I was told that as a baby I started to cry for no reason. I’d be lying there in my crib and nothing would have happened at all but suddenly I would be screaming as if someone had pulled my scant hair or as if I had been scalded with boiling water or as if someone had sliced into me with a knife. It was always like that. I was an odd child, they said, unhappy and difficult, hard to calm. Colic. Chronic colic. The nursery maids never stayed long. ‘Why are you so bad?’ they asked. ‘Why will you not settle?’

The noises upset me; I was always jumpy and scared and angry. I could not understand the words of the noises at first. At first it was just sounds and rustles, clinks, clicks, smacks, taps, claps, bangs, rumbles, crumblings, yelps, moans, groans, that sort of thing. Not very loud mostly. Sometimes unbearably so. When I could speak I should keep saying, ‘Who said that? Who said that?’ or ‘Be quiet. Shut up you, you’re nothing but a washcloth!’ or ‘Will you be silent, you chamber pot!’ because it seemed to me that objects, ordinary everyday objects, were speaking to me in human voices.

The maids would be so cross when I slapped about some chair or bowl, some handbell or side table. ‘Calm down,’ they kept telling me.

It was only when my Uncle Aliver, recently made a doctor then, took notice of my upset that things began to improve for me. ‘Why are you crying?’ he asked me.

‘The forceps,’ I said.

‘My forceps?’ he asked. ‘What about them?’

I told him that his forceps, which were something that Aliver always carried about him, were talking. Usually I was ignored when I spoke of the talking things, sighed over, or I was given a beating for telling lies, but Uncle Aliver asked me that day, ‘And what do my forceps say?’

‘They say,’ I said, so pleased to be asked, ‘Percy Hotchkiss.’

‘Percy Hotchkiss?’ repeated Uncle Aliver, all interest. ‘Anything else?’

‘No,’ I said, ‘that’s all I hear. “Percy Hotchkiss.”’

‘But how can an object speak, Clod?’

‘I do not know, and I wish it wouldn’t.’

‘An object has no life, it has no mouth.’

‘I know,’ I said, ‘and yet it persists.’

‘I do not hear the forceps speaking.’

‘No, but I do, I promise you, Uncle, a muffled, trapped voice, something locked away, saying, “Percy Hotchkiss.”’