Geraldine's story
I was going to be nine : two years older than the « reason age » when you are supposed to understand what it’s all about !
I felt I was a big girl now and sometimes thought my parents were somewhat over protective. Oh ! yes, I could go and play outside in the street and the close park, I could meet up with my friends to walk to school together, I could go to the library all by myself and I could go to the cinema with my big sister, just the two of us.
But I wanted more. At Christmas, I had written this nice letter to Santa Claus explaining how the only gift I really wanted were roller skaters, even if my parents thought I was too young….
Christmas day had come, and I creeped out of bed to see which parcel had my name on it, and saw 3 little presents, too small to be roller skatters and went back to bed weeping and just looking through my stocking where I found a yoyo I started playing with , tears streaming down my cheecks, but no one noticing my despair.
When breakfast was over , the six of us gathered around the tree and Jackie, my eldest sister started the distribution. By this time I had been able to put on a happy face again and was thankfull for the books and little bag which were to be discovered while tearing the wrapping paper !
Winter sat in with snow, cold and these periods I loved when we would fall ill and spend days in bed with fever, our Mum bringing special food to us, smothering our chests with Vicks and other miracle creams and lotions, reading books, making puzzles and wobelling to the bathroom 3 or 4 times a day.
No school ! What bliss ! How I hated school ! Although I knew I was learning things that might be useful in a future life, it felt such a waste of time. I remember when we all caught hooping cough, I was lucky to have a mild version of it and after a few days could go out playing and running around for another 5 weeks, for we were not allowed back to school because of contagion.
My birthday was now close : a few snowdrops had poked their nose out in the park, some of the early dafodills scattered yellow stars in the garden, the days were longer and the sun was heating the last spells of frost : we could forget our gloves or caps without to much damage.
I went to bed on February 28th 1954, very excited : my birthday was on a week-end day so there would be plenty of time to look at the present and play with it. I really had no idea wrhat I was going to get, as I must admit, without being a spoiled child, I did have plenty of games, books, puzzles which I still love to-day, and didn’t really need more clothes.
I wake up on March 1st 1954 : I’m nine to-day ! Only one more year before 10 which still seems like another century ! Everything is calm in the house. I lie calmly in bed before I hear my parents getting up, then dash to kiss them : I love that very special cuddle you get on your Birthday.
Breakfast for
all. My father always makes it long when
there’s something special. I think he
likes watching us getting excited. After
ou compulsory porridge which I really don’t like, I enjoy the toast and
home-made marmelade and wait for the others to finish.
At last, my Mum goes to fetch something behind the curtain : a large
paquet sealed by a big red ribbon. Happy
Birthday !
The parcel is heavy. I try to guess what could be in there : a big book – oh ! no it can’t be that heavy, a puzzle ? A doll ! but my paretns know I don’t really like dolls….
Finally I strip the paper and open a big box containing …. Roller skatters ! Beautiful ones with shiny metal wheels fixed on a metallic base and long strong leather straps to fit them over the shoes.
My heart started beating very quickly and tears of joy came up to my eyes ! At last ! I was big enough now ! And did I use them, and use, them and use them. There was a skatting rink in the nearby park and I think as from then, about 80% of my freetime was spent there ! What a day !
And, that’s how I found out, from that day, I had become a « Big Girl » !
Patrice's story
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All of my memories are peppered with salt and sand.
I have had great swathes of contented time in my life, overwhelming feelings of joy, immeasurable pleasure. So many of those diamond memories when held still for examination have a shadow tributary running through like a tangled ball of wool. I can’t separate my memories into favorites. It feels that if I do I won’t be living this lovely life that I have lived but an edited version of my experience, of myself.
As a young girl, I remember the absolute joy of dancing, of being so good at what I loved that others noticed. I was praised, and that was good. I also remember the meanness of my peers that came along with recognition. Stolen pointe shoes, tights found wet in the corner of the shower, the teasing that went like a knife to any soft part of one’s being.
