The thing about nearly dying at the age of twenty-five is you emerge no longer young. You have knowledge you don’t want but can’t unlearn. All those war casualties didn’t shock me. I counted myself lucky not to be among them, but I wasn’t alive like Hilda or Gordon or Bill. I felt older than Aunt Nellie, with her sketchbook, her sewing-guild musical review and her sweet, girlish love affair with Uncle George. That was shocking to me. Kissing the top of his head when she found him at his desk. The poems he left in her workbasket. The feverish notes of a Mozart sonata leading me to discover them side by side at the piano, pink-cheeked, nimble-fingered, breathless with laughter. I had been visiting Perth since I was three years old. Hilda and Gordon and I had crawled around on Auntie’s rugs, played house under her piano, shod her cat in walnut shells, tickled each other with the ostrich feathers she had worn to bob her curtsey to Queen Victoria. Of the town itself I knew almost nothing.
What do You think about A Petrol Scented Spring (2015)?
