Park Life

I started watching a new series recently on BBC 4, headed by the marvellous Dan Cruickshank, about the development of urban parks in this country.

Watching this programme and looking at the wonderful parks it featured triggered lots of memories about the parks we played in and visited when I was a child way back in the early sixties.

On Bakestone Moor (an adjunct to the village of Whitwell, Derbyshire) where I lived there was, just a few yards from our house, an area known as t'plantin' or Plantation. You'll recall from previous posts that the definite article was rarely, if ever, heard.

Now t'plantin' wasn't a park of the kind being examined in the TV programme but a park is what we called it. As in "Mam, I'm going t'park" or "Mam, can I go t'plantin'". The Canch in Worksop (our nearest town) and Queen's Park in Chesterfield (she of the Crooked Spire) were more akin to the urban parks with railings and flower beds and boating lakes that Dan was waxing lyrical about in his TV show.

Half of  the Plantation was full of trees (I'm guessing that's where the name came from) and mounds and dips and made a natural adventure playground. The other half of it was open and housed the ubiquitous slide, swings - baby ones and the flat seat ones for older children - and a roundabout. All of them surrounded by concrete; this being the days before Health and Safety and child-friendly bouncy surfaces around such things. Many a graze and cut and contusion and, for some, broken bone was sustained on these items. But a lot of fun too for sure.

I remember how we used to go down the slide on the waxed paper that loaves of bread were wrapped in before the ubquitous menace of polythene bags were invented. But we were ignorant of that then. We used the bread paper to make the slide slippier as it got sticky at times. Probably due to the potent combination of soot, from the everyone's chimneys (this being a mining area everyone had coal fires and it wasn't smokeless fuel they burnt) and quarry dust that the air was aways thick with. It was like breathing gravy!! Is there any wonder I was always ill with asthma??? Furthermore I rather suspect the slide got piddled on from time to time. Anyway, the bread paper would make us go down that slide like we'd been shot out of a cannon. Whoosh we would go, then try to stand up as we got to the bottom or we'd have a BSA (bloody sore arse) from landing on the concrete.

T'plantin' often played host to the travelling fair; many is the warm summer evening I was unable to sleep for the strains of 'I can't get used to losing you' being delivered by Andy Williams at full blast from the Noah's Ark!

Down in the village (Whitwell) there was the Rec or Recreation ground. This was a big square field and was home to a couple of huts, one where the 1st Whitwell Cubs, Scouts, Brownies and Guides met and another for the St John Ambulance Brigade. There was of course more play equipment but with additions here of a seesaw and a Policeman's Helmet. But even more exotic than any of that was the paddling pool! The times we spent down there on those (no doubt mythical) long hot summer holidays in the early sixties.

Going a little further afield there was the Canch in Worksop and beyond that Langold Lakes both of which held other pleasures but I'll write about them in another post.