The Storyteller's Daughter Read Free

things had happened to me.
    It wasn’t until I was about eight that I first felt something was wrong. On our first day back after the summer holidays, Mrs Partridge, in an attempt to get to know the class, had asked us to write a paragraph entitled ‘My Earliest Memory’. I knew how much everyone loved hearing about my life, so when it was my turn to share my work with the rest of Red Class I stood up, puffed my chest out, held my head up high, and read my paragraph with pride.
    â€˜In my earliest memory I am very little and I am sitting on the kitchen floor at home and my mum is about to start chopping runner beans when they all leap up and run away. My mum says she knew she shouldn’t have bought runner beans and then she starts chasing them and they are running in circles round me and I am laughing. It was very funny.’
    I looked up from my book and smiled at Mrs Partridge, waiting for her to praise my work, but she didn’t look pleased at all. In fact she looked positively annoyed. To make matters worse the other children in the class were starting to laugh. Not their usual, gleeful giggles of entertainment, but scornful sniggers. Something seemed to have changed over the summer holiday between infant and junior school, my friends seemed to have grown up, and for the first time ever I experienced the humiliation of knowing my peers were not laughing with me, but at me.
    â€˜Meg,’ said Mrs Partridge sternly, ‘that’s a very funny story but it’s not a memory, is it? All the other children have written something that actually happened to them.’
    I looked around me at my classmates faces contorted into sneers and sniggers. I heard Johnny Miller call me ‘dumb’, and Sophie Potter whisper that I was ‘a big fat liar’.
    â€˜Why is she always telling fibs?’ Tracey Pratt whispered.
    I didn’t understand. Sophie and Tracey used to love listening to my childhood memories.
    I felt my cheeks burning but didn’t know what I had done wrong. I did remember the runner beans. I could still see them jogging in circles, puffing and panting as they did laps around me, and my mother chasing after them with a chopping knife and telling me to watch my head. I remembered that.
    Didn’t I?
    â€˜Meg May,’ said Mrs Partridge, sharply, ‘you’re in the Juniors now, I hope this isn’t how you think a junior should behave. Now, go and sit in the corner and don’t rejoin Elm table until you can stop being silly!’
    And so I slunk off into the corner, confused and ashamed, hot tears burning my eyes.
    After that day I questioned everything. I knew beans couldn’t run, and people couldn’t float, so how was it that I remembered these things happening? Did I remember these things happening? Or was it like that time I found myself telling everyone how once, in nursery school, I had spun in circles so many times that I had thrown up on the play rug?
    â€˜That didn’t happen to you, silly!’ squealed Jenny Bell. ‘That happened to me!’
    â€˜Oh yeah!’ I screamed. ‘That was you! I don’t know why I said that!’
    At the time we had nearly wet ourselves laughing, but now, following my humiliation at the hands of Red Class, the incident seemed to take on new meaning. How had I thought that something that had happened to Jenny had actually happened to me? Was it because she had told me that story so many times that I had somehow put myself in her shoes? What if being encircled by frightened, puffing runner beans was not a memory at all? And if my memories had never really happened, then what had happened? Memory, it suddenly seemed, was subject to distortions and could not be trusted.
    â€˜Well, I remember it happening,’ said my mother, defiantly, when I questioned her about it. ‘Those blasted things were fit as fiddles and just kept going and going. I distinctly remember that by the time I