What is your favourite childhood memory?

I remember the first time I went to the ice rink. We were visiting my gran in Liverpool. She and mum took me to the rink and hired me some skates. I took to it really quickly probably because I was a whizz on roller skates. I grew to love ice skating more than anything.

Getting my first proper bike. Aged 9.

Seeing my grandad walk past our front room window, lovely big smile, and holding up a box of maltesers, which he knew were my favourite chocolates!

Feeding our milkman’s big, grey horse with a carrot outside my Nan’s house, where we lived. This was in London, not the countryside!

It was my 04th birthday and my Dad's friend arrived, normally I got a hug but he stopped me and asked if I'd mind giving his friend a hug instead...I looked at him because he was alone and he started to unbutton his coat, a little head popped out.
A beautiful little Border Collie puppy that was my much loved and still missed companion for many years.

My favourite memory is of our Christmases. The real tree would be put up and decorated on Christmas Eve. Lovely pine smell together with tangerines and my Dads cigars. Mum did all the cooking and I would spend the day reading all my annuals.

Mine is similar Poppyred. When I was too old to believe in Santa Claus, my mother asked me to help her to do the Christmas shopping. My two younger sisters still believed. We went into our local big town by bus. The shops were full of Christmas goodies and packed with people. I helped my mum choose the gifts for my sisters. We bought baubles and wrapping paper. When we were finished it was dark and we rode home again on the bus which was full, with people standing in the aisle. It was lovely, I felt very grown up although I was probably only about 10.

Thank you for sharing your special memories. I have enjoyed reading them. They were certainly different times back in the day 😊

Being taken by my dad with my two sisters to see the Christmas Grotto in the Co-Op department store in Belfast.And the sheer excitement of meeting Santa and picking my present from his giant bag.

I remember my mum picking me up from Reception class aged 4 and being taken to the Beach for a Picnic tea with a lot of other children. Homemade teacakes with dad's homegrown tomatoes and a slice of grans cake. Followed by a bottle of pop and a splash in a very cold sea.
Trudging home smelling of salt and sand. and looking back at a Solway sunset.

A really nice memory I have is playing in my grandad's large greenhouse when I was very small. He had a solid fuel stove in there with pipes that ran through the beds and a rocking chair next to it. I had completely forgotten this until I got my own greenhouse about 15 years ago and the wonderful smell from my tomato plants brought the memories flooding back.

I have lots of memories, I had a wonderful childhood.
Christmas evening at my Grandparents house was amazing.
My dad was one of 8... I was no 13 out of 15 grandchildren with the oldest cousin only being 3 years younger than my dad.
All my Aunties and uncles, cousins at diffent ages with us younger ones was great fun, my older cousins would bring their Records us all dancing in one of the sitting rooms.
Then my Nan sitting by the tree handed us all gifts, she wasn't the most affectionate woman but she did loved us.
After the gifts we all would troop off to the pub, after they kicked us out, back to Nan's for cold meat sandwiches and pickled onions that were almost black!

Eventually, wrap up warm and walk home.
I'm still fortunate that all us cousins still keep in touch, sadly we have lost 4 but those happy days will be always there.

Holding my Dad’s hand and walking to school. I was the youngest of 9 and had an ‘older’ Dad .😘

The times I spent sitting with my grandmother sewing or reading to her.

My happiest childhood memories were created by my Grandmother :
She was a deeply religious woman , who was so loving , kind and funny .

I think that my parents treated her extremely badly and that her life was difficult .

I have friends , who had unloving parents and they have emotional problems .
I'm not claiming to be perfect , but I wonder how I would have turned out without her .

I'm really grateful to her for her love .

Sunday 's after dinner ,we'd all gather round the piano and Dad or Granny would play all the songs we knew and we would all sing .We always finished with a selection from The Last Night of the Proms .We had new neighbours once who asked mum why they hadn't been invited to the party and she laughed and told them it wasn't a party just a Sunday night tradition.
I miss them all there are only two of us left

We moved from our grans house in inner city Liverpool in the early 1960s. We seemed to spend hours in a massive removal van all nine of us.
When the doors opened we had arrived in the countryside it was summer I was five at the time. I had never seen a tree or farmland it was surrounding our big new house.
It was the beginning of my adventurous childhood and my love of nature.

Thank you all for your wonderful stories.

When my mum went away to visit her sisters and my Dad and I relaxed and ate bacon and eggs every morning and just relaxed with no nagging and complaining!

inishowen my maternal gran lived a few hundred yards from the Silverblades ice rink I went once but wasn't a fan!

I have a lot really but the one that springs to mind just now is this. We lived on the coast and every summer families would arrive from London and the Midlands to holiday here. So every year I had loads of new friends for the summer months.
One family came for years and always rented a tiny cottage, 5 kids plus parents.

There were 3 girls and 2 younger boys. I was friendly with the 2 older girls. We have reconnected thanks to Facebook and it’s been great sharing memories of 50 years ago. Swimming, mucking around, swapping clothes, going to the fair, meeting boys etc. we have met up a couple of times now and those years in between have just disappeared.

going into a wood with my parents aged about 6 and finding in a tree trunk hollow the silver goblets and plates that my mum had previously put there, .all made by herself out of silver paper. Then my dad, who was a member of the Magic Circle, producing chocolate from the tree.. a lovely memory of how much they cared for us children

My parents were always more or less skint (at least when I was a child) so from very early ages we knew that it was no use asking for anything - (sweets, toys, ice creams etc.) when we were out at the shops - often a major weekend exercise with my father to do most of the carrying (no car then.).

I longed painfully for a pet, any pet! but knew it was no use asking. Our usual shopping trip took us through an arcade where there was a pet shop, where for a while there were a lot of baby tortoises in the window. (Yes, I know they’re not allowed now.)

I used to stop and look longingly, but never asked.,
But one day my father said, ‘Do you really want a tortoise?’
Oh joy!
Timmy cost 4/6d and the shopkeeper just put him in a brown paper bag!
I kept him for several years, until he died during hibernation during the very cold winter of (?) 1963. 😰

I was a ballet-mad child, When I was 11, the great ballerina Alicia Markova was due to dance inLiverpool, our nearest big city. I wrote to the stage manager and asked if I could present a bouquet. I just meant send a bouquet, but when my mother and I arrived at the theatre (rather at the last minute because the bus hadn’t turned up) I found I was expected to go onstage with the the rather pathetic bunch of carnations we had bought. (My mother had been horrified at the price of florists’ flowers.)

I was taken backstage - the thrill - and watched Markova dance The Dying Swan from the wings. Then I had to cross the vast stage to give her the flowers, with my best curtsey. She kissed me, and I was in seventh heaven. I wasn’t at all nervous, just excited.