In comparison to the cushioned world of Dad, the nurturing work of Molly is relentless. Nene Gare writes through the central persona of Peace, the daughter: ‘We never feel we get enough; we are always fighting – I’d be scrambling around telling her what happened to us during our days, claiming her ears, her hands, her eyes, and if she sits, her lap; those of us who don’t weigh too much’. The family and household management is also the mothers responsibility: ‘Dad transacted no business but his own, leaving the conduct of family affairs “to mother”.’

Molly and Adam Hounslow have six children. who crowd into a small wooden house – three in one bed – and when relatives come to ‘stay’, it often means three in the lounge room. But Molly Hounslow’s efforts to move house are continually thwarted by her husband who gives her no assistance and in the final analysis suffocated her with his love: ‘You don ‘t really want to leave here Molly old girl, do you?’ Molly Hounslow is the victim not only of her husband, but also of the new jaunty middle-class women. Nene Gare writes of her reaction to Mother’s Meetings at the local school: ‘Too busy she told us, folding our Mother’s Meeting Notices into tiny squares and too shy, too scared, she might have added. Too out-of-her-depth with the confident lot who waited in bright and chatty groups in the playgrounds outside the class­rooms. In A House with Verandahs the men are the parasites, continually draining the women. Unlike middle class women who were encouraged to develop little more than accomplishments as depicted so well by women writers as far back as Mary Wollstonecraft, Elizabeth Gaskell, Olive Schreiner, Charlotte Perkins Gilman and as recently as Virginia Woolf and Dorothy Hewett, it is the working-class women who maintain the family when their husbands are out of work. In contrast, men like Adam Hounslow and Mr. Manny spend their days talking, drinking cups of tea, and resting, whilst their women work to sustain all their lives.

Nene Gare also explores the younger daughter’s relations with men outside the family. There’s the inevitable flasher, and various crude attempts to seduce her, all told with a straightforward and disarming frankness. Her initial sexual experiences do nothing to confirm Freud’s penis envy theory – they more accurate in confirming what most women know about young men and that’s none too pleasant.

What is unique about Nene Gare’s writing in all her books, and particularly in The Fringe Dwellers and A House with Verandahs is the daughter’s reaction to changing patriarchal structures. It is a rebellious literature in this vein of Stephen Sewell’s The Father we Loved on a Beach by the Sea, and Alaq Seymore’s The One Day of the Year, but the concentration in this literature is between father and son. The daughter in A House with Verandahs belongs to the generation who produced the offspring who took to the streets in the nineteen sixties and seventies and helped give birth to the second wave of feminism. When Nene Gare writes about the Hounslows she is writing about my grandparents and parents and ultimately about me – that’s why I find it so perceptive.