What's Your Earliest Memory?

[plowter]

What's your earliest memory, the first thing you can remember?

My earliest memory is my brother undoing the catches on my pram so I fell out when my mam bumped the pram up the stairs. Ah, the smell of bandages brings back such happy memories.

[askyourgran]

Sitting on the cellar steps with my mum and baby sister when the air raid sirens were sounding.

[Euphemia]

War-time ration books.

[plowter]

askyourgran and Euphemia, what do you remember about those times?
Close your eyes and smell the memories. What images do you remember?

[DaisyNonna]

Remember running through a huge barrel and the cakewalk at Spanish City

[parkie]

I was born in 1944 and my younger brother 13 months later, and I remember my mother with one of us under each arm trying to lift us into a pram.
She had a hot water bottle in her hand to put into the pram to keep us warm, (though not too hot fortunately), and it burst, soaking all three of us. So I wasn't very old.
The other memory was when I was 18 months old. We lived in our grandparents' house and my mother's younger brother, who was a boy soldier, had pressed his uniform and left the iron in the hearth to cool off.
I grabbed it in both hands and remember being taken to hospital and having the burnt skin being cut off with scissors before having my hand bandaged.
From memory.............it hurt.

[Euphemia]

The fresh aroma of produce being sold on the vans on the country rounds. Since I lived on a farm there were always farmyard sounds, smells and activity. Birdsong. The noise of the carthorses shoes/harness, coming back from a day's ploughing and the cows being milked and pitchers filled with milk for all the locals.

[askyourgran]

My dad was in the Army in Malaya he was away for 3 years, my sister was born shortly after he'd gone, a bus came to pick up my mother at the end of the street to take her somewhere to have the baby. I was looked after by the next door neighbours for three weeks two unmarried sisters and their mother. It was blackout at night no lights and no-one knew where my mother had gone. She had been taken to Studley Royal a big House near Harrogate with several other women who were due at the same time. No-one talked about anything or where people had gone. I would have been 3 at the time and don't remember much about it.

[grasscarp]

In an Egyptian military hospital in a cot and two male staff stopping by to chat to me.

[Caran]

I was about 18 months and sitting in my pram, my nappy had come lose and I played with some little brown balls that fell out. Mother was horrified.

[DTCwordfan]

being in Scotland, aged 2, not long before my eldest sis was born, the reception a riot of colour with the tartan carpet running throughout - ideal for hopping on.

[grasscarp]

Euphemia , although I was post war baby must have still been rationing as I have my ration book somewhere.

[plowter]

That's interesting, parkdale and askyourgran.
I think we assume nowadays that history was always jolly.
We don't like to think about the bad things that happened.
Looking back, my granndad didn't talk about the war.
We never asked why.
Perhaps the modern generation, me included, doesn't realise how horrible war was.

[Euphemia]

Grasscarp, I too was a post-war baby, born at the beginning of 1945

[netibiza]

Apparently rationing ended in 1954. I remember ration books and I still have my Identity card from 1944.

[TheOtherHalf]

falling off the crossbar of my dads bike on cobbled streets.I still have the scar on my knee. You didnt bother about going to hospital in those days