When you’re very young you seem to suddenly become conscious of things that have been under your nose for a long time past. The things round about you swim into your mind one at a time, rather as they do when you’re waking from sleep. For instance, it was only when I was nearly four that I suddenly realised that we owned a dog. Nailer, his name was, an old white English terrier of the breed that’s gone out nowadays. I met him under the kitchen table and in some way seemed to grasp, having only learnt it that moment, that he belonged to us and that his name was Nailer. In the same way, a bit earlier, I’d discovered that beyond the gate at the end of the passage there was a place where the smell of sainfoin came from. And the shop itself, with the huge scales and the wooden measures and the tin shovel, and the white lettering on the window, and the bullfinch in its cage – which you couldn’t see very well even from the pavement, because the window was always dusty – all these things dropped into place in my mind one by one, like bits of a jigsaw puzzle.