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Until the age of eight I lived in Glenalmond, happily ignorant of the rest of the world. My life divides along several fault lines -- the death of my mother when I was two and a half, going to an English university, falling in love with a Canadian -- but leaving this valley that I knew tree by tree, stone by stone, remains in some ways the most irrevocable of these faults, something done to me for mysterious adult reasons that can never be undone or made whole again.

As I walk up Front Avenue and along the Main Road I notice in the well-kept grounds an unfamiliar presence: a Coke can under a bush, a candy wrapper caught in the grass. When I was growing up there was no litter -- what would cause it? We had no soft drinks, sweets were doled out one by one, there were no leaflets, no junk mail. People unwrapped parcels carefully, smoothing out the paper to use again, coiling the string. I tut-tut under my breath.

I continue up the hill towards my first home: Bell's Cottage. I lived here with my father, who taught at the public school, and a succession of women: my mother, Little Aunt, my stepmother.In my memory it has a grim aura, a grey harled house with a grey door. Today, however, geraniums blossom in the windows and swallows twitter back and forth beneath the eaves. I am gazing longingly at my bedroom window, not quite daring to look in, when the front door opens and a woman in shorts appears. Embarrassed to be caught gaping, I continue on my way toward the golf course.

The last time I came here, a dozen years ago, was to see the bench presented by the old boys in memory of my father. He spent many happy hours hitting a ball round these fairways. The bench, a simple wooden one with a brass plaque, overlooked the first fairway. A single bench stands not far from where I remember and I head toward it, hopefully. But it belongs to some clerk, the plaque announces, who served the school for a meager decade. I am irked.

I leave the golf course and walk the mile to the main school. At the back of the chapel, surrounded by a dense, dark hedge, lies a small graveyard. I find several unexpected inhabitants: my godfather, a flamboyant master whom I last saw at the bar of the Murray Park Hotel in Crieff; the college electrician whose surname, Proudfoot, gave us children considerable satisfaction; the science master who refused to let me come to the school to study science and to whom I probably owe my present occupation. My father, once again, is missing.

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