What's your earliest memory?

[Mad Doug Biker]

Yep, indeed, I can remember several early things, which is curious as there is a gap of possibly a year when I had brain damage at 18 months old. Looking at some of the literature, I shouldn't remember anything at all, but I do, very much!!

Even then, I have a memory of being in a hospital car park as we went to visit someone and me thinking that I was going back into hospital again, so clearly my memory wasn't totally wiped out during that period!

There is a definite pre and post Brain Damage set of memories though and I guess the carpark was possibly my first 'post' memory.

 

[biggs682]

playing in the river and the Elephant Feild around Rockwell Green at about 5yrs

 

[Aperitif]

Aged three, falling down the cellar in our pub

'The Dunn Inn' - that explains your penchant for La vie misérable. It has been light and bitter all the way since!

 

[Saluki]

Seeing pink flowers and a nice lady who smelled nice. My mother said that there were pink flowers over my playpen thing outside the house when we lived in Singapore. The lady who smelled nice would have been Lucy, the Singaporian lady who was assigned to our house. She said that I would have been about 2 because Lucy got married and was replaced by an older lady who smelled of onions. Or so I was told.
I have a memory of playing in a sandpit with other children and being hit in the face by a kid with a plastic spade. Mother said that would have been a toddlers/pre school place on base. The little sod with the spade managed to cut my face open.

 

[gbb]

My first day at school clinging onto my mums leg and screaming because I didn't want her to leave me there.

not quite the same, but i clearly remember being upset at school as a 5 year old, probably missed mum...and being consoled by a teacher who was squatting down next to me, by a fireplace.

 

[speccy1]

Being pushed around the garden in a wheelbarrow by my dad, I loved it, must have been about 3

 

[Aperitif]

Hello Mark,
Before age 5 - gawd...with a Capital G.
I was Davy Crocket, every day,on the front lawns of the flat that my parents had a property - soon enough walking past those properties, those green lawns, aged 5,(1960) towards Newnham Infants School.
Seemingly, every time I walked past the verdant squares, my tin globe would spilit asunder, and I would return to our three bedroom council house, crying to my Mum, who would fix the thing together again and send me on my way.
When I got to six. I was well into blackjack, roulette - allsorts.
Happy New Year.

 

[vernon]

I have doubts about many early memories. Certainly a lot my recollections of my early years were at variance with my parent's recollections of the events. There's quite a lot of literature that points at a lot of infant memories have been constructed and assimilated from others' recollections and repackaged and regurgitated as facts.

Here's a snippet of an article:

What's your earliest accurate memory? Chances are, it occurred after your third birthday, and until recently, scientists assumed that this was because children do not form accurate memories until the ages of three or four. But a new study from New Zealand suggests that children can correctly recall experiences from when they were two years old.

The general lack of memories before the age of three, dubbed childhood amnesia, has always had exceptions. An 1898 survey of earliest memories even found that 13 percent of the reported memories came from those early years. However, these recollections may not be genuine, but fabricated, actually coming from a different event, or reconstructed from stories told by adults ("remember that time Baby nodded off during dinner and fell face-first into her food?"). The doubt cast on young memories can disqualify some testimony from being used in court trials-but these early remembrances may in fact be true.

The rest of the article is here

Random things will trigger my memories of past events but I wonder how many of my early memories were 'planted' and not 'germinated'.

 

[ScotiaLass]

I was about 2 ½ ...and was walking around my granddads rose garden as he chatted to his next door neighbour.
It was summer, and very warm. I remember the smell of all the roses and calling to my grandpa to 'come and smell the pretty flowers'.
My mum showed me a photo taken at the time and I told her about that conversation - she was amazed!

 

[Mad Doug Biker]

Vernon, a lot of my early memories were of such obscure, varied and ordinary things, I have very few memories of big events or of something where someone else could have (sensibly) 'planted' a memory.

I would be curious to know if the brain damage impaired my memory after a certain time period or somehow improved/protected it as my brain rewired itself, as I have quite a few memories, especially from 2/3 onwards (but some from before, obviously)

 

[vernon]

[QUOTE 2854396, member: 1314"]I remember sucking on a (right) nipple.[/quote]
Making you a right tit?

 

[Mark Grant]

I'm sure I remember sleeping in my sisters bed because my mum was in hospital having my younger brother. I'd have been a little over 2.
I am equally sure I remember breast feeding as a toddler.

 

[byegad]

I got up this morning... ...I think!

Seriously, under two, in a pram trying to feed a dog my ice cream and getting told off by mam and grandma. Also about the same age, in a pushchair feeling lost at Whitby. I have the photograph taken at this time in an old album, I must have been all of 19 or 20 months. After that lots of memories.

My maternal grandmother had similar very early memories.

 

[alans]

I remember going to a picnic with my dad & coming back with my mum.

 

[vernon]

Sometimes one can doubt one's own memories....

Here's my recollection of the Led Zepplin gig at Knebworth on 4th August 1979 deposited at this web site

I've visited your web site and it served to trigger many happy memories of the event.
I was still a university student at the time at Leeds University but had arranged to go to the gig with pals from Darlington. We duly caught a train to Stevenage from Darlington the day before. I remember having our rucksacks packed with beer and very little else apart from a couple of salad sandwiches made by my mate's mum.

The train was packed with folk travelling down for the gig and we managed to drink most of the beer hat we'd packed on the train . Our first mission on getting off at Stevenage was restocking with ale and I was gobsmacked to see the procession of supermarket trolleys laden with cases of alcohol making a beeline for the festival site. At every major obstacle e.g. fence off dual carriageways, there would be a mountain of empty trolleys. As the obstacles became more difficult to get past with trolleys the mountains of trolleys got higher. I thought that the entrance to the site would be the final impassible barrier but no, there were trollies inside the site too!

I was taken aback by the size and extent of the camp site and the area in front of the stage. What was amazing is that we managed to meet up with folk that we'd arrange to rendezvous with amongst the 100,000+ people that were there. Figures between 170,000 and 250,000 were bandied about in the ensuing weeks but that's another story. Some serious drinking disposed of the night before the gig and most of the daylight hours before the gig.

Ironically the draw for me was Fairport Convention and most of the supporting bill was great. The biggest mis-match was Chas and Dave and lots of people caught up with some sleep during their set. The day of the gig was scorching and one of my pals fell asleep using his rucksack as a pillow. He managed to get a tan on one side of his face. The most bizarre event of the weekend was when I went to the 'drop box' toilets and heard a large splash as I was using one of them. Looking down through the drop I saw a bloke doing the breast stroke in the cess pool. He was shortly joined by a couple of others. I finished making my contribution to the pool and went round the back of the drops to see a crowd wearing Tadcaster Turd Tossers t-shirts egging some of their members to jump in. My mind boggled.

The day was perfect, the music great. I was converted to Led Zeppelin by their set and I experienced awe and wonder in the dark as they played. A life-long Led Zep pal who was with us didn't have a great experience. Having being rendered unconscious by copious amounts of Pernod, he woke up during the final song and asked "Have they just come on?" I look back on our cruelty with a degree of shame. I can't remember why we didn't wake him up.
Knebworth is still the most memorable major musical event of my life. I doubt that it will ever be equalled.

In the midst of that recollection is a reference to the Tadcaster Turd Tossers. For several years after the event I thought that I had imagined them and their activities. After all, no-one would dive into a cess pit and swim in it, would they?

I was wrong. I mentioned my doubtful recollection to some fellow attendees several years later and they confirmed that I had not imagined the bizarre event. I still gag when the memory resurfaces.