If only we knew then what we know now.

In the 70’s my mum bought a car, it was a Morris Minor and it came from a work mate of my brother David. He worked at Triangle Controls in Burscough and was an apprentice engineer. He saw the car for sale and told mum who went down with the twins and Simon and had a test drive and she bought it. It was black and in pretty good condition but it was a manual gearbox and she had learnt on an automatic. She passed her test before you needed a separate licence if you passed in an automatic. She had to teach herself how to change gear with a clutch pedal. She managed and was soon sitting in with the twins while they learnt to drive in “Betsy” as they had named  her. Both David and Colin had motor bikes just like I had but the wanted their car license too. “Betsy" became a part of the family and when Mum moved house out of Stanley Court into Hesketh road a garage was going to be found  to keep her in.

           One day and advert was seen in the local news paper “ Garage for free. Buyer must dismantle and remove.” Mum went along and saw the garage, it was a corrugated panel building with a steel frame and 20’ x 12’. Mum said yes we could take it away but it would be a few days. The owner was so happy that we could take it as he wanted to build a conservatory on the side of the house where the garage was. Colin was working at a local farm after finishing his A levels before going off to university and he borrowed a tractor and trailer. We all went down the night before and sprayed every nut and bolt with WD40 to make sure they would be loose for the next morning.

Colin Turned up at mums with the tractor and David, Simon and I rode on the trailer down to dismantle this massive garage. We had ring spanners and adjustable wrenches, no power tools, so every nut and bolt had to undone by hand. It took about three hours of hard work for us four lads to take it down and load it on the trailer. The panels were all six foot by two and the steel work was six inch by 4 inch I girder and it weighed  about three tons in total. We made sure it was securely tied down and we set off across Burscough from Lathom. It cause quite a stir on the road when we had a queue of traffic behind us for most of the way. Colin would not go above 10 miles an hour just in case anything worked loose. All the nuts and bolts were in a big bucket and we had ropes over all the panels and steel on the trailer. It took us nearly an hour to drive the distance to our mums home. We were absolutely filthy with dust, rust, sweat and cob webs, we looked a right sight, three of us sat on the back of the trailer watching the cars in a line behind us as we crept along. When we got back to Mum’s we had to unload everything as Colin had to get the tractor and trailer back to the farmer. It was all stacked at the back of mum’s house on the lawn as we could not block the shared drive. The neighbours needed to get into their garage after all.

It was decided the next morning that it should be erected square with the next doors garage so as to make it look neat. This also gave us a bit of space at the back to work around and put on the end panels. Most of the next day the four of us worked to erect the steel work  but it was not that easy, Whether the floor here was not quite level or it had been built slightly crooked and ours was true I don’t know but it would not go up without a struggle. Eventually it was up and the panels were on, the timber doors were hung and they would open and close with a little effort. Mum had the honour of driving “Betsy” the Morris Minor in to the garage, the car looked lost in this huge space. We all looked like had been working down a coal mine. We were covered in dust and grime from head to foot.

What we did not realise was the material the garage was made from.

 It was sheets of corrugated asbestos concrete. In 1975 we did not understand the risks we had taken when we were handling it. Mum sold the house in Hesketh road  in 1999 and moved nearer to where I now live. That garage is still at the back of the house today as it would cost thousands of pounds to dispose of it in a safe manner.

Now Get Out Of This.

In the early eighties I started to spend a lot of time up on Ashurst Beacon with my CB radio and I got involved with the park ranger service with two friends, Fred and John. They both came from Liverpool and volunteered with myself to help around the park. We did forestry work clearing out the thick undergrowth in the woods up on the hillside. Ponds had to be dredged and cleared to encourage the wild life. This was hard laborious work but it was really rewarding when you saw how the access to the park was improved. We also had to look after Abbey Lakes, this is a lake on the border with Wigan and had been a lovely spot for families in the past but had fallen into disrepair and was over grown,  the lake was almost sludged up. The head ranger got funding and it was dredged and restocked with course fish. We built angling platforms all around the banks and it was reopened to the local angling clubs. It can still be used to this day and there is plenty of access for wheel chair anglers too.

West Lancashire council organised a competition called “ Now Get Out of This” based loosely on the format of the TV show of a very similar name. The rangers were asked to work out various thing for the teams to do like an assault course around the Tawd Park and the Beacon Park in Skelmersdale. There were various teams of four from all over the borough such as council employees, the police, scouts, guides and of course the park rangers.

We suggested that maybe we should get some form of uniform for the team of four rangers to wear. Fred worked in Walton Prison and he managed to get four sets of prison denims for us to wear. We looked a right sight running through the woods just like escaped convicts.

Many of the tasks were physical such as building a rope bridge across a stream, getting all the team over without getting wet and then taking the rope over with you. On one task we were given empty plastic drums, planks and a length of rope with which we had to build a raft and sail it across Abbey lake with at least two of the team on board, I think we were the only team that managed the raft task.

Other tasks involved getting keys out of special places to open boxes to gain rewards much like the do on “I’m a celebrity, get me out of here.”

In another task we had to carry a weight around a course without putting it down on the floor.

It took place one Saturday in September and a great time was had by all. Lunch was provided in the Beacon Golf club and what a sight it was with everybody covered in all sorts of mud and detritus. The smell was not very good either, definitely a country smell. At about four o’clock we all went back to the golf club for a scoring and to present the medals to all who took part. You should have seen the bar staff’s faces when we all walked in, it was like the pub scene in Shaun of the dead. Every one clamouring at the bar, covered in seven kinds of shite, trying to reach for a pint. It was hilarious looking back on it now.

The locker rooms came in very handy when it came to cleaning up the contestants.

A buffet of pies, pickles and sandwiches was provided which was quickly demolished. After all the deliberations and sorting out the team of escaped convicts were declared the winners and we even got our pictures in the local papers the next week.

It was used to promote the parks around Skelmersdale for leisure activities for quite some time.

13th July 1985, What were you doing?

 What were you doing on July 13^th 1985? We were on holiday in Cornwall, we had arranged to go away with an old school friend of mine and his family. Dave and I had met again on the CB radio, he was Blue Max and I was Icebox. Dave was a bus driver for Ribble and in his spare time was a children entertainer and magician. His wife Margaret and their three kids had booked a caravan next to our and we were having a smashing time. Nathan was just turned six and Gaynor was to have her fourth birthday while we were on holiday. Both of families had our CB’s in the car and we had loads of fun on the way down keeping in touch with each other and the other drivers on the M6 and M5. It was glorious weather and I did loads of exploring around the countryside. I liked to get out early in the morning in my Austin Alegro and find a hill to try and get some distance copies on the CB. It was really fun speaking to all the different breakers. You could get copies from people all over the place and most of them were really genuine. You got the usual idiots playing music and swearing all the time but you learned to ignore them.

