I saw an interview yesterday with a British bloke who is 112 years old. His earliest memory was from WW1 and was a Zeppelin attack on his town in the UK. This got me thinking of my oldest memories…
I lived an adventurous life as a baby, fighting off cannibals in the jungles of PNG before jet-setting half away around the world for an extended stay in Germany. I don’t remember any of those days, and the earliest memories I do have come from just before I entered Kindergarten, back in about 1976.
I have two very specific memories from that era. The first is of brushing my teeth at daycare. I would have been 4 years old, and while I have dim memories of the daycare itself (playing with Duplo, listening to stories being read to us and sleeping on cots) I have a strangely vivid memory of a lesson on how to brush our teeth where we all copied what the instructor (a dental nurse?) did in front of us.
The next vivid memory – also I suspect from around that time – was of a heavy metal cylinder falling onto my head and cutting me. It left a scar that remains to this day! Bernard was hoisting it up a tree for an inscrutable child-reason and I was standing directly underneath ‘helping’ when the string broke and it fell directly onto me. I recall crying and lots of blood! I bet mum almost panicked!
There are a couple of other trauma-related memories but they are incomplete and not as clear as the above: losing a toenail due to a fall, losing two teeth in one day, and cutting myself everywhere after a fall into a rose hedge 🙂
A year on and I have a very vivid memory from kindergarten about learning to write! We had books containing sentences that were missing words and we had to write using slates and chalk the missing words. As the book progressed we were writing more and more of the sentence until it was just pictures that we had to describe. I expect it’s all done using computers now, and that even in the day we may have found the slates old-fashioned.
Around 1977/8 my memories start becoming much more abundant and I can easily recall specific events at primary school or during the summers of those years. Maybe I’ve lost the correct order and I’ve certainly lost fine detail, but it’s reassuring to know my memories go back over 40 years ago now.
Over 40 years… where did all that time go?
Yes the string broke… ?
I think your toenail loss may have been due to a large stone you (or I) dropped on it. :0
And don’t forget the neighbor shooting you in the face with a BB gun! D:
The illustrations in this post are fantastic.
Speaking of learning to brush your teeth, remember in infants school when they’d ask everyone to bring in their toothbrush, line us up at the bubblers and make sure we were familiar with the “circles, scrubs and flicks” method? An adult (visiting dentist?) would demonstrate using a giant set of teeth and matching brush. It happened once or maybe twice a year, and they’d provide us each with a Paddle Pop stick bearing a few dollops of super-strong, foul-tasting paste. Forgetting your toothbrush on the day was a lose-win proposition, as you’d get publicly roused on…then given a brand-newie, to the envy of your classmates. We students all jostling to get at the bubblers, rinsing and spitting together in a row – the boys enthusiastically exaggerating the spitting part – isn’t a pleasant image, in hindsight.
Or was it just my large Catholic school that did this?