RootsChat.Com
General => The Common Room => Topic started by: elliot on Thursday 12 December 24 17:59 GMT (UK)
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I have just heard that the excellent BBC radio documentary series SHORT CUTS is now being scrapped.
There are 250 beautiful episodes in the BBC Sounds archive
ROOTS
FIRST WORDS
Short Cuts - Series 37 - Roots - BBC Sounds
https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m001vsdf
The Infant Brain Remembers | Psychology Today United Kingdom
https://www.psychologytoday.com/gb/blog/the-nurture-revolution/202307/the-infant-brain-remembers?msockid=3817408b2099689a17bc54a821e069fb
https://scientificorigin.com/at-what-age-do-babies-start-remembering-things
When Do Children Start Making Long-Term Memories? | Scientific American
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As we are human beings and not robots, then that is a question that has no finite answer. We're all different, aren't we?
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I can certainly remember being in my pram!
Romilly ;D
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In my 70s, I am surprise at the vivid and rich quality of the recent returning infant memories or trauma of witnessing familial abuse.
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At a family gathering when I was in my early 20s, I accurately described the wall and window that I could see from my cot in my room in India. We left India before my 2nd birthday.
Regards
Chas
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My earliest memory was being in a cot or play pen when my parents were having a loud argument in their bedroom. (Must have been the noise upsetting me for me to remember it :o )
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I can remember the house we lived in when I was two. And the ones we lived in when I was three and four. As you can see, we moved quite a lot when I was small.
I have a theory that our very early memories are linked to an event we may have experienced as traumatic (even though it may not have been to our parents!). My daughter's first memory is from shortly before we moved house when she was 4 (long distance), and she displayed unmistakable signs of trauma when we moved again just two years later (this time just round the corner!)
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I have two recollections of being in my pram. One was outside our front door, but the other was half a mile away, passing where my grandmother would take me for a walk every Thursday until I started school. I think she stopped to talk to somebody, and what I remember is seeing men working on a row of half-built houses. A novel experience! I still think about that if I go that way.
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My earliest memories are from four years old. Nothing before that.
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According to both articles and others I have read previously, memories that last into adulthood only occur from the age of three, due to the development of the brain. Apparently any memories that we may think we have before that are due to such things as parents or other people talking about things that happened, or from perhaps looking at photos. We then go on to think they're actually our memories.
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There is another school of thought (no pun intended), which likens our memories to a computer file. Every time you access a file, it is changed. It is date stamped with the new access time. It is as if it is a brand-new file. This is why the police want to interview witnesses as soon as possible after an event - before they have time to think about what they have seen, and mentally edit their memory.
Memory is also a self-defence safety system - things that cause us distress or mental harm are forgotten. You can remember that you were in pain, but you cannot remember the pain itself. Contra wise, good or happy memories can be imprinted from birth. Babies might not remember what their mother looks like, but from the earliest days remember her smell.
Regards
Chas
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I remember being pushed by my mother in my pram. I also remember my second birthday, I was given a life sized baby doll. I was sitting beside the Morrison shelter in the dining room when the doll was put in my lap.
I also remember hearing the air raid siren and being bundled into the Morrison shelter with my grandmother, I could have been no more than three because I was only just three when the war ended.
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I Dare say there are exceptions amongst the billion of people not studied. I have a memory of a large colourful ball rolling down a slightly sloping garden path towards a small wooden gate. We only lived in this house for a year after I was born and the house we moved to had no such garden path or gate. Maybe this memory is linked to brain development - mine that is. At 8 months I
could apparently string a few words together in short sentences such as "somebody' walking." I don't have any recollection of anything I could apparently say though and the above was all I can remember my mother telling me about. I don't think scientists fully understand how brains work.
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I can remember being in a pram with my brother with a well in the centre where we could put our feet in as we grew, not for long as we had a doub,e push chair, I also think i remember black out curtains, I can remember my first day's at school, remember the teacher and 1 lad, Ernest Herring, why I should remember him I don't know
LM
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Aged 2, I remember moving house, and the car we left in (my grandfather's, as we didn't have one), and later the same year my mother bringing home my baby brother from maternity hospital.
First few weeks at school, a little girl asking me why I wrote/drew with my left hand - I didn't, she was sitting opposite me!
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A little bit older, aged not quite six, I unconsciously memorised a telephone number in French, but I did not learn any French until I was 11. My sister aged 18 was spending two months in Paris staying with a family and studying the language. My family telephoned her, only a few times, which involved going through an operator in Paris and giving the number in French. I listened.
Decades later she was speaking about her time there and the house where she stayed, then I said "And the phone number was Wagram trente-quatre soixante dix-sept". My family was stunned!
