CHAPTER 1
Memory: I scratch about like a hen in chaff.
The first thing that I can recall is light.
Pale, opaque green, white spots drifting. Near my right eye
long black shapes curling down and tickling gently.
Years later when I reported this memory to my parents they
confirmed it. There had, apparently, been an extraordinary
pea-soup fog; it had snowed at the same time. My mother had
lifted me up to observe the phenomenon; the black feathers
which wreathed her hat irritated my eyes and I tried to pull
them away. I was nine months old.
When I was two, I remember lying on my back on the lawn
behind the house in St Georges Road. It was a brilliant day of
high wind and scudding cloud. The tall house reeled away
from me as the clouds whipped across the blue sky and I was
afraid that it would fall down and crush me.
And later I saw our giant ginger cat – well, giant to me then
– nailed alive to the tall wooden fence which separated us from
an unfriendly neighbour. I remember my mother weeping:
which frightened me far more than the sight of the dying car
for I had not yet learned to recognize cruelty or death, but I
was recognizing pain and distress on a human face for the first
time.
It would not be the last.
The house in St Georges Road was tall, ugly, built of grey-yellow
bricks with a slate roof. It had the great advantage for
my father, who was an artist , of a number of high-ceilinged
rooms with a perfect north light. It also had a long narrow
garden with ancient trees.
An Irish woman lived in the basement with two children
