Fold ever outwards

Fold ever outwards is Jimmy Bigelow’s repeated instruction to his children, a rule about laundry that becomes a way of living with fear. Decades after the war, he checks the drawers in his suburban home in Hobart, Tasmania, and insists that clothes be folded with the fold out. The children do not understand the terror behind the demand; they know only that their father will never hurt them. The phrase holds those two realities together: a domestic routine they can see, and the violence from which Jimmy is trying, unsuccessfully, to prepare them.

The instruction and its repetition

In later life, Jimmy tells his children to fold their clothes outward and opens their drawers to check that the folds are correct. When they have not followed the rule, he does not strike them. He begs and pleads, then orders and demands; finally, exasperated, he refolds and restacks the clothes himself while the children wait nervously. The sequence makes the phrase more than a household preference. It is an instruction Jimmy cannot leave to chance, enacted again in the drawers and in his own hands.

The small correction carries an urgency that its object cannot explain. Jimmy feels a nameless terror, and the children carry a confusion they cannot resolve, a mixture of love and fear that extends beyond the opening and closing drawers and their father’s frustration. To Jimmy, the importance of the fold is self-evident. To the children, the connection between a crease and danger remains inaccessible. The rule is repeated, but its reason is not passed on with it.

Fear beneath the domestic routine

The children’s closest encounter with punishment also reveals the limit Jimmy sets for himself. At worst, he throws them over his knee and raises his hand, but holds it hovering above them. Sometimes they feel him shaking through his knees and thighs; when they look up, his hand trembles and his eyes are watery. He never hits or smacks them. Their certainty that he would not hurt them is true, but it does not tell them what the trembling means.

The narrative supplies the history they cannot know: Jimmy is trying to protect them from the unexpected smash of a rifle butt against a child’s cheeks, and to warn them of the horrors he believes the hard world has in store for the unwary and unprepared. Yet no warning can prepare anyone for everything. His children see the hovering hand; they do not see the violence it recalls or the impossible task he has set himself. Fold ever outwards makes that distance tangible: an ordinary rule is asked to stand guard against a world whose sudden changes cannot be controlled by careful folding.

When Jimmy’s trembling carries him back and forth through time, he releases the children with a familiar word. He says, "Rightio," throws them off his lap and back onto their feet, then averts his eyes and waves them away. The instruction follows in fragments: "That’s it. Rightio? Just. Just put the fold out next time. Out. Always out. Rightio?" The broken, repeated directions turn a simple request into an effort to restore order. Once released, the children run outside into the sun, leaving the fear inside the domestic scene without understanding its source.

Love, work, and the meaning of the fold

The phrase also belongs to Jimmy’s later reflection on his difficulty making room for love. He wonders whether he failed to give love enough time and space, fitting it in only for it to flit away. He cannot explain why he may have chosen the predictable lines of work over love’s wild circling, or the folding of a blanket over the unfolding of locked arms. That contrast gives the outward fold an additional resonance: it is an action he can repeat and complete, unlike intimacy, which cannot be secured by insistence or neatly arranged.

The expression does not resolve the tension between care and fear. Jimmy’s rigid demands arise alongside tenderness: he restrains his hand, tries to protect his children, and ultimately folds their clothes himself rather than hurting them. But his protection cannot make his wartime knowledge understandable to them, just as the rule cannot guarantee that life will remain safe. His warning is that everything may change—a mood, a decision, a blanket, a life. Fold ever outwards survives as a precise instruction and an incomplete inheritance: the children remember the rule and their father’s trembling, while the horror it was meant to guard against remains beyond their experience.