EXPERTS

A friend of mine told me of this project about stories from childhood. Now that I've read a couple of the stories I've come to think about my own childhood. My grandmother lived in our house – we had a big house in the countryside – and after my grandfather had died, she moved into a room on the first floor. There she often sat in the evening, listening to the radio, knitting or reading. I often went to see her after dinner because I enjoyed being in her room. Mostly she'd start telling me about her life, and she'd had a long life, with much to tell. She had lived through two world wars, flight and expulsion, and two of her children had died really young. But still my grandmother didn't seem embittered. Instead she seemed kind, and she often smiled to herself when brushing up one of her memories. This is how I learned a lot about earlier times and these stories made a tremendous impression on me as a child.
Now I've been a nursery nurse at a large kindergarten for a few years and I've suggested having a story telling hour once a week, when we nurses and the children sit together, and whoever wants to can tell a story about something that has happened to them. The children, even the lively ones, are really quiet during these hours and listen attentively – and I always have to think of my grandmother, of how we used to sit together in her room in the evenings.
Marianne, 48, nursery nurse

One day, I had a conversation with a boy (he was almost three years old) about the cold. We were looking through the window onto a snowy atrium. We were discussing what we decided to wear this morning. I told him I have black mittens, he told me that he had blue. I continued with telling him, that my mittens have five fingers. He paused for a moment and then replied: “My mittens have six fingers!”