Infancy: "It started from his birth"

25th October 1990 - 6.13 am - Taipei

"I can't push any longer!"

The exhausted sigh escaped her lips as she sank back on the pillows, her dark hair falling, damp, over her brow. She couldn't take any more pain. It was just too hard.

"Come on, he's nearly here." The nurse with the grey eyes murmured encouragingly. "Just one last, big push."

The half-dead woman, too weak even to cry, shook her head in mute denial; but she knew she had to do something to end these fifty-two hours of agonising labour. She closed her eyes and whispered a swift prayer, and pushed with all the last strength of her will.

She screamed one last time, and then the baby was out. She looked to the window, and dimly saw two crows, perched, looking in curiously at this spectacle of life and death.

"What will you name him?" The nurse asked urgently, seeing that her patient was fading fast.

"William..." She whispered in reply; and when the nurse turned to place William in his mother's arms, she saw that it was already too late. The young woman would never hold her son.

*

William's father was a good example of a bad father. Absent from the birth, he arrived too late to make any impact on his wife's failing health; instead, he was present with a squalling, smelly infant, wrapped in hospital sheets with a little tag around his littler wrist, proclaiming the word "WILLIAM". Astounded by this turn of events, he had not the sense nor the desire to look after William himself. So it was that, even from an early age, William was forced to fend for himself. At first he was a thin, staring little child, learning the arts of both walking and talking later than the other children in his area; in fact, many supposed that he was perhaps stupid or disabled in some mental capacity.

The simple, sad truth of the matter was, William's father often forgot to feed him. Only the presence of an aged servant, who went by the inexplicable name of Bessie, could account for his continued grip on life: at times she would remember his existence and hurry to give him a bottle. Thus it was, also, that he did not start solid food until one day, when he was several months past the usual age, his father forced a grain of rice into his hungry mouth. Then it was that William began to grow.

One day, playing casually in the kitchen, he saw a crow fly in through the window, peck at a few morsels of rice upon the table, and fly out again. Heartened by this example, he began to steal food whenever possible, and eventually grew at a normal rate; until finally, at the age of four and three quarters, he was just the same as others his age.

But, as with the others his age, school must follow soon. Although his father nearly forgot to enrol him, crisis was averted by the intervention of Bessie; and all was set for William's school career to begin.