I Am Born (Chapters 1–3)

Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show. To begin my life with the beginning of my life, I record that I was born (as I have been informed and believe) on a Friday, at twelve o'clock at night. It was remarked that the clock began to strike, and I began to cry, simultaneously.

I was a posthumous child. My father's eyes had closed upon the light of this world six months, when mine opened on it. On the afternoon of the day I was born, my mother sat by the fire at our house, the Rookery, at Blunderstone in Suffolk, timid and sad, when a strange lady came walking up the garden and pressed her face to the window. It was my father's aunt, Miss Betsey Trotwood, a formidable personage who had been unhappily married and had renounced the male sex; and she had come because she had decided that the baby was to be a girl, and that she would be its godmother and bring her up properly. "Your sister, Betsey Trotwood," she said. My mother began to cry. Miss Betsey asked her why she called the house a rookery when there were no rooks; my mother said my father had believed there were rooks. "David all over," said Miss Betsey. "Calls a house a rookery when there's not a rook near it, and takes the birds on trust, because he sees the nests!" When the doctor, Mr. Chillip, a meek little man, came down at last and announced that it was a boy, my aunt took her bonnet by the strings, like a sling, aimed a blow at his head with it, put it on bent, walked out, and never came back.

The first objects that assume a distinct presence before me, as I look far back into the blank of my infancy, are my mother with her pretty hair and youthful shape, and Peggotty, with no shape at all, and eyes so dark that they seemed to darken their whole neighbourhood in her face, and cheeks and arms so hard and red that I wondered the birds didn't peck her in preference to apples. Peggotty was our servant, and she loved me. On winter evenings she read to me about crocodiles, and I asked her whether she had ever been married, and she said no, and hugged me so hard that two buttons flew off the back of her gown.

Then a gentleman with beautiful black hair and whiskers began to walk home from church with us: Mr. Murdstone. I did not like him. One day Peggotty asked me whether I would like to go with her to Yarmouth for a fortnight to stay with her brother; and I went, gladly.

Mr. Peggotty lived on the beach at Yarmouth in an old black barge turned upside down and made into a house, with a door and windows and a chimney, the most delightful dwelling I had ever seen. With him lived his nephew Ham, a huge, sheepish young fellow; a little girl, his niece, Em'ly, with blue eyes and a necklace of blue beads, who said she would like to be a lady; and Mrs. Gummidge, the widow of his partner, who sat by the fire and complained, and said she was "a lone lorn creetur'" and everything went contrary with her. Mr. Peggotty was a fisherman, and the kindest man in the world; and the children he had taken in were orphans whose fathers had been drowned. I fell in love with little Em'ly at once, and we walked on the beach and picked up shells, and I told her I adored her.

When I came home, the door opened, and there was a strange servant. Peggotty took me into the kitchen and told me: my mother had married Mr. Murdstone. "Master Davy, you have got a Pa!"