Oh Happy Days

A Memory of Runcorn.

Yes I remember spending most of our (my brother John and I) summer holidays playing on Runcorn Hills. Both parents worked and so most mornings, weather permitting, we would head off to the hills from our home in Weston Village, armed with a bottle of water and usually a jam butty and an apple. We would spend the day there, often meeting up with other kids who were on a similar day out. One very powerful memory that I have is the smell of the ferns that grew in abundance on the hills amongst which we hid and built our "dens", the smell of the ferns has lived with me since those days to the extent that I have many of them in my own garden due to the nostalgia that they generate.

On those hills I was John Wayne, Davy Crockett, Cochise, Geronimo and Billy the Kid, all heroes from the many black and white films that we had seen on the screens of the Scala and Empress which were the two cinemas in Runcorn in those days. You certainly couldn't be any of those heroes unless you rode a horse which you did by running around and slapping your backside at the same time, this indicated to everybody present that you were riding a horse!

Everybody watched out for you, no problems being out all day without your parents, if you did wrong, (there were so many apples in the big houses on Weston Road), you certainly got "chased" and if caught (not very often) you got a slap from the householder, never daring to tell your parents or you'd get another slap off them for "scrumping".

Happy days, long gone and I'm so very, very sad that my six lovely grandchildren will never know the joys and freedom that we experienced in those days. My childhood was the better for it and dare I say - I think that I am a better person for the experiences.