Mum

I'm sure this isn't going to be the last time that I talk about my Mum. Indeed, she's already featured.

This isn't, I think, going to be one of those stories about an unnaturally strong attachment to a mother. For much of my childhood my mother appeared tired, impatient and angry.

That's because she was clearly all of those things.

She was working hard (nights as a nurse, a stint as a dinner lady - making ends meet kinds of things) whilst trying to make the time to be there for her family.

She could be wildly unreasonable (I will always remember a blow-up she had at me because I'd not done something that she'd forgotten to ask me to do - "I'm not psychic!" I shouted at her..."well you should be!" she shouted back!) but she could be gentle and poetic too (singing songs about Fred in the back seat of the car....putting together imaginative games for me and my friends at parties where you had to pretend to be different types of firework).

A lot of the time she seemed so disappointed. Life's letdowns were so crashingly tiresome but, at the same time, inevitable.

There's one memory that's always stayed with me.

I always knew that she was brainy and that she'd wanted to go to university but wasn't allowed to by her parents. I remember asking her how she felt about "having" to cook and clean for these three boys all the time instead of "going out to work like Dad". She said that that's what she was meant to do - that it was her lot in life.

I felt so sad for her. It seemed so wrong.

Waving goodbye

I can seriously only remember two things about nursery (pre-primary school). Firstly - there was the fact that every day, my mum would drop me off at the front door and say a quick goodbye. I'd then go to each and every window of the building, waving goodbye to her as she walked back down the street. I'd be devastated if she didn't turn around and wave at each instance.

The second is me sitting, cowering in a teepee with Carl, whilst a psychotic and hyperactic kid called Nicholas ran round and round the outside beating the walls of the tent with his fists over and over again. He was constantly out of control like this. He wore white trainers with green go-faster stripes on them. He's divorced with two children now.

Oh yeah - one more thing. Coathooks with animals on them.

What's your earliest memory?

Why do so many biographies feature (or even start with) the line "my earliest memory was this..."? Does anybody really remember something like that with any repeatable precision?

Surely it's a matter of a recollection here, an image or word there. Or maybe it's just me.

For me, yes, it's a number of things.

My mum hanging my teddybear by their ears on the washing line - I'm handing them out of the window to her.

Me sitting in the pushchair - it's Winter and there's a front to the pushchair to keep me in and keep me warm - and it starts trundling down the steps in the back garden towards the gate because the brake hasn't been applied.

Going into the kitchen before bedtime, wearing my PJs, to say goodnight to my dad who's on the floor making a fort for my brother and me out of plywood. It's got battlements and a portcullis which goes up and down thanks to a piece of string that's going to be broken in a couple of weeks time.

Rolling around on the floor of my recently cleared bedroom singing "playroom...playroom...playroom".

It's just one or two memories. I'm not sure if any of them are the first or the earliest. I can't think of anything else or anything more precise.

Do they say something about me?