I like to try unsigned  road to the coast to see what was at the end and came across a little village at the end of a narrow steep drive called Trebarwith Strand. About halfway down the road was a sign advertising Cornish Piskies,  no that is not the wrong spelling. They are supposed to inhabit the country side and you have to greet them when you get to certain spots or bad luck will befall you.

 The road down to the village was at the bottom of a steep valley with trees and ivy growing on both sides of the cliff faces. At the bottom was a dead end on to a shingle and sand beach. The village consisted of about six houses, a pub, a cafe and a gift shop and was washed by waves that came from the Atlantic ocean. Surfers had found it and there were boards lined up on the beach. Around the corner of the cliff were caves that we could walk through and both families had loads of fun later when we all came down to the beach. There were rock pools and tidal pools for us all to investigate and I was able to show my two children loads of animals they had never seen before, just as my dad had done years before on the beach in north Wales. I still have some shells and stones on the window ledge in my office at home that I collected from that beach. We bought an inflatable dinghy and had a great time with the kids in the surf making sure that it was tethered and we were with them when they went into the sea.

The caravan site we were on was at a place called St Mabyn and it was only small with about twenty vans and a small pool for the kids to play in.

Saturday the 13^th of July was special because it was Live Aid at Wembley Stadium and we spent the day with the TV on, having a day around the van with bottles of beer and wine. The whole site seemed to have the same idea and it turned into a giant party. Someone had a barbeque going and others had sandwiches and pies, everyone really joined in the fun especially when Queen came on, the whole site was singing along with their televisions. Everybody screamed with laughter when  Bob Geldof was being interviewed and he swore live on tele. From midday through to late evening it went on with all the families getting together and enjoying themselves.

No one worried about the children staying up late because we were all on holiday and they would probably all have a lie in on the next morning.

One of the days out we had was to a place called Morwellham Quay, it is a dock on the river Tamar where a village has been recreated as it was in the 18^th century. All the staff dress in period costume and you can see them going about their daily tasks as you visit. There is lead mine with a narrow gauge railway and the big water wheel on the dock side. They even have a carriage ride up to the big house with great big cart horses pulling the carriage. It was a real experience for the whole family. I would recommend anyone to go and see it if they could. We visited a working dairy farm just outside Newquay and saw how they made butter and cheese on the site.

Funny but I don’t seem to remember any wet days at all while we were on holiday or do I have a selective memory.

What to do with a goldfish from the fairground.

One day when we went to Burscough with the children to visit the grandparents Silcocks fairground was setup on the field behind the garage across the road Heathers parents house.

                   Heather and I had gone to Silcocks while we were courting and had fun on some of the rides like the waltzer. I was persuaded  by Heather and our mates that we should all take a ride on the big wheel. It was about thirty feet diameter and had about eight swinging gondolas that were just big enough for a couple to sit it. I was not very good with heights and it started to go round. It was alright on the way up, we could see all the lights of the other rides and tall all around and below us. It seemed that every nut and bolt that was holding it together was coming loose, it rattled and creaked as it turned and turned. The bulbs in the sockets that made it look so pretty were shaking in the sockets and flicked as the wheel shook. Then as the wheel got to the top and rolled over the crest, the seat started to tip over backwards and I started to panic. I felt my stomach go tight and I held on for dear life, it felt as if we were going to tip out over the back rail which was just at the height of my waist. I was going quite grey in pallor and was almost losing the battle to stop myself screaming. It got down to the bottom and as we started to go up the gondola rolled forward and I did scream as I fell against the lock bar across my stomach, it prevented us from sliding out of the seat but did nothing to reassure me that it would not come loose.

It went around and around for what seemed ages but I was assured that it was no more than five minutes. I wobble off at the end of the ride and nearly threw up on the grass. I have never been on a fairground ride since and I don’t ever intend to either.

           We took the kids over to see the fair with Heathers Mum and her younger sister Morag. Of course grandma wanted to let the kids have a go on all the rides and they went on the roundabout and the little train ride. She took them on the hookaduck stall and they won a goldfish each. They were so happy with their little plastic bag each with the tiny goldfish in. The problem was what to do when we got home, we did not have a tank or bowl so they went into the biggest dish we could find in the kitchen until I could go out the next day and buy a tank. It was a plastic framed glass tank with a filter and I set it all up. I even constructed a hood with lighting so it could be a proper aquarium and not just a bowl. That started me on keeping fish, It was not very long before I decided that I wanted something bigger and more exotic. I decided on a tropical freshwater setup. I did not want to spend a lot of money so managed to scrounge second hand stuff from one of my workmates. I found a fish shop that was selling a lot of fitments off cheap as they were doing a refit and I bought some equipment from them as well. I ended up with a three foot aquarium on the top of a stand with a two foot one underneath. Tropical in the top and cold water in the bottom. Slowly I expanded my new hobby, I started collection windows and glass I found in skips when I was out on my rounds. I brought it home and taught myself how to cut it and make fish tanks using silicone glue.  There were tanks cube tanks, hexagonal tanks, triangular and special narrow ones to fit on window sills. I made ones that were devided up into several sections so that I could keep breeding pairs away from each other but have one filtration system. I joined the local aquarists club and started showing my fish and got quite successful. I was following in the footsteps of my grandma Hart. Almost every flat surface in the house had a tank of some sort on it with a couple of years. I had rice fish from china breeding on the dining room window ledge, cichlids from Asia and Africa breeding in the garage, Mosquito fish from Florida on the bedroom window ledge and danios from Thailand breeding in the cupboard off the living room. I collected bog wood from the lake district and brought it home to clean it up in the back garden. That sold really well along with all the plants I was growing for the aquariums. Twice a year the fish club would have an auction and I would take lots of fish plants and bog wood to sell, this paid for my hobby. As I grew more experienced I decided to be a bit more adventurous and set up a tropical marine tank. I followed all the instructions about specific gravity of the water and maturing the tank so as not to poison any fish. I was not cheap but it was so rewarding when I got fish and it came to life with  a regal tang, yellow tang and a pair of clown fish. I started to grow sea weed and got an anemone for the clown fish. It looked really spectacular in the living room. The strangest fish that I got were yellow sea horses, they were so slow moving until I put live brine shrimps in for the to eat. It was my pride and joy until I introduced some living coral on live rock. Unbeknown to anybody in the live rock was a pest called fire worm which only came out at night and decimated the fish over a period of six months most of the fish were killed and eaten by these worms. I did not discover them until one day I was doing a gravel clean with a siphon tube and the worms started to come out of the gravel in their hundreds. I had to do a complete removal of the fish that were left and throw everything away as there were eggs and larvae of the worms everywhere.  

