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Unreliable recollections
Some of my earliest childhood memories are a lie.
There is a scar on the inside of my left elbow. It is a perfectly straight line, about an inch long. It is tiny compared to some of the scars I picked up later in life playing football, skateboarding, fighting and climbing lamp-posts. But it is significant because of how and where it was apparently inflicted.
Now there is no question that something happened; the scar is evidence in and of itself. I also know that the injury was sustained during the one family holiday with my parents in which we left our native England. But then things start to get a little sketchy.
I was four years old when myself, my parents and my paternal grandparents traveled to Ireland. Quite why they chose Ireland I have no idea; we have no Irish heritage of which to speak, my father hated travel of any kind, and my grandfather left the UK on only one other occasion — and he did so bound for Burma in an army uniform during WWII.
Anyway, the story goes that I climbed a five bar gate to take a closer look at a herd of cows. As a four-year old born and raised in London, this might have been the first time I had encountered cows in real-life, so I can certainly imagine the desire to take a closer look.
