My Mother Taught Me

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I was trembling. I was going to see a woman for the first time in my life. Or rather, a young, attractive woman. We had matrons at the orphanage, but they were a hundred years old and didn’t count as women. And when I say the first time, that isn’t completely accurate either. Probably I had met women before I was seven, but since then I’d been in the orphan home, and I couldn’t remember back that far. Now, after all these years of wondering and longing after that mystery, I was going to meet a beautiful woman.

I was born in Camden Town, North London, during the early years of the last war. I don’t know much about my parents except that they were Swedes who were caught by the war while visiting England. I know that I had a sister and that my father died soon after I was born. My mother, as far as I can judge, was a respectable woman who managed to take good care of us until I was seven. Then, for some mysterious reason (something I did, something evidently shameful and awful) she placed me in the orphanage.

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