First memory

I don't naturally veer towards believing in fate. I wear my seatbelt because I believe it keeps me a little safer. I know that I have control over much of what happens to me. I see that others also have an impact on me. I do not think there is a mapped out destiny for individuals. But considering I was brought up in a London suburb my first memory although not startling, was not perhaps what might be expected, and I can't help but wonder if it set some unconscious seed that has brought me to my particular here and now.
I was still at pre-toddler stage. I was taken about in a large perambulator, second hand I think, and of a size that suggests a nanny in control, but there was no nanny. My Father would take me out in the pram, wrapped up like a pudding, round faced, cosy against the elements. He pushed the pram to the end of the street and turned away from the centre of things and up the hill to the few acres of green belt that sat surprisingly just a few streets away.
The transition from concrete, pavements and brick was abrupt. Behind the run of rectangular gardens was farmland. I never saw a farmhouse or a farmer. I don't know if there ever was anything other than grass, and in my teenage years when I was bolder in exploring, there were no longer signs of farming and no fences. But my first memory is of a short journey, of being taken up the hill to see the cows. Black and white cows. Cows that lifted their head over the wire fence, curious and unafraid of a proud man with a young child in a pram, picking her up from underneath the blankets to show off her red cheeked beam to the animal audience.
I can recall the scene so clearly. Nothing in my childhood or that of my parents would have suggested farming as a way of life; it was an urban existence with urban ambitions and interests. And yet, those cows snuck in early and made, surely, some important impression.