Opinion

Anita Robinson: My earliest memory led to a lifetime's devotion to shoes

Anita Robinson
Anita Robinson Anita Robinson

Sometimes I wish science would mind its own business and stop discovering things.

I’m perturbed by a recent study on early memory that has concluded it’s impossible to recall events from when we were two years old, or even younger. This will come as a bit of a shock to the 40 per cent of people, (myself included) who believe they can. “Nonsense,” say the scientists. “We only develop the mental faculties to form memories from the age of three-and-a-bit. Recollections prior to that stage are ‘received memories’ generated by family anecdotes or photographs. It’s not until we’re five or six that we form adult-like memories, due to the way the brain develops.” So there…

Well, I have a very distinct memory of sitting on a black fur rug being fascinated by the sight of my own feet in little white buckskin booties. I was eighteen months old. It was the beginning of a lifelong passion for footwear.

At one month short of my third birthday, I was enrolled in the kindergarten class of the school where my sister had just been appointed to her first teaching post. To her mortification, I had to be dragged screaming, resisting and clinging to lamp-posts into a big brown room, redolent of plasticene and milk warming by a radiator. I have never willingly drunk milk since and when I became an Early Years teacher myself, never let plasticene into my classroom.

I think I must have been a difficult child. At six, after some sort of tantrum, I packed my little school attaché case with clean pants, socks, a cloth doll and my money box and announced that I was running away. My mother hospitably held the front door open, put the little case on the step and said, “Away you go then.” The slam of the door behind me shocked me to the core. I walked 50 yards to the bottom of the street and glanced back. Nobody was looking out for me. I hunkered down for a while on the patch of waste ground we called Hobby Square, because that’s where the funfair came every year. It was getting cold. In my ire I’d forgotten a coat and something to eat. Pre-planning was never my strong point. I could go back and knock and get my coat and some biscuits and a hammer to open the money box. I slunk back – to discover the door slightly ajar. I tiptoed in and up to my room. A voice called up the stairs, “Hi! Miss! Come down for your tea…”

All memories are unique to the person recalling them. Other people’s accounts of the same event or situation may differ significantly. The classic was my father’s annual query as the Christmas dinner was served. “Sally, what was the year we had the goose?” “I don’t remember any goose,” she’d retort, rolling her eyes. Daughter Dear has inherited her maternal grandmother’s acerbic tone. Looking at photographs of herself aged about four, she accuses me of making her look like a boy. “Selective memory dear,” I say. “The reason your hair’s so short is because you hid under the hall table with a pair of nail scissors and cut the front of it off to the very root.” Later, waxing sentimental, I ask if she remembers how, in our old house, we’d make pizzas together every Saturday afternoon. “Selective memory mum,” she responds drily. “We did it ONCE.”

Each of us is the sum of our memories. My generation’s greatest dread is losing them. My memory’s a sort of attic, much like the roofspace in my house, where things are chucked in at random and pushed further and further back by new additions until almost too difficult to retrieve. But some pop up unbidden. In this summer of all summers with every window wide, I’m plagued by flies and pursue them with toxic spray. It brings back the memory of my big brother, who taught me how to kill bluebottles with a length of knicker elastic. Hardly a drawing room accomplishment it’s true – but where these days would you get knicker elastic?