Childhood memories: Music

It's funny how we connect music, sounds, and also tastes or odours with impressions, feelings, memories...

Sometimes, when I hear very old-fashioned music, I feel pitchforked back to a time way back when. Must have been the time before school started, although I was quite fond of school. At least until 9th grade. Then other things started to be more important to me. I made it through high school diploma anyhow.

But I digress.

Do you remember the following songs? They represent the sound of my early childhood:

• Middle of the road: "Chirpy Chirpy Cheep Cheep", "Soley, Soley", "Sacramento"


• The Fifth Dimension: "Up, Up and Away"


• The Archies: "Sugar Sugar"


• The Marmelade: "Ob-la-di Ob-la-da"


• Tom Jones: "It's Not Unusual", "Delilah" (OMG...)


• Jeff Christie: "Yellow River"
  
• B. J. Thomas: "Raindrops Keep Falling On My Head"
  
• Dionne Warwick: "I'll Never Fall in Love Again", "Do You Know the Way to San Jose?"


• Tony Christie: "Is This the Way to Amarillo?"
  (remember, they had no GPS in those days...)

To be continued...

These songs (although they wouldn't appear on my favourite playlist) take me back to a time when the sun was always shining, as it seems...

Childhood memories: Clothing

As you know by now, I was born in the mid 1960s.

Handiworks were quite common, and so - due to my grandmother's knitting skills, I often wore knitted... thingies. You've already seen a kind of romper suit, and she knitted a lot of pullovers, cardigans and even dresses for me.


I can still remind some of the yarn my Granny used. A blue-and-red mélange cardigan with spherical red buttons. A skirt-and-cardigan ensemble from a light pink and violet mélange. The dress above was knitted from black wool, combined with very bright colors.

I never ever liked dirndl dresses. This one was dark blue with a pink apron (although the photo might suggest other colours). I was quite unhappy when this photo was taken.


Checkered pants seem to have been all the rage in the early 1970s. Yikes!

And I remember a kind of bib skirt made of red patent leather, combined with an apple green sweater. Oh my God! It was not an act of bad faith that one day, a chewing gum became entangled between the bib and the sweater, thus making at least the sweater unwearable...

You know what? Just have a look at the photo in the last post concerning gardening: This is the red bib skirt. And actually, it is the blue-and-red cardigan with the red buttons!

As I grew fast, I outgrew jeans at an extent that really bothered my Mum. To make the best of it, she sew an edging to the hemline. I outgrew that, too, so she considered adding another piece of jeans fabric... which I found rather embarrassing, but, hey, better than to wear your trousers at halfmast!

Later, in my teens, I wore (as many of my classmates) the nonconformist uniform: Tight jeans (bleached, if possible), Dad's discarded shirts and sweaters, and a parka without any national emblem...
(fashionable, hun?)


I inherited my grandmother's passion for knitting. But I must say, that noone in my family wears any of my knitted pieces - ahem, not even me. I knit, and I tear it up again. I hoard yarns, though. Knitting has a kind of meditative aspect. You have to sit still, and concentrate on the pattern (if it's more difficult than knit and purl, anyway). And you might say that your senses sharpen, because you can hear a lot of things which otherwise would escape your attention. I love those moments, when it's very quiet in the house and I can hear the wind outside, the cat purring beside my leg, and my son singing in his room upstairs...

Childhood memories: Gardening

I grew up in a house with a huge garden in the back. For a very long time, my Mum felt obliged of gardening and making preserves, just like her mother and grandmother had done.
But the garden was too big for her to cope with. There were always huge amounts of berries, and the juice was extracted and cooked to jam. I still remember the strange smell of warm juice, combined with warm rubber emanating from the kitchen (because of the rubber tube with which the juice was transferred to bottles). I remember glasses being collected to preserve the juice. I remember vintage jelly preserves (glasses covered with cellophane sheets) residing on old dark shelves in the basement, with the jelly shrinking from year to year, because we weren't that fond of jelly...

My Mum preserved beans, peas and carrots, she made our own mixed pickles (YUM!).
Thank God for the chest freezer.
We even had some home-grown potatoes in the cellar.
Mum grew tomatoes and peppers, asparagus, cucumbers and zucchini.
And the old plum trees provided with hundredweights of plums. With our lack of enthusiasm concerning the jelly and the juice, my mother considered winemaking. That was wonderful (except for the explosion of one 50-litre-balloon filled with sweet blackberry juice in the kitchen...)!

I still love fruit wine. I mean, made of other fruit than grapes.
(If I come to think of it now, it's funny we didn't have grapes then. Hm...)

Actually, all that preserving was not really necessary. I guess my Mum was very, very busy and not too fond of that inevitable work. So, when it got too much for her, she reduced the amount of work and just went for experiments with unusual vegetables and recipes. Which was big fun, too!

When I was very small, I got my own piece of garden, only the size of a towel.
I grew daisies, strawberries and forget-me-not.
Later, I began to experiment, too. I had read of several plants and wanted to see what they looked like, so I sowed the seeds and watched the plants grow.
I grew spearmint, hyssop and other herbs.
After having read the books of John Seymour, considering gardening and living in the countryside (and with my mother's winemaking efforts in mind), I grew pastinaca, a kind of white root. Seymour said that he'd made wine of almost every fruit and even vegetable, and
I felt adventuresome, so I tried to follow his recipe *).

