We decided to take a trip back to our lives when we were 6 and even younger. My brother and I set off on a journey to Lancashire where we spent out early years. John’s good at driving so he was roped in to be at the wheel. He’s used to long hours at the wheel gathering antiques for his business from contacts up in the North. I only ever went on one of these buying trips once but it was an education. He had what seemed then to be a bladder the size of a garden water butt, able to drive for hours without recourse to stopping, and got quite impatient with me at the time for disrupting the journey. He bought stuff on that trip that looked like it would make a fine bonfire, but told me later that he’d sold it to Americans the next day. Exporting woodworm was what it seemed to me. He still can’t resist buying the odd thing here and there, but this trip was not for that. I’d booked the air b and b just north of Preston, the centre for our trip.

We were going to try and visit where we had lived in several places in Lancashire. Our dad was in the police force up there and he and our mum and ourselves moved about 11 times, always into police houses.

Our mum was from St Helens in Lancashire and we planned to start at where we couldn’t remember being, as we were such small beings : the house of my grandparents, a modest terrace overlooking a green area in St Helens. It was where we spent some months of our nappy wearing years. My father and the rest of us were chucked out when I came along as I was only 11 months after John. I suspect words were exchanged. The gory details of this bit of our story never really revealed, but I gather there was some disquiet that they had multiplied the family so quickly. I’d like to think I was not a mistake, but I might be mistaken.

Dad had recently been demobbed from the Welsh Guards having survived his European road trip with only the odd tank here and there for transport from Normandy up to the German border. He claimed to have liberated Brussels from the Nazi yoke on the way. He returned physically unscathed and then joined the Lancashire Constabulary, which he had intended to do before Hitler got in the way of his original career plans.

So the first house was Haresfinch View in St Helens. Next door is now a Chinese Chip shop, apparently there was always a shop next door, which might explain why a chip shop can open in the middle of this row of houses. Back in the 1940s this was a heavily industrial area, as was much of south Lancashire, now clean and free of coal smoke and dirt, it must have had a quite different feel and smell back then. St Helens being sometimes referred to as Glasstown, where Pilkington’s Factory dominated and even parts of it were in the town centre.

Back to the car and a flat tyre, the garage on the end of the terrace was no use at all, the air machine broken. They would not have believed you back then that to fill a flat tyre you wave a plastic card at a machine and that takes money from your bank, to pay for air. We found somewhere else to fill the tyre and moved on.

Back then our new first police house was in Vista Road, Newton le Willows. Sounds posh, isn’t.We think it was demolished some time ago, so decided to give it a miss, and headed towards Preston.

John and I both went to Bamber Bridge Methodist School as infants. At the time our father had become a police instructor at a training school outside Preston in the Lancashire countryside ( yes there is countryside in Lancashire ) Stanley Grange was a large old red brick mansion which had a collection of wooden huts on the edge of a large field next to it. The house was used as the training school and the huts to house the various recruits who were attending. We lived in one of a group of red brick houses which were part of the original estate, these called Stanly Villas. It was from here that John and I were driven each day to school in Bamber Bridge in a police van. No one thought it odd then. We were not the only passengers, there were other kids who made up the full delivery load, including out new best friend Roger Mac.

So we went to find the infant school. It’s gone, as had the huge mill that loomed over it. Still some terraced housing and the station still exists just down the road. It was from this station that we went on a school trip to Gretna Green for the day! I’m not sure quite what a bunch of six year olds made of a trip to Gretna Green in Scotland, a place 107 miles north, where couples eloped to to get married! It’s only claim to fame. I brought back a cheap plaster model of the Forge for my mother, she kept this for evermore on her dressing table.

Stanley Grange was no more too. The large house demolished and replaced with a ‘village’ which is now used as sheltered accommodation for adults with learning and other issues. Stanley Villas though looked almost no different to our memory. We chatted to some of the present owners who gave us some history, whilst John and I took a look around remembering our happy times there.

