Gable End of 184 Tindale Green. ("When a scabby football is your only friend, it's just you against the gable end")A girl called Susan was my childhood sweetheart.
We moved to Tindale Green in 1973 and she did too. It was a new council estate that was still being built around us. They were known locally as the matchbox houses as they were built without roofs. Well, they had roofs just flat not pitched. I can't remember the day we first met,maybe it was at school or perhaps we just started playing together that first summer. One of my first memories is of a great big hill of soil, which we would run up and down and sometimes stand on the top singing "I'm the king/queen of the castle", that was until a bulldozer came and took all the soil away and flattened our hill. One day Susan was upset maybe even crying about something, don't remember why, but to try and cheer her up and make her laugh I started to walk towards the hill of soil and at the same time I dropped my trousers, it seemed to do the trick, she laughed anyway.
She was the first girl I ever kissed, she was too nice though because there was two of us who wanted to be her boyfriend so she used to share her kisses between me and Darren Slade. We would sit with Susan in the middle underneath Darren's window cill and she would kiss me first then turn her head and kiss Darren and then turn back to me and give me a kiss and this would go on and on until her lips were sore or one of us had to go home for our tea.
That fence is where our wall and fence was,probably long since replaced with this one.
There was a big fence with a brick wall in the middle near where Darren lived and we would all climb on top of the wall and sing songs but the only song I can remember is Cliff Richards "Summer Holiday", we use to belt it out at the top of our voices, yet none of the neighbours complained....."We're all going on a summer holiday for a week or two -oo -oo...."
There used to be a great big tree just across the grass from Susan's house that we used to climb, not too far up though because we were scared and still quite young, but one day we scaled up it . After we'd been up a while I managed to get down, but Susan's couldn't, so she told me to go and get her dad , and that was probably the moment I lost her forever. Her dad was a giant policeman so instead of going and telling him his daughter was stuck up a tree I went home and left her up there.
The tree almost in the centre is THAT tree.Something else we would do together would be to lie on the grass side by side looking up at the clouds to see if we could see anything up there. I'm nearly certain we once some elephants in the sky, I once wrote a short story about it called "Elephant Clouds", must try and dig that out someday.
There are loads more I could write but I think I better wrap it up now with few lines of how it all ended.
We were in the same class for five years at senior school, so we continued to see each other everyday we were there. Things change I guess when you go to a big school, more people to mix with and I suppose it was there that we drifted apart, she had other boyfriends and I had other girlfriends, but still at the back of my mind I always thought I would one day go back to Susan and she'd welcome me with open arms. What a big head! I remember writing on a piece of paper that I would love her forever and pushing it down a gap in the floorboards of my bedroom in 184 Tindale Green. I wonder if that bit of paper is still there nearly 30 years later. We left school in 1983, I knew she'd got married when she was 18 and at the time I was totally gutted. We never spoke to each other again for 24 years, not until last week.
I took these photos last year sometime when I was feeling a little nostalgic while working in Tindale Green.
