Recollections of
Jimmy Gilbert
 LORD
BYRONS WALK, the very name stirring up memories of a long gone past. Here,
where the famous Lord Byron hinney'had walked and here too, where I had
so many times walked to my grandmother's cottage, along the gravel cart
tracks and beneath the arched bowers of the May trees with their delicate
smell, here, I feel my first twinge of regret at having returned to revisit
the past. Here where I had walked my very first sweetheart, was now a wide,
busy motorway with trucks and cars screaming by, all trace of Victorian
serenity gone, all chance of a quiet stroll gone, the fast buck having
overtaken the hard earned penny.
Church street, the main shopping area of my boyhood, which had always been a bustling hive of activity, was near-deserted. The wide road which had carried all the traffic of the business houses was now a narrow brick-paved shopping precinct making me wonder how it ever coped with such a large amount of traffic. The black suits and the white silk scarves of the men, the pretty short floral dresses, and fully fashionable silk stockings of the girls were now replaced by denim jeans and shirts. Even the hair styles no longer distinguish the girls from the boys. The Theatre Royal, where I'd had my first taste of real theatre, was gone. The Empire Vaudeville Theatre, where I'd appeared in concerts to aid the efforts, was now deserted and derelict, and opposite where once was Thompson's Red Stamp stores was now a small second-hand goods shop. Recalling the times when Id had to ask for a stone of flour on my mother's bill, I wondered how such a small shop could have boasted fifteen assistants in long white aprons. Gazing down on the harbour where it had all begun, the harbour that had once been the main artery supplying the lifeblood to the heart of Seaham, playing host to ships from all over the world, I am overcome with remorse. "ere berthed the sailing ship that had brought my young father to this port those many years ago? Where too, the paddle-wheel tug-boat that he had spent those many years aboard? Where are the big ships that stood side by side waiting their turn to be loaded? Alas, the ships have gone, the wagons have gone, the coal has gone, the harbour is nothing but a memory. Even the small dock where my father moored his fishing boat, one of the dozens belonging to similar part-timefishermen, always bustling to accompaniment of a million screeching seagulls, was now deserted save for a few old tubs lying on their sides in the exposed slit of a low tide. Economic change, I suppose no longer warrants spare time fishing to stock the larders of the unemployed. The slope, where every day a hundred or more swimmers would enjoy the free enjoyment to be derived from a dip in the ocean, was now a bleak and barren pile of misshapen rocks. Could this really have been the scene of so much happy activity, where friendships were struck up, where love would blossom where families would spend many happy hours, where small crowds gathered around a portable wind-up gramophone. As I turn my back on the deserted scene and with the melancholy squawk of a lone seagull, I here from the back of beyond, my grandfather's feeble voice singing "Where are the joys and mirth, made this a heaven on earth, Oh they've all fled with thee, Robin Adair. " Oh to be able to press 'rewind' and live
once again those innocent, carefree days of a long lost childhood.
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