GREENHEAD Park has figured now in the lives of four generations of my family.
My parents, being Bradford folk, could not legitimately claim the park as home ground.
But they rented a house behind the sadly defunct Junction Inn just yards from the park’s top ‘gates’ when I was about five and we lived in Gledholt Road for about four years.
There weren’t any gates, though: I understood they’d been melted down with all the railings to make tanks or battleships.
The park quickly became our garden, and we’d stroll in it every weekend as if we owned it.
I believe that when my brother Anthony was born we wheeled him up and down the park in a Swan pram done out in racing green with something of a sweeping go-faster stripe down the side.
I used to play from dawn until dusk in the park during the holidays.
“Mind the dirty old men,” Mum used to say. “Stay out of the bushes.”
Red rag to a bull, that. Dirty old men or not, I had half a dozen ‘dens’ in the sprawling rhododendrons, each with a high ‘lookout’ branch and a corner where you could consume a small picnic of Spillers Shapes. Friends by invitation only.
I seemed to be alone in liking dog biscuits, though. Ah, well, more for me, then.
When my children were young we’d wheel them round the park occasionally in the family tradition, sticking them on the swings and letting them paddle in the rather grubby pool at the bottom end.
We lived away in Mirfield, so visits were infrequent.
I presume I told them how in winter I’d sledge down the hill towards the Open Air Theatre or try to turn the paths into glassy ice by repeatedly skidding on them.
I very probably told them how I’d squeeze through the holes in the terrace walls or sit in the fountain that they re-sited from Market Square in the town centre many years before I was born.
The conservatory was my jungle, and wouldn’t have been surprised if I’d been dive-bombed by exotic parrots or heard the distant throaty rumble of a panther.
The War Memorial was my fort and the low walls of the bowling green my runway and racing track.