My life started on the second of June 1920, which brings me now to over eighty two years old. I lived in Exton Street Miles Platting, just behind Trullio’s Ice cream Shop, on Oldham Road facing the Osborne Theatre. Yes in those days it was a theatre and not a Bingo Hall like in recent years.

In those days the people in the concert parties used to lodge in the house next door to us, but how they slept I don’t know, because four people lived in it plus one child, so where the heck they put the lodgers when the house was only a one bedroom house like ours I don’t know. Perhaps at night-time they draped over the clothes rack, then the tennant pulled the rack up above ground level. What ever happened they managed just the same. They even had at one time four or five midgets as lodgers, it was just great on a warm Sunday afternoon, they’d practise outside and as you can guess the children from other streets came to watch the free show.

I went to Nelson Street School and I must admit I was not a clever girl. In those days on our midsummer holidays of four weeks not six as the children of today have, we spent a day here and a day there. On the last day of term, before we broke up for the holiday, each child was given a card which was to take us on a free trip to Heaton Park for one day of the holiday. The card was serated into three separate pieces. One piece was for getting on the tram, one for the boat trip, and one for a bun and a tin mug of what looked like cocoa but we were told was tea! We used to push to get on the top of the tram because it was open at each end. As we were getting on we were each given a small packet of sweets. We enjoyed it ever so much. We never went away and Blackpool was another country to us.

We’d also spend a day in Prussia Park. Our mams’ would wrap up condensed milk butties in newspaper and off we would go and play on the swings. After a while we would sit on a form (Bench) and eat our butties which by then had gone as hard as the soles of our clogs! But what the heck, they still tasted good to us! Some days we’d get a big surprise-our mams’ had given us dripping butties!

Another day out was Oldham Road Dwellings, which I now believe have been modernised. We would spend hours just running up, down and around the stairs and floors for hours and hours. We must have made such a lot of noise, no wonder the people who lived there used to chase us out of the building. I bet they and our parents must have been glad to see the back of us when we went back to school.

This is just a little of what happened in my young days. I could go on for hours but my fingers are now going white. but it has given me great pleasure to put it down on paper. Thank you for helping me look back and remember some of the good times I had nearly forgotten about in my past.
Mrs. Dora Byrne, Nee Pearson