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Like many others I recall being in a dark blue pram, on a cold wet dark evening, facing my mother, who was pushing it, but there was a dark blue lined with cream shiny apron thing protecting me from the rain, which was pouring down. She was wet-haired, I was nice and dry. I could see a few street lights, far below, from the raised road we were on. Otherwise it was dark, and she was out of breath pushing me up a steep, bumpy road.
She got rid of that particular pram ( Tan -Sad) she identified it as, shortly after my second birthday, passing it on to her sister, who had just given birth to my eldest cousin, but it was before Christmas that year. That's the earliest I can firmly pin.
TY
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Molly C
I M very impressed by that .
In the early 1960's my father learnt German using an audio method
my sisters + 1 aged about 3 5 and under 7 Learnt
"Um de ecker"
&
Klaus das is nicht viktic ( spelling)
2 sentences that stood out for us
Meaning
"round the corner "
The second was in answer to the question " is she pretty ?" + Was said indignantly
"Klaus that isn't important " !
My french penfriend+ I met when I was eleven . I'd stay with her family for a month every other year til I was 19 & Stayed in touch
Their phone number had a 3 digit sequence that was the same as my home number.
20 years later on an unplanned trip to Paris I managed to dig the whole number from memory
(not sure how many digits )
But in English not french
I've had my current mobile phone for at least 8 years and still don't know the number !
Memory is indeed variable
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My father spent his early years in Angola and was a fluent speaker of Umbundu. When he was about twelve, he was sent to the United States to attend school and, since he had no one to converse with in Umbundu, he gradually lost his ability to speak the language. However, even fifty or sixty years later, out of the blue, he would come out with words or phrases from his childhood. I remember once we were strolling around Walden Pond and saw some water striders and out popped the Umbundu word for water strider.
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I remember standing at the top of the garden in a brown velvet dress. No more than 3 as have a photograph of myself in that dress. Doesn't fit me now :D
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The photograph used as my avatar was taken before I reached school-age. I am sure that it was taken whilst we were lodgers at a local farm.
My National Registration Identity card was dated 16 June 1942 and there are some additional stickers giving registered addresses, the last one date 3 July 1945 when we took up residence in the bungalow where we lived for many years. I wish I knew how to separate the stickers without damaging them, so that I can trace the timescale of my early years.
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My very earliest memory is of walking the streets of Tamworth with my mother and youngest sister and my brother in his pram. I was five.
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My very earliest memory is of walking the streets of Tamworth with my mother and youngest sister and my brother in his pram. I was five.
Not sure that you would recognise Tamworth today - it has changed so much, even since we moved here 20 years ago.
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My very earliest memory is of walking the streets of Tamworth with my mother and youngest sister and my brother in his pram. I was five.
Not sure that you would recognise Tamworth today - it has changed so much, even since we moved here 20 years ago.
We didn't live in Tamworth for very long. Our small house in Main Street (or road) is no longer there.
Mum moved to the Continent where we stayed and I returned to Hertfordshire in the 1980ies.
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A very interesting article on this subject from the BBC:
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20190516-why-you-cannot-trust-your-earliest-childhood-memories
It seems we must have many prodigies amongst us Rootschatters. ;)
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I think that we have two types of memory - snapshot and video.
My memory of the window in my room is definitely snapshot - I have no idea what I did before or after, but that single image alone was imprinted on my memory.
Whereas, when I was about 6, I heard and saw an argument between our neighbours. I remember clearly, he was telling his wife that she wasn't watering the lawn properly. She countered with, he was too stingy to buy a lawn sprinkler. He maintained that sprinklers didn't do the job properly. She asked why then did all the neighbours have one, and they were the only ones not to. Were they all stupid, and he was the only smart one in the estate? Shouldn't he be going round and telling all the others how to do it properly? He was wearing shorts and sandals. He had white hair and a white hairy chest, arms and back - I thought he looked like a polar bear. She was wearing one of those multicoloured print, shapeless, housedresses.
I was wearing green shorts with 4 pockets and a green button-up shirt in a sort of green tartan print and black leather buckled sandals.
A little incident of no consequence, but I have remembered it in detail this last 66 years.
Regards
Chas
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I remember GETTING to the pub last night.
Zaph
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Special mention to an older pal of mine who would have been the Big Eight 0 tomorrow. He said once that his earliest memory is the winter of early 1947 but it is hazy. If born 18 Dec 1944, then it is possible that he can just about remember early 1947 as he was just over 2 years old. I think it would have been almost impossible for him to remember anything from 1945 or the first half of 1946.
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I think that we have two types of memory - snapshot and video.
My memory of the window in my room is definitely snapshot - I have no idea what I did before or after, but that single image alone was imprinted on my memory.
