Camden Street

To the back of our little house in Brewer Street was an area designated as a playground, I am not sure if this had always been vacant or whether it had been a bomb site, nevertheless at the back of our house and entering from Camden Street was our little bit of recreational area.

I remember sitting on the brickwork of the second house in Camden Street that sided onto the playground on hot summer days and day-dreaming about catching butterflies, saving the world as a superhero, playing in the school football team (which I never did) and many philosophical matters which were beyond my comprehension (they still are), you know the meaning of life and all that sort of thing. I always found that I think best on a hot summers day just between the conscious and the day-dreaming stage.

All the local boys met here and we would play the usual boys things, football in the winter, cricket in the summer, friendships were forged but seldom did we get invitations to others homes. Probably because all our houses were so small we would have been under our parents feet.

At some stage when I would have been about eleven, one of the inhabitants of Camden Street (Mr. Mathews, if my memory serves me well) had a brilliant idea of sectioning the play-area up into slices and have various areas for different activities. What a brilliant idea, several mums and dads took part and we all got stuck in digging and moving bits of earth to level the ground. Then the bombshell, not a word perhaps I should use as these were still being found everywhere, the council stepped in and put a stop to the idea. Still don’t know why but there you are.

Some time after the council decided in there infinite wisdom to put up a swing in the top end of the field. The trouble as far as we were concerned was that it encouraged kids from others streets to come and play, the little rascals.

I have been back on visits to the area and looking at it now it is laid out to parking, another sign of the times (more cars and less kids that what they want).

But the thing that most surprises me is the size; it is so small, how on earth did we manage to play our games here, was it any wonder that our ball was always going into someone’s garden or that grown-ups were forever moaning about the noise we little angels made.

Still, think it made a better playground than car park.