The School Playground

It was 1947 and I was ten and still at Bazley Rd primary school in Northenden, for kids aged six to 11. That playground was just an expanse of English asphalt, but was heaven to me. An escape from the discipline and watchful eyes of the classroom teachers.

A place where at lunchtime there was freedom to be and to imagine.  I would slap my hips pretending to be Roy Rogers riding Trigger, or I was John Wayne storming the beach at Iwo Jima.  I could even be Stanley Matthews dribbling a soccer ball, bamboozling the opposition with a hip swerve and a sudden acceleration as I'd seen him do at soccer stadiums.

For lovers of peace and quiet, our playground was no place to be. It teemed with busy,
go-getting kids. A babble of conversing, yelling, shouting,running, jumping Britons of the future. Occasionally the teachers wandered around trying to calm us but it was like trying to stop an incoming tide.

Some of us swopped cigarette cards, fresh from Dad's 10-pack, eagerly scanning our collections and looking for rarities. The girls played hop-scotch, happily leaping from one chalked square to another, looking furtively from eye corners at which of the boys specially liked them. I had my eye on oh-so-pretty Janet, and a year before I'd fallen for her in a big way. That's another story, see "The Nine-year-old Romeo."

Times were tough in those immediate post war years in England, yet at the time I knew none of that. The playground was just a fun place. There was no grassy area, which some other schools had, but none of us cared. Sometimes we had bruised, grazed and even bleeding limbs from the asphalt - which wasn't compatible with young flesh, but we got up and got on with it.

The only sit-down entertainment then was the movies, so we improvised and imagined, and made our own entertainment.

Oh the commotion when Harry Wareing brought his tadpoles in a jam jar, and oh the glee when Ron Barnett somehow produced a frog from his jacket pocket and made the girls scream.

The hard bitumen could be the beautiful rolled green turf of Lord's Cricket Ground as I
strolled out to bat against the touring Australians. Or it could be the soccer Cup Final at Wembley and I'm on green grass again, racing toward goal with only the goalkeeper to beat, a hundred thousand urging me to score.

The playground is as vivid now as yesterday. My world was carefree. I didn't know what
mortgages were, or bank accounts. The war was over, my Mum and Dad still lived on rations, yet all I had to do was enjoy. Supper was always on the table, every day was playtime and my life was limited only by what I could imagine.

Soon I had to move on to Yew Tree Secondary School and it was goodbye asphalt, because Yew Tree had large, lovely green playing fields.

I revisited the Bazley Rd school in Manchester in 1991, and it was almost exactly the same.
I stood on that asphalt again and saw myself running there so many years ago.