Childhood memories - do you have any?

I have many childhood memories. I am trying to get my 87 year old Mum to write down her very vivid memories of her childhood, the war etc so we can pass her memories down to all the numerous great grandchildren. I think it’s just as important as all the sepia photos we have, priceless.

Some of these posts read like an Enid Blyton book, my sister tends to remember her childhood the same way even though we lived in the same house.
All this talk of cars and holdays and doting grandparents, I can not recall one occasion when my mother's parents actually spoke to me as an individual.

Only bad ones from 2 years onwards.

Remember being bombed out 3 times and once the firemen rescuing my dolls. Mum then sat putting them together with elastoplast! Obviously hospitals and nurses were part of my play. Later when living out in the country with GPs the days spent roaming the downs picking mushrooms and no fears about being abducted or molested. Also remember the American soldiers coming to the village and giving a party for all the village kids. Not so nice was the long 2.5 mile walk to school - sometimes got a ride part way home with a farmer and Dobbin going my way.

I remember back to being in a cot and pram.... nothing worth writing down save one incident when my older brother fell out of a car. He was seated on lap of mother in front passenger seat and fiddled with door handle. It was a door with the hinge to left so he dangled then fell onto a grass verge. Some travellers camping nearby came to help. I was two and a half.

I remember the birth of my little sister. I was 2 years and 9 months. I remember the mop of brown curls (which are now silver) and the sweet smell of mother's milk and baby powder. My next sister was born two years later and I can't remember much about her birth, probably because I had so many other interests at the age of four and a half!

I once read that we tend to repress memories of unhappy experiences, and only remember the happy ones. Usually.
My earliest one, I must have been 2-3, was sitting on my uncle's back while he swam across an indoor swimming pool.
Which probably wouldn't be allowed now.
Lots more, I was 4 when WW2 started, but won't bore you!

I could write two volumes... and not all with "rose tinted glasses", but in a positive upbeat way...which would make a good read....even though I say so myself!....I think I would entitle it "The Good, the Bad and the Downright Ugly" !

Lots of memories, I seem to spend more time looking back these days, maybe because I'm the only one left from my original family. I feel strangely nostalgic for things I didn't enjoy such as being dragged to mass on Sundays, religion was very much part of my life, I remember rites of passage such as my First Communion. I find it quite comforting to live fairly near the part of Surrey where I was brought up. I really rember the 1960s, but a bit too young to fully engage what was going on then still at school, but I think it was such a ground breaking decade in many ways. I have a lot of early childhood memories of going on holiday to stay with my maternal grandparents who retired to the Sussex coast. I particularly remember my father moaning about bucket and spade holidays in England when we went there, he had an enduring hatred of sand having spent the war years in North Africa, he really wanted to be staying with his sister, my aunt and her family who lived in Montpellier, but we couldn't afford that at the time so it was Sussex in my early years until such a time when my mother went back to work and we had less financial constraints. When I embarked on genealogy a decade or so ago when my mum was still alive and I was able get her to drag up some memories from the recesses of her mind that she had forgotten, I regretted that I hadn't had more conversations with grandparents and other relatives when they were still around, particularly the ones from abroad because I can't piece together those family histories in the way I can with the English born and bred people who are in my family tree.

I remember my childhood clearly and I even have second hand memories of the war even though I was barely 2 when it ended. We lived in London and when I was 4 there were severe earthquakes somewhere and talk of people being 'evacuated' and I had an immediate picture of an oxygen shaped cylinder deep in the ground with men in grey suits and tin hats trying to dig down to it before it exploded and people in the houses round it being evacuated.

DH has no memories at all before about 5 or 6 and even then they are vague. DD is even worse, her mind wipes itself clean every 5 years. She has no memory of events that happened when she was a child that were talked of regularly until she left home in her early 20s. If I refer to them now she just looks at me blankly.