When I turned twenty-one my parents took me to The Rainbow Room to celebrate - a wonderful old restaurant that was at the top of Rockefeller Center, in NY. I wore an orange silk dress that I had made with a square neck and hidden pockets in the front. I felt very beautiful in that dress - not a typical sensation for me at the time. I had returned to live with my parents after a disastrous year with a boyfriend in an apartment on The Grand Concourse.
It was just the three of us. The waiter was being sweet to me because it was my birthday. My mother got up to use the toilet, and when she returned she said, “The waiter told me that I was the most beautiful woman in the room.”
In that moment I understood so many things. That I would always remember the sensation of feeling myself, not someone else telling me, as beautiful. That my memory of the moment, the smell of champagne in a flute, the bubbles rising to the surface, the white table cloths, the lovely sense of occasion would remain with me always. And that, though I loved my mother, nearly adored her, and she loved me, her wounds would always play in the space between us, and it was my job to find a way to live in the memory, the whole of it, and make of it what I could.
So memory for me has always been a complex chiaroscuro of sensation never simply a favorite, never flat, or even easy, but mine to do with what I could.
A Favourite Memory
(28.07.2025). Sarah's story
What is a happy memory? Something that you call up from the depths of your past that makes you feel happy all over? I don’t have that sort of memory or if I do is too private to write about publicly. I live with the past, the past is important to me, but to say I have a favorite memory is a non-sense. I do remember, however moments when I felt beauty and registered the fact. So I will make a little necklace of those moments.
Two that come to mind are when I was travelling with my brother across Canada and down the Pacific coast, with an excursion of several days into Wyoming and Colorado. One night, after driving all afternoon in sight of the jagged peaks of the Grand Tetons, which I found absolutely wonderful, we decided to camp out for the night. We had a tent, which we used when we found a suitable place; otherwise we looked for the cheapest motel we could find. Both of us were still students and we were going out West, me to find lodgings for my coming year at Berkeley, he to the six-months job in an airplane factory which he was using as a practical break from his studies at MIT. We found a sandpit, where we could sleep out of the sight of passers-by if ever there were any, though the car of course was visible, but in fact there were none. There were fewer tourists in the West in those days, and people did not drive that much at night. And I think people were not so worried in those days about psychopaths out looking for victims.
In the end we did not put up the tent, because the weather was fine and looked to stay that way. So we lay in our sleeping bags and looked up at the sky, which began to blacken and gradually came out all diamonds. The sky over Flavigny is often wonderful at night, but this was sumptuously spectacular.
A week or so later we came to Oregon and went up to the top of Crater Lake National Park to look down on the lake in the crater below. The irregular coastline, curving in and out into coves and around small peninsulas thick with spruce trees, enclosed water of such blueness as I had never seen before. I would see it later near Naples and Capri, but now I could only compare it with the film Peter Pan.
Another memorable moment was, in fact, in that very region of Italy. I was with a group that had just climbed Mount Vesuvius, and we were coming down, slightly light-headed because of the rapid changes in altitude, and I was mesmerized by the plasticity of the view before me. What I saw was layer after layer of landscape unfolding before me, in what seemed like heightened three-dimension, all the way down to the sea beyond. It was as if I could feel it sensorily.
On another trip to Italy, I was in a train, going probably from Rome back to Strasbourg, and at the end of the afternoon we came to the lake of Lugano, turning a deep blue in the approaching night. On the farther shore the lights of Lugano came out, and the scene impressed me as a stretch of fairyland, which I gazed at until it disappeared.
I suppose I could go on and on, but that is not the point of this task. We were to write of “a” memory, but mine are too brief for any one of them to make up a whole text on their own. So that’s it for today!
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Annemarie's story
My Favourite Memory
You can have many favourite memories and I have too many of my immediate family and friends so I remember someone who was not the easiest person but it's a memory that always makes me smile fondly of her.
