When I was a child I thought of such lanes as led towards our house, or crossed the countryside around, as ways out of the world into another world. At night I conceived of huge doors closing at the ends of them, of carriages, carts, and hawkers' barrows waiting for the dawn that they might open up again.

Children entertain such mysteries. I have often thought that the world is more real in childhood than obtains when we are older, for in growing older we cloak the world in thought and make it other than it is. A child will say “I,” and yet it merges its identity with others and so better enjoys the fruitfulness of all. Upon reaching one's middling years, or long before, there comes a consciousness of conflict in oneself. One wishes to be others and yet not, and is in the very centre of a tug-of-war. So often does one hear another say, “I am not myself today,” or they may say, “I do not like myself-oh, would that I could change!” or again (and most often in the case of women), “Tomorrow I shall be different; I shall be more myself; I shall be better than I am today.”

I-older now-am both myself and yet another whom I do not know. I have gazed at my reflection in mirrors- many mirrors and in different rooms-and wondered at the being who stared back at me and to whom my only relationship, as I felt, was one of wonderment, a sense of being awkwardly disturbed that I had materialised in quite another guise to what I thought, looked how I did not think I looked, hair tousled where I thought it smooth, an alarm of creases faint upon my brow.

Once, in moment of exquisite terror-such terror as is flavoured by the condiments of deep excitement and a quivering in the very soul-I stood before a mirror in my mother's room, which mirror being on a stand allowed a full length view, and asked myself, “Who am I, then?” So piercing is the question to oneself that my toes curled painfully and I could not bear to meet the blank reflection of my eyes.