All this started with two fairground goldfish.

Christenings and They Had Not Seen One as Big.

                                 After Nathan was born we arranged for his christening and on a Sunday morning the whole family went up to the local church and he was baptised. My dad came on his own, I don’t know why as we had been to meet his third wife. All went well and everybody enjoyed themselves with a party back at our house.

                       It was a few weeks later that we got a Christmas card from my dad and Pauline with a note and a new address for them. It said this will be our new address very soon. It was for Economy Bay, Nova Scotia. They were moving to Canada. Pauline had got a job over there and Dad was going with her to see if he could get work. They had been sponsored by Pauline new employer. I was stunned he had not bothered to tell me or the rest of the family face to face. We did not have chance to say goodbye or to wish them good luck. Since then we have had sporadic contact through my aunty Mavis, his sister.

                            Heather and I decided to have a second child quite close together so that they would grow up together and we found out late in 1980 that we were going to have another in August 1981. Heather had quite a rough pregnancy with Braxton Hicks for a long time. We christened the bump Tillie Mint and laughed it off whenever Heather had a hick that Tillie wanted to be in the world with us. Tillie Mint was due to be born on the seventeenth of August but she arrived a month early on the sixteenth of July something that I still get mixed up with today. We named her Gaynor for Heathers second name and Barbara after my Mum as she was her first grand daughter. As she was early and so small she was taken to the special care unit straight way. She spent three weeks there with us going in every day, spending all our spare time feeding her and longing for the day we could take her home. The nursing staff were marvellous, they could not do enough to help us. Eventually we got to take her home and we fell into a routine again. Gaynor was a baby that cried a lot and at times we were pulling our hair out with walking the hallway trying to get her to sleep. Then someone suggested trying Calpol, it worked but not all the time.

                                     We decide that it was time we got her christened as well and we sorted out with the vicar that she could be baptised after the Sunday morning service. On the Wednesday before the Christening I was feeling quite ill as I was doing my round in the wagon around Liverpool. I had a terrible pain in my groin and could hardly walk when I got back to the depot. I made my excuses and did not stay to put any of the rounds in order as I did usually. I managed to drive myself home but when I got home I had a struggle to get out of the car. I had to swing my legs out onto the floor, then put both arms up over my head to grab the car roof  to get myself up into a stooping position. I sounded the horn as I got out by accident and Heather came out to see what was wrong. She found me leaning over the bonnet in tears with the pain. I managed to shuffle around the car and up to the front door by half lying across the car as I shuffled my feet from side to side. I got in to the house and collapsed onto the arm chair. I said to call the doctor and tried to relax. I felt like I had been kicked repeatedly in the crown jewels, it was extremely painful to say the least. The doctor came down to the house within the hour and called an ambulance straight away. I was rushed into Ormskirk General hospital and put into Philip ward. When the consultant came round to examine me had said that I was to be first on his list for the morning. I asked what the problem was as no one had explained what was the matter. He said that one of my testicles had got twisted somehow with the blood supply may be cut off. He said the swelling was either down to infection or that the fluid was building up and could not drain away. This time it looked rather peculiar with one testicle the size of a duck egg. After he went away the ward sister came down and asked to examine me, I thought this was what happened she was just checking that it was not getting worse, until half an hour later the staff nurse arrived and pulled the screens round. She wanted to examine me too, it went on for the next hour or two, I must have had a good six or seven “examinations”. Then one of the nurses said they all had to see as they had not seen one as big before. It is a good job that I was given pain killers as overnight it had swollen up to the size of a goose egg.  

                            I was due down in theatre at ten o’clock but I was woken at six by the new shift changing over. Then the examinations started again until the breakfasts had to be served. I was not allowed even a cup of tea as I was nil by mouth until after the operation.  In Ormskirk the theatres were in a different building and all patients had to be taken outside to get to the theatres. To transport them were two converted electric milk floats or that’s what they reminded me of. I was put on to stretcher and carried to the electric vehicle and driven the two hundred yards to the theatre building, up in the lift to the first floor and the anaesthetic room. A needle was inserted in my hand and I was asked to count backward from ten. Ten, nine, eight and I was coming around in the recovery ward. I was taken  back down in the lift, along the bumpy road in the electric cart back to Philip ward.

                           When the surgeon came round to see me he explained that the blood supply had been twisted and that is what had caused the swelling, he had managed to release the twist and stitch the testicle into place so it could not happen again. He had left a drain in and wanted to see how thing s went for a few days before I was let out to go home. This was Thursday and the christening was only three days away, I could not miss my own daughters christening. The swelling was starting to subside by the Friday morning when the doctor came to do his rounds and I was still very worried that I might miss Gaynor’s big day. On the Saturday the doctor came around in the morning and said that he would be back after lunch to see if the drain could come out. I was getting quite perturbed as to what was going to happen if the drain could not come out. He came around at about five o’clock, removed the drain, he said he would check in the morning if the wound was safe enough for me to go to the church but if I did go it would be on the proviso that I stayed in a  wheel chair for the whole day. 

                              The next morning he came round a nine o’clock and I had to be at the church by ten thirty. It was all right so long as I obeyed him about the chair and no alcohol as I was on the strongest antibiotics he could give me. I phoned home straight away and my mum came out and picked me up with the wheel chair. I stayed in the chair except to climb the stair up to our living room after the service. I had to be really careful because Nathan wanted to sit on my lap and I could not let a two year old bounce on me really.

I was taken back to the hospital and  had to stay in for another five days but I was not alone. My mother in law Lou was taken ill on the Monday and was admitted to the same ward. The staff were so good as we were “related” we were put in the same cubicle. I really thought this was a joke they were having on me but it turned out quite well on visiting times as it saved all out visitors having to go to two separate wards. At times for that week it seemed like a family party time instead of visiting time.

A Supersonic Outing. August 1979.

