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earth’s pull.
    Those home-made rocket launchers were the only bit of do- it-yourself I remember Dad doing. They fitted his definition of manly activity while serving the purpose, for once, of something wonderfully useless.
    I wasn’t allowed to light fireworks or handle sparklers, and I can see the sense of that. The pyrolatrous glint in my eyes can’t have been much of an inducement to take a chance on me behaving responsibly.
    Mum and Dad both smelled of smoke even when it wasn’t Bomfire Night, but underneath that Mum smelled like me and Dad didn’t. Mum and I had marked each other, as dogs mark lampposts. I smelled of the milk she had made inside herself, and she smelled of the milk I had taken in and then burped softly over her shoulder while she patted my back. Dad smelled different entirely.
    I remember being held in my father’s arms at a fruit stall in a market . I was reaching out towards a bunch of bananas and saying the word ‘Gee!’ with a hard ‘G’. My word for bananas. What I meant when I said ‘Gee!’ was partly ‘lovely bananas, want bananas’ and partly something else. It was partly ‘I love my daddy’s smell and the feeling of being in his arms.’ It was only much later I wondered if the brand name Geest had been stuck onto the bananas, so that I was instinctively reading the word, remembering my letters from a previous life. Geest of course being the Dutch for ghost or spirit.

Baby Bear bounce
     
    One day when I was three Dad borrowed my favourite red ball, flew over the garden and dropped it down to me from his plane. This would be the house in Bathford, outside Bath, at the top of a hill. Perhaps it was his farewell outing in a Tiger Moth, a training biplane manœuvrable at low speeds which was coming to the end of its long service life around then. Can I really have caught my red ball cleanly, without help, on the third enormous bounce? There was a Daddy Bear bounce, that seemed to go right back up into the sky it had come from, then a Mummy Bear bounce, up to the level of the tree-tops this time, and then a Baby Bear bounce which was just right, at hedge height. A bounce for each of us, and into my waiting hands. This was an extraordinary happening, needing to be replayed again and again in my mind until it took on a dark varnish of meaning.
    I feature quite strongly in the early pages of the family album. Later on I’m relegated to the sidelines. I become awkward supporting cast for other people’s birthdays and holidays. But Mum and Dad had quite a lot of photographs taken when I was three, by Cyril Howes of Bath / Abbey Churchyard / Telephone 60444 , so I go out in a blaze of glory as a photographic subject. Then later they couldn’t bear to sort through them critically, getting rid of the ones that weren’t so good. Knowing that my life from that point on had nothing in common with what went before.
    As a three-year-old I was a cheerful active child, happy to play with my bricks while the photographer worked away, with a little gallery of memories that didn’t need chemicals to be developed and fixed – the happiness of a good session at potty, the pride of peeing a winning arc, and the physical stimulation of being in Dad’s arms, reaching for the suggestive fruit par excellence , all too obvious object of desire. Unzip a banana.
    Then my life began. My life acquired its sruti -note – the fundamental drone that underpins a raga, the part of the music that isn’t even part of the music. The Sanskrit word has come to mean ‘ authority ’. Hindu cosmology is particularly compatible with musical analogies . It’s not so much the Big Bang as the Big Twang, a primal throb underlying every variation of pitch and timbre.
    My life began with a fever. The pain came only at night, to start with. Starting in the knee. Hot and dizzy. At two in the morning I’d be screaming, then by breakfast-time I would almost have forgotten. All childhood illnesses are dramatic, but this was