Fun in The Park

1960. As young lads most of us had started work and Friday/ Saturday night was our gang meeting night. Summer hols were good fun as the bay used to get a lot of girls, swap girls as we called them, on holiday from Sweden, the swap was a girl from the bay area would exchange family in Sweden and vice versa, but it was our swap if we had a date with one and did not like her, and would always meet in the fair ground - yes the bay had its own fair ground - small, but opposite the tunnel under the train station. Then most Saturdays we would have the battle of the Alamo with the canoes in Eirias Park, the last man still in his canoe had free drinks the following Saturday. There was always one in the gang who worked on the canoes and knew where the key to the chain was, and we always got the boats righted or it would of been the end of our fun, it happened when the next generation gang tried to do the same. One night a boy from Liverpool was with us  -Joe Dillon - my step mother's brother, he and Bobby Brown (one of the gang) took one of the canoes from Eirias Park to the sea, where it overturned on the first wave. Lucky they had not gone far out to sea as neither of them could swim.