I've always been fascinated by how memory works. Part of this has been reinforced recently by living through my mother's mental decline, and also by my occasional sifting through the big box of old photos I rescued when we sold her house.
The photos themselves can become a little misleading, since sometimes I can remember seeing a photo before, and am no longer sure whether I can remember the actual event depicted. This may also have something to do with having a strong impression that my early childhood was all in monochrome!
How far back can we really remember? They say that between ages 2½ and 3½ is when we start to put together coherent memories - it probably depends on how spectacular one's early years were. I have some photos here of a weekend I spent with my parents at the seaside at Borth-y-Gest during the Summer when I was 2. There are pictures of me playing with my toys, and I can remember some of these toys from having known them in my later childhood, but I don't remember being there. I don't even remember that my dad almost drowned us all by taking us out in a rowing boat when there was a gale warning, which must have been fairly memorable.
I am sure there must be bits of real memories in the early mixture, but the first definite event I can remember and put a date on was shortly after my 3rd birthday. I went to stay for a few days at my Uncle Ernie's house, across the river in the Wirral, because my mother was in hospital giving birth to my sister, and unfortunately (always having been a klutz) I fell off the swing in Ernie's garden and broke my left leg. I can't remember the swing or any of the trauma, but I have very vivid memories of two days spent in Birkenhead General Hospital; I remember the strangely-coloured lights they had on at night in the ward, and I remember very clearly playing in my cot with a Dinky Toys refuse truck which Ernie brought me by way of apology.
Just like this one, in fact:
I also have pretty clear memories of travelling with my mother by bus back to the hospital however-many weeks later to get my plaster cast removed.
One thing that doesn't necessarily attach itself to old remembered images is how I felt about what was going on. However, during the recent annual festival of Gorging on Chocolate which has replaced the religious themes of Easter, I was reminded of The Incident of the Easter Chick Cake, and this may be a very early sample of my feelings about events.
This must have been my 4th Easter, so I would be 3-and-a-bit. My mother came in with some groceries, and she handed me a small paper bag, which contained a simple little novelty cake she had bought at the baker's. It was a very plain likeness of a small Easter Chick, not much bigger than a real live one, I guess, made of two balls of sponge cake, covered with yellow icing, with currants for eyes and a little beak of folded orange marzipan. It must have been pretty crude, really, but I loved it, and no-one had ever bought me a cake before. I spent some of the afternoon staring at it, being its friend; at teatime it was served up on a little plate, and I ate it.
I was heart-broken. Inconsolable. It hadn't been all that wonderful to eat, and I now knew for a fact that I would much rather have kept the cake as a friend. My mother was actually quite worried, and the following day she quietly went out and brought me another little bag. Yes - that's right; she had gone back to Mr Osborne the Baker (in South Street) and they had one Chick Cake left. I can still just about remember how wildly happy I was - all of a sudden life contained the possibility that something you had lost could be replaced. I had maybe never thought of that before. It probably ruined me for life, in fact...
This time, I decided, I was going to keep my cake safe, forever - you may have some concerns that this might not have gone very well. What actually happened was that the replacement cake was served up on the same plate, at teatime on the day of its arrival, and I happily scoffed it without hesitation and without any subsequent qualms. It seems that, once I had explored and enjoyed the personal tragedy of having eaten and lost the first one, I was ready to move on to more orthodox gluttony. I have never looked back.
I find this interesting. We must put together a whole life-set of values and feelings based on personal experiences; I'm sure mine started a long time before the cake, but this is the first one I can identify.
And you know what? Both the Chick Cake and the Dinky refuse truck are remembered in full colour. Hmmm.
I had one of those Dinky Dust bin trucks as a child , it was the spitting image of the one that emptied our bins , the dustbin men used to empty our bin into an aluminium (?) one heft it onto their shoulder and then tip it into the wagon . Of course they bin in those days only really had ashes and the old tin can , no fast food wrappers and plastic .
ReplyDeleteI can't understand how we generate so much plastic packaging waste now - this isn't just hygiene - someone who is good friends with the government is making a fortune out of this!
DeleteThat old bin lorry - a nice clean specimen would be worth about £500 now!
I find this installment of psychoanalysis interesting too. I wonder if any of your early memories are false in that you imagine a memory to go along with the B&W photo? You and Twain may have much in common including your storytelling and wit.
ReplyDeleteThat's a good point - it's not a straightforward yes or no. Two examples:
Delete(1) the photos from the Borth-y-Gest trip are well known to me - they've been in the family albums for years. The fact that I know that the landlady's name was Mrs Heppins and she used to check the stair carpet to see if the guests were bringing in sand on their shoes is nothing I knew about at the time - these are details that exist in the spoken history. So some of that particular story was handed down.
(2) There is a photo in the old box which I didn't think I'd seen before. I recognise the setting as the street that ran up the side of my grandmother's house, and the style of the photo indicates that my mother's elder sister took it with her little box camera during the War. In the picture is an elderly lady with a scruffy-looking spaniel. I have no idea why, but I know for a fact that this is Mrs Stott, who was a neighbour, and the dog was called Paddy. My mum and her sisters used to take Paddy for walks on quiet nights in the blackout. That much is family folklore - how I identified Mrs Stott is a mystery - only explanation is that my mother could have showed me the photo within the last 8 or 9 years, failing which my grandmother might have shown it to me 60 years ago. Either way, I can't remember seeing it before. I don't know what Mrs Stott looked like, but I know that is her in the picture. At this point the memory almost becomes a collective thing!
