A Start in Life

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I remember childhood as an intense and wonderful love-affair that was stamped out by the wilful circumstance of growing up. So you can be sure I won’t spend long on it.

It’s hard to take things very far back, except to say that I came into the world without a father. A man must have been somewhere involved in it, but I didn’t know who he was, and I felt for a long time that my mother hardly did, either. In this sense I married my mother at a very early age, so that until I grew conscious of the world, I lived the most perfect existence. But when I tried to stop rivals getting into bed with her, she slapped me, saying: ‘Get out of the way, you little bastard.’ If she hit me hard enough I did as she told me, otherwise I crawled under the bed and slept to the gentle rocking noise above.

She sometimes called me a foreign bastard, but there was no great insult to strangers in this, for it only meant I was foreign to her own body, which could not help but be, having come right out from it. As soon as she thought I had reached the age of reason she stopped calling me these names for fear I should understand their exact meaning, of ask her to explain them to me. In this way I remembered the appellation till I was able to look up its significance in a dictionary at school.

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