Following the recent death of my mother I dug out an old photograph of my parents walking out to the no longer existing Sea Bathing Lake at Southport on the Lancashire coast. As well as the photograph here is a passage from my book
So Spirited a Town: Visions and Versions of Liverpool
Summer days at the Sea Bathing Lake were punctuated by family picnics around the pool, which consisted of tomato sandwiches, banana sandwiches and – the mere thought of it – jam sandwiches. Jam sarnies! I can still hear the clatter of feet on the planks of the wooden bridges over the Marine Lake as we strode towards the pool. There is a photograph in a family album which shows my parents, newly married, not long after the War, marching forward with their swimming costumes tightly rolled in a towel under the arm, something in their confident stride emblematic of the new world into which so many Britons were stepping in the late 1940s and 1950s, a world of semi-detached houses, washing machines, then fridges and cars, a land fit for consumers.
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| Brenda and Wilfred Murray 1940s |
