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called out, asking if the little girl wanted to look as well. When she ran forward he swung her up easily above his shoulder to join her brothers. She saw the shadowy recesses of the plane’s interior, noting the deep metal seat and the rudder bar, the control column and the instrument panel.
    ‘Is it hard to fly a plane?’ Jean asked.
    ‘Easy as riding a bike,’ he said, laughing.
    That night she dreamed of flying, and though often given to nightmares, rested easily, lifted in sleep into the blue blaze of a summer sky.
    Another letter came from Fred, this time just for Jean, bulkier than the ones that had come before. On opening it she found a bunch of wild blue violets pressed between its pages. ‘Do they really grow wild in the woods?’ she asked Nellie. She remembered the violets her mother had tended with care when they still had a garden. There was a garden of sorts where they lived now, a two-bedroom house at the rough end of St Georges Bay Road. It wasn’t big enough to contain all their furniture and some of it had to be sold. Nellie wept the day the piano went, not consoled by the good price it fetched at auction. At night, soldiers lurched down the road singing beery songs in ragged off-key bursts. There were houses where dim lights shone at night, even though they were supposed to be blacked out. When a drunken man banged on the Battens’ door one evening, lurching against the verandah post, Nellie said in a blistering tone that though women did have the right to choose what they did with their bodies she wasn’t one of them, thank you, and if the man wanted a disgusting illness, that was his business and may all his bits rot off. She slammed the door hard, and leaned against it. Then she saw Jean’s frightened face, heavy with startled sleep, in the passageway.
    ‘Get back to bed this instant,’ she cried, as if she were scolding. ‘Jean, go back to bed.’
    ‘I want Dad to come home,’ Jean said.
    In the morning this seemed like one of the bad dreams, the sight of her mother shaking from head to toe, collapsed against the wall. She caressed the violets her father had sent her, their slender stems dried out already and brittle, but when she held them to her face she was sure she detected some wild woody scent.

    HAROLD RAN AWAY FROM SCHOOL. In Wellington, he caught thenorth-bound night train, but somewhere along the way he had got off it. Nellie had gone straight to the police station with the constable who delivered the news. The police there had their hands full, they said. All these soldiers coming home and there was trouble of one sort or another everywhere. Did she think her son might have tried to join up? Of course, that was the first thing that had crossed her mind. She had to confess that. But, could they not, at least, ask the people at the railways if anyone had seen him? What if he had fallen from the train between the carriages, somewhere on the high central plateau, his body lying on the side of the tracks? By this time, at least a week had passed since his disappearance.
    The sergeant on duty said that yes, they could, at least, do that. In the meantime she should check the recruiting office. This wasn’t as easy as it sounded. Harold could have enlisted in any little town between Wellington and Auckland. Jean came home in the afternoon to find her mother standing in the parlour of the front room, white-faced. The sergeant stood with his notebook in his hand. Yes, he told her, the boy had been seen getting off the train soon after he left Wellington. The guard remembered him, because Harold had chatted to him, not long after the train left, although, as he recalled, the boy was fidgety. Harold told him he was eighteen, and reckoned he could do any man’s job — shovel coal, drive a jigger. Perhaps, he said, he could get a job on the railways. The guard had gone away to clip tickets and when he came back, after the next stop, Harold was gone.
    ‘Did you know what he was planning