                               Sunday 26^th of August 1979 was a day I will always remember. I had heard on  my rounds of Liverpool that Concorde would be landing at Speke Airport and I really wanted to see this for myself. Heather and I packed the car up with a picnic and put Nathan in his baby seat. I knew that if we went to Otterspool Promenade we would be able to park the car and walk along the riverbank outside the perimeter fence and get a good view as it came into land. I wanted to get some photos on the SLR camera Dad had given me so my camera bag with all the lenses was an essential for me to carry. We arrived at the car park at about quite early at eight o’clock to make sure we had a parking place. It was due at nine o’clock I had been told. We walked along the edge of the river until we came to the perimeter fence. At times the bank had collapsed leaving only about eighteen inches of solid earth to walk on. This proved to be difficult at times with Nathan in a buggy. The crowds were getting quite thick and we could see that if we did not stop at a spot soon we would not get to see much. I found a spot near the middle of the new runway that had been constructed at the east side of the airport behind the industrial estate at Speke. This was eventually to be the main runway for the John Lennon Airport of today. 

                             There was a shout from the crowd as someone was listening on a radio to the control tower. “ She is coming in over the Wirral”. Every one stared into the distant cloud out over the river Mersey. The tide was low so the mud flats were exposed and lots of wading birds were feeding. Then through the cloud we saw the iconic shape of the swept back delta wings appear in the haze of the distance. We could hear the roar of the Rolls Royce engines as she throttled back on the approach to the runway. All the birds on the foreshore took off and headed south as she came over the runway lights. Concorde seemed to be floating as she came towards us. The nose was in the down position and she looked so incongruous instead of sleek lines she was bent in the middle or so it appeared. She touched down and the brakes were applied, the engines went in to reverse and the noise was unbelievable. You could feel the vibrations on your chest, she rolled on and on and it seemed like she would not stop before the end of the runway. 

                                     My camera jammed,  I had used up a 36 frame roll of film so quickly and I had to change it quickly as she got to the end and started to turn around. I was so excited I could not contain myself. I changed to the longest lense I had as she came back to the centre of the apron and parked right in front of us. The engines went quite, every one cheered and clapped as she stood right in front of us about four hundred yards across the tarmac. I checked my watch and it was just nine fifteen.  The apron was alive with people that had  come out to greet this first flight of a supersonic aircraft to Liverpool. The passengers had flown over to France earlier by the last flight out of Liverpool by a Comet and were returning with Concorde to Paris for the evening. I think the lord mayor of Liverpool was there but I could not swear to it. They started to check all over the plane to make sure it was ok before leaving. I was going through film so quickly I would need a third roll before it took off the way I was going. Loads of cameras were clicking all around us. This was really being recorded for posterity.

                                       The engines had to be tested, and they began to start them with a gentle whine as they turned over, suddenly there was a blast of smoke and flame from the engines on the right hand side, all the cameras went mad clicking and whiring. Someone screamed “It’s on fire.” I said no they were only flushing the fuel from the engine no need to worry. The engines roared into life after an hour and a half on the ground and she taxied down to the east end of the runway. She stood facing towards the river and the Wirral and we all stood with anticipation. The engines opened up and the roar was deafening, the air vibrated as she stared to roll down the tarmac towards us. The acceleration was incredible and she was up to us and past before you knew it. With all the grace of an eagle the nose came up and she rotated up into the air over the river. She climbed up over the Wirral and was over North Wales before you realised. All the audience just stood there and with utter disbelief turned and started to leave. It was just after eleven o’clock and we all made our way back down to the Otterspool promenade where the car was parked. I could not wait to get home and develop the films. We stopped and had our sandwiches overlooking the river. When we went  home I went up to the bathroom and set up my dark room. It was a couple of hours before I came out and the negative had come out really well. I still get these negatives out sometimes just to refresh my memories and to think that I actually was there.

My Grandad was a Hero.

                                            When my mum’s dad Granddad Cheetham was in his eighties he sold the house in Aughton, he and his second wife Alice had moved into sheltered housing in Ormskirk. They seemed to be doing all right but soon Granddad was not very happy. He and Alice were not getting on very well, she wanted her share of the sale of the house. Granddad  was quite frail and he had had a couple of falls too. Mum said he could come and live with her in her house now that there was space after the twins had both got married. I helped collect his things and moved his few belongings over to mum’s. He had his own room and he could listen to his talking books as he was registered blind by this time. He still liked a drink on a Sunday lunch time and I came over each Sunday and took him down to the Stanley Institute where I went to the cinema as a child. He told me to call him Bert not Granddad. He liked to talk about how he had been in the first world war but would not go into great detail about what he had seen. He had only been eighteen at the end of the first world war so what he had seen as a young man I would  suppose had a great effect on him.                      

                               After the first war he had stayed in the army where he had gone over to India and the North west frontier or Afganistan as it is now. He had been there when Prince David, the prince of Wales, the present queens uncle, was over there too. He later became Edward VIII and abdicated. Granddad was wounded in a fight with the natives and had a sword slash to his upper left arm. He was operated on by a surgeon whilst over there called Major Crawford, he was something to do with the famous Crawford’s biscuit company. He lost most of the muscle in his upper arm but they managed to save the arm by pulling the muscles from his lower arm up and sewing the two ends together. He could not bend his elbow very well but he still had his arm. One of the souvenirs he picked up was a brass Buddha that sat on the mantelpiece of my mum’s. It is a statue of Buddha as the fat older man sat in the lotus position and stands about five inches tall. It never seemed to tarnish no matter how long it went without a polish. Mum later gave this to me to keep for my son Nathan, who now owns it.

                                       When Bert came home he got a job at Hattersley’s Brass Foundry and  he joined the territorial army which was based in Bootle. He was an engineer and he trained as a mechanic attached to an armoured unit. They worked on scout cars or Bren gun carriers and at the start of the second war his unit was mobilised. All the other members of the unit were young men who were in there twenties or thirties. Since he was born in 1899 when war broke out he was forty years of age, usually too old to go to war. The lads in the unit said they could not go to fight without “Pop” as they called him, who was going to maintain the vehicles for them? He volunteered to go along with the rest. In 1941 he ended up in the western desert with the Desert Rats fighting Rommel and the German army. He would tell me stories about the sand storms when you could not even see your hand in front of your face or how he had to check inside his boots every time before putting them on  in case of scorpions. He said in the desert sand got into everything. All the rations had to be stored in airtight containers. They could not use grease on the tracks of the tanks and Bren gun carriers as it would get clogged up with the sand and grind away all the metal. They had to use graphite powder as a lubricant instead. He had fought under Montgomery and was at Tobruk when Rommel was eventually stopped. He even went over to Sicily when the allies invaded Italy.   

