What was going on when I was born?

International Britain is exploring new ideas to halt the battle for the Falklands, according to Foreign Secretary Francis Pym. Addressing an agitated House of Commons, Mr. Pym said that the ideas included an early cease-fire but that no truce was possible without a withdrawal of Argentine troops from the islands, a condition that Buenos Aires has repeatedly rejected unless it is coupled with recognition of Argentine sovereignty over the islands. Responding to a question, Mr. Pym said that one possibility was the creation of ''a United Nations trusteeship'' in the archipelago. (Page A1, Column 6.) Argentina devalued the peso by 17 percent as part of a series of economic moves designed to spur exports and help finance the war against Britain. Buenos Aires said that about 800 survivors had been rescued from the cruiser General Belgrano. (A16:1.)

C. Arnholt Smith's financial empire has officially disappeared. With the filing of final liquidation papers in a Nevada court on Tuesday, the ill-starred Westgate-California Corporation, which had struggled along for eight years under Chapter 10 of the Federal Bankruptcy Act, vanished from corporate rosters. Checks were mailed Monday to some 6,000 persons who held the two million outstanding shares of the company, in keeping with a previously announced plan to distribute the nearly $62.5 million in assets. Shareholders were paid at a rate of $28.25 a share, more than some had originally paid for their stock.

''The President of the United States will endorse and support this proposal.

Mary Ann Walker's scrapbook is filled with the yellowed photographs and clippings that chronicle her childhood - the nurses, the sunny pink nursery high above East 72d Street and the doting couple who adopted her in March 1936: James J. Walker, New York City's flamboyant former Mayor, and his wife, the actress Betty Compton. Newspaper accounts at the time referred to Mary Ann as ''one of the luckiest babies in the world,'' a ''blue-eyed, curly-haired tot bubbling with a genial disposition - to match her father's.'' To Mr. Walker, a father for the first time at 55, she was simply ''the loveliest little lady anyone ever cast eyes on,'' and he vowed that she would be ''a normal American child.'' But like many sons and daughters of celebrities, Mary Ann Walker never really felt ''normal.'' For years, she struggled to extricate herself from the lengthy shadow cast by Jimmy Walker, who as Mayor of New York from 1926 to 1932 came to symbolize the gaiety and exuberance of the Jazz Age. And like many of the adopted, she discovered she knew nothing about herself when she emerged.

The White House and Senate Republican leaders agreed on a budget compromise, and it was approved hours later by the Senate Budget Committee. The plan would increase taxes by $95 billion over three years. It envisions a deficit of $105 billion for the fiscal year 1983, $70 billion for 1984 and $42 billion for 1985. (Page A1.) Earlier, at a House Ways and Means Committee hearing, Treasury Secretary Donald T. Regan and House Democrats discussed possible tax increases. (D19.) Paul A. Volcker, chairman of the Federal Reserve, came close to supporting a constitutional amendment requiring a balanced Federal budget. His testimony before a House panel and his remarks in an interview later marked an unexpected shift, although he warned against allowing the amendment to divert attention from solving the current budget crisis. (D1.)

Foreign Secretary Francis Pym said today that Britain had begun to explore new ideas for ending the battle for the Falkland Islands. The destruction of major British and Argentine warships this week appeared to have lent a new urgency to diplomatic efforts to find a peaceful solution to the Falkland crisis. Mr. Pym's remarks to a nervous and expectant House of Commons this afternoon contained subtle shifts in emphasis reflecting the changed circumstances. But he reiterated Britain's contention that no ceasefire was possible without a withdrawal of Argentine troops from the islands, a condition that Buenos Aires has rejected unless it is coupled with recognition of Argentine sovereignty over the islands.

The Parks Department will use aerial spraying to combat gypsy-moth infestations in four city parks, Parks Commissioner Gordon J. Davis announced yesterday. The department will not use the chemical pesticide Sevin, which has aroused controversy, but will spray with the biological agent Bacillus Thuringiensis, commonly known as B.T., which presents fewer ecological risks. The four parks are Van Cortlandt in the Bronx, Alley Pond and Cunningham in Queens and LaTourette in Staten Island. The spraying will take place sometime in the next two weeks, depending on weather conditions and the status of the gypsy-moth hatch.

The renewed unrest in Poland raised obstacles today to the rescheduling of loan and interest repayments that Warsaw is due to make this year. Poland's 1982 debt payments to Western governments and banks total an estimated $10.4 billion in principal and interest, including $2.5 billion in principal and $2 billion in interest owed to banks. High-ranking Polish bank officials were scheduled to hold talks this week in London with British bankers on rescheduling all of the 1982 bank debt, including interest, an unusually far-reaching request. They may also seek new loans.

The head of a bankrupt diamond company and his wife, who have been linked to the embezzlement of $6 million by a slain Federal witness, were arrested on mail fraud charges yesterday by the Federal Bureau of Investigation. At a hearing in Federal District Court in Manhattan, a prosecutor said Irwin M. Margolies, the 47-year-old president of the defunct Candor Diamond Company, and his wife, Madeleine, 40, were responsible for a ''fraud of monumental proportions.'' The prosecutor, Stephen Schlessinger, an assistant United States Attorney, said there was little hope of recovering the missing funds. He asserted that ''some of the proceeds of the fraud were secreted'' in foreign countries by Mr. and Mrs. Margolies last summer when they traveled ''under false and assumed names.''

In an unexpected shift of view, Paul A. Volcker, chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, moved close today to support of a constitutional amendment that would require a balanced Federal budget. But he warned against allowing the amendment proposal to divert attention from solving the Government's present fiscal crisis. Mr. Volcker, appearing before a House subcommittee, expressed sympathy for the idea of the amendment but ''great caution'' about the way it is now drafted. He did not call for enactment of the amendment, as President Reagan did last week. Nonetheless, Mr. Volcker's testimony and his comments in an interview afterwards were plainly more sympathetic to the proposed amendment than his last pronouncement, made a year ago. At that time he suggested that other methods of reducing budget deficits be tried first before resorting to a constitutional amendment to strengthen the Government's fiscal discipline.

An article in Business Day on Tuesday about a proxy fight against the Gulf Resources and Chemical Company incorrectly identified Gary A. Childress. He is a former president of the Warner Company.

A young garage maintenance man was charged yesterday in the bludgeoning death of a 24-year-old nurse at Montefiore Hospital in the Bronx after he confessed to the police, according to the office of the Bronx District Attorney. Authorities said that the nurse, Barbara Meliota, had been sexually assaulted, then beaten to death and that her body had been dumped into the airshaft of the hospital's garage. The attack occurred Tuesday morning. At his arraignment last night in Criminal Court in the Bronx, assistant district attorney Kenneth Anderson said that the suspect, Anthony Doyle, a 22-year-old Bronx resident, had made ''a full confession on videotape.'' The videotape is to be shown to a homicide grand jury today, Mr. Anderson told the court.