How Does This Look As The Start Of A Memoir?
The earliest memory? I don’t know. I’m not sure if this is a true memory or an imagined one. I think I recall my sister telling me that our mother had gone into hospital to have a baby. That would have been in November 1949 and I would have been 2 years and 5 months old. The baby was called Thomas and, despite contracting pneumonia as an infant at a time when it was a very dangerous illness for an infant, survived to grow to adulthood only to meet a violent end in Belfast less than 30 years later.
The only memorable neighbour in the house was a Polish man who lived with his family in another of its many rooms. He seemed to me a giant and when I saw him I’d run to him and he would lift me up and throw me high into the air. I noticed that one of the fingers on his right hand was missing. While I didn’t think anything of it then, I suppose now, with hindsight, that he’d been wounded in the war. Contrary to appearances, he was doubly lucky. He had escaped with a light wound and managed to get his family and himself to freedom before the Nazi occupation of his homeland was replaced with the Soviet liberation.
The house was in inner city Liverpool and it had seen better days. There were basements, which might have been the servants quarters in times past, a wrought iron balcony outside the first floor windows, and muddy remnants of a garden where the children of its new occupants played.