July 1966 Thornes Park & Eastmoor Estate

My Mum put the date on the back of these photographs. The first six were taken at Thornes Park in Wakefield on  Saturday 9th July 1966 so I was five years old; four months away from being six.

Chris (Skip) Wilby, Kenneth Beck, Mick Smith, me, brother Chris, Keith Gillings

 Out and about with big bro, Skip and the YMCA gang again.

99, please

Who remembers Mr Softee’s chimes?

Me, Terence Quinn, Patrick Roberts, Skip, Mick Smith, Chris, Kenneth Beck

I have to admire my stylish haircut and clothes. I wish I had that much hair now….

Slightly blurry image but I think my Mum was showing brother Chris her biceps.

That’s the way to wear a raincoat. Whatever caught my eye clearly also caught Chris’s eye, whilst everybody else looks in another direction….

It’s very admirable that we’re all munching apples – a healthy option that’s less likely to be the snack of choice for a gang of lads today.

The final three photographs were taken on Saturday 2nd July 1966 at 122 Linton Road (it later became 164 when new houses were built.)

I can’t remember why these three pictures were taken, but this shows the scene of my nativity. I was born in the corner of that very room behind Keith and Mum. I don’t know what Mum was about to do with the cricket bat she was holding.

The path. Hundreds, maybe thousands, of hours were spent playing on that path. In the sun, in the moonlight, in fog, in rain. Next door lived the Corcorans – Mum, Dad, Gary and Elaine. Memories, like the corner of my mind; misty water-coloured memories; of the Way We Were.

Keith Gillings and brother Chris, aged ten

Shakespeare’s Sonnet 77 muses on memory and how planting memories in written form (or in pictures in this blog, perhaps) revives the memories and helps them live again in the mind:

Look, what thy memory can not contain 
Commit to these waste blanks, and thou shalt find 
Those children nursed, deliver'd from thy brain, 
To take a new acquaintance of thy mind.