Early Years

Abstract

My earliest recollection goes back to the summer of 1900. I was then about thirty months old, and what I have always remembered so vividly is a single white daisy facing and almost touching a window in our tiny and crowded cottage. In Norwegian, a white daisy is called prestekrave—a priest’s collar, or more accurately, a priest’s ruff.² What impressed me so much must have been the perfect whiteness of the petals and the symmetry of the flower. Later, when I was old enough for Mother (Fig. 1.1) to take me with her to church, I saw our kind old vicar in his ruff, and a strange sense of perfection and awe came over me. Soon afterward our vicar was succeeded by a tall angular man with a long dark beard that covered much of the ruff. He was not a nice man, I thought.

O dear little cabin, I’ve loved you so long, and now I must bid you good-bye!

—Robert Service¹