                             When he came home he went back to working in the brass foundry in Ormskirk and stayed there until he retired in 1964. He told me the secret to surviving in life was to keep your head down, no matter what. Never do anything that will draw attention to yourself, just get on with it and you will survive. I  really enjoyed having a quiet pint or two with him on a Sunday lunch time. Sadly he passed away in 1987, he was an inspiration to have gone through three wars and still survived to raise his family.

Breaker One Nine for a Copy.

                                           In the late 1970’s while I was driving for a living I started to meet a few drivers that were getting citizens band radios (CB’s) for their cabs. They were illegal imports of American radios and could only be bought on the black market. I managed to find on for sale from a friend of mine who owned a transport cafe just outside Kendal. He had a coach which he converted into a cafe for the truckers on the M6 motorway. His handle was Bacon Bob, he got me this Sharps one hander, all the controls and the channel window were on the microphone and that was all you could see because the workings could be fitted out of site. I bought a whip steel antenna, a mirror arm clamp for it and fitted it in my wagon. There were six or seven of us had cb’s at Hedges and we all had different handles or nick names. Mine was  the Icebox, not very original I know but it fitted. It was great fun travelling up and down the motorways chatting with mates as they passed. If you were in a strange town many breakers would help with directions, I made lots of new friends this way. There was always the idiots or “bucket mouths” , these were breakers who insisted on swearing at everyone just to cause aggravation. I even fitted a magnetic mounted antenna on my car. It looked like something off the dodgems with the five foot aerial on top of the roof.

                                       One afternoon I was coming south on the M6 towards the lake district from Carlisle when I heard an American accent on the cb shouting for a copy. I answered” do you copy the Icebox south bound on the M6?” “ yes I copy you Icebox, Where is the M6?.” I explained that I was south bound from Carlisle towards Liverpool. He said that he was south bound from Washington on  I95. “Are you in America?” I asked. “Yes where are you?” I told him I was in England and at first he would not believe me. I said do you have any way I can prove where I am. He said send me a post card with my details on and he gave me a post box number and address to send it to. We chatted for about five or ten minutes with no breaks as we both drove. The all of a sudden his signal faded and disappeared.  I got home and sent off the post card as he had requested, sure enough two weeks later I got a reply and a pack of QSL cards, these are cards that radio operators send out to prove a long distance copy or conversation. I later found out that the sun affects the upper atmosphere of the earth and when there is a lot of sun spot activity the upper atmosphere turns into a mirror for radio waves. Our signals had bounced right across the Atlantic ocean over three thousand miles. 

                     This encouraged me to go even further in to the hobby and I bought a home base antenna which I mounted on the top of thirty feet of scaffolding pole in my back garden. I would sit up until  the small hours of the night talking to local breakers and then in the dawn light go out in my car to the top of the local hill, Ashurst Beacon and try to see how far away I could copy other breakers. I would regularly have a chat with  mates on the Isle of Man, North Wales, North Yorkshire, Birmingham and sometimes southern Scotland.

One Sunday morning I was up on the top of the hill and I was trying to get breakers from their homes to be able to have a chat with a few long distance breakers. Suddenly a police car drew up behind my car and two officers jumped out and came to the drivers door. I would down my window and said hello. They said could I please turn off my cb as it was interfering with a radio for greater Manchester Fire service. All morning I had been coming over the radio round Bolton and Salford as clear as bell. I apologised and closed down the network. They were interested in the set up I had and asked where they might get one.  I was a bit worried becuse it was then illegal to have these sorts of radios i the UK. I said to come down to meet me later and I would see if I could get one for them. We met up when they were off duty and I put them in touch with a friend. They became real friends and had the cbs fitted in their own cars. One took the handle Black Rat and the other became Bluebottle.

                          Heather and I joined the local breakers club The Roger Roger club and we had many happy years with other breakers doing things for lots and lots of charities. We organised a convoy to the top of the Horseshoe pass in North Wales each Easter Sunday and we had a mass eye ball. One year four of us had our head shaved while we were up there to raise cash for a young girl from Bangor  who had encephalitis. We wanted to send her and her family on a much needed holiday. She had been in and out of hospital most of her life and one of the breakers brought her to our attention when she was in Walton neurosurgical unit for treatment. Her name was Hecarty and she was just fifteen years old.  We organised  lots of different events to help raise money, a gala night in the local working men’s club with three or four artists. We culminated with a Sponsored Modulation. Two of my mates Fred and John and our wives would go away for a weekend to do this expedition. This was when a group set up a transmitting station as far away as possible and tried to reach as many people as a as far as possible in a continuous twenty four hour period. We decided to go up a hill in the southern lake district called Black Combe. We got all the permissions we needed , got a caravan, a generator and took a fifty foot aerial tower to five hundred metres up the hill. We started off on the Friday evening and drove up to the lakes, at about eight pm we got to the site and set up the caravan. There were six of us in a eighteen foot caravan and we did not get much sleep that night. The next morning we put up the aerial started the generator and tested the radios, everything was fine. Our wives were on kitchen duties and kept us supplied with drinks and hot food. Over the twenty four hours we contacted all four countries of the UK and as far south as Cornwall. I n total we raised nearly two thousand pounds for Hecarty and her family and they went off for a holiday in Majorca.

                         I still get very nostalgic about my cb days, it was a great period of camaraderie in my life.

Animals, Accident and Arrival.

                                         With our new house came the chance for me to start expanding my collection of pets. We took our cat with us, Huggy, he was a white tom cat with a large black patch on one side of the top of his head and a black tail. I had got him one day when I had seen the advert for kittens at one of my deliveries. We also had our budgie, Snowy, no prizes for guessing he was pure white. Huggy would sit and watch the bird for hours and we could only let Snowy out of the cage when Huggy was out of the house.

We had not been in the house in Skelmersdale long when I turned up with a pair of rabbits.  They were Netherland dwarfs, one of the smallest breeds you could get. I built hutches for them out of old pallets and made the garden safe so they could not escape. It was not long before I was supplying Mrs Philips at the pet shop in Ormskirk again. We soon got another kitten, a black and white one this time and we called him Whiskey. Huggy tolerated him but they never really became best buddies. 

                                          The biggest responsibility that anyone can have is to be responsible for creating a new life. We decided that as we had a house and a reasonable income that it was time for us to start a family. Heather and I said we should try for a baby and everything went fine. Heather found out she was pregnant in the autumn of 1978 and she was due in June of the next year 1979. It was an exciting feeling to be told that I was going to be a dad and I could not wait to tell all the family and friends.  Mum was going to be a grandparent for the first time as was my dad. We went over to Burscough to see her and tell her the good news. She was living alone with Simon by this time as the twins had both got married to the girls they had met in school. Jackie and Dolores were both Mrs Hart. She was really excited for us and offered to knit all sorts for the baby.

