An invitation to come and play

The bandstand, round and somehow forbidding, but I’m sure I remember pale sun-bleached ecru deckchairs and once, a band.  Trees and a low brick wall between park and road and the other side a concrete path - ochre with orange and white pebbles - between grass and the drop down to the sand.  It was a run-down part of town, midway between two otherwise touching towns, gentility on a third edge, in the guise of a Grand Terrace of houses, forlorn and peeling, which sort of said it all.

Oh! and the octagonal little thatched house in the trees with it's pointed-top door which, no matter how often I asked, never became anything,according to my mother, other that "the place they keep tools in."   (Then it made me think of a charity money-box;  today I'd say it would be perfect for 'cottaging')

It was there I witnessed my first eclipse of the sun, entered a fancy dress competition and was eclipsed by a dark-featured boy dressed as Noddy.  It was there I had the conversation which ended, my mother aghast (it was the Fifties when no-one spoke of what was before their eyes) “You mustn’t ever mention it to her.”

And it was there I embarrassed as much as shamed and irritated my mother by climbing the steps to the slide only to become transfixed with fright at the necessity of sliding down the other side.

A response to an  invitation from Thinking Ten - a place I've too much neglected lately, whch is a shame because as somewhere to limber up, to have ideas come sparkling from unexpected places, it can't be beat.   I will try and go there more often.