Early Memories.

My Earliest Memory.
My earliest memory takes place when I was three months or so away from my fourth birthday.
My mum was in hospital having my sister and my father was looking after me at home.
I cannot remember anything about him looking after me although I have a vague recollection of tinned Heinz spaghetti for some reason.
I can remember not being happy with the living arrangements at that time and wanting mummy to come back home.
The memory that sticks in my mind is when we visited mum in the hospital. Sadly I cannot remember mum or seeing my new baby sister, but come on I was only three years old. What I do remember is a patient in my mums ward giving me a little wooden raffia basket that had been a part of her fruit collection. Everyone gets fruit or flowers when in hospital and I guess this lady was no exception.
I don’t know why this little basket made such an impression on my memory unless I was feeling slightly abandoned because mum was in hospital with my sister and not with me. Maybe this memory is so strong because it was something for me alone and not the new baby. Or maybe it was just that the basket was especially nice with lots of bows and ribbons or something like that.
What strikes me as strange is how I remember this basket but not my new sister. A basket isn’t a life-changing thing but a new sister is. Or maybe I was materialistic even back then.
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Another memory I have around the same time is of a toy I was given one Christmas probably when my new sister was four months old. It was a little, battery powered train with various brightly coloured disks that played nursery rhymes rather like the old vynil records. You slotted the “record” into the back of the train and it rolled along playing the nursery rhyme.

I must have left it near the fire because the next time I went to play with it the back of it had melted slightly which broke it and to make matters worse I can remember my father shouting at me and telling me off for not looking after it.
The sadness I felt at breaking my train which apparantly I loved being made a thousand times worse by the reprimand.
No-one ever said life was fair.
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I can remember visiting my fathers mother, most likely when I was around five years old.
She was a fatally obese woman and I can remember she had one of those machines where you placed this big band round your waist and the machine shook the layers of fat around.
It was meant to help with weight loss although whether it actually worked is dubious as she never got any smaller but it did look like fun.
The actual woman and her house I have no recollection of apart from a vague vision of a large woman sitting in a chair.
I think though that it’s the size of her that sticks with me not the woman herself.
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I do have vague memories of my first year at school.
I can remember my first ever teacher, a Miss Fruen hitting me on the hand with a ruler as a reprimand for nibbling the end of my pencil. A bad habit I still have to this day. I can also remember her forcing me to hold my pencil in the wrong hand (I’m left handed) time and time again. I don’t remember when this stopped or if it continued until I went up to the next year. I like to think that someone noticed, possibly another teacher and put a stop to it.
I can remember one lesson in which we were learning our vowels, you know “a” sounds “ah”, I remember this because a neighbour was also in the lesson even though he was two years older than me. I can remember him laughing hysterically at the sounds while I had learnt this with my mother long before and was to be honest more than a little bored.

I have various other memories but they are mainly from the age of six upwards where these are memories up to my the end of my first school year.
I’ve heard that some people can remember their babyhood, being in a pram for example but I find it hard to believe that anyone can go that far back. It’s just unlikely that someone could remember that time of their lives when they are so busy learning and seeing new things almost every minute.