On my 7th birthday, we moved continents. I remember sulking the day before because I wanted to wear a skirt on the plane, and my mother insisted I wore jeans. I didn't like my jeans. They were flared, with embroidered flowers on them, and they were too dark a shade of blue. I had a lovely long purple skirt that I wanted to wear. I still remember my indignation, that horrible sense of powerlessness. I slammed the bathroom door when my mother told me that my purple skirt was packed, and I could not wear it. My mother slapped me for slamming the door. My face stung. I was furious. I really did not want to wear those jeans.

It was a night flight, I remember that. We were leaving my father. It was all quite sudden, but my mother tried hard to paint it as an adventure, whilst biting the skin around her thumbs so much they started to bleed. She had packed seven suitcases. She was bringing nothing else. My father was going to drive us to the airport, but he changed his mind. My mother called a taxi. I remember this. Then, apparently, my father left the room, went down to the cellar, loaded his rifle and came back up the stairs, where he dragged me off the sofa by my hair and told my mother as she sat with my brother that if she tried to leave him he would shoot me. I don't remember this at all. It is like a film stopped just after my mother called a cab, and then the film starts again at the airport. I know something bad happened, but as far as my memory is concerned, it is no more than white noise.

When the film restarts, my father is at the airport too. He had cancelled the taxi, after my mother had made him believe that we were just going for a holiday, that we would be back, and had driven us to the airport. I doubt my mother had much choice but to let him. I remember very clearly the moment we left him, as we were going through customs; my mother crying and biting her thumbs, her face contorted, looking backwards at him, and my father standing, slumped, his back like a bracket, looking at her and at us and sobriety landing on him.

He wasn't crying. He looked lost and alone and very afraid.

It was nineteen years before I saw my father again, but at the time I really did believe we were just going on holiday.

I remember this, and I remember looking at my jeans and wishing that my mother had let me wear my floaty purple skirt.