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Mingli Books · Years 7–10

The Tide Line

Every year the family paints a line on the wall at the height the water reached. Nobody in this story is lying, and nobody remembers wrongly on purpose.

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My great-grandmother painted the first line. She was eleven and it was her job because she was the one who could be spared.

The wall was new that year. The line she painted is the low one, the one you have to crouch to look at, and it is at the height of a knee.

That is where the sea got to, in the worst week of that winter, in the year the wall was built.

You should know what the wall is for, because it is easy to make it sound grander than it is. It is not a fortification. It is a lip of stone about the height of a door, running along the back of eleven houses, and on the other side of it is the flat and then the water.

It does its job most years by not being needed.

Then my grandmother, then my father, and now me. One line a year, on the first Sunday after the worst week, at the height the water got to.

It is not a ceremony. There is no speech. You get the tin down, you find the brush, you argue for a while about exactly where the mark was, and you paint it.

Then you put the tin back in the shed and it is done for another year.

When I was nine I asked my father why the lines were not evenly spaced.

He said they were. He said it looked uneven because of where you stand, and because the wall leans a little, and because some years the sea is high and some years it is not, and that is what a line is for — to show you the difference between one year and another.

All of that is correct. He was not managing me. He believed it, and he had good reasons for believing it, and one of them is that he had painted four of those lines himself and each one had been a completely ordinary Sunday.

I measured them the summer I turned twelve, with a tape from the shed, and wrote the numbers in the back of a school book.

The gap between the first line and the second is a hand's width. The gap between the sixth and the seventh is the width of two fingers.

It is not that the sea comes higher every single year — it does not, and three of the lines are lower than the one below them, and that is exactly why nobody notices. It is that when you stand back and look at all seven at once, they crowd towards the top.

Nobody in my family ever stood back and looked at all seven at once. Why would you. You are up a ladder with a brush and you are looking at one line.

I showed the numbers to my father in the kitchen. He looked at them for a long time and then he said, "Well," and then he said the wall leans.

And it does lean. I have measured that too, and it accounts for about a finger's width over seven lines, and I did not say so, and I have thought about that a good deal since.

In the spring the sea came over.

It came into the kitchens of four of the eleven houses and it took nine days to go down and the smell stayed until August. Everybody said it was the worst in living memory, and everybody was right, and it will be said again.

What nobody said was that the wall was too low. What everybody said was that it was a very bad year.

Both of those are true. That is what I keep coming back to.

It was a very bad year. And the wall is too low. Neither of those sentences is a lie and neither of them can be argued down, and a family can say the first one for four generations and never once arrive at the second.

The tin is out. It is the first Sunday after the worst week and I am the one who can be spared.

There is about a hand's width of wall left above the seventh line.

I know where to put the mark. I have been standing here for a while working out what to write next to it.

Afterwards

For whoever is reading alongside

Of the five stories on this site, this is the only one told in the first person, and the only one where the narrator is inside the family they are describing. That changes what you can trust and it is worth asking a class to notice it.

A word worth stealing

Scientists have a name for what happens on that wall: the shifting baseline. Each generation takes the world they arrived into as the normal one and measures change from there — so a decline that is obvious across a hundred years is invisible across any single lifetime inside it. It was named by the fisheries scientist Daniel Pauly in 1995, about fish stocks, and it has turned out to describe a great many other things.

The wall in this story is a baseline that somebody wrote down. That is the only reason the narrator can see it at all.

Two ways to read it, and they disagree

  • The father is avoiding it. He is handed a measurement, says "Well," and reaches for the lean of the wall. He has four lines of his own on that wall and what the numbers mean is that he painted them wrong.
  • The father is being careful. Seven readings is not many, three of them go the other way, and the wall genuinely does lean. Treating a small noisy dataset as proof is a real mistake and adults are right to be slow about it.

The narrator does not tell you which. Notice that they also did not tell their father about the finger's width — and that they mention having thought about it since.

Questions with no answer key

  1. The story never says how much time passes between the first line and the last. Work out roughly how much it must be, and explain how you know.
  2. "It was a very bad year. And the wall is too low." Explain how both can be true at once, and why holding both is difficult.
  3. The narrator withholds something from their father. Find it. Discuss why you think they did.
  4. The story ends before the line is painted. Say what you think should be written beside it, and why the story stops rather than telling you.
  5. Name a measurement your own family or school keeps. Who would notice if it drifted?

Something to make

Find something in your own life that has a record going back further than you do — a height chart, a photo album, a class list, a street, an old map. Look at the whole of it at once rather than the most recent entry. Write two hundred words on what you can see from standing back that you could not see from up close.

One text, four years

This story reads whole at Year 7 — nothing in it needs a device a Year 7 has not met. What changes up the years is the job, not the text. The four descriptors below are quoted from the Australian Curriculum v9.

  1. Year 7 AC9E7LE05
    how characters, settings and events combine to make meaningAlmost nothing happens and the setting carries the whole plot. Explain how a wall does the work that events do in the other four stories.
  2. Year 8 AC9E8LE03
    how language and images position readers to respondThe pictures show seven lines and the narrator never counts them for you. Explain what that asks of you, and whether you did it the first time through.
  3. Year 9 AC9E9LE05
    allegory, symbolism and literary devicesThe wall is a baseline that somebody wrote down. Work out what the lines symbolise, and find where the text deliberately refuses to name it.
  4. Year 10 AC9E10LE04
    evaluate the social, moral or ethical positions representedThe father is either avoiding the measurement or being properly careful with a small noisy dataset. Evaluate both readings against the evidence actually in the text.

Year 8’s descriptor is the one this collection was built for: its own elaboration reads “discussing how a complex picture book combines words and images to position readers to respond”. Every story here is a complex picture book, and the picture is never a decoration of the sentence beside it.

The analytical ethical work belongs under Ethical Understanding, Level 5 (Years 7–8) and Level 6 (Years 9–10) rather than under the English Literature strand, which has no moral-position descriptor before Year 10.