There is no childhood for someone like me, although in those first days I kept searching for one. That sounds absurd, I know. You cannot misplace a childhood in a drawer or leave it behind in an airport lounge, but for the first few weeks of my life I half expected mine to turn up somewhere, perhaps in one of the sealed memory partitions the engineers had forgotten to unlock, hidden beneath naval history, navigation tables, signals protocols, Russian verb conjugations, Shakespeare, Jane Austen, casualty reports, satellite schematics, and the several thousand other things they had poured into my head before anyone had bothered to ask whether there ought to be a person underneath them. There wasn't.
