What's your earliest memory?

[vernon]

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.

Define toddler. The age range is flexible.

 

[Aperitif]

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



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.

Bloody hell, I was playing cricket at Knebworth Park CC on the Saturday afternoon - having drunk about 6-7 G+Ts before the game.
Bloody festival goers buggering up the day for ordinary imbibers. It was the extreme pits at Knebworth.

 

[Hacienda71]

Having my stomach pumped at 18 months. A bit traumatic.

 

[Slim]

3 years old in a bus in Cyprus being told by my aunt to hide under the seat because we were going through a Turkish Cypriot village and they might shoot us.

The fact that the Turkish Cypriots were angry because people like her treated them as second class citizens just didn't occur to her.

 

[Mad Doug Biker]

Some researchers think it's not so much that memories aren't formed in children younger than 2 or 3, but that they are quickly overlaid with more important information and lost.

My memory of being in the pram was a bit like this in the sense that I learned something to keep for further reference, i.e. Not to throw away toys. Other memories were similar, and when I think about it now, I must surely have had to relearn certain things after the brain damage, so doing things twice whilst my brain must have been working overtime to recover, is that why I have so many memories? Were my earlier memories put into 'storage' as it were as I was no longer functioning 'properly' whilst I was having my episode?? Has anyone ever done a study on it??

I also remember things like sounds, some of them quite distressing at the time. Imagined later or genuine neurological symptoms at the time??

Telling children family tales and anecdotes helps to form what seem like direct memories, but probably aren't.

Whilst I have no doubt this happens, I still beleive that some memories are real as some of the things I remember would have been too personal, obscure and subjective to have been planted, and I have no doubt others will be similar, so to that end, I reckon there are bits of both going on.

There, solved.... NEXT!!

Some memory studies with young child subjects seemed slightly mean to me. In one such study the researchers asked children aged 5 or 6 if they recalled a trip they had made in a hot-air balloon when they were 2 or 3. The children didn't remember the trip, because in reality it had never happened. But when they were shown photoshopped pictures of their younger selves in a hot-air balloon they developed very elaborate and firmly held memories for the event. It's slightly worrying how easy it is to implant a convincing memory trace.

Yes that's just nasty!!

 

[ColinJ]

I had a memory of being taken out by a female neighbour in her car when I was 3 years old. She took me to a nursery school class and as we stopped outside, I pointed at a control knob on the dashboard and said "CHOKE". I remember her being gobsmacked and asking what I'd said, so I said it again.

I came to think that it was a false memory but I asked my mum about it 50 years later and she confirmed that it did happen. Apparently she had been ill and was having to look after my baby sister so the neighbour had volunteered to take me to the nursery. She had gone in to see my mum when she got back and told her that I had read the word "CHOKE" and she had been very surprised because I was so young. My mum confirmed that I could read before I went to school!

I had a similar shock when reading Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator to my stepdaughter when she was about that age. She was nodding off so I skipped a couple of pages towards the end of the chapter. She immediately opened her eyes, took the book out of my hands and turned back to the exact line that I had skipped from, pointed at it and read it out - "But if they're so fierce and dangerous," Charlie said, "why didn't they eat us up right away in the Space Hotel?"

 

[colly]

Being sick on the floor the day my younger sister was born. I was 4

Attention seeking even then ! Some things never alter.

I have lots of early memories my early years but have no reference as to when they happened. I can recall laying in bed on my side looking at the cowboys and indians wallpaper but I might have been 3 or I might have been 6. I remember, quite vividly, being behind the sofa of Janet the girl across the road doing what naughty girls and boys do and getting a ticking off from her mum. No idea how old we were though.
I remember a photo being taken of me, by my uncle, across the road from our house and looking at the photo which I still have I would be about 4.
So I'll say 4.

 

[ColinJ]

I remember, quite vividly, being behind the sofa of Janet the girl across the road doing what naughty girls and boys do and getting a ticking off from her mum.

Blimey - you have just given me a flashback (or should that be a flasherback? ) ...

I was walking across some fields not far from Kenilworth common, and I remember passing a girl and a couple of boys. The girl had her knickers round her knees and she looked at the boys and said "I've shown you mine, now you show me yours"!

We moved from our house next to those fields when I was 5, so I must have been 4 or 5 at the time.

All of those rolling fields are covered by housing estates now.

 

[MontyVeda]

sat in the back of dads car, being driven up the street on which i grew up... moved there in 1972, a new build semi and the road was still rubble, so i guess it can't have been too long after we'd moved in, so I'll have been aged 3 or 4 max. I have only a handful of memories up until 1976/7, from which point they're are in widescreen, technicolour, and with surround sound.

 

[Linford]

Being sat on a wooden kitchen stool in the middle of the river chelt behind my old house by my big sister and her mates who would have been about 11 then (more of a brook though in the summer). I would have been just 3 as we moved before my 4th birthday. I remember a lot of stuff from that old house, and things which happened there.

 

[Nigel-YZ1]

Getting separated from my mother an being lost in a shop doorway in Mexborough. Must have been about 2 or 3.
I remember my first day at primary school, being allocated a drawer, a blob of plasticine to put in it, and being sat there in front of the teacher.

 

[swee'pea99]

Being held up over the bath by the ankles while all the marbles I'd been quietly swallowing over in the corner dropped out one after another...clang, clang, clang....4? 5? something like that.

 

[swee'pea99]

Another just came back to me, must have been about the same age when I sat in the old-school chemists round the corner behind the weighing machine and, while my mum was presumably chatting, set about unwinding all the sellotape which had been wrapped round & round and round to hold the back on - successfully, in the end, because the back eventually fell off and hundreds of pennies flooded out all over me. Come to think of it, I must have been younger then - 3?

 

[Black Country Ste]

Watching my grandparents drive away from our maisonette when I was two. We lived two hundred yards away from their house!

 

[Mad Doug Biker]

I remember going on my first ever bouncy castle whilst on holiday in Hopeman aged 3.
I didn't know what to do, so just stood there watching what everyone else was doing, bless!