Your first memory

In my cot in Arbroath waiting on my brothers coming home from boarding school aged about 2 1/2

I still cannot fathom sending your 11 year old on their own on a train from Arbroath to Ipswich, but I guess my parents thought it a good idea at the time !

We lived with my grandparents in Clapham until I was around 3. I remember looking out of the bedroom window and seeing a tiger in the back garden. Of course, it must have been a cat but to me it's still a tiger.

Sitting on the pramseat of the big coach built pram and my mum getting cross because i wanted to get on off on off. I must have been just coming up to 3

I can remember being in my pram, looking up at a tree, and playing under the table and chairs. These memories were before we moved abroad when I was 2 and from then on I remember hundreds of early things. I'm the family oracle on what happened when!

First definite memory is the arrival of my sister when I was 2 and 9 months. I can remember the smell of her (pleasant, not poo) and her soft, dark curls. The next memory is a few months later when I fell off my granny's sofa and fractured my right elbow and had to go in a taxi to Kilmarnock for an x-ray.

Crawling around the sofa with a ball of wool tied to my ankle and the cat chasing it, I walked at 12 months so before that. not sure really of the scenario but well!!!!!!!

'.....babies are far more switched on than we give them credit for'.

I'm sure they are. I remember crawling across the hall floor towards the front door, which was open and sunny - and I know I wanted to get to the pole outside (which held up the porch) and pull myself up!

At my 3rd birthday party, being lifted up onto a table to sing a song to amuse the company of children and adults, I sang it but fluffed a line and cried [I remember feeling mortified that I had the words wrong!]All the other children and the adults too then did their own 'party pieces', songs poems etc and somebody then played on our piano.

Playing in the sand under the house (built on a slope so that end of it was up on stilts) next to my grandad's outdoor workshop, looking for ant lions or sand lions as we used to call them. I must have been taught this by my grandfather, I was between 3 and 4 years old. Here's what they are:

www.antlionpit.com/what.html

And the reason I know I remember this, is I took my mother back to that house (where she grew up) when she knew she didn't have long to live, and the memory was so strong, I walked around the house and straight to there and said what I was looking for.

I remember sitting in the tin bath in front of the fire and playing with the soap. I remember the smell too, it must have been Wrights Coal Tar.

An early one was being in the back living room of my parents house. I had picked up her lipstick and tried to apply it to myself. As I was doing so there was a window cleaner laughing at the mess I had made of my face. (Still cant get it on straight.) Probably 2or 3.

I have many intermittent early memories, the reason I think is that my dear mother died very suddenly when I was 2 years and 10 months.
My earliest memory is strangely, being lifted up by my feet having my nappy changed, my mother was chatting with someone in the room, I was lying on what seemed like a table. I have no idea how old I was but we were living at the time in the house where I was born. We left that house when I was one year old. I know this as I was looking at the lattice windows which were in this old house.
I think babies are far more switched on than we give them credit for.

Mine us much less edifying!! I clearly remember shouting out to my mother for what one might refer to as "lavatorial assistance" in German (my first language pre-school) - "Mutti komm' wisch mir's Po***chen ab" - so I think I can't have been more than 3!!!

Dancing at my mother`s wedding reception in the evening, with another bridesmaid, Elaine Booth. I was 3, she` was about 6, this was back in October 1946. We wore pale blue dresses with tiny flowers on, and matching little flat caps on our heads, tied on with ribbon, and carried matching muffs instead of flowers. My mother wore a proper wedding dress, but in pale blue, it was her second wedding, my father died before I was born.

Nursery school: bunny hops round the garden; lining up for elevenses when we were given a drink and a handful of raisins or grapenuts; playing hide and seek - I hid under the piano and accidentally sat on one of those toys where you hammer in the wooden 'nails' & had to be taken to the GP (no lasting damage, I still had two children!!) One of the other children gave me a BIG hug to make me feel better I would have been about three and a half I suppose.

Being woken when the doctor came into my bedroom by mistake on the night my twin brothers were born! I told my mother that I even saw the black bag he had brought the babies in!! I was nearly three and a half!

Finding myself alone in a corridor (actually a hallway) in a part of the house I didn't recognise, with the sound of silence ringing in my ears. I remember crying and my mum appearing to take me back to the kitchen. It was an old farm cottage which we left just before my fourth birthday. I think I had found myself near the 'front room' which was only used when the doctor visited!

Sitting on the edge of a cobbled street and the few cars seeming very big. I was two when we left there and the memory is still vivid .

Sitting in the big pram in the cold and semi-dark, with the hood up, and the smell of fresh bread.

My mother told me that I must have been just over one, she would put the bread behind me under a thing at the back that propped me up, and when she got home I would have somehow reached behind myself, gouged tiny pieces out of it and eaten them! So it must have been over the winter months, as I was born in October.

Around 2 I was wandering into our kitchen and banged my head badly on the corner of the kitchen table. I still remember it as if it was yesterday. We left that home when I was 3 but a few years ago a friend from work was living in the exact style of flat just along from where we used to live. I walked into her home and knew exactly where every room was before she had shown me around.

Aka that sounds like a scene from a film. A touching memory.

Waking up Christmas morning to find a large doll sitting in a red pushchair next to my bed. It was a month before my third birthday.

Standing on a hill above the River Clyde with my father looking up at the new house we were going to live in. He was carrying my sister and it was winter, so I must have just been coming up for three.

I was watching my baby brother being bathed in a bowl in front of the fire,when a mouse ran out of the meter cupboard.My Mum screamed and water slopped over the hearth rug.
I was 3.

My first memory is a lovely one - it is walking across a wet lawn and stopping to wonder at the dew caught in a nasturtium. I was probably about 3. It is as vivid today as when it happened.