I was born in the 'manner of the time,' squashily, slippery with blood, greased up like a cross channel swimmer and whacked on pethidene. When the drugs wore off I started to scream, and the noise echoes on, and I hear myself protesting. Protesting isn't the right word. I was reacting: it was neither good nor bad, it expressed no opinion, only the shock of existence.

My father and mother were both present in that hospital room, although neither of them liked to talk about it much and it was a long time before I realised I'd been born at all. The shock forgotten, existence seemed to me as something that gradually came about like seasons changing, I thought I had appeared leaf by leaf like a hedgerow faery. I didn't belong to my parents, who had simply materialised at the same time as myself. My father was a reincarnation of Henry VIII and my mother was a collection of opposite emotions, beautifully shaped.

The house in which we appeared was numbered 19 and next-door to a dockyard. Wild cats lived in our back garden. Furnishings were orange and purple and lime green, ornaments were cracked and glued back together after shouting, which was a kind of background noise my parents provided. I walked to a nursery school, kicking leaves, where I was left to paint, dress up, fight for the sand pit. All but the fighting was encouraged by The Super Lady, who was as tall as the ceiling but had no legs, only floating skirts and carpet grazing bead necklaces and she only spoke these words: 'super, darling, super.' A little girl with my same blonde hair showed me the secret of painting numbers back to front and she didn't remember being born either so it was obvious we were both sprites bound by our own supernatural laws.

The shouting rose to middleground noise and taught me two lessons; one, if my father hit me I must not cry; two, if my mother hit me I could cry but only if I was really sorry. I stayed in the garden and chattered with the cats and the snapdragon flowers. There were days when it rained and the garden was buried under slugslime. From inside the windows I watched the ships and the cranes and the men hurry when the siren blasted, all holding sandwiches and newspapers. I watched the sea change colour; grey, blue, green, gold, silver, oil smudged and cloudy. At night it was as black as the sky and held the same stars but they slid up and down on the waves. Sometimes it got angry and tried to throw them back into the sky.

We went to heaven and called it a beach. There was sand and sea in the beat of my heart. I was a changeling, a mermaid, my hair was strands of seaweed. Every night I faded from existence and every morning I drifted back and never remembered sleeping. But then the terrors arrived, real as daylight, snarling under my bed, in every dark corner, even in the darkness of the sea and rock, threatening me with non-existence, with losing everything. I was here now and I wanted to stay. I had things I loved; I wanted to stay with.

I had a brother arrive in the night. My father woke me in the dark and whispered 'You have a little brother, come and look.' I could tell by his tone that this was a significant event. I followed him in to the bedroom with the big bed in it. There was a cot- I imagined he arrived in the cot much as an astronaut arrives in a space rocket- and in it was a baby.

'He looks like you,' they said, with further significance I couldn't comprehend. It didn't look like me. It was a baby. It didn't do much but it stayed and I was fond of it.

I started reading, that was part of my world, where the mermaids and magic godmothers and all the creatures I believed in lived, where I could walk over the clouds and under the sea. My books, my garden, my view, my nursery, my beach, my television.

Television was a portal to other worlds, coloured more brightly than ours. Or no colour at all. Everything grey or Bright Red, Bright Blue, Bright Yellow and when it wasn't frightening you it was teaching you to read and count. And then when warm sick came out of my mouth and my bed was all sticky I stayed home with the television and it showed me a girl who was dancing through a nightmare. It killed her but I felt different. I was still a mermaid and a changeling but if I must be dragged into the mortal world I would put on my red shoes and be dancing through it. Miss Victoria Page, page like a book.

At some point I must have gone to school. They interrupted my wandering with meaningless numbers but they also put a pencil in my hand, an exercise book on my table, and I could write my own world. I threw up my milk, numbers were impossible to remember because there were too many of them, fighting was still discouraged, but the pencil and paper made up for everything. I drew pictures too, of beautiful things such as life cycles and princesses.

Summers were hot. The sky was blue, the sea was all diamonds, the sand a trove of tiny shells, each with its own story. In Autumn all the leaves caught fire and fell into ash and pulp. Pumpkins and turnips grew faces, the world was candlelit. Winter was cold, frosted, illuminated with stars and tinsel, and presents arrived, and chocolate. In Spring all the green buds arrived, in each a fluffy chick, and clear as crystal the rain washed the cold away.

