My earliest verifiable memory is of meeting my brother for the first time in his foster parents' living room. I never saw it in a photograph, but I remember the curtains vividly. (Babies, OTOH, are basically interchangeable.) I'd have been maybe two and a half.
I also have memories of learning words in the muddled-up order that small children often process language: I asked my dad what some interesting piece of apparatus in one of the rooms at the MRC compound was, and him saying it was a 'headover projector'. I knew what a projector was (we had one for 8mm cine film), and concluded the lens-onna-stick was so that people's heads wouldn't get in the way of the beam.
More difficult to date (probably aged 4 or 5) was a frustrating conversation I had with my mother about "the flying thing on the wall sometimes". She gave several unsatisfactory missing-the-point answers before changing the subject. It was only years later that I understood that she couldn't see what I was talking about because it was a floater in my eye.
