Life As A Youngster In 1960x Old Basing

A Memory of Old Basing.

I went to Old Basing school slightly later, in 1962,and I remember school dinners as being dreadful, the dinner ladies were so strict that you did not dare not to eat your meal, they even reported to my mother if I did not eat mine. The puddings had lumps that I will never forget. However, I remember to my eternal delight that, on nice sunny warm days, we would take our lesson outside.
Does anyone remember the lido/swimming pool in Old Basing just a stretch away from the railway line just off the footpath to the recreation ground? I seem to think that is was closed due to a polio scare, but can find no records of it anywhere, I think I remember that I was a mere 2 years old in 1959 and had been given a new swimming costume (green seersucker.....) to wear to the pool, and I remember that you could sit on the gently sloping hill which led down to the pool and sun/dry yourself between swims. It almost seems like a dream now as I cannot find any record of a swimming pool in the area at any time.
I remember the mobile dentist in the silver caravan that put such dread in our hearts at the end of the summer holidays. Guaranteed to pull out or fill teeth - no one escaped! The legacy lingers on....
I remember standing on the railway bridge waiting for the steam trains to go by beneath and there was such a feeling of power and magnificence when they passed by.
I remember the old Grange Farm Tithe Barn in Old Basing with the old fashioned stables and the house where my mother used to clean. We lived in a house at that time in the area which was built around the time of Basing House or, most probably, after, as I know that Old Basing was constructed from the ruins of Basing House after its razing by the Roundheads during the civil war, The house in which we lived was actually a owned by the Council and which is currently graded as a designated Grade II Listed building. I have been unable to find details of this house so cannot comment as to how it became listed with the local council to be available as a Council house. But I remember the house with an attic and my parents had to cart the water upstairs from the kitchen by the bucket all the way up there. Obviously we had no bathroom or internal toilet.
We were housed as refugees from the Hungarian Uprising, after a brief sojourn opposite Basing House, in one of the new Council housing estates, where I grew up, from the age of 4, as a citizen of Old Basing, participating in all the rituals and ceremonies that local life required.