What Makes Things Special?

Appropriately enough my Gran is my happiest memory through my childhood.
Not any one memory in particular, she just made me feel happy, loved & special!

One of my earliest and happiest memories is standing on tiptoe by the side of the pram in our back garden, tickling my baby sister, who must have been about five months old. She was laughing as only a baby can, and it filled me with joy. I must have been three and a half.

Mum and dad couldn't afford to take us away on holiday until we were in our early teens.
They never owned a car in all their lives, so for dad's summer break they would buy us all weekly rail runabout tickets. We would spend days out at different seaside resorts. The whole day would be spent on the beach. It was the highlight of the year !

I know this sounds pathetic but I don't have any just a very difficult childhood- sadly its not good for everyone.

What made mine special was in the long holidays waking up to brilliant sunshine, hearing friends already playing out and rushing to get out to join them. Then all day having fun playing, chatting to the mum's sat out, taking babies for a walk in their coach built prams and as I got older, watching the boys play cricket and football. Blissful times and still friends with those I grew up with.

Me too suebailey1, but now I enjoy some of the things I missed growing up - watching the local children playing in the fields next to my house and hearing their laughter is especially healing. When we had all that snow a couple of years ago I watched them tobogganing down the hill and we even had a snowball fight, which left me crying with laughter (and very wet and very cold!)

I had quite a happy childhood but the one memory that stands out (at this present moment in time) is being on a country lane with my mum and picking blackberries - just wish I knew why that memory is jumping out!

Oh and another: we had a very, very big fish pond (or lake as the council called it lol) in our back garden and it had a small bridge over the middle. I vividly remember my Dad running around the garden and over the bridge whilst pushing the wheelbarrow - with me in it (with the inevitable, but fake, threat of toppling the barrow over the side of bridge whilst he 'fought to regain control of it)

I know this sounds pathetic but I don't have any just a very difficult childhood- sadly its not good for everyone.

Nothing that went well at school? A feeling of happiness when out with your friends and, say, fishing for sticklebacks?

One happy memory is sitting in front of a roaring coal fire in winter, learning to knit with my mum. I was six and had been given rainbow-coloured wool and needles for Christmas. I had two younger sisters and my new baby brother and mum always seemed to be busy doing other things, so those moments of her time stand out in my memory.

Mine is the same as posie's memories of my lovely paternal Grandmother.
All through my childhood my Mum kept me at arm's length. I didn't feel she or my father had any warmth or feelings for me. I was the eldest, they seemed a little, not much, warmer to my younger sister and brother. Anyway..just weeks before my Mum died she told me of my elder sister who had died at full term just a year before I was born. My parents had never spoken of her after her stillbirth. We, Mum and I, visited the baby's grave just a fortnight before she died. She had never been there before. My lovely Gran was brilliant, I would have loved her to have met my DD but sadly she died at 69.

During the war, my dad would sing a hymn to me as I fell asleep. I don't think I have ever again felt so safe, secure and well loved.

Anything that involved being out of the house. There was always a tribe of us. Conkers, frogspawn, making snow slides, jumping in iced- over puddles. making pea shooters out of thick stemmed cow parsley, hiding nests in tall dry grasses in the graveyard, kicking up autumn leaves, finding pheasant feathers, picking primroses ... that sort of thing. Bit of a tomboy.

What a lovely memory, anno.

Sitting on my little chair in front of the old fashioned built up grate in our old kitchen, drawing, and finding caves and pathways in the the hot coals. With my granny.

And oh so many more. Nasturtiums and Sweet Williams I used to pick from the back garden and put in jamjars, dolls of all kinds, Christmas pillowcases..... [sigh] and

I go back there in my mind these days.

My life at home was a bit bleak. I think my mother was depressed, looking back, after I was about five, things were fine until then but my father had an affair. It was never the same again. Great big house, four girls bringing themselves up, father never there. I took refuge in books. I lived in them all the time I was at home, as did my mother really. Happiness to me (apart from school) was going to the library armed with library tickets for all four of us, choosing just one each for my sisters, and using the other tickets for my escape. I can't get to sleep at night, no matter how late I get in, until I have read at least a chapter.

My first riding lesson when I was nine is something I will never forget. We'd moved around the Middle East for six years and it was my longed for dream to have a pony of my own when we returned to the UK but I knew it would be impossible because within two years we were off again.

Sparky was the chestnut pony belonging to a local farmer's daughter. Not exactly Champion the Wonder Horse but I'll never forget him.

Lots of happy memories, so I was very lucky although we weren't well off and never had a car.

My brother teaching me to ride my bike in the road.
Mum and I would cycle to her friend's farm each week. While the mums chatted I would play with mum's friend's boys( not always such fun, one put a toad down my back once) and I would collect the eggs. Each one would be wrapped carefully in newspaper and put into my bicycle basket for the ride home.

Reading through the posts, there are some lovely memories - I find myself smiling at your memories as I can imagine how lovely it must have been, it's strange isn't it how someone else's happy memory can make others smile

One bit I didn't smile at: the toad

I have enjoyed reading the memories in this thread - some very poignant.
One of my most treasured memories was standing at the piano with my mum playing 'Somewhere Over the Rainbow' and me accompanying her. I do not have a good singing voice but I sang with much joy and mum made me feel very special. We used to do this several evenings a week after school. When mum went into a care home one of the most emotional things for me was browsing through her sheet music.

My mother reading to me, my brother and sister (and the dog). Sitting on the floor, by my father's chair, in front of the fire and him stroking my hair. We were not a very emotionally expressive family but that gesture has stayed with me ever since.

Coming home from school on a winters day. Mum would either have a baking potato in the embers of the fire for me, or make toast at the fire using a toasting fork. It wasn't that we didn't have an oven, she just did it for the novelty of it.

The toad! Yes, I always longed for that boy to get his comeuppance!

The strange thing is, it seems that happy memories don't come from expensive things but more so from the simple pleasures in life - that is somehow very reassuring isn't it.