In a recent blog I wrote about my memories of being five years old. Some people find being able to remember in detail that far back amazing, so I thought I would go back a bit further.
It is dark, and I am carried out into a starkly black and white snow covered landscape. In the lamplight I see close to me the details of twigs coated in white frost or snow. I am handed down by the starchy one into the arms of the one who smells right.
The doors close and the car moves off. Lying on my back I can see when we move from the dark into a street in which there are pools of light from each shop. There are canopies in front of many of them with things stacked under them. The light is less vivid, and less all enveloping than that of the shopping streets we now know. The colours are muted. We move into dimmer light again, and the memory ends.
I asked my mother about this memory, and there is only one occasion that fits: I was six days old and being taken home from the maternity home.
There was hard, settled, frozen snow the February I was born.
My father's vehicle in those days was a fish lorry, but grandad lent him his car to take home his first grandchild, so this is the only time before I was a sitting up child that I travelled in a car. I must have travelled on my mother's lap many times in the lorry (children did in those days) but the angle of my view in this memory is completely wrong for that.
The logical route from the Croft Baker Maternity Home at the top end of Mill Road to our home in Prince's Road would have been down Trinity Road/Beacon Avenue past the cemetery and the Girls' Grammar School and on to Clee Road, but my memory shows Mill Road to St. Peter's Avenue with all its shops. Apparently not all of the obvious route was metalled road in those days, and - although my memory includes nothing of this and neither of my parents could recall either - we may have stopped to introduce me to Grandad, Nothernan, Uncle Steve and Auntie Clare who lived at the bottom end of Mill Road.
I also find the concentration of light and the muted colours of my memories interesting. I have since learned that babies are supposed only to see in monochrome at first. Most of my early memories are in glorious technicolor, and here they are not truly monochrome but more like an interim stage on one of those fades on a film from black and white to colour.
This is the earliest thing I can remember. I have several distinct memories of my maternal grandfather which must date from my first year as grandad died when I was fourteen months old.
I am in my pram and he is pushing me down Isaac's Hill on the far side from Princes' Road. As we turn to cross the road I can see the boards round the site where in a very few years time the Memorial Hall will be built.
I am in my pram again, and we are in the Dolphin Gardens to see the clock. My cousins Shelagh, Jackie and Richard, but not I think Patsy, are with us.
My memory gives no details of the clock beyond the fact that it was a clock although in my mind I have substituted a Hickory Dickory Dock clock from the Cleethorpes seafront illuminations. I am told that it was the Emmett Clock which on tour had reached Cleethorpes four years after its first appearance at the Festival of Britain. Unlike other memories here, this one is reinforced by a photograph.
I am in Nan's arms and she has carried me to the corner of Princes' Road to see the clock on the Electricity Showroom.
I have this memory from a toddling point of view as well, and I believe this little excursion was oft repeated. the clock is still there and the art deco building is now grade 2 listed.
I am in Nan's arms and she is holding the roses on the tall bushes in the garden for me to smell.
This too is oft repeated and reinforced by a photograph.
The house in Princes' Road - now in a sorry state of disrepair and with an overgrown hedge replacing Nan's roses.
I am toddling up Isaac's Hill beside Nan on the way to the library. I hold up my arms to be carried and she tells me that she can't carry me any more now she is an old lady of sixty-one.
Nan was sixty years and five days older than I, which means that any memories of being carried by her date to my first year and maybe a few months into my second.
I am with my cousins playing on a board floor in one room (a bedroom, I think) Jackie is trying hard with Patsy and me and entertaining us with a glove puppet monkey. Shelagh is reading a book. Richard is playing there too. The grown-ups are in another room on the other side of the front door. Everyone is sad and quiet.
I think that the location must be my uncle's and aunt's house (a plotlands timber building) on a field by the Thames with views (which I don't remember) of Hampton Court, and the occasion must be just before or after my grandfather's funeral.
My other memories of babyhood are mainly of scents and feelings. I can still remember the feeling of terry-towelling between my legs and the smell of urine mingled with Johnson's Baby Powder as the nappy is removed - a strange smell for nostalgia.
Talking about Johnson's Baby Powder reminds me of another repeated early memory: I am lying on my back on a flannelette sheet in big basket scales looking up at ranks of brown varnished shelves stacked with the goods of a chemist's shop and surrounded by a plethora of fascinating smells.
The shop I am pretty certain must be Broadburn’s at the top of St. Peter's Avenue, although my more conscious memories are of the expanded and modernised shop over the last fifty years.
By this time I am very much a walking talking baby, so I'll move on from babyhood to toddlerdom in a later blog.
