For the literary critic, autobiographies of childhood are most appealing. This is because they are most obviously reliant on an act of imagination in the narration of memory; and the protagonist is more obviously concerned with himself or herself than with other people and their stories. No doubt also, autobiographies of childhood appeal, as Walter de la Mare wrote of W. H. Hudson's childhood memories, ‘to the child in us, the lost or forsaken youth’. Memories of childhood in post-Romantic cultures are valued in themselves; they refer to personal beginnings which are to some extent shared. Not everybody is a novelist, doctor, historian, chemist or mother, but all adults were once children. Early childhood memories erupt into the consciousness as different from other forms of memory: as Chris Wallace-Crabbe puts it, they ‘glow’. Childhoods are also beguiling because they often seem so unlikely. For instance the young Ruth Park going fishing with a goat in the boat: ‘sitting dreamily in the stern, chewing the salty seaweed, she [Senta, the goat] appeared to pass into the regulation fisherman's trance, bemused by sea shimmer and the sweet clucking of water against the boat’; or Robert Raymond, the son of an amateur beekeeper, rescuing a koala which had become stuck in a bucket of honey; or Graham Little's father impersonating Lou Costello at a charity cricket match with Bud Abbott.