BARELY HOLDING ON

Chapter 2 – Chores and the Debacle of Intervention

Dust settles in sunbeams like pale flour on a kitchen counter. A thread of light crawls along the sill, and in that thin, patient thread I count the moments by the sound of wood meeting wood. The woodheap sits outside the back door, a low, patient hill of ash-gray and deep red logs and pine-scented slivers. It has a way of pressing into the borders of a room, like a quiet neighbour who never speaks, but who makes the air clearer by presence alone. I am out there before dawn, hands stiff with cold, gathering the day into a tote, into a hat, into a stubborn habit of doing nothing else until the job is done.

The stove in the kitchen is our small sun, a corner star that returns heat in a measured, unforgiving breath. It hums with the slow engine of its own thinking, a sound that says: you can warm up, but you will work for it. The heater in the lounge room is a second pulse, broad, direct, and loud enough to remind us that warmth has a weight, a responsibility. When I open the door to the woodheap, a draft comes in like a spoken warning, brushing the back of my neck and turning the kitchen window into a pale, shivering eye.

I learn to read the world, not as a stage for my mood but as a sequence of chores that arrange themselves into a life I can organise. There is a rhythm to it, a cadence that feels almost musical in the stillness of morning: the muffled scrape of shoe on concrete, the creak of the back door, the clink of a metal tote against the wooden fence, the frost-crisp snap of a log breaking along its grain. You would think that the room would stay hushed, that the simple economy of warmth would calm the breath. And yet the house has its own weather, dust motes dance in shafts of light, a stray thread of wool drifts across the floor, and the radiator sighs with the memory of every complaint it has ever heard.

In these early hours, I am cast as the elder; I am told to be the wiser, to be the line between childish squabbles and something approaching civilised order. My siblings stand near the doorway, their eyes on me and not on the stove, not on the task at hand. They want the problem fixed, or worse, want to add kindling to the fire raging within and between them; they do not yet understand that the problem is the question of how to live together without breaking each other.

“Get the wood in,” my mother says, and her voice is a kind of weather, a calm rain that asks for obedience without naming the storm. “Stack it clean, don’t leave a snag, and for heaven’s sake, don’t trip over the wheelbarrow.”

The wheelbarrow is real enough to trip over, with its dented metal belly and a wheel that seems to know every corner of the yard. It weighs something that isn’t just metal and tyre, an ordinary weight that attaches itself to my spine and insists on a particular, narrow kind of focus. Weight is a character in this memory, not a plot device. It sits in the chest like an unspoken sentence, a sentence I have to carry and translate into action.

My father, at one stage, built me a billy cart, either for my birthday or a Christmas gift, to make things easier in delivery of this chore. Red and white, aptly named Rocket, as a non-verbal instruction into its intended use or more importantly its place the associated chore had in the hierarchy of events.

I tell myself to slow down, to align my breath with the rhythm of hands smoothing wood into even stacks. The name on the bully carts says “don’t linger”. The old garage door rattles in a gust, and the wind carries the day’s news in a language I am still learning. The rope I use to secure the logs leaves its rough, dry scent on the skin of my fingers, a texture that clings to the nails and crayons into the cuticles. The touch of cold wood against the palm is a discipline, like a teacher’s hand, but with less warmth and more resolve.

In the kitchen, the stove’s flame dances in a tight orange twirl, licking the air with a careful, patient hunger. It has a voice, a quiet insistence that I hear when no one else speaks: keep going, keep feeding the lines of heat. The room warms slowly, and I feel the temperature rising in my cheeks, in the way the skin around my jaw tightens with effort. The ash pan grows black as a slate, a thin second horizon that I must cross before I am allowed to stop.

“You are the oldest, act like it,” my father repeats, though the exact source in every memory blurs with time. The phrase lands on me like a stone dropped into a well, no splash, just the dull, sinking sound of gravity. The injunction isn’t about fairness or equity, but about control. About making sure the house holds, that the day does not derail into noise and blame. I have a sense that I am not asked to solve the whole conflict, only to hold a line between argument and peace, between the heat of the stove and the cold of the floorboards.

The chore becomes not only wood but weather, a test of temperament, a measurement of courage in a small, daily act. As I lift a log from the heap, the weight shifts in my arms as if the log itself wants to tell me something. More often than not, it needs splitting so the resultant billet fits through the orifice of the stoves. The log’s rough surface bites at the skin where the calluses of no gloves have worn thin. I feel the dust gather at the cuticle, a dry rain that makes my fingers ache. The dust is patient, too; it clings to the knuckles, follows the line of the wrist, and lands on the sleeve with a small, stubborn map of where I have been. It is a compass of the body, pointing toward the present moment and away from the fantasies I sometimes curve into when the room grows too soft or too loud.

