Autobiography of a Child by Hannah Lynch

The picture is clear before me of the day I first walked. My mother, a handsome, cold-eyed woman, who did not love me, had driven out from town to nurse’s cottage. I shut my eyes, and I am back in the little parlour with its spindle chairs, an old-fashioned piano with green silk front, its pink-flowered wall-paper, and the two wonderful black-and-white dogs on the mantelpiece. There were two pictures I loved to gaze upon—Robert Emmett in the dock, and Mary Stuart saying farewell to France. I do not remember my mother’s coming or going. Memory begins to work from the moment nurse put me on a pair of unsteady legs.