A Toddler's Anecdotes

 A Toddler’s Anecdotes

 

I have a hypothesis about the visual memories of long ago. Like any hypothesis about the reliability of distant memory, it is ultimately unprovable, but there’s a suggestion of plausibility.

 

Some visual memories are constructed as if seen through one’s own eyes. Others have a more disembodied form- the memory is of a scene with one as a participant distinct from one remembering. For example, I have an unlikely memory that, as a toddler barely beginning to walk, I decided to leave home, taking as I exited an umbrella by the front door. I visualise my toddler self doing this, but I’m sure that this “memory” responds to, and was largely created by, my mother telling and retelling the story of this escape to amused friends and relatives. On the other hand, I have a memory of a time when I was not much older, when the family (at that point just my parents and me) were voyaging by liner to the US to take up a two-year posting. I leaned out of a porthole when the ship was in harbour and the cardboard soldier’s hat I was wearing fell off and sank, sodden, beneath the murky waters of the port. This visualisation is private to me; so I think it is genuine.

 

I was aged between 2 and 4 during the US stay. There’s a couple of memories of snakes. I think the first must be a compound of actual memory and parental input. We are walking along a river that gives its name to two Civil War battles – Bull Run (how would I have known that piece of history). I, trotting in front, see something like a coil of rope on a low tree branch over the path. I reach up. The rope partially uncoils and its head hisses at me – it’s a Water Moccasin snake, poisonous (how would I have known that). I am quickly snatched away.

 

When I’m a little older and staying at my maternal grandparents’ house in rural Texas, there’s a more dramatic event. I am playing barefoot on their lawn, when suddenly an adult yells at me to stand absolutely still. My foot has landed within inches of the sleeping head of a Copperhead snake (also poisonous). I am rigid whilst a gardening hoe is hurriedly fetched. An adult tiptoes up and, with a mighty blow, decapitates the snake, and I escape. Again, this memory is no doubt a compound of very vivid fear and adult reminiscence.

 

Two strange memories of the US: one of them of very strange behaviour on my childish part. The first: I was playing in a children’s area of a typically spacious suburban street – all grassy front yards and no fences, when some older boys (all of four or five) decided to show their willies, albeit there was of course not much to show. The memory is that I fled home, whether in puritanical horror or just feeling out of my depth.

 

The second memory is of an event that I find impossible to explain, but I’m sure that the memory is not implanted. My parents were on secondment to the US army. They were obliged to be sociable company to their colleagues and hosts. Usually, sociability took the form of early evening cocktail parties. The dress fashion of the early 50s meant that the women guests wore long skirts, it seems (from the memory) about calf length. The parties being early evening affairs, I could be in attendance, toddler though I was. Maybe my presence was thought “cute”.

 

Driven by some deep impulse of toddler psychology, I was fascinated by the skirts, and what was under them. I was cunning enough to exploit my status of child innocent by, as I remember, rolling on the floor and under a nearby skirt. It was Toddler Upskirting. My memory is of a vague impression of stockings and suspenders. I presume I was swiftly extracted with a chuckle and an apology. No one, I think, suspected a case of toddler voyeurism. Who would?

 

My mother was not a happy mother. She was not a happy wife, either – an Irish-American, a highly educated intellectual adrift in the snobbish, mostly philistine world of the British army in the 1950s and 60s. The number of other wives she formed friendships with over some 20 years could be counted on one hand with fingers to spare.

 

My parents’ marriage was, therefore, uneasy and often acrimonious. I remember lying awake at night and hearing them shouting angrily, though I’m pretty sure that their rows never escalated past hard words and tears. Not that my mother was above raising her hand in temper- but her physical fury was almost always directed at my clumsy, fidgety and often naughty little brother, whom she frequently chased with a hairbrush.

 

I was timid, absorbing the family unhappiness without protest, except once. Middle class families in those days would keep a fancy box  (silver usually) of cigarettes to offer guests, even if they themselves were non-smokers. There was an occasion when I surprised my mother sitting puffing away, having pilfered from the box. Horrified, I snatched the cigarette from her fingers. I don’t recall what I did with it, or what words were spoken. It is only time I remember raising my hand.

 

There was one very sharply upsetting manifestation of my mother’s unhappiness. It must have occurred when I was old enough to read. I came across a journal kept by my mother, lying open on a desk. I read words to the effect: “I feel that I shall not have much more time with my children”. I suppose that I kept quiet and brooded miserably. I thought that the words were some premonition of death. They could also have meant that she could envisage herself walking out.

 

Jan 2023