A Violet Beginning

Malcolm Fraser

The world is very strange to me and every ordinary day extraordinary, and I live full of wonder at the ease with which others navigate the strangeness. For me, to be alive and conscious at all was to be immersed in wonder, and my first remembered consciousness was, therefore, the purest shock of beginning.

I can date the day, to a little after my second birthday. As my folks tell it, at my annual medical it was discovered that I had not grown 'was neither heavier nor taller than I had been aged one' so I was prescribed ultra-violet treatment, to stimulate my body to produce vitamin D. I doubt whether the diagnosis and treatment were explained to me, but if they were the explanation washed over me or was, subsequently, washed out of me. In any case what it meant might have been medically-rational, but the experience was, for me, arrestingly surreal: I remember the clinic, and having some goggles strapped-on; and then a door opened and I walked into a room full of, bathed in, made of, violet light.

I stood there daft in it, numb with incomprehension. Afterwards I must have gone home with my mum: to our usual afternoon gathered round the radio and its 'Listen with Mother', with those weird, other-wordly Queens English clipped vowels exhorting us to 'find loobyloo', or 'sing along with me children!'; to my house on its hill, down which I'd dream, that night, of my tricycle hurtling out of control; trailing violet light behind me, as it has woven itself through and around me ever since, as it follows me still...