Whats your earliest memory?

Is it really a memory or just a fond reconstruction of all the family stories you've heard so often?

I can remember a big sheet of plywood with my Dad bending thin strips of wood around pins knocked into the plywood sheet. It was the building of the sides of the sidecar.

My sisters on a sidecar, Dad in the background, in front of, can it be, a Butlins Holiday camp accommodation.

I can smell plywood and glue. The little pin hammer and the panel pins.

Its a memory of a few minutes, I think it was at night. Was I dumped on the floor by Mum taking me to bed and risking a goodnight to Dad while he fought with the stupid, fiddly, (I think that's what he called them) strips after a long day at work. Down on his hands and knees on the kitchen floor working with some paper pattern which involved building this framework with thin plywood skin applied to it. I would later learn this was definitely not the way my Dad would have built it so it must have been from a professional plan - a project in a woodworking magazine?

How old was I then, months, still a baby, or years, a toddler?

I've heard stories since of the travails of travel in the sidecar but I have no memories of it visually, however I do remember a smell. A pungent, linoleum like smell mixed with petrol fumes.

I have only one other memory of the sidecar. A long road, a dip stretching off miles into the distance. I think I'm standing looking out of the sidecar down this incredibly long road while we are parked in a layby. Was I standing looking out of the roof of it? I have a memory of a map, an RAC gazeteer for the journey from Croydon to Brighton, all of fifty miles, and we are lost trying to find the way.

Do I really remember all this? Was I even there for the building of the sidecar?

My understanding is that I was conceived at Butlins while the girls played Pirate Treasure with the Redcoats. How did the family get there before the sidecar? Was it train and bus leave the bike at home? So was the gazeteer and the dip road the first time we went to Butlins under our own steam, motorbike and sidecar? How old was I then?

I know the sidecar was reputed by family legend to have taken years to complete but the above seems an awfully detailed memory for a toddler.

Me and Dad with the sidecar.

So a partial explanation. The first photo with my sisters is the sidecar that came with the bike. This photo is of the sidecar that Dad built. So original trips were in bike and old sidecar, I remember trips in the new sidecar. You can see by the size of it that its a Dad project. Definitely not delicate.

Its also a family legend that the sidecar when completed was found not to fit through the door, so it had to be disassembled, taken outside and then reassembled. I think the word fiddly may have been employed again.