[Frank Goss reflects at length on his sense-memories—the smells and sounds of very early childhood. His mother Nellie Goss, née Bartlett, was a dressmaker.]

My mother comes into the picture as someone in a frilly white apron with broad white tapes that are tied in a bow behind, and a voice humming a song. There is a kitchen and a brown American cloth-covered table, and sunshine flooding in from the garden […] The lady who sang and popped peas into the colander gives me a handful of raw peas to eat and so diverts my sobbing and, in my comfort, my mother breaks through from being an element in the pattern of accepted wellbeing to becoming a solid personality that was to last me all my life.