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down when she stepped back into the kitchen the dish under her arm.
    â€œThat’s done,” she said hanging it in its place above the fountain in the stove recess.
    The recess and a door leading outside took up one end of the kitchen. Built of corrugated iron smoked grey-black the recess was big enough for both the stove and an iron grate for an open fire in the winter.
    Sylvia saw herself sitting by it with the others on cold nights, her father taking most of the lamplight reading the Farmer and Settler , her mother in the shadows making what she called a “start for tomorrow” which was slicing bread for school sandwiches and soaking oatmeal for porridge.
    A chill as cold as the coldest night ran through Sylvia. Would she be here this winter and the winters to come, all her life in Berrigo with no one decent to marry? Oh my God to end up a Gough, a Motbey, a Wright, a Henry or a Turner! To die would be better!
    All her youth spent with no money of her own, no job but helping her mother around the house, nothing to go to but the Berrigo Show and the Berrigo Sports and the Agricultural Ball where Berrigo’s idea of decoration was to pile the stage with potatoes, pumpkins and marrows and cross stalks of corn around the walls! You felt you were dancing in the farm sheds.
    She sank onto a chair pushing her feet out before her and raising her eyes to see a piece of sky visible where the galvanized iron did not quite meet.
    Oh to be free as the sky, to escape forever the closeting of the kitchen!
    â€œCan’t we write to Aunt Bess and say when I’ll be coming?” she said staring at her skirt stretched tight across her knees.
    Her mother was dragging the sewing machine to catch the late afternoon light from the one window and didn’t hear or chose not to hear.
    She sat at the machine and began to sort through a little pile of cutout garments still with the paper pattern against each piece.
    My dress! thought Sylvia. She has been reminded to sew my dress! But Mrs McMahon bypassed Sylvia’s dark grey flannel with a collar in white pique intended for wearing to job interviews and selected a skirt for Esme cut from a tweed suit sent in a parcel of good worn things by Bess, a sister of Mr McMahon who had promised temporary shelter for Sylvia in Sydney.
    â€œI am sorry she cannot stay permanently,” wrote Bess in reply to her brother’s suggestion.
    â€œBut George and I have reached an agreement owing to all the relatives coming to stay with us since we came to Sydney.” (George was a policeman.)
    â€œI get no extra money from him when they are here and it is a struggle to keep the meals up.
    â€œSo we decided none of his come and none of mine.
    â€œBut Sylvia can stay until she gets a job and we will help her find a boarding place.
    â€œOur Margaret is doing very well and got a raise last week. They are not putting any more girls on there.”
    Mrs McMahon got up from the machine now and laid Esme’s skirt on the table to remove the pattern and put the pieces together for machining.
    Sylvia stood too. Her mother did not appear to notice as she sat again and slipped the tweed under the machine needle. When the wheel began to whir Sylvia got up and let herself out of the kitchen.
    The sky was right above her now with clouds idling across it in unconcerned fashion.
    Her father and Frank and Lennie were finishing the day’s farm jobs and Esme, Rose, Yvonne and Jackie were on the rails of the fence around the dairy watching. Esme was on the top rail her long thin legs dangling and Jackie who was three had his neck between the two lowest like one of the young calves.
    â€œSylly, Syllvy!” cried Esme seeing her.
    Sylvia turned and made for the fence surrounding the house. She heard Jackie’s wail and his cry “Take, me, take me!” and turned once as she scaled the fence to see his woeful moonlike face and the others sober too in the afternoon