This is the first volume in Janet Frame's autobiography. In language startling for its freshness and clarity, she tells of her childhood as the daughter of an impoverished railway worker and a mother who aspired to write poetry. Amongst superb evocations of New Zealand landscape and the sharp recall of childhood perceptions, we learn of the tragic death by drowning of her sister Myrtle, her brother's epilepsy - and begin to feel the dark undercurrents that were to suck her under in the years before she found herself as a writer.