My primary school essay is written with plodding care. The perfection of cursive script slopes self-consciously and tensely along the page lines, indicative of the good girl impulses that I have belatedly winced about all of my adult life; those traits that I recognise in my mother and daughters.
Reading the awkward efforts to please my teacher takes me immediately back into my childhood self. I wonder if I believed the fiction as I wrote it. The name of the teacher and any certainty about the year have been lost from memory like the watery traces of ink seeping into the paper.