Sometimes I drift into worlds that feel more sure than the corner of the kitchen where I stand. Dragon flights, far-off towns and forts, stories where the wind acts as a guide rather than a threat. I imagine the road, the engine of a truck, the clean line of a horizon that never ends. It helps to imagine a different set of rules, a different set of weights. But the moment the daydream begins to take shape, a crack, not in the dream, but in the air around me, jolts the memory back to the present. It is the crack of a whip, as close as a physical object can be in a memory without the actual strike: the sound that follows the thought of a punishment, the sudden air in the room catching, the tremor that travels along the floorboards and settles in the spine.

In our house, the riding crop is not a prop in a stage show; it is a presence, an instrument of correction that has a history with everybody in the room. It sat across two cupboard knobs directly over the stove, it appears not in every memory, but in enough to imply its authority: the sharp line of sound that says, this is where you stop, this is where I begin to count your mistakes, this is where you learn to be still. The “debacle of intervention” is not a single event but a pattern of almost abuse, an ongoing rehearsal in which I am both actor and observer, both the one who must keep the peace and the one who bears the failure of not quite achieving that peace.

You may wonder why a child is asked to be wiser than a child ought to be. You may ask how a small body can carry the weight of an entire family’s unspoken demands. The answer is not simple, and it is not a single moment. It is a thread that unspools through days when the weather is kind and days when the weather chooses to be mean. It is a thread born out of two histories pressed into one kitchen and one woodheap, pulled taut by necessity and fear, by hands that learned to endure before they learned how to forgive.

If you trace that thread back through the lives of my parents, you meet the land they walked into with bare feet and a stubborn faith. My father, a virtual “pioneer” of the land, learned to read the soil as if it were a ledger, to measure rain by the weight of the furrows, to feed a family with the mercy of a careful harvest. He moved through seasons with a practical tenderness that kept a family fed and a roof intact, but the land also asked him to be hard, to choose efficiency over sentiment, to discipline not just his own emotions but the pace of the day itself. In his hands I hear the wooden grip of a tool, the roughness of palm against grain, the weight of a decision made in the moment when hunger pressed in from the outside and fear pressed in from within and the inbuilt rage of anger of his father.

My mother, too, carries a history that lives in the quiet places of this house, the memory of being carried along by policies and fears that sought to strip people of their names, their kin, their belonging. She is, quietly and without flourish, one of the generations spoken of in the phrase the stolen generation, a lineage of mothers and children who learned that patience can be a form of resistance and that violence can be a brittle substitute for safety when the world refuses to listen. Her voice in the kitchen is a soft hinge, a reminder that gentleness was once a strategy to survive when the world around her tried to erase her identity. Her hands remember the weight of an absence: the absence of a home not from distance but from memory, a pocket of time where trust was tested and found wanting.

Between them, the room learns a shared grammar: a grammar of weight and restraint. They taught me, by their own inexperience and endurance, that patience is not a single act but a pattern, woven through long evenings of quiet, through the hours of work that arrive squarely at the door and demand attention, through the breath that steadies the stove flame when the room grows too loud. The patience that I did not yet possess in the moment appears later as a map: a road that runs alongside the memory of shouts and the sting of a boundary crossed, a road that invites me to choose another route next time.

That is not an attempt to justify, as there is no justification for abuse, but it does give you a peak into a “why” needed to be understood, if not abhorent.

Why is violence the only answer, and where was the patience that could have kept us from turning to it? The question travels backward through generations, tugging at the fabric of memory until you can almost hear the old engines cough to life, the cattle truck, the truck delivering supplies to a half-built homestead, the memory of a whip’s sting that marks more than skin. In my father’s hands, the land became both an ally and a judge; in my mother’s memory, the land is a witness to a different kind of struggle, a struggle to keep a child’s voice intact when the world kept counting losses. Patience, in those stories, was not a passive virtue but a deliberate act of choosing not to retaliate when insult and fear arrive as a package deal. It was the choice to hold a line in a room full of heat and dust, to listen for the truth beneath the words that were spoken aloud and the truths that remained unspoken.

