Happy Days

My sister and I used to visit our grandparents, Harry and Lily Bliss, who lived on Sandringham Drive, West Monkseaton. We would come down from Scotland in late June and stay for two weeks.

Favourite memories include the Spanish City rides, Torres fish and chips, the Venetian ice cream, St Mary's Island, roller skating down the steep slope at Monkseaton station, the smell of creosote on the platform timbers at West Monkseaton station, Grandpa cycling to the North Shields fish quay for the best fish I have ever eaten and the sound of colliery trains in the mornings. I was also fascinated by the pit heaps and the mines, the slag buckets, the big white railway crossing gates at Backworth.