Pointless meandering...

[chaletian]

It’s funny, Nicola’s question got me thinking about Sheffield, and how much of my family’s history is embedded there. I mentioned not being able to drive anywhere without my mother claiming that she had driven along that very road for her driving test. But sometimes it feels like everywhere has that sort of connection. I used to go on the bus past High Storrs School every day to get to school myself, and my aunt was head girl there (she’s still indignant about the speech day fiasco, but we’ll not dwell…). Back in the day, my great-uncle was head boy there as well. Various family members went to school there. Or Abbeydale School, where I took one of my music exams, and which is where my mother went to school (she still has uniform joy, to this very day). Or catching the bus into town, and going past the old grammar school (and God knows how long it’s been since that actually *was* a school), where assorted other relations went (including my grandparents – my grandmother was on their hockey XI – and Cousin Rosemary, who went out with Grandad before he met Grandma). And I have my own memories of life at the High School – sitting on canteen drive with our lunch; catching the number 60 into town, and hoping to get to the bus stop before the Birkdale boys got out, because then the buses weren’t so busy; stopping off at the newsagents to get a quarter of sherbert lemons (or kola kubes in Karen’s case); sitting in the botanic gardens across the road at lunchtime once we got into the Sixth Form; going to the dinky sandwich shop in Broomhill; endless speech days in the Octagon; catching the supertram out to the Don Valley stadium for sports day, and lolling about on the grass trying to do as little as possible and failing to sum up any kind of house pride (not least because Stanley always came either 3rd or 4th at everything – we were definitely *not* the crack house!); going along to the university theatre to watch their French students put on random plays; wandering vaguely towards Broomhill with Catherine for her A-level Geography project and actually managing to get *lost*.

And we drive through Gleadless, and Mummy shows me Grandad’s ‘patch’ from when he was a GP there, and where GG used to live before she moved to Reney Drive, and past the Northern General, where Grandad worked for a while back in the day (and where, thinking about, my mother was allegedly *conceived* - on a hospital bed, during one of Grandad’s breaks when Grandma had smuggled herself in – I just don’t think about it…), and down Bradford Road next to the golf club where Grandma and Grandad Hallatt (Grandad’s parents) lived for about a million years, and up along Lodge Moor where Daddy lived (next door to the house where, in future years, my English teacher, Mrs Storrs, would live), and Scout hut where he went to Scouts, and the golf course up along there where he caddied (very badly), and walking down the Mayfield valley where he used to play when he was little.

My grandparents bought their house in the 60s. It’s just down the road from the house-next-to-the-golf-club where Grandad lived when he was little. I think I’ve spent time there every summer since I was born.

I had the same Latin teacher as my mother (albeit at different schools).

I don’t know – it’s nice, I think, to feel linked to a place like that.

Comments

[helenprev.livejournal.com]

OK so I wasn't going to comment on any posts but:

1) I was born at the Northern General! :-)

2) Yes, I feel linked in the same way to where I grew up (Wirksworth in Derbyshire) - I went to the same school as my mother, my mother's mother, and my mother's mother's father!