My name is Alan, Alan Stark.

But, until I was eight, I believed that, like all other children, I had a mother. When I
cried, there was a woman who held me so gently in her arms and rocked me that my tears stopped flowing.

I never lay in bed without a woman coming to kiss me, and when the December wind stuck the snow against the
whitewashed windows, she took my feet in her two hands and stayed to warm them, singing to me a song. The tune
and some of the words of which I can still remember in my memory.

When I was herding our cow along the grassy paths or in the weeds, and I was surprised by a storm of rain, she
would run to meet me and force me to shelter carefully under her woolen petticoat, brought back by her on my
head and on my shoulders.

Finally, when I had a quarrel with one of my comrades, she made me tell of my sorrows, and almost always she
found good words to console me or prove me right.

By all this and many other things, by the way she spoke to me, by the way she looked at me, by her caresses, by the
gentleness she showed in her scolding, I believed that she was my mother.

This is how I learned that she was only my nanny.