Trafika Europe 9/10 - UK in Europe

All the voices

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

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