In Pleasantville

Sitting on the step

THE ACCENT GAVE her away. I asked: “How long have you been here?” Twenty years, she said, an English-Australian who always feels divided. “My children grew up here and they don’t want to go back. They’ve been over there, they hated London.”

“That’s OK for them. What do you want now for yourself?”

About the author

Sylvia Lawson

Sylvia Lawson (1932–2017) wrote essays, critical journalism and fiction. She published widely on film, media and cultural politics, and worked in print and broadcast journalism,...

More from this edition

Into the second generation

ReportageBANANA PLANTS GROW like people. A white banana corm planted beneath the soil can give life to endless generations of banana plants. The corm...

The story my mother tells me

MemoirI started going to yoga classes in the hope that the physical preparation would make the birth a little easier. I spent a lot of time watching the other women, the new arrivals who barely showed any signs of pregnancy, lying next to the old hands who only had a matter of days to go. We were like lemmings walking towards the edge of the cliff. I was somewhere in the middle and that was where I wanted to stay, but there was no way of halting this horrible progression towards being the most pregnant one, the one who didn't turn up next week, the one who just disappeared.

Gift of the gods

MemoirYvonne and I spent a lot of time on the phone over the next few days. And the news I received was – to say the least – staggering. My daughter was a clinical psychologist, married with two young children. Suddenly, out of the blue, I had become a grandfather.