                                       We went and visited my dad, who by this time was with his third wife another Pauline, to give him our news. He was working at an engineering company called Fazakerley engineering and he had met this Pauline there. I had just bought a cheap plastic 35mm camera and was experimenting with it. I had taken some pictures of Colin’s wedding and showed them to dad. He said they he thought they were that good he would give me all his photographic equipment. I was amazed at what he had given me, 35mm SLR with telephoto and wide angle lenses, an enlarger, and all the dark room equipment for developing black and white film. I wasted no time in converting our bathroom into a dark room and was soon making all my own photos. Heather really put up with me and my hobbies what with the animals in the garden and garage and now photography as well.

                                  Everyone was so pleased for us about having the baby on the way. Heathers family were very generous with help for the imminent arrival. Heather found out early on that she was rhesus negative and that meant that if I was rhesus positive Heather or the baby might  need to have a blood transfusion when it was born. I decided that the least I could do was to start donating blood. So one afternoon after I had finished my round in Liverpool I called into Central Hall on Ranelagh Street where a donor session was in progress. I parked my lorry behind Lewis’s and walked over to Central Hall. I gave my first donation and came out with a bandage on my left arm. I was fine no problems but it was a little bit difficult trying to change gear with the bandage around my elbow. If they had known I was going to be driving a lorry so soon after donating I doubt they would have let me. Donating blood is  something that I have carried on all the years since then and have now given seventy one times.

                                      Heather is such a good organiser that weeks before the baby was due everything was ready. The cot was up and the room was decorated. We had nappies galore and lots of lovely little clothes. It was going to be in the little upstairs room in between our bed room and the living room . Heather started with Braxton hicks very early in the pregnancy and was having these contractions quite regularly, it was not very comfortable for her. We had a couple of false alarms where we went to the hospital and got sent home again.

                                  It was on our fifth wedding anniversary thirty first of May 1979 and I was delivering around Liverpool. The lorries at Hedges  had recently been fitted with diesel powered fridge motors. I had to deliver a large load to a Lennons supermarket in Garston south Liverpool. The fridge motors were rather noisy and while I was parked up in the loading bay of the supermarket I turned it off. The warehouse man and his assistants came out and we all unloaded the frozen food for the shop. It probably took us about thirty minutes get all the goods off the lorry. Afterwards I had to turn the fridge back on. I climbed up on to the wing of the lorry and reached up to turn the ignition of the fridge. I suddenly lost my footing  and slipped down, I was left hanging with my feet about a foot from the floor, my wedding ring was stuck on a bolt which was through the walk boars on the roof of the cab and I was hanging with my full weight on my ring finger of my left hand. I managed to get my toes onto the wheel nuts of the wagon and lift myself up. I grabbed at my hand and shouted to the warehouse man to get the first aid pack from the cab. He did not understand what I wanted at first until he saw blood dripping from my hands. He got the first aid pack and I opened my hand. My wedding ring had dug into the finger and was buried in the flesh almost at the finger tip, I slid the ring back down my finger and it left a flap of skin and flesh down to the bone almost three quarters the length of my finger. We wrapped it up it a pad and bandage and he got me in his car up to the local emergency hospital. I was seen at once I think because I was covered in quite a lot of my own blood by now. They managed to stem the bleeding and had to cut off my ring with a special cutter. I had fourteen stitches in the finger and told to rest it for a few days. They phoned my depot in Scarisbrick for me and someone came out with another driver to bring the lorry home. I managed to drive home from work even with my hand stitched up.

                              Three days later Heather went into proper labour and we went to the hospital, It was Sunday third of June and a fantastic sunny morning. I won’t go into the gory details but I was there when our son Nathan James was born at midday. My mum turned up at the hospital later with a lovely bunch of fresh sweet pea flowers, the scent filled the hospital ward. Now we were a real family.

1976 and Families were on the Move.

                                   My Mum and brothers moved house out of Stanley Court to a bigger council house in Hesketh road in Burscough.  Heathers family had applied and got one of the new council houses in  Fletchers Drive. As much as we loved our own flat in the centre of the village we wanted a house of our own with its own front door on ground level with a garden. The only way we could get one was to apply for a council house. As a childless couple we were so far down the list for Burscough it would probably be something that would never happen. Our friends Chris and Helen had got a house in the new town of Skelmersdale and the development corporation was offering them to anyone that could move in. We filled in the forms that Helen got for us and we posted them off. Within a couple of weeks we had a letter back offering us a house in Little Digmoor.

                     I took a day off work to go over with Heather to pick up the keys and have a look at the house we had been offered. It was right in the middle of the estate just around the corner from Chris and Helens home. It was a three bedroomed terraced house with an enclosed back garden. When we opened the door I was disgusted with the state. It had been vandalised with paint graffiti and the  downstairs windows had been broken. The down stairs toilet had been used and as the water was turned off nothing was flushed away. We even found used needles and burnt tinfoil inside one of the bed rooms. It had been used as squat for drug addicts. We just locked up the front door and took the keys straight back to the Development Corporation offices. They apologised and said it had been checked a couple of days before. I said they ought to check them on the morning they were due to be offered to tenants. 

                           We went home really disappointed until the next week when we got another letter saying there was another property with a garage not far away that we could have a look at. This one was far better with an integral garage, it was built into the ground floor. It seemed a strange layout with the kitchen at the front of the house and the dining room and one of the bed rooms on the  rear ground floor with two of the bedrooms and the lounge upstairs at the back of the house. The garden was quite large at thirty feet square and it had a tree at the bottom of the garden. We had a quick discussion and decided that we could make it what we wanted. We went back and told them, yes, we would have it. The next day I went into work and asked could I borrow a lorry to move our furniture. That would be OK so long as I paid for the diesel, my boss told me. So in December 1976 we moved over to Skelmersdale to the house that we were going to start our family in.

                            We  took everything we could out of the flat even the carpets that we had bought when we moved in as we did not have much spare cash. Getting the furniture out of the flat was an adventure. Everything had to be carried around the narrow corridor, down the fire escape staircase at the back and then through the narrow gate into the next doors yard where I had managed to park the lorry off the road.  It took  two full loads to get all the stuff we had accumulated across to the new house. 

