Pram-bulating

An entry to Sepia Saturday "Using old images as prompts for new reflections"

From the gardens of the Schloss Belvedere and the wonderful needlework seen on the Sepia Saturday prompt picture lets journey to northern England

and wave.  I'm waving at my father here but was told I used to wave at everyone from the pram; I still enjoy waving.  This is Bardsea Road one Sunday in June 1950 it encompassed a walk which I would take with my mother Sadie shown here until her old age, you had to take up a brisk pace because she considered that slow walking tired her out. While browsing through the many pictures of me in a pram I noticed for the first time the pretty woven basket which seems to vary from half to brimming full.

Wheeling back in time a month to

May 1950 here at Canal Foot by the side of Morecambe Bay, the railway viaduct just visible in the background.  Now there are two elements from the prompt both a pram and a blanket. My mother and her life long friends Julia and Harry Boyd share a rug while it looks as though my 'Aunt' Julia is instructing her son Roger to do something or more likely not do something, I'm an 'innocence bystander'. 

Five years later and I don't think I quite fit a pram although it was good fun to roll up and down the garden path in it. The month is August and the photo says it is a warm day; I look brown so, unlike this year, it has been a good summer. I once stayed with Mrs High, the mother of my friend here Marion (who you can see is blond with complexion to match).  She tried to scrub the 'dirt' off my knees in the bath until I told her it wasn't going to come off because that was me.   But lets get back to the pram, I suspect this is the one from which I saw a tyre in a stream and insisted on visiting it every day which meant that the Bardsea Road walk in the first photo was one that my mother could not deviate from for some time.

Not long after this photo only the wheels survived of the pram when they were turned into Go-cart, not by me but one of the neighbourhood boys, although I did get rides on the completed construction, bliss. You never see home made go-carts today and I have no photos of these particular wheels but to relive those memories of simpler times with the help of Flickr and the National Library of Wales

The Longden Bay Go-cart Racers, September 1953 - Photographer Geoff Charles (1909-2002)