Bill Nighy

It's kind of what you need to know about America before you start.

And this is a short passage from it.

100 years ago, our great-great-grandparents were pushing America's frontier westward to California.

That's a quote.

So began the speech I wrote to deliver at my eighth grade graduation from the Arden School outside Sacramento.

The subject was our California heritage.

Developing a theme encouraged by my mother and grandfather, I continued, made rather more confident than I should have been by the fact that I was wearing a new dress, pale green organdy and my mother's crystal necklace.

It was in June 1948.

The pale green of the organdy dress was a colour that existed in the local landscape only for the few spring days when the rice first showed.

The crystal necklace was considered by my mother an effective way to counter the valley heat.

Such was the blinkering effect of the local dream time that it would be some years before I recognised that certain aspects of our California heritage did not add up, starting with, but by no means limited to, the fact that I had delivered it to an audience of children and parents who had, for the most part, arrived in California during the 1930s, refugees from the Dust Bowl.

It was after this realisation that I began trying to find the truth

quote point of california to locate some message in its history i picked up a book of revisionist studies on the subject but abandoned it on discovering that i was myself quoted twice

You will have perhaps realized by now, a good deal earlier than I myself realized, that this book represents an exploration into my own confusions about the place and the way in which I grew up.

Confusions as much about America as about California.

Misapprehensions and misunderstandings so much a part of who I became that I can still to this day confront them only obliquely.

That's the snippet.

And just see how you feel.

But Persevere, it's a significant book.

Thank you for listening.