I am 3 years old and am in the hospital garden with my father.  I, a Jewish child from a totally secular family, am searching for Easter eggs, and he is helping me.  “Look,” he says, “under that red flower!  Isn’t that an egg?”

I peer under the flower, and he’s right!  It is an egg, wrapped in silver paper.

I don’t know whether I, a precocious child, already suspected that he was so good at finding the eggs because he had put them there himself, or whether I simply accepted it as part of the omniscience of grown-ups.

When we have finished looking for the eggs we go into the hospital.  I am going to see my sister, whom I haven’t yet met.  Her name is Peggy.

We go to my mother’s room where she is sitting up in bed smiling, but I don’t see any sign of Peggy.  “She’s in that room”, says my mother, pointing to an open doorway, “with all the other babies.  Daddy will show you which is her cot.”

In the other room there’s a line of cots with a baby in each.  “Your sister’s in the end cot,” says the nurse who’s looking after them.  “She just had a bath and now she’s going to be dressed.”

In the cot before the end one there’s a very pretty baby, pale, with a chubby face and a lot of dark hair.  My sister is being lifted onto a table to be dressed.  She is skinny and red, and does not have much hair.  I don’t much care for the look of her at all, and I wished the pale, chubby baby in the other cot had been Peggy.  But I don’t say it.  I already know that there are some things it isn’t nice to say.

However, I am happy to record that this disenchanted introduction did not presage my subsequent relations with my sister, long since translated into Margaret, and the deep bond formed in our childhood has not been weakened by 50 years of living in different continents.