                           I didn’t realise how much we had collected in the nineteen months we had been married. The corporation helped by giving us a grant to redecorate, we bought paper and paint with it as the walls were either orange or blue, even the ceiling in the lounge was purple. It took quite a few  coats of emulsion to cover it all up. The whole family chipped in to give us a hand getting the house into shape. Chris checked out the electrics, he was an electrician that worked for Vernons pools in Liverpool.  He wired up our electric cooker for us so we had somewhere to cook. My mum came over and helped us with the wall papering and the twins even gave us a hand.

                              On my travels around North Wales I picked up a load of slate from the construction site of the hydro electric station near LLanberis and used it to create a pot around the tree in the garden. We found out later it was a flowering almond tree, every house on our road had one, and the local pub is called The Almond Tree.

                               The neighbours were mainly people that had moved out of Liverpool in  the late sixties and early seventies for the jobs at the new factories that had been built like Cortaulds and Dunlops. There was even a big television making factory on the next estate called Thornes. Shopping was easy as there was a big new shopping centre with an indoor market and loads of big stores. Heather soon found a new job in the Co-op store and I was still at Hedges. We were further away from our families but we still went over to Burscough to see them every week.

Long Distance Driving.

                          Driving for Hedges was a job that I really enjoyed. It meant that I could control how hard I worked and how fast I worked. I was free to plan the routes of the deliveries to suit the customers and myself. I tried to get most of the deliveries done for lunch time because the canteens and restaurants all wanted the food there as early as possible. It worked out well for me too because most of the time I could have a quiet afternoon before going back to the depot to plan the routes for the next day. I could enjoy the country side if I was away in the Pennines, Lake District or North Wales. If I was in the area of my home after finishing I could call in to  relax for a couple of hours. The bosses knew what we did because they had our log books or later tachographs to check up on us. I had nice people to meet every day doing the deliveries and had some really funny times too.  

                            The first time I was sent to North Wales to do the Anglesey and Betws Y Coed run was a bit of an adventure. I was in the yard at five thirty am to leave at six o’clock. I filled up the liquid nitrogen tank for the fridge in the van and collected my notes and two tickets for the Mersey tunnel. These were prepaid and meant we did not have to have money for the tunnel toll. The diesel and oil had all been done the evening before but I checked them all again. All the lights had to be checked every morning because sometimes they would be damaged by the shunters in the yard overnight. All was OK and at six on the dot I left the yard in Scarisbrick to head through Liverpool and to the tunnel. I had a good run because I knew the route to take to avoid all the traffic lights down County road past Walton hospital. I once counted them and it was something like forty two sets of lights between Ormskirk and the tunnel on one route and eighteen on the other. I took the new tunnel and on to the M53, it was again quicker the  new Chester road and the Rock Ferry byepass. Then across to Two Mills and down to Queens ferry. Here I got on the A55 and headed towards Colwyn Bay. I had to at the representatives house for eight o’clock and it was a distance I found out of seventy miles from door to door. Remember that the A55 was not a dual carriage way as it is today and that it was in a ten ton TK Bedford. 

                            Bernard Cooligan was the head representative for north Wales and I was knocking on his door at seven forty five with his paper work, he invited me in to have a cup of tea. I left at eight fifteen and went to my first delivery in Conway. I was enjoying myself finding the new drops to me and meeting new customers. Everyone was so nice and helpful, after Conway I had to drive along the coast road to Bangor and find all the university halls kitchens. I got a bit lost with one or two of them but by eleven o’clock I was on my way to the isle of Anglesey. Over the Menai straight through the Stevenson Bridge and on to the A5. I was looking forward to my next delivery, it was the cafe on the railway station at Llanfairpg or to give it its full  name Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantyysiliogogogoch. It is the longest place name in the British Isles and the platform sign is over thirty feet long. Next was the Officers mess and the sergeants mess at RAF Valley. Security was tight, I had to show identification and sign in before I was allowed on the site. This is where I was given my lunch while the chefs supervised the unloading of the van, I did not have to do anything. After Valley I had to get to Wylfa Nuclear power station with their frozen foods. Here the security was the same as at Valley and I had to be accompanied at all times by one of the security guards. I had to drive all around the island  and deliver to four other hotels before coming onto the mainland again.

                            I had  a chip shop to deliver to in Caernarvon, it was right in the middle of the city walls, quite a tight squeeze for me to fit the lorry though the arched gates. As I carried the frozen fish in I could hear the staff in the back chatting away in English but as I opened the kitchen door and said hello they changed to Welsh, something I thought was quite ignorant. A few weeks later I asked them why they had done this and they apologised as they had not known me. 

                            From Caernarvon I was going to Llanberis and the construction site for the new hydro electric power station that was being constructed inside the mountain. A lake that was at the top of the mountain would be used to drive turbines as it fell to the lake below, then at night when the power from the nuclear power stations was not needed it would be used to pump the water back up to the top lake. This was getting to late afternoon by this time and I still had to drive over the LLanberis pass and down the valley to Betws y coed. It was getting late when I pulled up at the back of the Waterloo hotel and the chef said I could park up for the night behind the hotel. I put their delivery in their freezers and the wagon was empty. I phoned back to my depot and they said to be back at about nine o’clock the next day for a local run to Liverpool. I had never had to sleep out in the van before and I needn’t have worried. The head chef took me into the kitchen and gave me a smashing meal of his own home made shepherd’s pie made with real welsh lamb.

He said that I could have a bed in the staff quarters and showed me to it before he took me through to the bar where I was able to have a couple of pints. The other chefs came out and joined us when they finished their sift at nine o’clock. I played darts and pool with them until it got to about ten thirty when I made my excuses and went off to bed.

                              I was up the next morning at five thirty and the breakfast chef was just getting up too. He said to come and have some breakfast before I left which I did.

                           The drive through the morning light towards the rising sun was spectacular as I crossed the bleak Denbigh moors. Miles and miles of peat bogs with a narrow winding road over the tops of the hills and the steep fall down to the Denbigh valley before the climb up again towards Mold and on towards Chester. It really was a good job, one I enjoyed for sixteen years.

"Those eggs could be over three weeks old".

