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Dodging the 'Parkies' and catching 'effets'

The notorious ‘Parkies’

I was born in Freshfield Road, and lived in Whichelo Place throughout the war. I was a Post Office messenger until 1958, but then got called up for National service, never to return. I spent many happy hours in Queens Park and remember well its notorious ‘Parkies’ who kept us kids in line in the1940 /50s. A particular incident I remember was when I was caught out on the clock tower hill. I was with my aunt and it was 1943. We were fired at by a passing German aircraft. To this day, I still remember the sound of the thuds of the bullets as they hit the ground.

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Queen’s Park

Queen’s Park

Fishing for ‘effets’

I remember always getting caught in the finely kept stream area, feeding the occupants of the pond, which was always fenced off in my days there. I remember falling through the ice on the pond; fishing for ‘effets’, otherwise known as newts in the pond, and of course bird nesting, which is banned today. I enjoyed many happy hours playing cricket under the trees next to the bowling green. It had an iron fence around it, until one day they took it down for the war effort, and took away the gates too, to be melted down.

Queen’s Park

Queen’s Park

Comments about this page

  • I too lived in Freshfield Road, number 111, in the mid to late sixties. My mother, Jean, and my sister, Joy & I played tennis on the Queens Park courts with our boarders from the College of Technology. There was a derelict mansion on the west side of Tower Road, up to the Pepper Pot, which was really spooky, so we dared each other to go in it whilst the other chucked stones through the windows and doors!:)
    I worked on it’s site a few years later (we used to unload 10,000 bricks by hand in a morning!) helping to build the little estate of houses that one of our boarders moved into after we shared flats in London!
    I’ll never forget the murmurations of Starlings over the island in the Queens Park lake and how devastated the island looked when they finally migrated.

    By Joe Stoner (09/09/2021)

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