WHETHER today is what used to be called Mothering Sunday in England, or whether it is the American concoction to the greater glory of Hallmark greeting cards, I have not bothered to find out. All I know is I try not to think about it. It brings on a sense of failure, of obligations never quite fulfilled - and when I was a ruthlessly selfish infant, I was quite clear in my brutal little mind who it was who was being let down by whom.
The first sense I had of betrayal by my mother was when she took me for my injections. The person you rush to, whose legs you grip on to, whose skirt you bury your frightened little face in, suddenly peels you off and pushes you back into the needle you were fleeing from.
In those days there were no neat little designer syringes in sachets. Needles were made of Sheffield steel and took two male nurses to carry. I don't know what it is they have so recently discovered about the arm, but back then they shoved this sharpened steel pipe into your bum.
Of course, I would run back shaking into my mother's arms, but now with a nagging question. What would she throw me at next? School, that's what. I forgave her for throwing me across the room when I was three. That was a clear and understandable response to my attempt to shake the window cleaner off his ladder, but I could not work out what it was I had done to deserve school.
Mother and I have different memories of our parting on that first morning. I recall her taking me there, screaming, digging my heels an inch deep into the schoolyard gravel in an attempt to go no further. I remember the class teacher's hand - a skeleton covered in chilly crushed silk - closing round my pudgy five-year-old arm.
Mother says she put me on the bus and saw my newly-capped little head disappearing in the back window. She went to my grandmother's and cried, she says. Well she might. I hated school. I continued to attend it in different forms for some years to come with precisely the same loathing and fear I felt for it on that first morning. It is a dislike which has translated in later life for any regular need to attend an office.