The thread binds the dust in the sunbeam, the warm breath of the stove, the careful stacking of logs, and the uneasy quiet that follows a raised voice or a stern look. It binds my small body to a larger history, the weight of lineage shaping the way I move through the morning: the way I count logs, the way I pace my breath, the way I watch for the moment when a quarrel could become harm and choose not to let it. The thread does not absolve others of their choices, but it does offer a context in which restraint makes more sense than punishment, where a slow, patient response can be the first and last act of a wiser kind of strength.

And you, reader, who asks the questions with me, why violence, where patience? You are part of this long pull. You are following the same thread through your own rooms, your own memories, your own attempts to keep the peace when fear speaks louder than care. The memory I hold is not a sermon about blame; it is a map of how a family learned, imperfectly and stubbornly, to stay in the room with pain and still choose a gentler way forward. The road is long, the engine inside us rumbles in fits and starts, but it moves. The dust settles; the sunbeam grows brighter; the weight of the logs becomes a discipline rather than a judgment; and in that quiet, the possibility of patience returns, not as a memory of perfect restraint but as a practised readiness to begin again, together.

There is a particular afternoon when the sun is low, and the kitchen windows are smeared with the winter’s grime. My siblings are arguing, hot and quick, their voices a raw, wet noise that slides over the wooden floor and into the stove’s grate. I stand there, the older one in the room in some unspoken language, trying to separate the noise into categories: what to fix, what to let go, what to punish, what to forgive. The room itself seems to lean in, listening. The woodpile behind the back door becomes a kind of mute audience, a judge with a dusty robe who cannot speak but knows the truth of a thing by how it weighs.

An instruction lands on me, heavy and out of place. “Shut them up,” says a voice that seems to come more from the stove’s glow than from a mouth in the room. The words arrive with the heat, not with a person to hold accountable, and they press themselves into my chest as if gravity itself has chosen me to bear the responsibility I did not seek. I am not the one who will draw the line between right and wrong; I am the one who will inherit the room’s aftershocks when the line proves inadequate.

I am asked to mediate, to decide who is right and who is wrong, to declare a path that will end the quarrel before it can spill into something worse. But the role is not mine by choice; I am simply a child pressed into a position I did not seek, watched by eyes that expect me to hold the peace yet show no mercy when I fail. I am tainted with the same brush as everyone else, and the outcome lands squarely on me, the one who bears the room’s quiet aftershocks, the look on a sister’s face that says I did not fix what I did not start, the breath I take that seems loud enough to be heard by all, the memory of being blamed for a fight I did not begin.

The room narrows around me. The conversation stalls; the room’s edges soften into a dull halo of heat and dust. The stove’s hum becomes a reminder that warmth has a cost, and sometimes the cost is one child absorbing the ache of two others. My siblings reposition themselves, drawing toward their own corners, not toward a bridge, and I am left to shoulder the scene I did not write, the scene I merely inherited.

I am not the ancient authority; I am the recipient of the moment’s burden. I bear the cost of a quarrel I did not start, but probably had a hand in, especially where inequality was concerned, and the memory threads itself into my chest as if a second skin, the weight of expectation, the sting of being blamed, the quiet that follows every raised voice. The memory sits there like ash on a grate, and I breathe through it: steady, small, stubborn. And you, reader, if you hear yourself in this memory, know this: you are not alone. We carry these rooms together, you and I, even when the room refuses to acknowledge our presence.

Then the intervention, the moment that will later become a memory I cannot fully escape, arrives in a form that feels both immediate and inevitable. There is a whip, or a tool that resembles a whip in a child’s memory, a riding crop, perhaps, or a belt with a raw edge that leaves a line on the skin. The crack arrives as a sound that seems to pull the air from the room. It is followed by silence that closes in so quickly you can hear the walls breathe. It is followed by the weight of a pain that settles in the body, a weight that is not purely physical but mental, a memory of being marked as deserving punishment, of being deemed less worthy of warmth and safety in that moment.

In truth, the memory is not simply about the pain of a strike but about the moment when the house makes a judgment about who I am supposed to be: the elder who should speak, the elder who should fix, the elder who should accept the blame of others and bear it with quiet, unspoken grace. The body remembers the sting as if it were the weight of an iron door closing on a room, a room where I wanted to invite everyone to sit and share, to speak honestly, to be heard. Instead, the room closes, and I stand in the centre, a child who has learned how to be careful with others’ truths and with my own.

