I have, incidentally, already said of him that, having lost his mother when he was in his fourth year, he remembered her all the rest of his life, her face, her caresses, ‘every bit as though she stood before me in real life’. Images of this kind may be recalled (and this is no secret) from a yet earlier age, as far back as the age of two, but in such a manner that they emerge all one’s life only as bright points in the dark, like a tiny corner torn from an enormous picture which has all faded and disappeared, apart from that one little corner.
