Pressure. Colour. Pattern.

I believe memory begins before birth.

My earliest memory is of weight and of gold and yellow light in movement. This was the pressure on my eyeballs while I was being born. Look, I can reproduce the pattern now by pressing hard against my eyelids.

An academic psychology text I read years ago said something to the effect that the senses only tell us about the end organ stimulated. This seemed an important insight at the time, although it also seemed to confirm the theoretical possibility that we are alone in the world and that life is a complex illusion. But then there are so many such theoretical possibilities, predestination is another coming immediately to mind, whose elimination of individual freedom, responsibility, and the possibility of shaping the future for the better, I simply reject.

I press my eyelids again and there is the familiar colour pattern. It is proof of my liberty and the reality of cause and effect. But why do I always associate that pattern with my childhood?

The nearest I ever got to that pattern in the outside world was the wallpaper in the maid’s room at 8 Cowper Drive, Dublin 6, my first home. A flash of sunlight crossed the attic window as I tried to lean out to look down into the gutter where a ball thrown from the garden was out of reach. That reproduced the familiar colour pattern.  I was six then.

That maid’s room, for as long as the family had a live-in maid, was always an exciting place to be. I was not supposed to go in there.  Maids were given privacy because they were employees. They were paid a weekly wage and a stamp bought in the post office was stuck each week in their insurance books, small grey/brown folders with marked rectangular spaces for each week’s stamp.

There seemed to be a succession of maids. I can no longer relate their names, always first names, to faces. All were expected to wear a skirt and apron uniform in the house. They were all country girls and Catholics. They dressed up and wore hats to go out to mass on Sundays and they also had an afternoon off each week. Those afternoons provided the opportunity to sneak upstairs to have a look at their room.

By the time I was big enough to climb up on the maid’s room dressing table to look out the attic window there was no longer a maid in service.

Read on: 1940 – First Perceptions