The past was a place of games played with deadly earnest, the terrible arena of childhood. He was very young and he smelled of melting running shoes and schoolyard dust and warm apples and peanut butter sandwiches. The girls at noon bounced hard rubber balls under their knees or flung them rhythmically at the school wall, chanting in girl language: ordinary, moving, left foot, right foot, curtsies, salutsies, turnsies. The boys watched them, fascinated and bewildered and afraid. Apples, peaches, pears and plums! the girls screamed as they flung themselves in great suicidal leaps into the whirling maw of their skipping ropes. Tell me when your birthday comes! And dancing in the frenzied centre they called out the names of the months of the year - this year, any year: 'JANuary, FEBruary...' until the schoolyard was a whirling circling planet of tastes and smells and colours and sounds erupting into chaos like the first dream of his life in which the sky broke up into a jigsaw of faces and figures and mythical animals and then it all fell down.

Rockabye baby, on the tree-top,
When the wind blows,
The cradle will rock,
And down will come baby,
Cradle and all.