I think for me the important thing to remember is not what an event was, but what it felt like, the lasting impression that would be left on my emotional landscape and buried in memory, for retrieval when buttons were pushed or heightened emotions surfaced.

While I have no recollection of it, I was apparently inseparable from a near neighbour, a girl of the same age; we’d play in the garden together for ages apparently. But then her parents emigrated to New Zealand, leaving me bereft at her loss, but the very sound of her name resonates pleasantly to this day, an emotional memory perhaps. My first day at school, probably about September 1960, was the first time to spend time out from under the watchful eye of my mother, whose distraught face I tell myself I recall, outside the classroom window, crying at leaving me there. The names of the class children were neatly written in big, bold lettering on slim letterbox shaped pieces of card pinned on a notice board; we were asked to go and retrieve our namecards – I don’t recall how I felt but I didn’t recognise my name…did anyone I later wondered? The school health inspectors came around while I was in the infant’s class, and in a large public hall we were all stripped down to underwear, which we then had to remove for bodily inspection by the health visitor. I was diagnosed with a slight curvature of the spine and occasionally taken out of school, for physio – exercises to develop my breathing – to a specialist at St Woolos whose name I still remember. And Sunday school, up until the age of about ten I was subjected to the opprobrium of the vicar glaring balefully down from the pulpit; it was probably nothing personal, I think he disliked all children. 

In short, the handful of recollections I can honestly claim from those early years were generally based around heightened emotional responses to external stimuli, which I now interpret as being significant in my early development. They aren’t necessarily true in and of themselves, but they certainly influenced my sense of self and would be useful in understanding and re-framing my self-image much later, when I realised they didn’t have to remain fixed.