first memories

i have flashes of memory from the second year of my life --and one possibly from six months, though many would say this is impossible; but the memory I write about in the first part of my newish poem The Half-Rhyme is the first in which I have some continuous sense of myself. I was born in January 1935, and it was not yet wartime, so I must have been four. I was aware of anxiety in the voices of my Daddy and some pal of his who had called. Clearly they were talking about whether there'd be war with Germany.

As if on cue, a huge spider, probably a house-spider, tegenaria domestica, crossed the carpet from the adults' direction. A spider's shape is very suggestive of the swastika, though I hardly knew that at the time. It was heading away from me; I got up, intercepted it, and planted my sandal on it. Then quite calmly I peeled it from my sole.

My mother would have been busy in the kitchen, and my sister perhaps in her little bedroom next to mine.

Then I have the first memory of a warm handclasp as my father took me out to wave his friend off. My first remembered speech, and first words from someone else, the word 'Peace', which reassured me. Also, as I looked up, the first memory of stars, a whole skyful of them, and the faint white arching wash of what I later learned was the Milky Way. A moving memory. Summer of 1939 --but would I have been up so late? Perhaps spring '39. In a sense it embraced the extremes of experience --evil, death, murderous aggression, human love and the mysteries of the universe. A very early 'white hotel' experience, you might say.