Road Trip 2012

This weekend I took a long-planned for Road Trip down memory Lane with my sister (who is older than me by almost 5 years). As children we moved around a lot - on average every 2 years until I was 7 and my sister 12 which has meant that our formative memories are of many different houses, schools and areas.
The older I get the more important it seems for me to have a clearer picture of my memories. Snippets of events I remember but they merge into each other, whereas my sister has a clearer memory of where things happened. I suppose you might say that I wanted the timeline of my early life to be in order! (Being such a control freak!). At times I often wondered if such things were memories that I had of things that really happened or whether over the years I had either dreamt them or just got a feel from old photographs and conversations of others. I have memories gong back to when I was 2 or 3 - and my sister, using me as a play thing, made me jump from a chair - in the process smashing my head on concrete requiring 3 stitches (explains a lot??). I can vividly remember the wash house it happened in, the actual jump - but little else either surrounding the event or indeed where we lived etc.

So, plan in hand, we set off with plenty of sweets (pear drops, pineapple chunks etc), old music ( We Shall not be moved: The Seekers, Walk Tall: Val Doonican, Downtown: Petula Clark) to remind us of the days spent playing our parents old singles on the mono, dansette record player - stacking them high so we didn't have to keep changing them - (oh yes young people - we had technology then too!)

Trusty Satnav was programmed with all the addresses got from Dad - postcodes from google, bag packed, camera ready - and we set off into the flatlands, travelling through fens and wolds of Lincolnshire - and realised I was a Fen person (not as posh as a Wold person).

Spalding, Brigg, Boston, Martin, Cleethorpes,  Grantham - all were investigated, memories jogged - I recognised my first ever classroom at the age of 4 years old - I even knew what had changed and what was missing. Along the way we met such generous people - a tour of the town by one guy from the church, got invited in to houses we had lived in, shown around schools we attended. The Red arrows even did a fly past on the road to Brigg.

Was it worth it???? YES definitely. I have a better understanding of my earlier life - I know where I belong, I have a timeline for my life so far, I have put to bed some nagging memories as I have a fuller context. It felt strange to be told - this is where we used to go swimming, this is where Mum would bring us with picnics - and I have no memory of those things being so young at the time - but because we moved away no-one was able to say those things to me as I grew up. It was quite cathartic in a way to picture such family moments. Don't get me wrong, I have some wonderful memories of my childhood - but most only began when I was 6 or 7 - so from Cleethorpes through to Grantham. Now I have fuller pictures in my head of our family from when I was born.

A lovely, lovely weekend.