MEMOREYS OF THE 1963 WINTER

[Aden Roller]

As you lived in Purley do you remember the smogs the year before. 

I do indeed!  My young sister and I went to schools in Croydon, and I would pick her up from school and travel home on the bus with her.  I remember one of the smogs when the bus stopped short, and we had to walk the rest of the way home through this rather eerie pea-souper.

1957 to 1959 = my school days in "The Smoke" before we moved south. Apparently the family doctor suggested we join my grandmother on the south coast as I was often a sickly child and he thought I wouldn't survive if I stayed up there for long (or so the story goes). The smogs made breathing so difficult despite the hanky & scarf wrapped around my face.

My father was a bus driver and well known for getting his bus back to the garage no matter how thick the smog was. He simply (?) stuck the front wheel in the gutter and bumped along hoping to see any parked vehicles before he hit them. We lived in Norwood.

[Aden Roller]

[cornykev]

Another child from 1964, alright lincs I'm moving, I'm moving, grumpy old git.    :P       ;)

[Aden Roller]

Another child from 1964, alright lincs I'm moving, I'm moving, grumpy old git.    :P       ;)

:D  :D  :D

I guess it's something to do with our ages.  ;D

[Mr Smith]

Left School at Easter time in 1963 and started an apprenticeship as a moulder, the place was stuck up on the edge of the Pennines  it was a four mile walk there and a four mile walk back, and it was trudging through snow to get there,  :)

[lincsyokel2]

Left School at Easter time in 1963 and started an apprenticeship as a moulder, the place was stuck up on the edge of the Pennines  it was a four mile walk there and a four mile walk back, and it was trudging through snow to get there,  :)

When my mother was 16, just before WW2 broke out, she worked as a downstairs maid i na big house. This involved walking  four miles along dark unlit country paths and back every day.  My father worked at Rustons - he would bike five mile to work, bike home for his lunch  and back again inv the afternoon, and home again at night. This use of bikes in those days was necessity, since cars simply werent widely available to the working class. My grandfather was a bike fanatic, he had a bamboo rimmed racing bike and at weekends he would bike to Skegness and back from Washingborough, a round trip of EIGHTY miles.

I used to walk two miles to school and back, but how many kids bike or walk any distance nowadays ? There all transported in luxury in the back of a car!! PE  was more brutal as well, in the winter of 67 we started doing cross country running at school, and we were made to run round in a loop of three miles BAREFOOT in the snow, it was pure evil lol.