Here is my recollection of childhood memories, wrote Dale Daniel...I was born in the village of Witton Park near Bishop Auckland, County Durham in the year 1946.

My first recollection of childhood was starting school at the age of 5 in what we called 'The Tin School'...the entire school being covered in a corrugated coat of steel.

Our houses were of terraced streets with unmade roads and a couple of gaslights in an attempt to give some illumination to our streets. Our dwellings were two up, two down and lit by gas...no hot water and at the end of the yard an earth closet where one went to do what one had to do, and the old tin bath hanging in the yard...which was brought out once a week on a Friday night for the weekly bath in front of a roaring coal fire.

Carnival Float from those crazy, hazy days of the fifties..this one in 1952 depicts the Olympics.....each street having it's own tableaux or float....this particular one was from Thompson Street.

In the summer we would collect snails and caterpillars and race them for entertainment....we would also race allies (marbles) down the school playground as it had a distinct slope.

At Easter time our mams and dads would give us paste eggs, they were brightly coloured eggs which were dyed in cloth and hard boiled and we would go down to a place known as 'The Roly Banks' and let our eggs roll down.... the one that went the furthest would be deemed the winner and collect all the other childrens' eggs.

Going back to the marbles we would often play a game called 'hit a alley get a alley'...meaning if you hit your opponents alley (marble) you would become the owner of that object.

The nearby river was a magnet to us kids and come the fine weather one would stay down there all day, sometimes with only some jam and bread sandwiches and a bottle of water for sustenance; the day would just fly by.
Also we would fish for what we would call Tommy Lodgers....later as we got a bit older we discovered they would be called minnows.

I also recollect picking rose hips and taking them by foot to a village some two miles away to a Mrs. Hart and getting a few coppers for our bother....making sure the green uns (unripe hips) were at the bottom and the red uns (ripened) at the top of the bag....you got nowt for green ones.

Our local cinema was a converted chapel and we kids got in for a tanner (sixpence) and there were three different features shown, twice a week...if it was a packed house sometimes the only seats were on the central heating pipes and many a time have I returned home with a burnt rear end.

In our village in the 1950's we had carnivals that were second to none....the village a buzz with activity and every street entering what we called a tableaux....these days a float, which would be brightly decorated and always had a theme towards it...the best winning a princely sum of £5.

At the carnival what we would call 'The Shows' would be in with roundabouts, shuggy boats and the likes where one would really enjoy one's self....the modern name for 'The Shows' would be the Funfair.

I also liked to get up to a bit of mischief and play a game called 'Knocky Nine Doors'. I would tie two neighbours' doors together with rope .....usually in the middle of the street...then knock on both doors....then they would both try to open their doors...of course to no avail, that is why the middle of the street was chosen to do the operation...thus with being terraced streets the occupants would have to walk right round from the back to the front to untie the doors....naughty or what?????

Also in the early autumn we would 'raid the local orchard', which meant going stealing apples and pears...the only punishment I can ever remember was our painful tummies after over indulging in the fruits.

Having no electricity, my main form of indoor entertainment was listening to our big wireless set (Radio) listening to Radio Luxembourg and second half of a first division match, the wireless's were run by a big battery and an accumulator, the accumulator was a glass sort of vessel with a handle on it and I remember making trips to the hardware shops to put it on charge.

My father had two accumulators...one would be on charge while the other would be operating our wireless.

I think I could reminisce for ages....hard times we had, but would I swop them for something more grander?...yer bet yer boots I wouldn't.