Archive For The “The way it was” Category
Let me admit it right at the start; the Road on which we live is not all that congenial. Stately, if you like, with big trees and some bigger houses; a Princess once resided halfway up the hill, and the Director of the National Bank lives up at the top. Every front drive sports at…
The first part of this tale is true. Beyond that, judge for yourself; me, I’m just not sure. It was my late Great Uncle Edwin who first told us the story, when we were small. Back in the ‘twenties or so he had taught at the village school in a place which he called Hochurch….
Joe Collier discovers lost well in garden. Authorities now looking into it. Last week I sat twiddling my thumbs. I had planned several summer projects but all had been thwarted. Finally, my wife suggested that if I had nothing better to do, why not look for the well in the front garden. We learned of…
It was more than sixty years ago; I was twenty and on my way to a party on a summer evening in Wonderful Copenhagen, as Danny Kaye had taught us to call it. Why Copenhagen? The University, you see, had organized a course in Danish for foreign students, most of who turned out to be…
Yesterday morning, just after eleven, I suddenly realized that I now been sinning for at least seventy years. I had already emptied the contents of my supermarket trolley into a shopping bag, but I continued to stand there, observing with more than a little fascination the purchases made by the amply proportioned lady fumbling in…
Alan West has a crack at predicting the past. Yogi Berra the American baseball star of the fifties and sixties (and not the cartoon bear of similar name), once said, “It’s tough to make predictions, especially about the future.” He also famously said, “It ain’t over ‘til it’s over” and “It’s like déjà vu, all…
It was a rain shower, sixty eight years ago, that started it off. My good father, who could never quite resist the lure of a jumble shop on any occasion, was on his way home without an umbrella when he felt the first drops. Mr Gittins’ tumbledown store, which offered unsellable leftovers from all around,…
I should, of course, have known better than to go back there at all. But I am not particularly prone to nostalgia; I appreciated that the place where I once grew up was, even in those days, in need of change, and I was curious. So it was that I did go back, just a…
