Lythan's difficult challenge

Lythan wants our early memories and boy is that a tough one!
My head isn't so much like a sieve as a colander.I'm never really sure whether I actually remember something, or I've just seen the photo!
I grew up in a little seaside village in the North east of England and most of my early remembrances seem to be to do with the sea - going rock-pooling with one of my Grandads for instance. We must have spent hours and hours crouched over the pools looking for crabs, sea anemones and starfish.
When I was teaching, I'd tell the little ones how my mum used to meet me out of school and we'd go straight down to the beach - for children living about as far away from the coast as possible here in England, who saw the sea maybe once a year if they were lucky this sounded like heaven and their little eyes would open wide in awe!

I've always been stubborn and my mum was never able to "shift" me once I'd dug my heels in. She could just bribe my brother with a matchbox car or something to get him to do what she wanted, but that never worked with me. My aunt however, could do no wrong and it was she who dealt with the stuff my mum couldn't get me to do.
I've never been a happy bunny about getting my hair cut so it was my aunt who would take me all the way from our little village to Newcastle on the bus - which took an hour or so - to the children's hairdresser at Fenwicks (I think) in the hope that they'd be better able to cope with my tantrums. My aunt has always maintained that I never had tantrums when I was with her - which only served to wind my mum up, of course. I aslo remember the hated frilly dresses we had to go to Newcastle to buy for special occasions like Easter. I was a shorts and T-shirrt kind of little girl , not the frilly-frock sort that my mum must have wanted. Tradition had it that you HAD to have something new to wear for Easter Sunday or it would be bad luck so the hated ritual went on every year! I'm sure I remember throwing tantrums in Fenwicks and the other big Newcastle shops! Horrible child I was

Until we got a puppy when I was about 14 I was absolutely terrified of dogs. I don't actually remember this, but my mum told me that when I was a baby a big alsation stuck it's head right into my pram, it didn't hurt me, but she reckoned that's where my fear came from. I was so scared that if I was eating chocolate and saw a dog coming towards me I'd throw the chocolate away in case it came up to me - because dogs like chocolate, don't they?I'm still a bit nervous but I'd prefer a dog to a cat any day - they are just nasty creatures (oooooooh I can feel the wrath and the hate-vibes coming in from all those cat lovers already :)