General questions get general answers: *what was your childhood like* produces *we were poor but we were happy*, and then a silence. These 40 questions about childhood are specific enough to open your grandmother up. Childhood answers best to sensory questions — what a room smelled like, who had a car in the street, what happened when it rained. Grandparents are often the easiest people to interview and the ones with the least time. Both of those are reasons to start this weekend.

Questions to ask

40 questions to ask about childhood

Before you start

40 questions in 7 groups. Pick eight or ten; do not try to get through them all.

  • Ask if you can record. Almost everyone says yes, and almost everyone forgets the recorder is there within ten minutes.
  • Sit beside them rather than opposite. It is easier to remember something difficult when nobody is watching your face.
  • Have a photograph to hand. A picture unlocks more than a question does.
  • Let silences run. The useful answer usually arrives about four seconds after you would normally rescue the pause.
  • Do not correct dates. Being wrong about the year is not the same as being wrong about the memory.
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The printable question sheet plus a one-page interviewing guide — how to sit, when to stay quiet, and what to do when they stop talking. It arrives in about thirty seconds.

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Before you start

Most people ask your grandmother about childhood once, get three sentences, and never ask again. Not because there is nothing to say — because the question was too big. "What was it like?" is impossible to answer. The questions below are small on purpose: they ask for one thing at a time, and they ask for detail rather than summary, because detail is what memory actually stores.

There are 40 here, in 7 groups. Pick eight or ten. You will not get through them all in one sitting and you should not try.

The questions work the same whether you are asking grandmother, grandfather, mother, father, parent, grandparent, husband or wife and yourself. What changes is not the question but how much they will say to you, so start with the group you think they will enjoy rather than the first one here.

The place they began

  • What could you see from the window of the room you slept in?
  • What did the house smell like when you came in from outside?
  • Which room were you not supposed to go into, and did you?
  • Where did you go when you wanted to be on your own?
  • What was the coldest place in the house?
  • Who else lived there that people have forgotten about?

The people in it

  • Who was in charge, and how did everyone know?
  • Who did you go to when you were upset, and why that person?
  • Which adult frightened you, even if they never did anything?
  • Who made you laugh?
  • Was there someone who was kind to you that nobody else noticed?
  • Who did you look like, and did people say so?

Ordinary days

  • What did you eat when there wasn't much money?
  • What woke you up in the morning?
  • What was Sunday like?
  • What job were you given that you hated?
  • What did you wear that you were embarrassed by?
  • What did the day feel like when nothing happened?

School

  • Who was the teacher you remember, and what did they do?
  • What were you good at that nobody made a fuss about?
  • Were you frightened of anyone there?
  • What did you get in trouble for?
  • Who did you sit next to, and where are they now?

Play and freedom

  • How far were you allowed to go on your own?
  • What did you do that your parents never found out about?
  • Who did you play with, and what did you play?
  • Where did you go that you weren't supposed to?
  • What was the most dangerous thing you did as a child?
  • What did you make?

The wider world arriving

  • What was the first thing that happened outside the family that you understood?
  • When did you first see a television, and what was on it?
  • What did the adults talk about when they thought you weren't listening?
  • What did you think the future would be like?
  • When did you first realise other people lived differently?

Looking back

  • What do you miss that you can't explain to anyone?
  • What did the adults get wrong about you?
  • What would you tell that child if you could?
  • What did you want to be, and when did that change?
  • Is there anything from then you've never told anyone?
  • What smell takes you straight back?

When they stop talking

Move to the next group and come back later. Often the answer arrives twenty minutes afterwards, unprompted, while they are making tea.

What Your Book Pro does here

Your Book Pro is a British book-writing platform. You bring a book — an idea, a folder of notes, half a draft, or a finished manuscript written somewhere else — and it gives you the editorial process a publisher would run: a plan, structured feedback, a simulated beta read, a line edit, a proofread, a cover, a blurb and a print-ready file. You can type it, upload it or speak it. The tools sit in one place and work on the same manuscript, so the feedback compounds instead of arriving as twelve disconnected opinions.

These question sets are free to use and free to download, with no account. They are here because the recording is the part that cannot be done later, and it should not sit behind anything. When you have the recordings, Transcription turns them into clean verbatim and Themes from Bulk Audio finds what the material is actually about.

A professional oral historian at £150–£400 a day brings judgement about what to follow that a question list does not. What a list gives you is the courage to start, which is usually the actual obstacle.

Record their answers

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