                                  While Heather was working in Tesco’s she met a kind old man. He was in his seventies and cycled in to do his shopping in the village every week. He stood about five foot  two tall inches with a stoop. He dressed in a jacket and trousers with a shirt with no collar. Braces kept his trousers up never a belt. He always wore hob nail boots and had his trousers in cycle clips to stop them catching on the chain. On his head was a flat cap that he never took off. Wisps of white thin hair came from under the cap. His face was furrowed from his constant smile. His hands were hard and calloused from years of hard physical work. He smiled at everyone but never said very much. His eyes danced with the experience of years and the knowledge of a wonderful full life. One day as he was coming through the shop Heather was filing the fridge with boxes of eggs and he approached her. “ Those eggs could be three weeks old you know. “ he said in a broad Lancashire accent, “ I will bring you some fresh eggs next week” Heather said that would be nice and forgot all about it. The next week he turned up with a box of six fresh eggs, “ you will not get any fresher than that “he said” they were laid this morning”. Heather was stunned and offered to pay for them which he refused saying “I said I would bring them and did not ask you for anything”. He was right, they were really tasty when we tried them with our tea that night. Heather asked him his name and he said “ Mr Vickers”. Every week after that he brought eggs for us and we started to buy them from him for our families.

                                   One day he asked Heather “ what would you do if someone gave you one hundred pounds?” She said “I would probably put it towards a newer car.” She didn’t think anything about it until the next week when as he passed her in the shop he put an envelope into her hands. She looked in the envelope and was so shocked to find twenty crisp five pound notes. She not know what to do she said thank you and he went off on his business before she had time to recover her decorum. She went straight to the shop manager who said he would put it in the shop safe until she went home. When she came home Heather told me what had occurred and showed me the money. I said that she ought to make sure that he really could afford it before she accept or use the money. The next week Heather approached him and said that as much as she wanted to she really could not accept it but he insisted that it was a gift for her and not to worry. He was really a kind old man that wanted to help her for no other reason than she was nice to him when he did his shopping. Heather said we could trade in the mini we had with the money to buy a better car. We went and bought a Mach II Cortina that lasted us for a good few years. 

                                     We started to visit him at his home which was an old cottage out in Lathom where he kept his chickens and his son ran the local blacksmiths shop. He welcomed us in wearing his shirt and braces, on his feet were a pair of wooden clogs with steels on the bottom. his polished hobnail boots stood by the back door. He was really pleased at the newer car we had bought.  We took him a stew or a casserole each week and bought his eggs. He became like a sort of adopted grandfather for Heather and each Christmas or birthday after that Heather would receive an envelope with a hundred pounds in it. We told his son what he was doing and he said it was his dad’s own money and he could do anything he wanted with it. One of the many things he gave us was a Christmas cactus that was always full of beautiful pink blossoms and we still have it today over thirty years later. He said put your cold tea from the pot on it to keep it watered.

                                He grew all sorts of vegetable on his smallholding at the back of the cottages. He tended them all himself digging the land and spreading manure it for his crops. He would not bother if he got a scratch or a cut while he was working. He would just rub it to stop any bleeding and carry on. I got a message from John Davis, his neighbour and my work colleague at Hedges, that he was quite ill one day and we went around to see him right away. His son Jimmy was in the cottage and he told us that he had caught lockjaw from a cut on his hand he had got when cutting cabbages. Now lockjaw is probably better known now as tetanus, he had taken ill, gone in to Ormskirk where the poisoning had gone too far for antibiotics to work and he had passed away. We still remember how he helped us as a young couple just starting out in life together and we remembered him by giving our son his name James as a second name.

1975 The Grand Tour (Part 4) The Last Leg.

The weather wasn’t the best for the time we were on the Isle of Skye but we coped with the grey clouds and drizzle. I even bought an orange cagoule to try to keep me dry, the thin ones that would roll up, then fit into the hood and had a strap to fasten them around your waist. We visited the main town on Skye, Portree, on the last day. It was a town of white houses all along the sea front. We drove right over the other side of Scotland to Inverness for one night and then on to Edinburgh for the final nights. From Mallaig to Fort William was the reverse of the journey we had done just the previous week but the next stage was going to be new to me. It was alongside the Caledonian Canal and Loch Ness. We tried to keep an eye open for the monster but we were disappointed.  The loch stretched out to the right as we drove along side it. We watched Castle Urquhart grow bigger as we got nearer. It is wonderfully impressive on the rock almost in the middle if the loch.  In Inverness the hotel was really nice. We had the evening out and found a nice steak house to eat in. The next morning Ken went to the kilt makers and made some inquiries about finding the Muir tartan . They said that there was one but it would be a special weaving job to get a bolt made. Ken said that he wanted a full size kilt for himself and ladies kilts for Lou, Heather and Morag. He did eventually get them a few years later. I wore Heathers kilt for a full week one year while doing my rounds for Hedges Frozen foods to raise money for Children in Need. The drive from Inverness took us through the highlands and past Aviemore where the big ski slopes are in winter. All the cable cars and ski lifts were there over the heather and peat, they looked really incongruous in the summer time. We passed Kingussie and Pitlochry on the way to Perth where we had lunch. By the time we got into Edinburgh we were all rather tired. We stopped at the Redholme House hotel, it reminded me of the house from the Aadams family.  It was dark and cold and they had animal head trophies on the wall in the main hall. We went out for our evening meal before we settled down for the night. The next day we all trooped out and around Edinburgh zoo. It really had quite a few big exhibits including the polar bears. The penguins are a special attraction, they had about thirty or forty then. Next day we went to the castle, down the Royal mile. Half way down the royal mile is the cathedral with a stone heart in the pavement outside, this is the heart of Midlothian. We saw Greyfriars church with the statue of Greyfriars Bobby, the little dog that would not leave his masters grave.  I really enjoyed the museum of child hood. It was four floor display in a narrow building with exhibits of toys going back hundreds of years. Later we walked down through the tenements to Princes street and the main shopping centre. The castle still has the one o’clock gun ceremony each day when a cannon is fired from the battlements over the city. We ended up at the top of the royal mile in a pub called the Ensign Ewart, it served a lovely pint of Drybroughs Heavy.  That night we were going to see the Tattoo at the castle and we had to really wrap up warm even though it was August. We parked the campervan in the Grass market right under the castle. It was a real steep walk to the castle entrance. The grandstands had been built up around the castle esplanade and we had really good seats. The marching bands were special to listen to and the atmosphere was unbelievable. The bag pipes and drums of the massed bands at the end was a real spectacle with the drum major marching at the front with his silver topped baton. There were bands from all over the world, Canada, New Zealand Singapore and even Africa. Afterwards everyone was not really ready to settle down so we went down the royal mile for another couple of pints in the Deacon Brodie. It really made us have a good nights sleep. The breakfast before we left was the best we had the whole holiday with everything we could want. I went out and made sure everything was OK for the journey home while Ken settled the bill. We were quite sad to be on the last leg home but we were going to have a good day as we travelled. Even though it had been one of the coldest and wettest holidays that I can remember I will remember it with a real sense that it was a family holiday that we all enjoyed.