I read the words “My earliest memory” today. It’s been one of those days - I’ve not achieved the potential I believe I should achieve and so together with self anger there is depression. My earliest memory….
My earliest memory is being pushed by my mother in a pushchair in West Wycombe on my way to playschool. As we moved when I was 3 and a half, it was probably not long before said move. It’s a fleeting memory, less an image and more a sensation, a state of being. That feeling of motion without moving, and a sense of peace. It’s the only memory I have of West Wycombe when we lived there, my grandparents bought our house so I often went back but in other memories I’m much older. Many other memories tend to get reinforced by photos or things parents say, but in this case I’m the one who’s always had to insist that it happened to bring back the memory of it in my parents. It’s a rare memory that I can trust as first hand.
When I think of home, I remember concrete paving stones at an angle. This is from later, living in West Hyde where I spent most of my childhood. Concrete paving stones, aged slightly by weather and the grass growing up between. One of the stones is new. Its predecessor must have grown too cracked and been replaced. The picture widens from the stones to metal railings, trees, red brickwork buildings with easily climbable drainpipes. A graveyard and a long built up barrow of trash. Oddly none of this was my home - a nearby playschool/football field that I’m lead to by that first memory of concrete.
Fields of wheat, overgrown undergrowth, a curving lane. Slowly the images idle by until there are rose bushes, a T-junction and the light smell of car fumes. Mottled yellow brickwork is the order of the day, the door is brown glaze with a pane of glass, and I think I can see an older white door in my memory when I think of that door. Lions and dolphins. My memories start to head in the door, but I don’t want that for now. When I remember outside, it is always lazy summer, when I remember inside it is the safety and warmth while endless drizzle rains down outside. I want to enjoy this lazy sun some more.
I’ve been replaying these memories in recent days. Thinking of childhood and wondering what Nathan will remember of now. Soon he’ll be storing these memories that linger, the tiny images and sensations that he’ll be able to reflect on in three decades time. I wonder how silly it would be to take Nathan to see those concrete stones, and what the chances are of a lazy summer day appearing. Having spent my memorable childhood in one house, I wonder when we need to get out of rented accommodation, and will it be bad to move between cities in the future.
Then I think of my boy… “Play cars?”… and none of this matters because it’ll be the weekend soon.
