Nechells

Another area of Birmingham where I spent part of my life and a lot of my childhood. A dirty smelly disease ridden unsanitary place by anybodies reckoning.

But to a youngster it was a wonderland, that half demolished building was were you and your mates fought the final stages of WW2. That bomb site with the lone tree was Sherwood Forest and the tree was the oak beneath the branches which Robin was buried. Young minds could imagine so many different scenarios but the one we never imagined was that the area was a slum. That realisation came to us later when answering Neachells when asked where we lived it was written all over the faces of those that asked.

But that was later we were still young and collecting wood from those part demolished houses when the workmen had finished for the day. We would load it on to our go carts and transport it back to the communal brewhouse where we would saw and chop it into firewood to sell around the neighbourhood to get our admittance money to the local fleapit The Ashted on Saturday Afternoon. If we had made enough money we could even afford an ice cream from the Italian ice cream who sold his ices from a bike outside the cinema when the matinée finished.

Phil