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I was born in 1953, quite an active year as history goes, reminisced Peter Walker. I lived in Clifton Bristol for the first five years of my life, at a place called the Polygon (I think that's how you spell it). I have two brothers and a sister, she is older than me but I am the oldest boy.
I said goodbye to Bristol in 1957 and we moved half way across the country to Hampshire to the market town of Alresford. It was a quiet place, traffic was light and the countryside was almost on my door step.
I soon fell in to the kind of pasttimes any young boy had, given that kind of area.
Fishing (What Privet River? Oh this one), bird watching (honest it fell out the tree), to name just two. I also found out about television for the first time. Programs like Jo 90 and Thunderbirds became my regular weekly viewing.
At that time I often wondered if what I was seeing would be the life I would have when I was an old man of 47. The year 2000 seemed a long way of then.
We lived in Mitford Road and it was there that my youngest brother was born, the only true Hampshire hog in the family. We lived on the council estate, which had two shops, run by a Mr Pointer (a general goods shop) and Mr Burns (a sweet and tobacco shop).
The town of Alresford has 3 main streets: East and West street and Broad street. The first school I went to was The Dean, an old Victorian place built of flint.
I once had a fight with my brother in the playground and we both ended up splitting our heads open on one of the walls. The Dean does not exist now for they built houses on the site some years ago.
I was not to know it at the time but I was at that school with someone who was to make his name in motor racing, Derek Warwick. Some of the friends I made there would be my mates all through my school life. Reggie Ash, Bimbo Findan and Kenny Mansbridge, were the main three.
One place we all liked to go was Alresford Lake, a great place for fishing. On one trip there I almost lost my life. We used to fish out in the reed beds, and on this day I took a wrong turn and ended up in mud up to my chest.
No one could find me. I shouted my self silly but the reeds were so thick it was impossible to see me. It was only by shear luck I got my self out. I spent the rest of the day drying out so my mother would not find out what had happened. I think she did. Well I did smell a bit.
Of my several friends, Reggie Ash was my best mate. He was like me, into all the things we should not have been into; that is until we found golf. At least caddying, by going to our locale club and getting the O.K. to do it, we found we could earn big money like £10 to £20 a weekend.
And in those days it was. In the first real job I had a few years later I only got £27 a week.
Over the ten years I lived there, I saw Alresford grow from a small town with one estate, to one that had six. It had just a few hundred people in when I first got there, it had a few thousand by the time I left.
I still go back there from time to time, as I now once more live in Hampshire. It's still growing but I will always regard it as my old home town.
Peter Walker, Hampshire, 2001
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