Whatever you remember to write it down for yourself in later life and for your descendants. Every life is interesting and what you describe is a piece of history. Your Children/GC/GGC may not be interested now but they may be in the future. I regret not asking my grandparents more when I had the chance.

like my own granny did I tell my grandchildren stories about "the olden days" and they love to hear them .Its important to me they hear not just my memories but the tales told by my mum and her mum.Sadly Dad didn't have a happy childhood and lost his mother when he was 12 ,he had no idea about family history.Since the internet I've got his tree back to 1740...he'd have been thrilled

I could write a book, but funnily enough nothing earlier than about seven, before that it is all a misty blank

Childhood. A few happy memories, a few bad memories and the majority of it a blank. Currently trying to unblock the channels to remember more. No relatives survive who can help. Feel very lonely and alone now and that is a feeling that has been with me most of my life. All brothers and sisters paired up to play leaving me on my own. Was not going to let my children be the same. They have many many friends and we rarely see them as we rarely saw family they think that is the norm.

Paddy-ann
You should write that book

I AM writing a book about my memories from about eleven,when my travelling adventures began, before then I have lovely childhood memories, but they arent anything to do with my book, I wont be a JK Rowlings, but I am hoping a few will be interested about my travels the past fifty years.

I've got some very happy memories of a house I lived in for a while and a few years ago I was asked to write about the house as it sadly no longer exists. It's only now that I've got a little more time to plan it out and put my recollections down It's my New Year resolution to get on with it!!! We moved when I was about 8 when life became more 'mixed' shall we say especially when my mother became ill but there were happy times too and being an only child I could retreat to my bedroom whenever things got too much.

I was born in 1944 and my earliest memory is standing on a lap and holding on to an Army uniform (father or uncle) and pulling on the blackout curtain and I remember my mother screaming "get that child away from the window" so bombing must still have ben going on. The next one came back to me last week after a Points West item on TV which showed Stroud Subscription Rooms. I made my first public appearance there aged 3 as Little Bo Beep complete with bonnet, crook and a toy lamb. I got second prize. How on earth Mum managed to get the materials for the costume beats me but I remember her being very happy. She was even happier when I won the school Eisteddfod prizes for Victoria sponge and Cornish Pasty when I was 12.

I remember being the child my mother hated, the one she picked on and never had a nice to word to say to say to or about me.
I could fill a book with all the horrible things that happened to me, but I do remember nice times at my paternal grandparents.

I remember a few events or situations, but when I try to pin down the details they've gone.
Can you remember accurate details of even something that happened last week? It's not an age thing, I think. Just that memory is painted with a broad brush, not minute detail. It's why you should be very wary of getting involved in a lawsuit where witnesses are involved. They will pretend to remember detail, but they'll be making it up. Not maliciously. But they'll be working out what MUST have happened according to their perception of an incident, not remembering what DID happen.

My happiest childhood memories involve my maternal grandparents. I practically lived with them during school holidays and spent most weekends at their house playing in our Wendy house in the garden, baking, going for walks and collecting horse manure in an old barrow for my granddads leeks.

Not many good ones. A strange upbringing!

I had a really happy childhood despite the fact that my Dad kept leaving jobs. (He hated being told what to do, by people who weren’t as “competent as him!) I went to six different primary schools all over the country. I didn’t really notice the hardships my Mum went through until in my teens.(We once lived in a caravan in the middle of a muddy farm yard for a year)
We didn’t have a t.v until I was twelve but we read books, listened to the radio and made things. In the Summer we lived in the fields, making dens and in the Winter we wrapped up and did the same, Like others I can remember it so vividly!
My husband had a miserable childhood due to an overbearing Father and remembers very little.

I have lots of memories right back to when I was two. My sister didn't, nor does my husband. I don't know whether this has to do with the fact that they both are the youngest in their families, or whether it is because DH and my little sister weren't particularly happy growing up.

I agree writing down memories of earlier generations is a good idea.

I am wrtiting my memoirs for the grandchildren - I have so many happy childhood memories. Trouble is, there's so much I want to say I get a bit bogged down!