Did you ever live in Parson Cross? (Part 2)

[spanner 1954]

what is the stream you are on about,, i may be a tab young at 37 but there is one across alan ponds garage (now total station) it stretched down the 7 fields but not sure how far as used to pull out dumped push irones (bikes) and do em up i remember having a bmx bike (if you had a mongoose you had money,sadly i did not) i put a front end of a 10 geared racer, forks and all,, little back wheel and massive front wheel,, i went down cinder path (path between mansel and yewlands) and front end bloody broke,, i nearly broke my neck,, then i bought a grifter off jason swane off dugdale,, it happened again,,then it come to me that walking would be safer

 

ah! jason swain, that conjures up some memories , i lived on foxhill, then deerlands ave,and then knutton road . ( i was the biker that swapped houses with bob ) next door to roy fox RIP the bsm driving instructor. and i knew jason as a youngun and when he was a van lad for fletchers . and now he is still on the cross and so is most of his family , really good people .

[mh01]

ah! jason swain, that conjures up some memories , i lived on foxhill, then deerlands ave,and then knutton road . ( i was the biker that swapped houses with bob ) next door to roy fox RIP the bsm driving instructor. and i knew jason as a youngun and when he was a van lad for fletchers . and now he is still on the cross and so is most of his family , really good people .

i was talkin to 1 of jasons sisters on sunday

[spanner 1954]

cool, i know jays brother lives across from my old house on knutton, but im not sure if his parents are still living , salt of the earth they were . and his mams home made pickles mmm!

[spanner 1954]

can anyone remember the butchers family that lived on deerlands opposite the cross next door to derrick aka super smurf, and are they still on the cross?

[spanner 1954]

does anybody remember the butchers family that lived at the top of deerlands opp the cross ? and do they still live on the cross? thanks.

[Mini Milk]

Oh god I remember the Butchers!!! I moved in a house just down the road from them in the 90's, think there were 3 women all with kids to god knows who & walking around in mini skirts and crop tops! kids didn't harf give them trouble.

[Mini Milk]

I knew Mr Evens, the welsh guy with the dark hair, I sold him a car a few years back when I worked in car sales, i'm afraid he passed away in 2008, he was a lovely bloke, he remembered me from school, he was a great customer of mine and teacher.

[miami now]

I lived there at 65 Doe Royd Cresent with my grandparents the Harrisons,from 1951 until we moved in about 1956 but they raised my mom and aunts there for yrs before.

[Bushbaby]

Tongue Gutter

The small river which meanders down the western perimeter of the field from Wordsworth to Holgate is the Tongue Gutter. It changes its name to Sheffield Lane Dike at Holgate Ave and then Hartley Brook at Barnsley Rd. By all accounts you can now get guided tours along it, but I guess that at the age of nine or ten nobody knew that river better than we did

During those long summer school breaks we would often play for the whole day around “Our Stream”. (it didn’t have a name to us). We knew the best place to get a jar of taddies after spawning time. We could also get hold of a few stickelbacks, especially when it had been raining for a while, and the area down around Deerlands garages became marshy. And we became experts at the long jump. We could identify all the places where, if you were leaping to and fro across the stream, it suddenly became wide enough to be a bit of a challenge, and eventually there would be a spot where you had to make an extra special leap, or suffer the consequences. Falling in was an occupational hazard, and I recall often having to either go home and face the wrath or, more likely, spend two hours running my clothes dry. I genuinely thought that mum wouldn’t notice that I was caked in dried mud. She did.

My strongest memory though is of the days when we went on expeditions through the “tunnels”. Going under Holgate was fairly easy, It was not much wider than the road and you could always see the “light at the end of the tunnel”. Most of the mardys could manage that, and occasionally even a girl would go through. The coolest thing to do was to stop halfway through, perch precariously to one side in a tenuous sitting position, and have a fag. When cars went over your head, it was like a very small earthquake, or so we thought. A bus was about “six” on the richter scale.

A bigger challenge though, was going under Wordsworth, in the small opening next to Roy Fox’s. This went under the Wordsworth garage site, then up under Chaucer garages, and continued on up towards Foxhill. Every so often was a “Sitting”. This was where there was a grate above your head, and the stepped sides formed a welcome seat. You could even stand at this point. Lighting a candle and a woodbine flip was now the order of the day, and there was evidence of others having previously enjoyed a similar leisure trip. Around the second sitting, the light at the opening would drift out of site, and here the claustrophobics would have a field day, hiding their fears by telling tales of impending doom. The rest of us would go as far as the fourth sitting, but that was probably as adventurous as we could manage. We always came back down at a hundred miles an hour, and it was blessed relief to breathe fresh air again. I often wondered if the world had changed while I’d been potholing. Been watching too much Dr Who I guess.

Yep, if you want a guided tour of the Tongue Gutter, my nine year old alter ego is the expert.

[franko0774]

lived there in 1980s