Whereas, when I was about 6, I heard and saw an argument between our neighbours. I remember clearly, he was telling his wife that she wasn't watering the lawn properly. She countered with, he was too stingy to buy a lawn sprinkler. He maintained that sprinklers didn't do the job properly. She asked why then did all the neighbours have one, and they were the only ones not to. Were they all stupid, and he was the only smart one in the estate? Shouldn't he be going round and telling all the others how to do it properly? He was wearing shorts and sandals. He had white hair and a white hairy chest, arms and back - I thought he looked like a polar bear. She was wearing one of those multicoloured print, shapeless, housedresses.
I was wearing green shorts with 4 pockets and a green button-up shirt in a sort of green tartan print and black leather buckled sandals.
A little incident of no consequence, but I have remembered it in detail this last 66 years.
Regards
Chas
Very interesting.
Going back to when I was five, Mum pushing a Silver Cross with my brother inside of it, I remember so well looking at the embroidered sheet on the pram and being mesmerized by the beauty of the colours and the intricate stitching and on both sides of Main street in Tamworth, feeling happy with the tall trees on either side. When we reached our destination which was my grandmother's house, climbing on her bed and being told off... Just as if it was yesterday!!
I am 77.
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I am fifteen months older than my brother and I can recall memories of times before he was born and they were not traumatic. On this particular day I was playing with older local twin girls and they suggested we play "Hide and Seek". I was told to face the wall, close my eyes and count to 100. I remember thinking that I only knew how to count to ten so I'd have to count to 10 a few times. After a while I walked around the garden looking for them, then climbed up the front door steps to the open front door where my mother and grandma were sitting with a new baby. "Go and play dear" said my mother - and I obeyed. We left that house on my third birthday.
I can recall getting off a bus (can't recall the journey) and walking along the lefthand side of a road that had no pavement but a ditch where every few yards there were simple home made wooden bridges over the ditch that led to garden paths. My mother and I crossed the bridge of the last house; She didn't knock on the door of the house but walked along the side of the house until we came to a another but smaller wooden house. Inside was a buxom lady wearing a blue dress and a tiny man seated in the corner. My mother went straight over to the man and kissed him on the cheek. My next memory is of visiting the same house but with my mother's mother. I held her hand as we walked to the same house where the same action of kissing the little man in the corner was enacted.
My next memory is of standing in a railway station with my mother. She bent down and instructed me not to stand over the line as it was dangerous. I didn't walk over the line but was more interested in what was happening behind us. A very large black horse with white feet walked down the slope pulling a laden cart. As an adult I have waited on the same platform which is in Manchester - I have no recollection of the journey from Hull. My next memory is of sleeping in a strange bed next to my cousin Avrille. I went in search of my mother and got told that she was in the bath with our new baby.
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Memories form very early but then they are lost or perhaps buried under the pile of newer memories. My mother told me a little story about my childhood memory, but I don't recall any of the events myself.
When I was about 20 months old, my mother took me to England to visit my grandparents. We travelled by ship and, to save money, my mother shared a cabin with another woman who was making a similar trip with her young daughter. This child had a set of wooden farm animals that we both played with. Many months later, back in the United States, out of the blue, I asked my mother, "Why did the cow have a broken leg?" She was flummoxed by the question until she realized I was referring to the wooden cow which did have one leg broken off. So, there's a memory that was formed before the age of two and survived for at least a few months before being lost.
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I remember standing by my crib in my sunny bedroom - no idea how young I was, but a vivid “snapshot”.
A more detailed memory is from when I was three, at my brother’s kindergarten year end party, so I know quite accurately how old I was. I got hit in the forehead with one of those suction caps from a plastic gun some boy was brandishing. That was traumatic enough for me to remember. Before starting school I was at some friend’s place with my brother and he and the other two were in their bathing suits. I sat down on the edge of the wading pool and went in head over heels backward, fully clothed. I must have been pretty young as I still had braids, which were chopped off by the time I was five. I also remember wearing navy blue pedal pushers, all the rage around 1960. I was soaking wet, and walked home about five houses away. Another trauma!
A happier memory was my father bringing home a mini hula hoop for me, probably the late 1950’s. It made my older brothers envious, a bonus!
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I took my foster daughter to Paris when she was 9
At one point she was turning round blinking ..I asked what she was doing and she replied I'm taking mind photos so they will always be in my mind .
It didn't work 40 yearsager she hardly remembers the trip let alone the images and we didn't take many real photos
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In that case my aforementioned pal who would have been 80 today may just about have remembered something from the first half of 1946. His brother was born May 1946, so whether he would remember that at almost a year and a half is certainly moderately possible. He'd deffo be too young to remember Aug 1945 at 8 months old and the worldwide news about the nuclear bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.