“So Strangely Works the Mind of a Child”

This essay uses published and unpublished autobiography and memoir to consider the place of the First World War in childhood memory and asks how those memories are shaped by the relationship between the adult present and the childhood past. Childhood memories of war reveal a complicated mixture of emotions. Authors present themselves as being at times excited, frightened, bewildered, and confused by what they experienced of the war. For many, it features centrally in their autobiographies, suggesting that these selected authors see the war as a dominant feature of their childhood years, one which shaped their experience of growing up and around which they construct the narrative of their childhood. But memories are shaped by more than just personal experience. What prompts an individual to recall their childhood experiences may shape the memories themselves. Several autobiographers recorded their memories of the First World War on the eve of, and during, the Second World War. If they were prompted to revisit their childhood experiences by the circumstances of the 1939–1945 war, has that influenced their memories of the earlier conflict, or has their experience of the 1914–1918 war affected their response to the new conflict? In other cases, it appears as if authors are remembering their own war in the light of what they have read of others’ war experiences. Many of the memories I have come across have some of the qualities of Freud’s screen memories. Authors recalling their childhood have often attached meaning later. Earlier images have been reshaped by later events or by the mere act of recalling them. This is inevitable because of the fragmentary nature of memories; a scene or part of a scene may be conjured, but its meaning at the time may escape the author, prompting them to invest the memory with a meaning drawn from later experience. This does not diminish the importance of what is being remembered, but encourages us to explore the process of memory and the relationship between an individual and their past.