The aftermath is a kind of wind that passes over a field and leaves a residue of quiet in its wake. The fire in the stove continues to lick at the air with patient heat, and the lounge room’s heater hums in its own stubborn way, as if to remind us that warmth is a responsibility that must be earned anew each day. The dust lifts with each exhale, and the room seems to tilt toward a different axis, the axis of silence rather than argument, the axis of restraint rather than release. My siblings drift into the corners of the room with their own injuries, their own private storms. We are all damp with something we cannot name, a dampness that clings to the skin and to the memory.

And yet in the middle of this history of punishment, there is a stubborn thread of resilience I want you to notice, reader. You are not alone in learning how to survive a space that insists on order while quieting the scraps of real feeling. The memory tells me that you can not only endure but also name a more humane path inside your own life. The insistence on restraint, on choosing not to strike back, on choosing to listen even when the other person’s voice is loud and unkind, is a kind of courage. It is not flashy. It does not glitter. It is slow and patient, and sometimes it is the only way to keep the house from burning down.

In the days that follow, along with a third son being born as an attempt to cure my mother’s depression, I seek a way to translate the choked, sharp pain of the moment into something that can be measured and understood. I keep my hands busy with wood and my mind filled with fantasy, not because the task will erase the memory, but because a measured task is a form of counterweight to unplanned emotion. The stove and the heater become metaphors for the way a mind can be warmed by small, consistent acts rather than by sudden, violent force. If the mind has a current, like the water that runs under the kitchen sink, then perhaps I can follow it toward a calmer channel, toward a safer shore.

Sometimes I remind myself of your presence, reader. Not to pry, not to pull you into the memory as if you shared my pain, but to tell you that you are with me in the sense that memory is a hallway with many doors. Some doors are open wide and welcoming; others are boarded up and too heavy to move. We are walking through them together, even when we are apart. The motif of the road, our long, windy road, runs through my memory like a thread. The road is not simply the path from place to place; it is the path from fear to speech, from silence to honesty, from the old way of managing pain to a version of life that can hold more complexity, more truth, more tenderness.

You may ask how a child can carry a house’s weight and still carry hope. The answer lies in small, stubborn acts, the act of cleaning the ash from the grate, the careful stacking of the last log so the stove has something to lean on, the whispered good nights to the siblings who fight their shadows in the corners of the living room. Hope is not a shout; it is the weight you carry with you into the next morning, the next meal, the next argument that might arise but can be met with a different answer, the answer that does not rely on a strike to end a conflict.

In time, the memory shifts its shape. The whip’s memory remains a line in the distance, a memory that you only reach by turning toward it, naming it, speaking its truth without glamorisation, and then letting it go enough to move forward. The intervention, once a moment of sharp impossibility, becomes a chapter in a larger story about how a family learns to breathe together again after a moment when breath was taken away. It is a memory with a future shape, a memory that can be spoken about with clarity, not with the heat of fear or the glaze of denial.

I want to be honest here, for you and for me: there are days when I wake to a sense that the Black Dog is not a metaphor but a present thing, the weight that presses down on the chest, the sense that warmth is earned and not given, the memory of the sting that does not fade with time. And yet, there are days when the light finds a way through the dust, when the woodpile is neatly stacked and the room is clean, when a single sound, perhaps the engine of the old car outside or the steady drip of the kitchen faucet, becomes a reminder that life keeps moving, with or without our consent. In those days, I tell myself a line I wish to give you: you are not alone in the long, quiet work of staying with pain, of naming it, and of continuing to move toward a kinder approach to living with it.

The memory ends not with a dramatic revelation but with the blunt, unglamorous truth of that afternoon: the day turned thick with heat, the air filling with the acrid scent of ash and fear, and his rage arriving like a storm you cannot outwait. I fell to the ground, the dirt biting at my back, legs welted from the beating that followed, skin dark and tender where the blows landed. Dust clung to my skin and to the sweat that crept along my spine, the stove’s muffled hiss a distant, stubborn drumbeat as if the house itself was trying to hold me up. I dragged myself upright with quivering arms, every breath a small burn, every step toward the grass, another measure of gravity pulling me down.

The world shrank to the sting in my legs, the sting in my chest, and the quiet that followed the last shout, the memory of violence settling into the room like soot. It’s not a moment of triumph but a stubborn, enduring truth: I survived, and the memory of survival is a kind of endurance you learn to call by its name.

I can still feel the welts, even today, many decades past, but like most things, its only one ingredient into who I am.