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in this range) and placing them in the correct order where necessary, resorted to her usual vade-mecum in times of trial. ‘Tyger! Tyger! burning bright,’ she chanted silently to herself, ‘In the forests of the night,’ and she had just arrived at ‘what dread feet?’ when a customer whom she had not so much as noticed interrupted her.
    She held up a black-and-magenta sheath.
    ‘Have you got this one,’ she asked, ‘in a W? I can only see this SSW here.’
    ‘Just a minute,’ said Lisa, ‘and I’ll enquire from the stockroom.
    I’m sorry,’ she added, as she had been schooled by Patty to do, ‘to keep you waiting.’
    Did he who made the Lamb make thee?
    The tyger had entered Lisa’s life, back in the days when she was no one but Lesley, three years previously, when she was at the beginning of her Intermediate Certificate year. Frail, apparently lonely, strangely disengaged, not much noticed by her teachers, a merely average performer academically, she had sat near the back of the classroom and faded into corners and against walls during recess. Her only cronies seemed to be two other girls similarly outside the fashion: a very fat girl and another who suffered from eczema: girls for whom there seemed everything to be done, but nothing which might be: girls who must find their way through the maze as best they might.
    How the fat girl, the girl with eczema, accomplished this feat is not recorded; in the case of Lisa, the thread was discovered within the pages of a poetry anthology which came into her hands one day in the school library—literally: it fell off the shelf while she was searching for a quite different book, and since it opened as it fell, her eye could not help alighting on the right-hand page: where she espied the word ‘tyger’. This having come to pass, the rest followed with simple inevitability, for no moderately alert fourteen-year-old is going to see the word ‘tyger’, spelt thus so mysteriously, so enticingly, without investigating further, and as Lisa did so, the chasm of the poetic opened at her feet. She had soon got the poem by heart, and during the next few weeks she pondered its meaning, and even its means, and when a few months later her class was asked to choose a poem, any poem in the English language, and write an essay thereon, Lisa was in a position to say much on the subject of Blake’s tyny masterpiece, and did so freely.
    Her English teacher wondered aloud thereafter if she ought not to be sitting nearer the front of the classroom: it was possible, she thought, that the girl’s eyesight made so great a distance from the blackboard inadvisable. Lisa was made to move to a desk in the second row, and went on as she had begun; for Miss Phipps had, as it were, now tasted blood.
    ‘First-class honours material, definitely,’ she said in the Staff Room. ‘Didn’t know she had it in her. First class, definitely.’
    It being the primary purpose of every teacher in the school to produce as many first-class honours results in the Leaving Certificate examinations as humanly possible, Lisa, all unknowingly, was now a marked child. As is the way of things, the attention and encouragement (discreet enough) which she now for the first time received affected her performance generally, and she improved in all her subjects. By the time she was in her last year, she was respectably in the ranks of the medium-to-high flyers: those students who would achieve not spectacular, but certainly solid, results, and almost certainly win Commonwealth Scholarships.
    Filling in the application form for the last had been a matter not unproblematical.
    ‘Well, I don’t know, Lesley,’ said her mother. ‘I don’t know about the university . We’ll have to see what your dad says. He has to sign it anyway.’
    They managed to corner him just as he began to go off one evening to the Sydney Morning Herald.
    ‘No daughter of mine is going anywhere near that cesspit,’ said he, ‘and that’s