I think my earliest memory was when we were in Chicago when I was five, we’d been on a long day out in the city to visit the John Hancock Center which is the tallest building in Chicago, we got home and we were recording a message to my grand mother on a tape so that she could hear all about our exploits and we were trying to explain to her that we’d been to see this tall building and my sister who was three, was also trying to be on the tape but because she was three she didn’t have a clear idea of what it was she’d seen but she knew she wanted to talk. So we are making the tape and my mother would be asking us what we’d seen and we would start to tell her and my sister would perk out with: “I wanna talk it! I wanna talk it!” And my mother would say something along the line of:“Well you can talk then tell us what you’ve seen” and my sister said “an elephant, I saw an elephant.” She hadn’t seen an elephant so my mother said: “You didn’t see an elephant did you? What did you see?” and she said “An elephant” so my mother tried and prompt her by saying: “You saw the John …” “An elephant!” And eventually after several attempts my mother had to say on her behalf that she ‘d seen the John Hancock Center. My sister still insists to this day she saw an elephant, it’s just simply not true.

Memory