My earliest memory

I’ve spent the better part of the last 25 years researching my family history, looking into the lives of those who came before me.  I have my useless history degree (lol) and a passionate interest in anything before about 1930 (arbitrary date) but generally don’t think about myself much.  This time of the year, most people are busy making resolutions and looking forward and I while I don’t do much of the former I excel at the latter.  This time I think I will explore a bit of my earliest memory, at least as I think about it.

I was born in 1954 in a post-war Britain that was looking forward. With a glamorous young Queen on the throne, I like to believe that my parents thought of themselves as a glamorous young couple ready to embrace this bold new world.  My dad was a aerospace engineer with DeHaviland’s and after his death I had a quick look through some of his papers which pointed to a young man dreaming of space and rockets and other worlds.  My mother always impresses me as a young woman maybe hardened a bit by the war but artsy and interested in politics and the promise of rebuilding Britain.  Their marriage in 1950 was modest by today’s standards and their life together began in a small trailer due to the acute housing shortage. Two boys quickly joined them, Peter in 1951 and Paul in 1952, both sadly now gone.  By 1953, though, this young couple had managed to build a house that was featured in an architectural magazine. Described as being ready for a growing family, I came along the following January.  I visited the house a few years ago and gazed at it from a distance.  I’m not so bold as my son Chris who had knocked on the door several years earlier and was invited in for tea and shown the original blueprints which included my father’s distinctive signature.  The house still showed its revolutionary mid-century design although the present owners had extended it a bit.

I only have a fuzzy recollection of the house and there was a time when I could recall the floor plans, sorta.  I had a boyfriend in high school who once made a comment about my ability to recall the floor plans of all of the houses that I had lived in, about 10 at that point.  But I digress.  By November 1956 my parents had decided to take their chances in America and made plans to emigrate like so many of their generation.  A dramatic story was splashed across a newspaper showing our little family and what Britain needed to do to keep its best and brightest.  I don’t really remember anything about leaving England but a friend of my parents took a splendid series of black and white photographs of the scene at the airport as we awaited boarding.  Years later when I had newly returned to live in the UK and got really serious about genealogy, I discovered the passenger list for that flight and was amazed to see the great Ravi Shankar next to name on the list.  I asked my mother if she remembered anything about that and she told how they knew who he was as a rising musician about to embark on an American tour, long before the Beatles discovered him.  I remember none of this.

What I do clearly remember is getting off a plane, at the top of the airstair, and looking around at a bright, new technicolour world, The pilot made a comment to my mother “What a little doll” to which I politely replied in my perfect English voice “I’m not a little doll, I’m a little girl”