Early memories

My two year old grandson got me thinking this morning. he apparently pointed at the little photo of me on Facebook, and said "Nana in there!"

That brought back some memories for me; just odd little things that I remember from when I was a child. Probably the earliest memory is of sitting in my pram with the hood up. The trim was the wrong side of the Greek key pattern. My mother told me she put away the pram a couple of months before my brother was born, so I wouldn't think he was in my place, so I couldn't have been more than 15 months old.

I had a dummy as a baby, and my next, very clear memory is of my Nana picking up my dummy and saying "Jennifer" When I held out my hand for it, she threw the dummy in the fire. I don't remember any great distress over that, I just accepted it was gone, and as I didn't know you could buy them in the shop, I don't think I made a fuss. Later though, when my brother was newly born, I remember stealing his dummy, and sitting in Nana's leather armchair with my head under a cushion so nobody would know what I was doing.

Just a few months before my Mum died, she mentioned that at about that time, I would talk about wanting to see the "pignig." They couldn't let me see it, because they didn't know what I was talking about. Fifty years later  I was able to enlighten her. It was the teddy bear's picnic. I think I mixed up an actual memory of my Dad pushing me in a pushchair and lifting me up to show me children playing on swings and slides, with a dream, where the children were bears, dressed in clothes. I know my Dad used to sing "The Teddy Bears Picnic" to me, so that might explain it!

My Grandad died when we were in Germany. My Dad was in the Army. I have three clear memories of Grandad. The first is of standing between his legs for a cuddle. He had thrombosis, so couldn't sit me on his knee. The second is of eating his dinner, sharing with him. Mum had told me he was very fastidious about food, so it didn't really add up, until she told me that at about eighteen months I stopped eating. They discovered that if I thought my Grandad was giving me his dinner, I would eat, so Nana started putting both meals on a huge serving platter, one at each end.

The third memory is of Elsie Shufflebottom. Elsie lived at the bottom of the yard. She always got the best, a share of Grandad's sweets, a bit of his icecream. Worse than that, she was beautiful. She had long curly hair, so long she could sit on it. She apparently only appeared when I wasn't there, and Grandad described her clothes to me ..."Do you know, she had the bonniest pinny I've ever seen!" He would tease me with "Well I'd like to give you some of this, but I promised Elsie Shufflebottom she could have it. Then he'd relent, saying as she wasn't there just then, I could have it instead. I was very jealous of Elsie!

My memory of my Nana is more hazy, but just as precious. It's of a feeling, rather than of a particular event. It's a feeling of great love and security. Feeling safe, and just knowing that she really, really loved me. There are lots of things I do remember. Helping her with the mangle in the back yard, going with her to the town, visiting the indoor market, and having a drink in Woolworths, sitting up on a swivel stool. Her sitting in her chair by the back window in the "kitchen", which was what we'd call the living room now. But the main memory is the one I'd really like my Grandchildren to have of me.. a memory of a Nana who really really loved them.

My New Blog!

For some time now I've been reading and enjoying my younger daughter's blog. I've been constantly surprised by the new insights I've gained into the life she lives, and sometimes by the way she thinks, but mainly I've been delighted to follow the way her children are growing and developing. It keeps them close to me despite the fact that they live about 200 miles away.

When my husband said he could help me set up my own blog, I thought at first it would be difficult to know what to write, but as I tend to be a bit opinionated , I think perhaps I won't find it too difficult.

For today, I want to talk about how it felt when I was first told that I was going to be a Grandparent, nearly twenty years ago now. It came at a very sad time in my life, the news being given in the phone call I had made to my eldest son to tell him that his father and I were splitting up. So on the one hand I was terribly upset, and then I was being given this utterly joyous news.

Up until then I had given little thought to Grandchildren and to their relationships with their Grandparents, beyond the very happy memories I had of my own Grandparents. Suddenly all those jokes came back to me,about Grandparents and their obsessions with their Grandchildren, their boasting and their photographs.

I started to think about something my Father had said to me about something entirely different. He had been talking to me about The Book of Common Prayer. He said he liked to go to services where they used these old  prayers, because they gave him a connection to his ancestors, who would have said the same prayers, used the same words, followed the same services.

I realised then that one of the things that was so amazing about this new Grandchild, was that she was connected through the generations to all those people. That however she turned out it was due in some way to each of these people, diluted the further back you go, of course, but that is what makes it so interesting. Who knows whether her eyes are like those of her great grandmother? We know her curls are from her mother...and perhaps also from my Dad.

Since the birth of that first beautiful child, I've been blessed with nine more Grandchildren, and I've searched the faces of each newborn baby to see what I could recognize in them. Some of them have looked a lot like my own babies, some looked more like the other parent. All of them had something of me, whether I could see it or not. All of them are special individuals, and I like to think that something of my parents and my grandparents lives on in each one of them. It may be my Father's intelligence, my Mother's beauty, my Grandmother's work ethic, my Grandfather's stubborn ways, who knows? All I know is that I have never got over the feeling of wonder at the birth of another child into the chain that is our family.