Memory Lane

The house we moved into during the post-war austerity of 1947 was rented from the National Coal Board. It was a stone’s throw from Gresford Colliery near Wrexham, where a pit explosion had killed 266 miners in 1934.

Our home was the back half of a dilapidated manor house with run-down out-buildings, an enormous

vegetable garden and extensive overgrown lawns and shrubbery.

To us children it was idyllic. We made dens in an old summerhouse, dabbled in the lily pond, climbed and cut down trees, and explored the grimy cellar beneath the house. Parental disapproval did not stop us climbing on the roofs of outbuildings or adventuring up the local pit-heap.

To our mother, however, the home represented unrelenting toil. The large, barely furnished rooms were difficult to decorate or keep clean, a problem exacerbated by the closeness of the pit. We had no washing machine,

while shopping was a major undertaking. In the days before supermarkets, buying provisions involved visits to different shops and then everything had to be carried back home on the bus.

My father’s work was at several pits. So he acquired a car, a black Morris Ten (all cars were black then), and we had a telephone on a party line. It is strange that now, well over half a century later, I can remember the number of the car’s registration and the telephone, although I can’t remember the number of any cars or phones since.

What is even stranger is to visit this old house now. The pit-heap has gone and the building has been converted into a Whitbread Inn.

While having a beer in the pub, it is fun to quiz the serving staff about the cellar beneath the house. It is even more fun to reminisce with my sister next to the same fire-place where, as young children over sixty years previously, we had opened our Christmas presents.

By Brian Witcombe, who receives £50. Readers are invited to send in 400-word submissions. Every Thursday, we update the Readers’ Corner of the website with unpublished Memory Lanes. Go to theoldie.co.uk