From the age of eleven to seventeen I spent most of the school holidays with my great grandmother and my great aunt. Great aunt Gwynneth was a strict, very religious and very critical woman. She was very keen that we, my sister and I, do all our household duties to make us into 'good little mothers and housekeepers'. In her own way she was loving but severe; she took us out for weekend outings and treated us to the cinema but it was a strange life for us two teenagers. Before World War II she worked as a nurse on an ocean-going liner to China. She fell passionately in love with the onboard doctor and end of cruise meant end of the love affair. (Great Granny told my fourteen-year-old self, my eyes agog, my ears flapping, and that "he was a married man and she never forgot his treachery"). I always supposed this made her the woman we knew.
When Auntie Gwynneth (as I always had to call her,) reached 85 years and could no longer manage her bungalow she came to live with John and myself and our two teenagers. She was not the easiest of people; critical of our meals, of the books I read having discovered one that was on the banned Roman Catholic list, and quite demanding; the six years she remained with us required a degree of patience. Yes, the roles were now reversed and she had possibly felt the same about my sister and me all those many years before.
When it came to her ninetieth birthday we tried hard to think of something special to celebrate it. Serendipitously I heard on the news that a baby giraffe had been born at Whipsnade zoo. Auntie G loved a drive in the country and she loved a picnic. I packed up her favourite picnic foods, hauled the wheelchair into the boot and manhandled Auntie G into the passenger seat for her surprise birthday treat.
Whipsnade zoo is the largest zoo in the UK, with vast fields for the animals to roam...and we did roam throughout the day. Pushing a wheelchair up and down slopes is hard work but people were incredibly kind, moving to allow this visibly old lady a good viewing position to see the giraffes.
The giraffe was about seven feet from the fence; sixteen feet of star-shaped tan blotches on a creamy tan background right in front of us. It was the first day in front of the public for the foal. Below the height of its mother's tummy the baby giraffe had to reach up to drink from her teat. The mother giraffe bent her long patterned neck downwards in a graceful arch to stroke her foal in gentle soothing movements of her bony head while the foal drank.
Then we heard that the elephants were going to parade along the paths of the zoo and 'would anyone like to hold the last elephant's tail?' From the wheel chair came a shout accompanied by an uplifted arm ,"Yes, yes, I would", called out Auntie G. Lots of 'aahs' and she was given the honour of hanging on to baby elephant's tale. There were six elephants in all, each one gripping the tale of the one in front of it and myself taking up the rear pushing the wheelchair as we paraded the paths for 15 minutes, Auntie G hanging on with both hands and I desperately hoping the baby elephant was 'house-trained'. We ate our picnic lunch in front of Henry the hippo's enclosure, Auntie G throwing bits of her sandwich to the cavernous mouth of this enormous creature, just a few feet from us.
Yes, that is my favourite memory of my severe, difficult aunt having what she said was one of the best days of her life and remembering the childlike pleasure on her nonagenarian face.
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Jackie's story
My favorite memory
Living a long life one has thousands of great memories – some of them favorite ones and its difficult to imagine putting down on paper just one. A favorite one is when you jump for joy and remember it I suppose.
So here is my list ;
Receiving my first teddy bear when I was 6 years old – he lives to this day above my bed in Viserny
Swimming in the Pacific Ocean and enjoying the sun after moving to the USA
Feeling proud to have graduated from High school
My first job in London
A favorite moment when I walked down the Champs Elysees in Paris and decided to spend the rest of my life here
A wonderful weekend discovering the Chateaux de la Loire
Going to St Tropez to sleep in a house that had no bathroom or hot water
Getting married - Becoming a “Madame” and changing my last name
Birth of my son and then daughter
Returning to Paris after a short interval in the UK -
Loving different dogs
Walking in the mornings at 8 am
My first shop
Getting appreciation for something I have made
Living in Paris was a permanent favorite memory
My most recent favorite memory was having my two older granddaughters visit for a few days – getting to know their grown selves and listening to their plans and projects for the future.
