What we remember in our childhood and what we are told afterwards often
become inextricably confused in our minds, and after the bureau and Aunt
Lizzie, my memory is a blank for some years. I can't even tell you when
it was first decided that I was to go on the stage, but I expect it was
when I was born, for in those days theatrical folk did not imagine that
their children _could_ do anything but follow their parents' profession.
I must depend now on hearsay for certain facts. The first fact is my
birth, which should, perhaps, have been mentioned before anything else.
To speak by the certificate, I was born on the 27th of February, 1848,
at Coventry. Many years afterwards, when people were kind enough to
think that the house in which I was born deserved to be discovered,
there was a dispute as to which house in Market Street could claim me.
The dispute was left unsettled in rather a curious way. On one side of
the narrow street a haberdasher's shop bore the inscription, "Birthplace
of Ellen Terry." On the other, an eating-house declared itself to be
"the original birthplace"! I have never been able to arbitrate in the
matter, my statement that my mother had always said that the house was
"on the right-hand side, coming from the market-place," being apparently
of no use.
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