Day to Day happenings in my life

Childhood Memories

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Day 3121--June 11, 2024

Prompt: Childhood Joys
Do you think childhood is the most enjoyable time of life or are we reading too much into it? What joys do you remember from your own childhood?

Remembering childhood is like trying to capture fog. It’s hard to grasp on to memory because what is actually true? I could ask my brothers about their memories of times when we growing up together and their memories would be so different from mine.

When I have a memory I need to visualise the house I was living in it at the time. By doing that it gives me a ballpark figure of my age at he time. My first memories are in the house we lived in from birth to being seven.

I can walk through that house in my mind’s eye but the memories are simply wisps.

I am being perched on the top of the sideboard whilst my mother is standing on the table all because she saw a mouse!

I’m crying in my bed because of a pain in my head. (my first migraine?)

I’m sitting on steps in the garden staring at a spider catching a fly.

I’m leaning over the railway bridge breathing in the steam from a steam train as it passes under.
Yes I think those first seven years of my life were mostly happy and carefree.

The second set of memories are from aged seven to fourteen. Stronger ones but still fragmented. This house was on a farm. A much larger house. Over those years I graduated from being a child to a teenager, even so none of that time is really clear.

I’m seeing the house and garden for the first time and loving it.

I’m collecting the eggs and being pecked by the broody hens.

I’m watching the baby pigs being born.

I’m sitting on my tree stump reading far away from anyone who might disturb me.

I’m listen to my mother cry. (She had a nervous breakdown and cried a lot)

I’m keeping out of the way of my dad who is shouting about not helping my mother and why weren’t we doing something useful!


The next house we lived in was a corner store or delicatessen. Aged 14 to 18.

End of my childhood. Not happy years. Too much responsibility for my age. My mother had a heart attack, nearly died when I was 15. My brother and I ran the shop. He was seventeen. Mum remained bed ridden at home and everything, being the only girl was left to me to do. Very clear memories and ones I choose not to think about too often.

So to answer the prompt. I don’t think my childhood was all that happy. My children tell me theirs was so that gives me comfort. Of course my childhood started in 1944. An era so different to that of my children.
A father at war for six years, a mother raising three children alone and who was ill most of the time.
I truly believe most of our memories of childhood are misremembered or are those we think we remember from stories told to us.