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I first got to start to know people when my daughter was born and in fact, for the first three months, first time new mum, I was very nervous and very lonely, I didn’t know anybody around here. I got to know one or two people very casually through the Clinic, which is something else that’s gone over the years. In those days you used to take a baby to a Clinic in the early months, on a weekly basis, to be weighed and checked over and then before injections and checks. I got to know one or two people casually through that, and then somebody in the church, when my daughter was six months old, started a young wives group and that really was my salvation, it opened the door to all sorts of other contacts and activities, so that I would say that was a major point in my life. The Clinic was in Perrin Road, which is just up the road by the school, but it’s been knocked down, there’s a block of flats now on the site.
Kathleen
It was very popular tennis in my young days, as a fourteen years old I joined the club the other side of the Vale Farm, which is still there, and then, when I finished college and came back home, I joined Parkside, a bit later than that actually, probably in the early seventies. I joined the other one as a school girl, three of us joined and we just enjoyed playing on Saturdays and Sundays, and yes it was just really part of my social life, I needed to get out a bit more and my friends took me down and I started playing there. This was common for us ladies to wear a head scarf or a bandana, that was very fashionable. Everybody had a wooden racket as you can see in the picture, very, very heavy, you got tennis elbow, shoulder problems, but by the late seventies-eighties rackets were changing, much, much lighter.
Patricia
