Chapter One · Childhood
The Yellow Kitchen
Spoken by Eleanor M. · 7 min
The first thing I remember is the colour yellow. My mother's kitchen in the old house on Wellfield Road was painted the colour of butter, and the morning sun came through the back window and made the walls glow. I would have been three, maybe four. I was sitting on the cold linoleum floor in a nightgown, and she was at the stove with her back to me, stirring something. Porridge, probably. It was always porridge.
She was humming. I cannot tell you what the song was, I have tried for sixty years to place it, but I can still hear the shape of it. A little falling phrase, like a question she was asking herself. The kettle was on. Th…