If I have anything in common with Twain (which is unlikely!) it may be that we both came from cultures which thrived on old stories, in which people kept alive the memory of their heritage by means of a spoken tradition, almost as a deliberate strategy to hang on to who they were.
Both of you use a nom de plume too!
DeleteThat's very true. Not the same one, though.
DeleteYour childhood mis-remembering's ring so true. I know I was hit with wooded spoons and hair brushes (I almost certainly deserved it) only because I've been told about it so often. However, the only time I remember being struck, slapped across the face for cutting off my mum when she was on the phone talking to someone, my mum can't remember it. Memory is soooooo selective.
ReplyDeleteWhen it comes to perilous aquatic adventures, it's likely you weren't even aware - the adults would've tried to reassure or distract you at the time if at all disconcerted. As an adult I once went dinghy sailing with my girlfriend, an experienced sailor and surprisingly now my wife. When we got back she berated me for the number of times I had come so close to overturning; I hadn't even realized, perhaps ignorance is sometimes bliss - but very risky!
Hi Rob - ignorance is not very handy as an excuse in court, either! I'm confident that my parents must have fought like cats throughout the rowing boat incident - melodrama was never far away in our family, so they would have made the most of it; whatever, I don't remember it, so it must have been pretty routine.
DeleteI visited a bus museum a while ago, at Brooklands. Not exactly my thing, but they had a bus such as I frequented in my youth, complete with cigarette stabbers. I sat and rose and the sensation of reaching for the familiar grab rail as of old was uncanny.
ReplyDeleteExcellent. I believe that you are absolutely spot-on - the instinctive things that we do to preserve our balance, keep our feet, are not schooled by what our friends think, or what we have practised at finishing school(!) - they are just natural, and doing natural things is often a great way to find ourselves.
DeleteLong ago I lived in an apartment in Marchmont, Edinburgh, and years later, by total coincidence, a work colleague moved into the same apartment (being younger, he was a bit behind me on the housing ladder!). I went to visit him, and while I was there I made use of the toilet which opened off the porch. As I went in, my hand instinctively reached up behind the door for the pull-switch for the light - maybe 12 years after the last time I was there!
I seem to remember a TV documentary many years ago which looked at children and memory, and which I think suggested that kids can have memories going back to their first year of life, but once they reach a certain age ( I think it was 6 or 7 ) those memories fade, and memory then only goes back to about the age of 3. This seemed to be some sort of side-effect of brain development.
ReplyDeleteI have no idea if this is still good science, or even if I have misremembered it... I always thought it was interesting, though.
I think that's a good summary of what happens. Some of the best coverage of this material I heard was about the only useful thing that ever came out of all those damned management courses my former employer used to offset their tax liability - courses on management of change covered a lot of interesting stuff on where people get their beliefs from.
DeleteThe theory was that our main personality is established by about 3 as you say, and then our brain gets busy and formulates our core values by the age of about 7, under the influence of family, school, church, piano teachers...
After that, the general pattern is that we only challenge what we were taught if and when we meet with some personal issue or emotional challenge. In fact, it may be that "good" social behaviour traditionally involves avoiding such change and revolution. I recall that the Catholic Church made a point of getting the message across before the kids started senior school.
Interesting post and in relation to your last coment, you weren't allowed to become a monk in medieval England until you were seven years old as it was a recognised point of development then and now according to your course now. My earliest memories, about three, I think, seem to involve pain, doing a handstand on concrete and waving at my mum, resulting in a trip to hospital and some weird lights and my mother pulling my fingernails off , one by one while telling me it wasn't going to hurt each time! I had a skin desease that was taking my skin off my hands and partially delaminating my fingernails, which were hanging on but catching and causing me pain, so from a point of affection, although rather painful!
ReplyDeleteBest Iain
Thanks for this Iain - the fingernail story is wild - I would have signed up for anything several times during that. Waving during a handstand is inadvisable - very similar to my falling-off-the-swing adventure in Ernie's garden, when my hat (blue beret!!) blew off and I let go of the rope to catch it.
DeleteI have very few early memories. As you say, disentangling genuine early memories from things we were later told is difficult.I have a very vivid visual memory of sleep athletics when I was about 8 or 9, jumping from bed to bed in my sleep, and that clearly can't be a real memory but what I was told! I do still have that Dinky dustcart, though, in my box of old Corgi/Dinky vehicles from my childhood, one of the few collections I still have surviving from the Great Clearout of my toys by my parents after I left home (without consulting me - I gather parents often feel that children's toys still belong to the parents and not the child) and which still feels like a huge betrayal!
ReplyDeleteFunny you should mention that! When I was at uni, my mother gave all my Dinky Toys to a local charity's annual jumble sale. I had some 1930s Dinky military vehicles, which would certainly have been worth a fortune later on, so ouch!
DeleteHowever:
(1) the reason they would have been worth a fortune is because of rarity since everyone's mother gave them away (without asking).
(2) the reason I had them in the first place is because I had some much older cousins, and THEIR mother passed them on to me when I was little (without asking them!).
Let's not get started on where old toy soldiers come from (or go to).
That's a good point - although my favourite toys were actually ones I was bought for Xmas and birthdays, generally. These days I'd at least have a decent record of them using a digital camera. All I have now is rather faint memories (time for the violins!). Ah well.
Delete