On each Sunday of my childhood, the colour that I saw in the silk of the vestments and the altar-cloths in church was green or red or white or violet. For one hour each week one or another of those colours appeared, in strict accordance with the calendar of the Roman Church.

The colours coming and going were like the threads that I watched in the hands of the girls during sewing class, on Friday afternoon in the schoolroom. I sometimes asked a girl to let me look at the underside of the cloth in her hands – the side away from the pattern of leaves or flowers or fruit slowly forming. I trusted that a pleasing pattern was beginning to appear on the upper side of the cloth, under the eyes of the girl. But I studied the side of the cloth that seemed to matter less. I watched the tangled strands and the knots of mixed colours underneath for hints of shapes quite different from leaves or flowers or fruit. I would have enjoyed the game of pretending to the girl that I knew nothing of the pattern she was working at: of pretending to think that the tangled colours were all I could admire.

The colours and the seasons of the Church were complicated, but I saw them only from beneath. The true pattern was on the other side. Under the clear morning sky of eternity, the long story of the Old Testament and the New was a richly coloured tapestry. But on my side, under the changeable skies of Melbourne County, I saw only the green and the white and the red and the violet strangely interlaced, and I made from them whatever patterns I could. (Inland)