Rosie: Scenes From A Vanished Life

Shortlisted for The Man Booker Prize in 1989 for Restoration, and winner of the Orange Prize for Fiction in 2008 with The Road

Home, Rose Tremain is one of the best-loved and most successful authors of our time. Here, in an extract from her new memoir, she explores the earliest of a young writer’s observations...

I can remember this: lying in my pram and looking up at a white sky. Across the sky, some lines are drawn, like musical staves. Fluttering shapes arrive and land on the staves: birds on telegraph wires.

My mother used to say, ‘You couldn’t possibly remember that. Babies can’t capture anything, because they have no words. Your mind would have been as empty as the sky you think you saw.’

I would remind her that the sky wasn’t empty. It was filled with the descending notes of birds. They settled on the wires. And she would say, ‘Don’t be silly. You invented that stuff. The first real memory you could possibly have – when you were, say, three or four – would have been of Linkenholt.’

All right, then. Linkenholt. It’s clear and present in my mind. The big house stood on a hill in Hampshire, where the wind was always strong. It was never a beauty. The colour of its brick was too screechy a coral red. Its whitepainted gables were too massive. It reminded people of a lumpy three-masted ship, riding its waves of green and beautiful land. But all through my childhood, I longed for it – for the moment of walking through its heavy front door and breathing its familiar perfume. What was that perfume? A composite of beeswax furniture polish, Brasso, French cigarettes and dogs. It was the smell of home.