What is the earliest memory you have?
It’s not a good picture I know, but this is me at about the age of my earliest memory (I am about 3 – 4 years old) and I loved the red coat that I am wearing! I remember that, which is unusual as I am not really into clothes nowadays.
Someone already beat me to the comment that this is actually a really hard ‘prompt’, because it is difficult to know whether this is my memory or just something that I have been told by my parents’. However, the coat really does pinpoint the period of my earliest memories. I definitely remember the park that was near to our house at the time and using the swings, seesaw and roundabout there. It was definitely a fun time, but it is not the most significant memory that I have of this period.
My mother was a chemistry teacher and at the time there was a desperate shortage, so the local authorities paid for me to attend a Private nursery school (very unusual as I have not attended a private school since)! My most significant memory from that time is that we still were having ‘afternoon naps’ and in the summer we used to sleep outside on camp beds under the trees – that is definitely MY memory. I also remember going to a pond within the grounds and collecting frogspawn, which we stored in pond water in jars to await the appearance of tadpoles when we dutifully returned said water and tadpoles to the pond.
It’s weird what prompts your earliest memories! The part that my parents’ have added is that I used to tell people that I was going to “the blooming nursery school”. Of course it’s real name was the “Blenheim nursery school” – even to this day I am not sure that that is the correct spelling of ‘Blenheim’!
Memory Jar 
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