How old are children normally when they start to remember? To know that they exist in their own minds?

Most people I’ve spoken to describe it, not as an event, but almost as a trickling into awareness. A powerful smell, a sudden change, or the flare of sunlight through a nursery window, perhaps. Nothing they can fully articulate until suddenly the series of blurred sensations takes a shape, a real memory they can name and describe.

For me it wasn’t like that. There was nothing, and then suddenly there I was, looking up into a room full of strangers in a bright room and they were all looking back at me. I couldn’t name it at the time, being only three years old, but I felt they expected something from me, only I didn’t know what they wanted me to do. So I just looked back at them and waited.

It was the day my mother died. I’ve never managed to conjure a single concrete memory of her presence; what she looked like, how she smelled, the feeling of being held by her, but I believe that it was the sense of her loss that finally dragged me into my awareness. A blanket being suddenly taken away on a cold night.

An old woman dragged me to her then. She held me close to her and rocked me, making shushing noises as if, for all the world it was me who was sobbing and not her at all. She smelled strongly of something artificial and cloying. When I tried to pull back, she gripped me harder.

I distinctly remember the edges of panic creeping in then and I imagine I would have set up an almighty racket of my own if a pair of dark brown, scuffed winklepickers hadn't appeared on the floor beside me. It was the seventies. We were poor and they were the smartest shoes my dad owned.

The woman tried to keep hold of me. She was shouting something, but my father gently lifted me away from her. He smelled right and he didn’t clutch at me so I remember feeling like things might start to be alright again. I wasn’t going to scream after all, I decided.

They were arguing, he told me when I was older. My mum’s mum didn’t think a man would be capable of caring for a child and she was going to take me home with her. Times were different then, he said. But I wasn’t about to let you out of my sight. I told him I was glad he hadn’t. She was a terrible old crone, as it turned out.

He took me out of there. I’m still not sure where we were. Perhaps it was the hospital, or maybe my grandmother's house. I don’t think I was ever in that place again, as far as I knew. I remember dark hair, a face smiling down through the wetness of tears and then being carried outside into the bright coldness of a new day.