I have no memory of my parents. What I have is a handful of facts, told to me by people who did not much care about them, and which I have turned over so often that they have worn smooth.
My father was Walter Shirley. My mother was Bertha. They were both teachers in Bolingbroke, in Nova Scotia, and they were very young, and they were poor, and they lived in a small yellow house that I have furnished in my head a hundred different ways. My mother died of a fever when I was three months old. My father died of the same fever four days later. That is all. For twenty years I believed that nobody had thought to keep a letter, or a photograph, or a book with a name written in it. I was wrong about that, but I did not find out until I was grown.
After that I belonged to whoever would have me. Mrs. Thomas took me because she had known my mother, and kept me because I was useful. Her husband drank. They moved to Marysville, and I minded her children until I was eight. Then Mrs. Hammond, up the river, who had eight children, three pairs of them twins, and needed another pair of hands. When the Hammonds broke up I went to the asylum at Hopeton, because nobody else would take me. I was there four months.
I do not tell this for pity. I tell it because my own children, growing up in a house where there was always a lap to climb into, used to ask me what it had been like, and I never found a good answer. The nearest I came was this: it was like living in a house with no mirrors. You do not know what you look like to anyone. So you invent it.
I invented a great deal.