The baby faded out of existence, replaced by a small boy who got in my way sometimes so I hit him. But we didn't throw ornaments because we weren't old enough yet. Sometimes we had birthdays with party food but it was a lie you could do what you wanted for your birthday. You couldn't shut your brother's head in the door, interrupt a football match, breathe underwater or cheek your mother.

In all seasons my friend the sprite and her sister and I played. We played in the schoolyard, on the beach, at each other's houses, three things spun from the same blonde thread. Other friends were to be instructed as to the rules of our supernatural standing, others resisted with spite and fighting but we made our stories regardless. Imagination was our creed, our reality.

I knew I was a bit different though because my parents weren't artists and they were foreign. I tried to get them to paint. I stuck to being a changeling so it wouldn't matter.

One day a thunderstorm came to find us. It knocked on the roof and the small boy was scared. I was allowed to take money across the big road and buy pasties for tea. I wasn't afraid of the storms. When I came back we were happy and I gave my brother his pasty and I was his sister then.

One day my father got up out of his armchair and taught me all the natural world and how to frame a photograph and we went walking along the sea wall. He went ahead, not looking back, until we saw a whale, dead, spread across the rocks, a mountain of animal. And I looked at how big the sea really was. He walked on again and I followed back home, where I watched my mother cook and run the house. I watched her guard our health with broth and stop blood from pouring with firmly applied plasters. She stopped fights. She wouldn't let me wear my favourite yellow skirt because of the sick-stain but she did wash it for me. And she told me that before I could remember things I had been a baby and never eaten anything but raspberry blancmange and I did a raspberry pink poo in the garden which made us all laugh and laugh. Memory is a list imbued with meaning.

Next two uncles and a grandmother started to live in a haunted house next to the sea. They had wolves in the attic, a talking mongoose in the greenhouse and no sympathy for stubbing a bare toe on the gravelled drive. Gran was herself made of granite with fabulous hair. Only my grandfather could make her cry and only because he was dead. I looked for my grandfather's spirit in that house; for old brown shaded photographs, stories of war and trench gases, visions of the cancer ward; but he'd been gone too long. Unless he appeared as a mongoose, and it was odd that the creature chain-smoked Woodbines. My uncles hunted, swam out far, climbed cliffs for fun, went to sea in grey metal ships. When on land they changed their girlfriends and drove around fast. I was inspired to ride my pushbike into several accidents. My mother said 'no more plasters until you at least put some shoes on.' My ankles were freckled with old blood but I could run over gravel and glass, I didn't need shoes. But death and catching my ankles on my bike chain did sometimes make me cry.

Someone came and took all the wild cats away. My father was angry. Once we'd caught one because it had a bad eye and, although it didn't realise, it needed us to mend it, so we did. We let it go because it had to be a wild thing. My father loved the wild world, my mother could cure us with herbs and soup but nothing could bring the cats back.

I went to my friend's house everyday. It was roll-ups and cups of hippy tea and tubes of oil paint and climbing on the roof before I was afraid of heights but carelessly perched over the guttering like a little bird, eating stolen fruit. It was the perfect house for sprite-nurturing. We teased her sister but hoped she wouldn't die. The nurse hit her on the back and the machine gurgled and between them they tried to get the illness out. One day she did get better. We were happy to see her be given a life because children did die. The sea stole them, building sites fell on them, diseases rubbed them out, terrors haunted them.

I was six years old. In the shadows of a powerful sun, from the other world depth of the sea, a monstrous shark cut its fin across safe summer harbours. I saw its picture on a billboard the day we walked home from the beach and found our garden undulating with the winged bodies of ants. The sun shone so brightly, the flowers opened so widely, the glossy insect bodies lay glutted and frying in the heat. The sky was never so blue, the sea never so clear, my swimsuit never so television red, and the light got brighter and brighter and scorched into a searing afterlife whiteness.

The brightness of the sun flickers like the end of a film reel.

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Lisa Donohue has lived most of her life, as far as she can recall, in Cornwall, being schooled by pirates and has the table manners to prove it.

At some point she acquired two happy children, one of whom can belch the alphabet.

At some later point she hopes to be rich enough to buy them all a house with better acoustics.

Her hobbies are binge drinking, randomly biting strangers and Scrabble.

She lives by the following principles: friendships over relationships, truth over comfort and freedom over love; and by working in a shop.

You can reach her at: Ladonohue@aol.com.