, or the ever-present, ominous hum of insects that rose from the bleached grass. But I did not make any tantrum or protest. Aside from the fact that it was not in my nature, the heat drained me and made me feel exhausted almost the moment I left my bed. I could not imagine undertaking the long journey back home.
Winter, when it came, was only a little better, for all seasons were but variations of summer in this land. But at least there were cool breezes and occasionally dew beaded the morning grass. I took to rising very early, just before sunrise, in that hour when the air would smell clean and fresh and damp and there might be a few veils of violet cloud in the peach-gold sky. All the birds sang at that hour, though later in the day only a few cried out, sounding harsh and exhausted.
Best of all I liked the thunderstorms, which were elemental and thrilling, knives of light slashing through the blackness,