My first memory

My first memory – or at least what I have always convinced myself is my first memory – is of falling, down steep stone steps. I was about two and a half. I remember nothing except the sensation of falling, of not being in control. My mother tells me now that I was wearing a “siren suit”, an old name for a onesie, with a fur hat. Perhaps the padding made the impact less painful. But there were certainly tears, and my mother’s friend emerged from the adjoining flat to see what the commotion was.

I don’t remember any of that; nor does my mother recall how this fall occurred, or where she was. She who was absurdly protective. I had almost died of pneumonia in infancy, and that had made her super-vigilant. Except the day of my vertiginous tumble.

We lived in what my parents rather disparagingly referred to as “rooms”: four flats in a rambling old house occupied by families with young children waiting for a council house. Another early memory – I would have been three – is moving to that estate and seeing cows outside the window, cows grazing on farmland that would soon be replaced by housing in the great Macmillan building boom of the late 50s and early 60s, one world giving way to another.

The move and the cows and the security of the new council house which would be my home for 15 years till I left for university are happy memories, but many of those earliest recollections are painful: a boy throwing sand in my eyes as we watched the big new road next to the estate being built; standing on a wasps’ nest in a neighbouring wood and being stung multiple times – I was going to the circus a day or two later and had to hide my puffy, swollen face behind sunglasses; and, at five, going to school, screaming and clinging to my mother as she left me, for all I knew for ever. Falling, always falling.

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