In 1965

A Memory of Market Harborough.

1964 and my parents announced to us kids that we were going to move to the countryside from Great Bar in Birmingham where we were all living at my grandmothers house My Father had died back when I was seven and mother had eventually remarried to a fantastic man who took on a single mother with two young children and a dream to do something better with his and therefore our lives, He was a test driver for Joseph Lucas and spent his nights driving up and down the M1 from Birmingham to London, as fast as whatever car he was driving that night could go, with a boot load of test equipment running diagnostics on every electrical component that JL made, a big man at 6'3" and about 20 stone but he wanted to do something where he could be home every night to spend with his new wife, consequently they applied for and got the managers job of a little country pub called the Harborough Lounge.
The pub was in the process of refurbishment so the first time we went to see it, it was just an empty shell with no fittings or even a bar at that time but over the next few weeks, a couple of months and it was ready to go. We moved into the large flat above the bar, us kids had never lived in a house that was all on one level before, and for a play area we could play on the large flat roof, strange days indeed. On the official opening day and the newspaper was there taking pictures of the gleaming twenty-foot-long polished solid copper top bar and the little snug around behind the huge black fireplace, with my parents standing behind the bar looking very chuffed. Even the town mayor was there to commemorate the opening of the "All-New Harborough Lounge" My mother told me it went very well, except the stuffed eggs were still frozen solid. I remember about a year after we moved in, the cellar flooded, from the rain to the depth of about three feet, so to my excited young eyes we had an underground, indoor pool. even though my mom refused to let me swim in the dirty brown freezing cold water with all the empty beer barrels floating in it. Back then there was a rag-and-bone yard right behind the back fence and of course, I became firm friends with the guy that ran it, I would "Help' him unload the old truck and you could not have wished for a better place to play and explore as an eight-year-old boy, the treasures I found, I would run to the boss and show him whatever it was, and he would usually ask if I wanted it or not, I got some real treasures from that yard, like a small working steam engine with its own flywheel and a whistle, it even still had the spirit burner with it. I had it cleaned and shiny and running that same night, by far the best was a large box so heavy I could not pick it up, full of electric train tracks, HO gauge, and as I emptied it in my bedroom discovered engines and carriages and wagons of all descriptions, and so starting a hobby that lasted all my life and that I passed on to my son, Another close friend was the blacksmith, on the other side of the road from the rag-and-bone yard, I would stand for hours watching him making horseshoes and again "Help" by holding the horses head rope, even if they were tied off to a ring in the wall, and talking to them to keep them calm while the shoeing was going on. I still can't get a whiff of burning hair and not be transported back to that smithy all those years ago, Sadly at the tender age of ten I was dragged, kicking and screaming away from this young boy's utopia, to what I had been told was going to be a much better life in Australia, and now I think it was, but at the age of 68 I look back at my years in Market Harborough very fondly, and with the aid of Google Earth it nice to see the pub still stands although the rag-and- bone yard has gone and is now a carpark, I can still see the door I used to stand in and watch the horseshoes appear under the hammer blows of that long gone Smithy.

---

---