We then drove over to our old secondary school, but did not linger. The installed security gates kept us out. As John muttered as we drove away, they locked us in when we were there and they have locked us out now. So we went on to see other places where we lived, most unremarkable, some now surrounded by bungalows when they had been surrounded by waste ground, ideal playing areas when we lived there. We decided to miss out Accrington, our collective memory was of rain. Apart from Stanley Villas near Preston We lived in houses back then in Newton le Willows, Lower Ince, Standish, Ashton in Makerfield, (all near Wigan ) Leigh, Bolton, Accrington, Ulverston, and Ashton under Lyme as I recall. Every single house was a police house and different, they got slightly smarter as Dad moved up the ranks. My mother could have a place looking like home in a matter of days. Our parents sent us to boarding school to avoid us constantly moving schools.In my absent minded way I do recall once going home to the wrong house on a visit home from school.

It was just a few days in Summer when we went and since then I more recently did a proper return visit to my old secondary school: Hutton Grammar School near Preston

When we were there we were resident, and despite good behaviour we got no time off. We both did seven years. In those days Hutton Grammar School, had pretensions to be a sort of ‘posh’ school. For instance at the boarders morning assembly where we were counted up to check that no one had ‘ gone over the wall’ we had to respond with the Latin: Adsum, meaning I think: ‘ I am here’. How odd is that? They no longer have boarders at the school, the old boarding house now a place where they do geography.

I was a little unusual at the time, at the end of my years there, going off to Art School, and John did the same, I went to Manchester and John went east to Hull. My art master: Mr Heap, was always encouraging and supportive, and as Art was the only thing I was really any good at it seemed a good idea. So from being incarcerated in a boys only boarding house I was let free to grow my hair, smoke somewhere instead of by the bike sheds, and drink beer until I was sick. I learnt reasonably quickly to not drink an excess of beer ( even the golden Boddington’s ) but the smoking stuck for longer and my hair shrank and started growing in places where I least expected it. At the end of my school years I was invited to the Old Boy’s Association Dinner in Preston, where the guest of honour was my French A level teacher. He was unsurprised that I failed to pass my examination getting instead just another ‘o’ level in the subject.

So my second visit back to an Association dinner had a gap of 60 years since the previous one. I was persuaded to make the trip North, my persuader: a former Detective Superintendent with the same force my father served with, so there was more than just a school connection.

The School was in many ways much the same. There were 70 former students at the dinner with a gaggle of women, the school has taken girls into the sixth form for some years, I suspect they don’t call themselves old girls. None of my contemporaries were there. My brother John also gave it a miss, not really his sort of thing. We ate in the Assembly Hall of the School which brought back a few ghosts and memories, one of which was the moment John dropped his sheet music into the piano at a concert, which made the piano emit strange sounds and the music teacher made a similar strained noise. John had already been told to mime to the music as his voice was putting everyone else off. An inspired end to his music career.

At the dinner I sat next to a charming former engineer: John Wood, who in his school days had persuaded the then Headmaster to allow him to reconstruct an old British Rail signal box he’d bought for a pound, at the back of the Swimming Pool ( Yes, we had a swimming pool, and I think it’s still there, we boarders were sent swimming 3 times a week which is why I have no love for swimming thereafter ) So for some years a fully functioning signal box was a feature of the school and a measure of John Wood’s project management skills.Perhaps he can do something for the Bamber Bridge signal box?

It was a good evening and now in retrospect I wish I’d circulated myself a little more. I’d taken the train up to Preston this time and had taken in the football at Preston North End with my good friend Mike ( another cartoonist , who had come south from Penrith, and a keen North End supporter ) There again there was a 60 year gap between my last visit to Deepdale when Preston were then playing Liverpool in the FA Cup and won with a thumping header from Alex Dawson, Preston’s giant centre forward. We stood then but the stadium is of course all seater now. Back then , after a Liverpool fans pitch invasion before the match, one of the policemen patrolling the pitch took a meat pie thrown from the stand on the back of the neck, gravy included. No thrown meat pies these days.

I stayed the night in a Premier Inn in Preston and an uber driver took me back to it after the dinner. Turns out he was a Pakistani chap with 6 kids who spoke fluent Italian after spending years in Italy, and who’d moved himself and family to the UK for the sake of the education of his kids.Who would have guessed?