A walk down memory lane

There used to be a television series called “Last of the summer wine”  which was a gentile sitcom about a bunch of old friends who, now retired, would wander the surrounding countryside of their village in the Yorkshire dales having adventures. They had reverted to being children, and although now well into old age they revelled in pranks and foolish games, to the annoyance of their wives who took tea and tended the day to day necessities of life.

Yesterday I met up with my childhood friend, Malcolm. We grew up in the same street  together on the outskirts of Barrow. The road we lived in, Yarlside road, petered out into the countryside of hedgerows and famers fields. In fact in my first few years we lived in a lane, where on the opposite side of the road,  were hedgerows and beyond that fields. By the age of reaching ten those hedgerows would begin to be transformed into a new housing estate, we would soon be no longer living in the country side.

Just a short walk from our homes, less than a few minutes, we would be in country lanes where Yarlside road would finish and the countryside would begin. In those days we would have this as our natural playground, in the Spring we would comb the hedgerows for birds nests, but often we would make our way over the farm gates into an area we knew as “the forts”.

Playing out up the forts today Mala?

The forts were not forts, but the remnants of a long since abandoned mine works, where many years before we were born they used to extract very high grade  iron ore called hematite.

The whole area of, perhaps 100 acres was littered with collapsed mine shafts that formed holes in the fields, cordoned off with barbed wire that plunged deep into the ground. We could easily sneak under this barbed wire and drop stones into these chasms and count the seconds to see how long it took for the  thwack of the stone to reverberate back up the hole, one and two and  three, crack.

There were other holes that were  always full of water, collapsed holes that had been dug perhaps or just collapsed and sealed themselves. Around some of these were “the forts” Huge lumps of concrete structures that would have  housed the guns of Naverone. With the 2^nd world war having  ended just before we were born we christened them the forts. But more than likely they were simply part of the rush for iron ore in the early part of the 20^th century, or perhaps earlier than that.

But to us as kids it was a magical area where we could conjure up all kinds of games and scenarios.

Back then a railway line still ran from this outpost to connect up with Roose station a couple of miles away although no  engines ever rolled down this disused  branch line. There were signs that in a distant passed other lines had criss crossed this hillside, perhaps dumping spoil that now was gassy humps. One of these  humps was known as “rice pudding”. Rice pudding was a prominent bump in the fields that we often sat upon as a rendezvous point as we waited for our mates to arrive back in the 50’ when we used to play around there.

Today it looked quite inconsequential but back then with it’s conical shape it was Everest to us well Hillary had just climbed  Everest. Rice pudding is about 30ft high.

Fifty five years  later, on  a  glorious late summer afternoon me and Mala went to revisit our old playground, and it’s still there almost the same as we left it all those year ago. The only difference being that it was now surrounded by barbed wire fencing. No cattle or sheep graze here so the thistles and nettles have taken over. The ponds are covered in weeds and are a haven for dragonfly, in fact it’s become a sanctuary for wildlife. We saw a dragonfly the size of a small sparrow and Kestrels hovering and waiting to strike.

We took in the immense vista from Morcambe bay to the  Furness fells and marvelled  at the privilege at being able to grow up in such a stupendously beautiful place. We sat on the edge of one of the “forts” with a   twenty foot drop into one of the ponds below , like we perhaps did all those years ago when proving  our bravado would have been so important , today I sat a long way back.

We  walked, and talked, as old friends do about the past  about how life has twisted and turned, about our kids, about our plans for the future, but most of all we just enjoyed revisiting this special place in our childhood,  a place fraught with the most abject dangers that we just took for granted back then in the late 50’s.

It was a wonderful place to grow up in, a huge leap from there into the world of rock n roll, where we both ended  up, me into sound engineer, Malcolm as a soundman for the  BBC, me with my own recording studio, walking the fields of our youth,.

A fitting end to my time in England,  a walk down memory lane.