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father’s self-interest and self-concern infuriated him. ‘If there’s a fire,’ he said, ‘my place is with the boys. It’s my duty. I’m their lieutenant. What the devil are they going to think if their lieutenant isn’t there?’
    â€˜I don’t care what they think. Your place is here with me. This farm’s your duty. In heat like this you’re a farmer first. It’s your bread and butter. Fighting fires isn’t.’
    One hundred and one degrees yesterday, ninety-nine the day before, ninety-seven the day before that; too much for raspberries unless they were in the gullies where humus was deep and soils were moist. The Georges’ raspberries were in the open, on the hillside, because they had worked the gullies for so long that raspberries wouldn’t grow there any more; there was a disease in the soil that stunted their growth. This happened to everyone, but old man George saw it as one more act of fate directed specifically against him. He’d have saved his crop if it had been in the gullies.
    â€˜You haven’t had a call,’ he grumbled. ‘No one’s had a call.’
    â€˜Fat lot of hope I’d have of hearing the phone from here, anyway.’
    â€˜You’d hear the siren, wouldn’t you? And there hasn’t been a siren.’
    â€˜Even that’s a toss-up,’ said John, with an acute sense of guilt. ‘The way the wind’s blowing it’d blow the sound away.’
    The old man turned on his daughter. ‘Have you heard sirens, Lorna?’
    She hadn’t and she had to admit it, even though her sympathies were with her brother.
    â€˜There,’ the old man said. ‘Her ears are the youngest of the lot of us and she hasn’t heard anything. It’s heat, that’s what, not smoke—sheer blistering heat. Fryin’ the sap in the trees.’
    Lorna felt like saying, ‘Don’t be stupid. Don’t act like a stupid old man. Don’t make me feel ashamed of you,’ but she couldn’t say it and would never say it. She couldn’t hurt her father. He was hurt enough already, for life had hurt him all along the line and Lorna knew all about it. Old man George was born unlucky, unlucky in all things except his children. John was a fine son, and as for Lorna, how she could be her mother’s daughter, heaven alone knew.
    Lorna was capable and level-headed and supremely patient, and over the summer months this was probably just as well. The family relied upon her, heavily, for her mother was ill: emotionally ill, they said. She was a weak woman who couldn’t face up to life. If she had married a banker or a prosperous storekeeper and lived in comparative ease she might never have fallen ill at all, but she had married a farmer much older than herself, a small farmer whose crops were at the mercy of the elements. They said she would get better, but it would take a long period of complete rest in a convalescent home. Lorna was part of the cure, for her mother knew that her husband and John were secure for as long as she cared to leave them in Lorna’s hands. Indeed she had always relied a great deal on Lorna; far too much, probably; but she was that kind of woman. She had never realized that Lorna’s childhood had been something like a sentence to hard labour, hard labour in the house and hard labour in the paddocks. Old man George didn’t realize it either, but for a completely different reason. To his mind one’s children were duty-bound. Life wasn’t a game, it was a battle, and everyone was in it.
    â€˜Old man George is a tyrant,’ people used to say, ‘and his kids can’t have much spirit or they’d buck against it.’ (People used to wonder in private, though. John’s tenacious loyalty to his father couldn’t have been a mark of weakness.) And Lorna’s friends of her own age, her school friends, were not friends in