Notes of Substance

It’s summer now, but in my memories it seems like winter. Cold glass bottles stand like sentinels on the gravel, and my milky memories smear across the years, back to the thought of fresh milk, delivered in bottles with foil tops. In this scene, I am watching through the leadlight window of my gabled-roof room. The slap of hoof on road floats up to my bedroom eyrie, as the milk cart delivers its morning load. The bottles of milk would be set down on the edge of our driveway as the first light of morning was arriving. At times, the milk was a little warm when we brought it in, the icy coldness having melted down to cool. The cream at the top was sometimes a little clumpy, but a shake was all it needed. The pint bottles became 600ml bottles, but my memory of the foil lids has stayed the same. At some point in our childhood years, our milk began disappearing. Not the lot of it, just a bottle or two. Most weeks there would be milk taken, and eventually a pattern emerged. Who was ma

A photograph of a new mum, squinting into the sun, shadows hiding her face, shrouded. Standing beside her, stationed on either side, a girl and a boy, aged 6 and 5. They are all in front of a Hills Hoist. Nappies flap, flannel sails fluttering over their heads, catching the November wind. The new baby’s head is bent into his mother’s shoulder. It has been thirty seven years since our home had been sold. Here I was, standing outside it on a Sunday, taking photographs of my bedroom window from the park next door. ‘That’s quite a view,’ the man said, fresh from tennis at the club. ‘I used to live there,’ I said. Or did I say ‘I used to live here ’ or ‘I grew up here’: is that what I said? ‘You should go and knock on the door, and ask to go in’ he prodded, but as he got in his car, I thought, nah, I wouldn’t. Gum tree branches moving on the gravel, the sight of the owner moving in the garden. ‘I used to live here.’ Yes, I said it. ‘I grew up here.’ He watched me fro