Different from my Mum's attempt to an almost sterile process, I just chopped the cleaned roots, cooked them according to the recipe, and filled the cooking water (which smelled like a carrot stew) into a glass bottle of 10 litres. I added some sugar and freeze-dried baker's yeast, put a wad of cotton in the bottleneck and waited. The wine resulting had a very fine aroma of nuts, and reminded of a dry sherry. My parents were quite fond of it ;-)

Me in our garden, approx. five years old.

*) Seymour's recipe for wine from pastinaca:

Take 2 kg of Pastinaca, chop and boil in 5 litres of water with some lemon peel. Pour through a sieve while still hot and add 1,5 kg of sugar. Stir. Add some lemon juice (acting as a starter for the yeast). Fill in a suitable glass bottle and add yeast after the juice has cooled off to room temperature. Let ferment. Important: At least a wad of cotton should keep flies away. After fermentation, transfer into smaller bottles, store for some time before drinking.

We were quite fond of Seymour, who was a kind of pioneer in self-supporting. I loved the idea to make wine of nettles and whin or broom... (never tasted those, though.)

Childhood memories: On regimen

From the time I outgrew my baby fat until a few years ago, I could be considered skinny.

Yeah, kind of.

This is why the doctors decided to pull me away from my family, friends and school, to send me away for six weeks of regimen. They claimed I looked malnourished, despite my desperate Mum claiming that I had enough food, but simply wouldn't gain weight.

Regarding my recurring attacks of bronchitis in winter, and acting on the assumption that the sea air is good for the health, especially considering the lungs, they sent me to Föhr, a small island in the very North of Germany, only a stone's throw off the Danish border.
In February.

And while the aim was to improve my health (i.e. me to gain weight), I got ill.
It was cold. It was dark and rainy.
All the other five girls in the same dormitory had the measles.
I had chickenpox.
And I was homesick.

Actually, the food was not capable for me to gain weight. It was... aww, no, let's leave it at that. I got an idea of what you get to eat when you're dispeptic.
The only edible meal was on the last day: Chicken and French fries. And red fruit jelly. It was a feast!
And it was then, preparing the festivities, when I had my first appearance on stage, in front of an audience (of children. But - hey, what the heck?).
I had to wait for another 26 years to get that thrill again.

Was there nothing else positive during my stay on Föhr?
I'm sorry to say: not much.

I remember the big white scary house in a dark windy night, when we arrived.

I remember having been asked if I was a small girl or a big girl, when I went for the dining-hall. What a silly question! I would have answered "Big girl!" anyway, even if I had been three years old at that time.
I was the youngest at the "big girl table".

I remember the souvenirs I bought for me and as presents: A small yellow shiny vase, a small dark grey vase with fine orange lines engraved in it, and - my treasure - a small box of plastic with a kind of undersea scenario with sand, some stones and a dried starfish and sea urchin sceleton. How I loved that! I kept it until it got too smelly...

I remember when I had recovered from chickenpox, that I discovered the library - which completely made my day. It was there that I read Astrid Lindgren for the very first time: The Six Bullerby Children (or "The Children of Noisy Village"). I loved that and read and re-read it over and over again when I got home. I guess Lindgrens stories formed my perception of an idyllic setting...
(which was obviously not on the island of Föhr)

Early 1970s. Me being the second to the right, in front, with the horrible plaid pants.

Sorry, no story today...

I'm just too tired...

Childhood memories: The seesaw

One of my first childhood memories is from the time when I was about three years old. I am sitting on a seesaw, it was painted in a pastel green, and the paint began to chip off.

I was wearing a short dress, maybe made of a terry cloth, and a straw hat. My legs were full of sand, and I began brushing it off.


Just a short moment from way back when. Short enough for me to wonder if this really happened or if it was just a dream or something.


A few months ago, my Dad sent me a CD containing some very old photos of our family, and this one was among those pictures:




Me, on a pale green seesaw, wearing a short dress and straw hat, scratching the sand off my leg. Go figure!
The photo was taken during a vacation in Bulgaria, in 1969.

Childhood memories

When I was a kid, my family was living in a house that my grandparents and my great-grandparents had built in the 1950’s. My grandparents had died, but my great-grandmother was still alive and living on the 2nd floor (I already wrote about her some time ago).
Whenever my parents took out on a Saturday night, I was told to go upstairs not to be alone in our place, and it was so totally different with Omama, as we called her. She had a big eat-in kitchen with a sink and a sofa and a large old cupboard. There was a table and some chairs and a coal-burning stove. She had a bathroom and a bedroom, and, there was another room that stored some belongings of my deceased Granny. In the bedroom, there was a huge wardrobe made from black wood, and a huge double bed made of the same material, as well as a cabinet with a threepart mirror. In the bedside locker, she stored some pocket watches that had belonged to my great-grandfather (whom I never got to know). Along with the chains that belonged to them. I took a fancy in the pocket watches! There was one made of silver, and a golden plated one. They had a lid to cover the glass, and one of them had even a lid you could lift, to see the watch work. What a sight, to see the tiny sprockets turn, and the balance spring twist and turn. There were also cuff links in the drawer, pretty little things.
To be able to have a look at those watches compensated for the fact that I had to be in bed by 20.00, just before Omama went to bed herself, untying her thin white hair from the bun she wore in the daytime. And going to sleep and snore on her side of the bed.

Unfortunately, when Omama died in her 90’s, all of those precious belongings went to her remaining daughter, my grandaunt. I saw nothing of that ever again.

But each time I go to a flea market and see such wonderful watches, I have to think of my great-grandfather’s watches, and it even let me to buy my own pocket watch some months ago. It’s a modern form, but there’s a chain attached to it.
Sadly, it is not half as pretty as the old ones, so I will have to go on searching at the flea markets…