What is your earliest memory?

First vivid memory was at 4 and a half years of age when receiving a whack across the back with a big stick from one of the so called Sisters -of -Mercy when washing the dormitory floor.
I had missed a bit with trying to see out of a lazy eye. I had a patch over the good one.
SO many beatings and being thrown in a tiny cupboard for hours for no reason at all.
All this happened way back in the 1930s.
I was finally re-united with my family when I was around 6 and a half in 1937.
Full story in the book I wrote about the first twenty years of my life.

Age two crawling under my GPs large bed to retrieve a clockwork crocodile toy.

May walk for you ?

I have two early memories but I'm not sure which came first. One is of playing with my imaginary friend, Pixie. He went away on holiday and I helped him pack his case. He never did come back.
The second is of the night my Mum went into hospital to give birth to my sister. I was taken to the home of an old lady friend of my parents, who I called Auntie Grace. She had a chair with wooden arms; the back went down flat to make a bed and I slept there overnight. I would have been nearly 3 years old.

Redhead56

May walk for you ?

Many thanks Redhead.

I definitely remember being in an isolation hospital with scarlet fever in 1945. Looking at mum and dad through glass doors because they weren't allowed onto the ward. I couldn't bring books and toys home. I was 5.

I was about 3 and a half and was admitted into hospital in Birmingham with suspected polio, rife at the time. My sister was also admitted with appendicitis. My poor mum coped well as our dad was away on business, but he returned quickly.

I was kept from my family for 10 days and no one told me why. When my dad collected me as I had fortunately not got the illness, I clung to him and developed a bad stammer. I had a speech impediment for about 6 or 7 years from the shock of it all. I had speech training and subsequently did not developed a Brummie accent. Later in life I became a public speaker and teacher.

My father was killed 6 months before I was born, my earliest memory is being a bridesmaid when my mother married again, I was 3years and 4 months. I can remember the photos being taken, and later at the reception in the church hall, playing chase with the other younger bridesmaid, Elaine Booth.

Hiding under the kitchen table as our house was packed full of neighbours watching the Coronation on our tiny TV.
They were so noisy and excited. Everyone had brought a dining chair and there was no space to move. I was scared.

I was 23 months old, ready to go out in my coat and shoes (Startright, tan) when I fell downstairs and hit my forehead on the red tiled hall floor. Mum panicked at the egg on my head and scooped me up and ran across to my aunt’s parents across the road.

I remember being bathed and coming downstairs in my dressing gown whilst The Archers was being broadcast on the wireless. There were vegetable characters embroidered on the dressing gown, about which my lovely Dad made up stories. I must have been about three.

Aged two, I was in hospital for the repair of an umbilical hernia. No visitors were allowed but there were big windows through which I gazed for hours. Something I still do for much of the time nowadays.......!

Our cat had a litter of kittens and although my mum had made her a bed out of a box with blankets in the kitchen she carried them one by one upstairs and put them under my cot,obviously feeling it was quieter and more secure there. Mum moved them back to the box but our cat was having none of it and I remember standing in my cot seeing her creeping in my room with a kitten in her mouth.

Standing in amongst the red currant bushes which were way over my head, picking the red berries and eating them, whilst grandad picked them for a raspberry and red currant tart - yum - had with home made cream.

Lying in bed listening to the rattling night trams going from the coal mine to the tip, don’t know age because it was every night .

One memory when I was a toddler and before my brother was born, of mum sitting at the kitchen table peeling potatoes. She had a pony tail. Another memory when I was 4 1/2, going into mum and dad’s bedroom and seeing a pile of snow in the carpet beneath the window. It was January 1958 and I was told I had a beautiful new baby sister.

I have lots of vague snapshots stored away. One is just a pair of hands. I used to wonder if it was the midwife's hands from my birth but now I think they were my mother's hands so might have been from when she was feeding me or changing me.

I have many recollections from my earliest childhood up to when we moved away from London when I was 3 and a half. I had a toy trumpet of blue and silver plastic which I loved. It must have made an awful racket. Bits kept breaking off it but the noisy bit survived for a long time. I remember standing on the gate post trumpeting away.

I also remember going to Mrs Rice next door for tea. She took me on her lap because my DM was carrying my baby sister. I had just learned to do up buttons and quietly undid all the buttons on her blouse while she was talking to Mummy. This caused quite a fuss although I remember she had loads of layers underneath (vest and petticoat probably, as would have been usual then)

Bombs, explosions, sirens. I was 2 when WW2 started.

I remember playing in the snow in the garden, it must have been December 1947/January 1948. I had on a pale blue siren suit with swan's down round the hood, I would have been about 19 months old. My Dad made a snowman that looked like a goblin and was quite scary.
When I was grown up I asked where the idea came from, he said the snowman was modelled on a Cornish pixie he had bought as a souvenir.