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All the voices

139

him. To emphasise this I

tried to make my own eyes

mellow and appealing.

And I can honestly tell you

this was the very first time

I was conscious of trying

to create the smiling-eyes

effect.

There was disagreement

about my limp. Some

believed I was born with

it, others that I got it later

on. My mum sometimes

said the one thing and

sometimes the other.

When she was in a self-

pitying mood she would

always find somebody to

blame for anything that

went wrong in life. Then

she’d say it happened at

school, playing football. I

fell on a spike which had

been left lying on the

ground. Nobody knew

where the spike had come

from. She said it was an

accident that could easily

have been prevented. If

the teachers had been

more caring, if they were

better at doing the job they

were paid to do. Mum said

that after the accident, my

left leg – the one that fell

onto the spike – stopped

growing at the same rate

as the other leg. Or she

would come up with a

completely different story

altogether and say a nurse

had dropped me in the

hospital where I was born

because she was a nasty

piece that one, and had it

in her to do a bad thing like

that. I had screamed Mum

said and the leg had gone

bright red and then later

on it never grew properly.

Sometimes she said I just

came out that way and

stayed that way. It was

fate. My granddad, he had

a funny leg too though in

his case it was that the