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RANDOM MEMORIES OF A MISSPENT YOUTH IN GOLDENHILL

I apologise if you have read parts of my ramblings before but one thought leads to another thought and sometimes they overlap.

I can vaguely remember starting at the nursery school, the cloak room with the pegs to hang coats on, the very small sinks for washing your hands and walking into the main room and seeing a massive coal fire burning in the grate.

We had a small tubular metal rocking horse outside and I can recall playing on it with David Thornton and Janet Deakin.

I think it was at lunch time that we were given a spoonful of Cod Liver Oil and then a drink of orange juice to take away the taste, it didn’t work because we could still taste it at teatime.

In the afternoon we had to take a nap on the canvas cots, I didn’t like that at all, being forced to stay in one place and I’m still the same now, can’t sit still for too long.

I don’t know which class I was in at the time, but, when we were going outside for the afternoon break I thought it was home time and ran outside the gates and across the street to the main road.

It suddenly occurred to me that I was on my own and feeling very frightened and embarrassed I crept back in to the school grounds only to find that no one had missed me so I said nothing and soldiered on until home time.

Can you imagine being less than 7 years old and going home from school on your own and crossing a main road too?

Mrs Embrey was the lollipop lady by Stonier’s garage and Mrs Rawlinson was down the road at the Church Infants School.

I believe that one of them, but I don’t know which one, was the first lollipop lady in Stoke on Trent.

There was a time when I was in the infant’s school when the air raid siren had to be replaced.

They had built a steel tower in Gilbert Street, behind the police station and mounted the siren on the top ready for testing.

The test lasted for several hours and drove us all crazy.

That was what we used to call a soak test, years later when I was part of the test department at English Electric and we had sirens to test on the equipment, we only used to test them for a few seconds.

This was due to the barrage of abuse dished out by the wiremen on the shop floor if it went on longer, I think it used to wake them up.

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