Mjmatsalts

A Memory of Heckmondwike.

As a child I lived just a couple of hundred yards from that zebra crossing. Out of shot on the left was the Pavilion cinema - many happy memories spent there, though I had a stronger bond with the Palace, the other picture house in town where my grandmother worked as an usherette and for whom I delivered the weekly listings to several of the shops seen here in the farther distance: Freeman Hardy & Willis and Market Fisheries, among others. Tordoff’s, Norman Stone’s and, particularly Gallons, are all in the foreground and remind me of joyous shopping with the ration book. Post-war austerity wasn’t a term I associated with childhood. My mother described this kind of photo, nostalgically, as the ‘Old Heckmondwike’ and died with a similar view looking down on her from her care home wall.