England, 11/22/1963

It was a Friday, and Elsie Gale had come to babysit.

I was supposed to be asleep already. But I was teething, and Elsie had been walking me around the living room wrapped in a blanket; she had only managed to get me quiet and drowsy, and had deposited me on the settee. As soon as my parents left for the evening, she decamped to the kitchen, where there was a pile of ironing and a bottle of Cutty Sark. But she left her cigarettes in the living room, probably because her constant need was a reminder to keep an eye on me every few minutes. I remember the ache in my jaw receding pleasantly, and I remember staring at the ceiling for a long time — if I really remember any of this at all.

Eventually Elsie came back in, with an ashtray in one hand and a neat pile of vests in the other. She chunked the door shut with an authoritative bum, made cooing noises at me, and switched on the telly. Then she reversed into the big, wing-backed Parker-Knoll, a chair that had been stretch-covered in a spectacularly ugly oily-yellow fabric. Moroccan Sands, the catalogue probably said.

A dark-haired, big-boned, strikingly tall woman, she didn’t really fit into that chair, and she sat awkwardly sideways. Ignoring the screen, she flipped through an old copy of Country Life while sucking hungrily at yet another Player’s Navy Cut. I was fascinated by the way tendrils of smoke would continue to leak from one nostril or the other long after she had apparently finished exhaling.

The television was a Rediffusion set, black and white of course, from the Radio Rentals shop in the High Street. It had wood-veneer trim, spindly black screw-in legs, and one of those V-shaped aerials designed to make you think you’d bought Sputnik. Peter Cooke was being deadpan, then Lance Percival got out his guitar and made up a silly song about the Prime Minister. Oxbridge-undergraduate satire — not at all the kind of thing Elsie would have described as “a bit of a lark.” She continued to flip through the color spreads: ornate baronial interiors; women on horses; men in tweed with their twelve-bores and golden retrievers. But when the news came in from Dallas, she dropped the magazine at once and leaned forward, mouth open in horror.

It must have been only minutes afterwards that my parents came home. Elsie jumped up, stood irresolute at the window for a moment, and then turned the set off. A shirt appeared from nowhere and she started feverishly sewing buttons onto it. I could sense that she didn’t want to seem glued to the set, wanted just to be doing something quietly useful, and did not know what she would say to them.

A later memory paints the scene I could not see from the crib: my father, urbane in his dark suit, with his hair Brylcreem’d flat, getting out of his new car. It was a Hillman Super Minx in two-tone; dark green on top, light green below — the latest thing.

“Hello, Elsie dear,” my mother said, standing in the doorway in her faux-fur coat. “Everything all right?”

“Oh, Mrs. Farr, there’s been this terrible news, ’ave you ’eard? Simply terrible. ’Specially ’im so young and ’andsome, and that young wife of ’is left wi’ nowt to do but ’er ’air. And that little boy of yours, slept through it all, ’e did, good as gold.”

She rushed to pick me up, as if in doing so she could protect me from the newly dangerous world into which I had been born.

“… a lone gunman?” someone was saying from the screen. It was tempting to give my opinion—I was a Grassy Knoll theorist already—but I didn’t say a word.