Archie Greenshields was born in 1920 in his grandmother's house in Tower Street, which is where he lived for the first three years of his life. He was one of eight children and, as was so common in those days, his parents struggled, financially to make ends meet.

Archie has written a couple of books on his memories, from the earliest as a child to his retirement days after serving with the police force. This story has been edited from one of those books and Archie shares with us the kind of simple things which children enjoyed in those days, in their spare time:

Even with ample parks so close to home, the choice of where to play of many children seemed always to be out in the road. Of course we visited the main park in groups quite a lot when very young, the bigger girls taking charge of the toddlers.

I well recall my aunt, Florrie Hall, who is only a half dozen or so years older than I am, taking me and my sister out into the Priory Park to look for young immature conkers. We found some that had been brought down by a strong summer wind, fallen from trees that still stand there today, just inside the main gate. Then we looked along the slightly raised path which separates the sports field from the general park, searching for 'dead' matches, thrown away by smokers whilst watching a game of cricket.

Our aunt showed us how to make furniture from the young, under-developed horse chestnuts. She would stick the matchsticks into these and join them into shapes to simulate chairs and tables.

On another outing to the park later in the year, she picked up almost fully developed husks, which had prematurely dropped from the trees, and these produced cream coloured nuts. We learned from her that they were this hue before ripening. She removed the nuts, it seemed, by magic, by rolling the husks under the sole of her shoe on the ground. But the real magic came after she put the creamy round nuts into a secret hole of a tree. We had to wait a while for the magic to work, so took us to play elsewhere until it did.

She might take us to the swings, even to shoot the cannon that for many years stood on the top of the mound in the middle of the park, near the bowling green. How many boys of my age, I wonder, have straddled its black iron barrel and imagined they were firing at fantasised enemies in the centre of Chichester?

Upon our return to the secret hiding place, our aunt produced, not cream coloured nuts, but lovely chestnut brown hued conkers. If her 'magic' had worked sufficiently well enough she made them into a necklace by threading them on a string.

When we were very young, we smaller children were used in games of 'doctors and nurses' or perhaps 'mothers and fathers' and forced, by the older girls, to act as their patients or pretend children. Often it gave them an opportunity to carry out inquisitive 'explorations' which, to the very young, not knowing quite fully what was happening, and enjoying the pleasurable attentions, at the same time believed it ought not to have taken place.

On the last Tuesday in July, which was always in the first week of the school summer holidays, every child knew that it was the start of 'Glorious Goodwood Week'. Penny notebooks and a sharp pencil were bought and every one of us set up a position in West Street, usually on the Cathedral side, and recorded as many car registration numbers as we possibly could.

It was every child's ambition that by Friday evening at the end of the races, you would have filled a notebook. Of course, it rarely happened and often, in an early example of one-upmanship, to be able to have more numbers than a friend had collected, it wasn't unknown for a number or two to be repeatedly recorded.

At the end of the day, after the races had finished, big charabancs returned to Chichester. It was time for us all to chant, 'Copper Gents! Copper Gents! Throw out your pence!' repeating it until a handful of small coins were thrown towards us.

Goodwood Week posed some disruption and was not looked forward to all that much by me and perhaps others in my family. For, in spite of the excitement of the traffic and at times, generous racing crowd, on more than one meeting Mum and Dad arranged bed and breakfast for a couple of London paper-sellers who sold their editions at the races. As a result beds had to be given up and temporary ones made up for us young ones on the floor. I am sure, however, that the arrangements were for the best and we would have benefited in some way or other.

'Out in the street' had a very special appeal for us all, especially after school and during holidays, when it must have been a very noisy place indeed. Each time that I hear a flight of swifts screaming about tall towers and chimneys, I imagine that they too, are at play before nightfall puts an end to their flight, their strident cries so like those of us children at play.

Skipping games were mainly played by the girls, but boys sometimes joined in to show off their skills too, but knew instinctively, that they were not as good as it. These games were seldom interrupted, for very little traffic used the roads. Perhaps the brewer's horse-drawn dray would have made a delivery earlier in the day, as would the milkman with his cart loaded with churns, from which he served customers the milk, measured from a half-pint ladle.

The wool stapler's cart, pulled by a pair of horses did occasionally interrupt a game, when it left the warehouse with its load of enormous bales of wool, on a journey to the goods yard. It would then be the turn for the boys to act out a ritual, by running up behind the cart and hanging on, the bravest and strongest by gripping tightly to get the furthest distance away from our street.

It was much more difficult when the cart was driven empty, for we would be in full view of the driver. It was woe be-tide any daring boy too if he was caught in the act, who would find himself the target of the long whip which the driver could expertly flick backwards to discourage any hanger-on.

Opportunity often presented itself for more mischievous games, if the huge sliding doors of the wool warehouse had been inadvertently left open. If the way was clear and you kept quiet, we boys could enter and climb a mountain made from the stacks of huge bales of sheep wool. Each bale seemed the size of an elephant, and was stuffed to capacity, the slit opening of the sack-cloth covering fastened with wooden skewers, shaped something like chopsticks.

Our gang had great fun, climbing up and sliding down, eventually getting noisier and noisier, until we were discovered and chased out. Many of us had a collection of the skewer fastenings that were lying around the floor of the warehouse, or I dare say, pulled out of the full bales.

The warehouse formed part of the property owned by Ebenezer Prior Ltd., and Mr Prior himself, lived in a large town house, almost next to the grounds of The Grange. He also owned a similar business in Bradford, Yorkshire, and had his warehouse converted from alarge boys' school and 'The Fighting Cocks Inn' that originally stood on the site.

Were these 'The Good Old Days' that we are prone to remind the younger generation time and time again? Were they really?

On more than one occasion, a tramp knocked on Mother's door and asked for some boiling water to make a drink, offering her his blackened tin with a wire handle. They were hardly ever turned away in this type of community, as we knew only too well what it was like to be without, and often gave something to eat as well. That rarely happens today.

Hardly a week went by when as a child, I would hear a street singer, some with an empty sleeve or trouser leg, who would collect pennies thrown to them from doorways. These were mostly ex-servicemen down on their luck, forced to live by begging or selling bootlaces or the like. An illustration included in these memoirs shows a typical street entertainer with a cluster of children listening to his one-man-band, their eyes fixed also on the ice-cream barrow, whose owner regularly touted his trade in halfpenny cornets.

These then, were the good old days for the children, quite different than those of today, where it is anything but safe on some of the streets, and where begging is still to be seen, but in a much more invidious manner.

A copy of a photo found among Archie's mother's possessions taken during the late 1920's or early 1930's in a street in Chichester. The tall girl to the right of the one-man-band is Archie's sister, Joan. Archie is wearing a cap next to the man with his elbow on the ice cream barrow.