Memoryshare

My earliest memory is pretty gruesome and I still feel the side effects on windy days!  Apparently our first, clear memory is often of a significant or traumatic event.  That's certainly true for me... 

I was about three.  A friend of my Mum's had come round with her little lad and one of his favourite toys.  The two of us were playing happily on the carpet with our cars and lorries.  Mine were all Matchbox racing cars.  But his was something my parents would never allow me on health and safety grounds: a crane.  No one quite knows what happened next, but the crane was being swung round - and the hook landed in my right eye lid, partially detaching it. 

The next few hours are a complete blur.  I can still see the ambulance which pulled up outside the house: blue, chrome trimmed, very sixties-looking (this must have been about 1970), with a red cross on the side.  However what I remember above all are the red blankets.  For years afterwards I had nightmares about them and couldn't watch television anywhere close to bedtime.  I'd always wake up having nightmares about being driven around.  Sometimes it was an ambulance.  Bizarrely it was occasionally a salt lorry!  I was taken to Hull Royal Infirmary, screaming.  In fact I carried on screaming, non-stop apparently, until my father finally arrived many hours later.  He was in the building industry and was working on a site at the other side of the country when the accident happened, and - pre M62 - it took him hours to get back to Yorkshire.

What made the whole thing worse, and it seems quite barbarous now, is that parents weren't allowed to stay in hospital with their children.  I couldn't understand why Mum and Dad were leaving me with these strangers: "I cried, but you didn't come," was apparently what I said when they were allowed back the following day.  I also suffered personal humiliation.  I was fully toilet trained by the time of the accident, but was still struggling with certain words.  For some reason - pretensions to Yorkshire gentility perhaps? - my parents were trying to get me to use the word 'lavatory' for 'toilet'.  I needed the loo, but couldn't explain myself properly to the nurses that first evening.  "I need the shappy", I said (mangling the word 'lavatory').  They didn't understand, I wet myself and was back in nappies for a while once I got back home.

For lots of reasons this experience still lives with me.  Ironically my Dad's got eye problems at the moment and I'm in and out of Hull Royal Infirmary with him.  I still look up at those upper windows, and try to imagine the little boy who couldn't understand why his Mum and Dad didn't come when he cried.

That's Andrew's first - and rather traumatic - first memory. Now what about yours? Just click on the link below to find out how to share YOUR first memories with the BBC's Memoryshare project here in West Yorkshire - and to find out what other people have been saying...

...and remember you'll be doing your bit to build the BBC Memoryshare archive of hundreds of  memories from across the UK since 1900 until the present day!

To find out what Andrew Edwards is up to these days, listen to BBC Radio Leeds - broadcasting across West Yorkshire on 92.4 FM - between 6am and 9am every morning! Along with Georgey Spanswick, Andrew helps to bring West Yorkshire up-to-date with what's going on, whether it's on your doorstep or somewhere on the other side of the world!