A comment of Lavinia’s on my last post sparked this one.

Julia has just visited Niagara Falls on her trip to Canada. Lavinia remarked that she had been five and had been in awe of the giant rainbow they generated. That got me thinking.

Clitheroe Castle – taken from a street where some of my family lived in 1914

My Dad had what was quite a glamorous job in the 1960s. Unlike me, he was an ambitious man and we moved around a lot as he went from job to job. I started life being born in Walsall in Staffordshire. It is now in the West Midlands. We moved from there before I was old enough to remember it but I remember York, Blackburn, Clitheroe, Bourne and Peterborough. I was nine when we arrived in Peterborough and was glad when we stopped moving. Even though he eventually stayed with that company until he retired, Dad always talked about moving and “going home” when he retired so we never felt settled. Mum put a stop to the “going home” plan when she pointed out that they knew very few people in Lancashire as they had all moved or died. She added that Peterborough was flat and dry, where Lancashire was damp and hilly. As she developed arthritis she also developed a liking for Peterborough’s terrain and weather.

I’m afraid I’m a bit like Dad in that respect. This house was only ever meant to be a first step on the housing ladder and for years I looked at other houses, and t moving to different towns. We never did. Of course, like Mum, I am now going back to East Anglia for the flat terrain, and to be nearer to family. The original plan was Suffolk, but when we got the chance of the bungalow in Peterborough the practicalities outweighed the charms of rural Suffolk.

Bin raiding squirrel at Clitheroe Castle.

Part of his job in 1967 was to visit Expo 67 in Montreal. He was working for  a French company and the French were very keen on Expo 67, He went to Niagara falls as part of the trip and brought back Viewmaster reels of the Falls. Do you remember them? They are one of the things that link my childhood to the Victorian era – others are disabled servicemen from WW1, who were still around in significant numbers in the early 60s in Blackburn, and the town of Blackburn itself, with cobbled streets, terraced houses and cotton mills. They were still working in those days, even though we tend to think of them being something from the 1930s. Viewmasters owe a lot more to magic lanterns than they do to Gameboys. In fact, in 1962, when we moved to Blackburn, it was only 61 years since Queen Victoria had died. I was, at that time, closer to the Victorian Age than I am now, 62 years later, to that small boy. Sorry to chop about in time, but that’s memories for you.

He saw coloured TV on that trip, though he wasn’t impressed as he had been watching it for some time before he realised it ws colour. When we got colour TV in the UK (like a lot of people, we rented our first colour TV for Christmas 1969) the colour was so bright that things like check clothing patterns and the red coats of the British soldiers in The Last of the Mohicans tended to take on a life of their own.

Bin raiding squirrel at Clitheroe Castle.

Just think. Dad, as a child wore clogs as he developed his ambition not to be poor when he grew up. Both my grandmothers worked in cotton mills, where they used to run shifts for mothers so that they could, work, go home to get the kids fed and then go back to work. One of my grandfathers had been wounded in the Great War when kicked by a horse from his gun team, the other one built his own TV for the 1953 Coronation when the local vicar ran evening classes in the village. Sorry, I know I’ve said some of this before.

I have two kids. One does something on the internet I don’t fully understand. The other has just been promoted from working in a call centre to supervising people who work in call centres. They’re both doing jobs  that didn’t exist when I was a kid and using technology that didn’t exist. The only thing they have in common with life as I know it is that they both work hard and are doing well, just like their grandfather.

I think I may just have discovered why I am feeling so old.

I really don’t know what to use as photos for this post, probably some of Clitheroe I took a few years ago.

The Pendle Witch trail