I’ve heard it said over the years, more than once and by lots of sources, that one’s memories of earlier times could’ve been a pastiche of what one’s heard from the adults down the decades, rather than what one actually remembers from first hand experience. You’ve heard it described so many times that you start to take over the memory as your own experience recollection.
In my teens, I came across a photo of myself as a one(?)-year-old.
It was obviously posed for the occasion in a photo studio (common in those days when the majority of people wouldn’t have a camera, going to a studio only for a memento to mark the event, usually a wedding as that'd be important enough).
I was sat, cross-legged, next to a porcelain Alsatian, also seated but the same height as I. My right arm was around the dog’s shoulder in a “we’re chums” pose, with my right hand fingers gently holding the dog’s right ear.
I was kitted out in a pair of dungaree shorts, but the fabric was not denim. As I looked at the photo, my head flashed up the colour scheme (patchy mixture of subdued lime green and lemon yellow) and the texture (seersucker type with small raised blobs).
Now, where would I have got the colour and texture from, since it was a black and white photo?
Even if the grown-ups had talked about the photo (but to whom and why? — it was only a posed studio photo of a one-year-old, after all), I doubt that they’d have gone to such detail as the texture and colour scheme on the child’s garment. They’d more likely have talked about how hard it was to get the child to sit still for the pose, or how much it had cost — IF they had talked about it at all.
I can only conclude that what flashed up in my head was from my own experience on that day — as a one-year-old at the time of the photo shoot: the feel of the material and the colours that fed onto my eye screen.
(Singapore, 1960s)
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