I'm pretty sure my fondness for travel was developed at a fairly early age; and I may have mentioned elsewhere that, when we settled back in Liverpool after the end of WW2, my parents enrolled me as chorister in a local church. However, my early religious upbringing in a small chapel in north Wales may have been responsible for a certain uneasiness with the rituals associated with The Church of England. Furthermore, I realised that the sixpence I was given for the collection conveniently covered the cost of the return bus-fare into the city centre and a ferry across The Mersey to New Brighton and back - a journey which I calculated would take almost exactly the same length of time as the average Evensong.
I often think fondly back to those little adventures; being fascinated, for example, with the changing views from the top deck of a double-decker bus as it travelled from the leafy suburbs towards the more grimy city-centre and enjoying watching escapologists or other street-entertainers on bomb-sites or discretely following the LFC centre-forward as he strolled from one city-centre pub to another.
Those were the days!
However, the point of this particular blog is to chronicle a rather different journey.
As it happened, my grandparent's farm was situated a couple of hundred yards from a farmers' co-operative dairy - from where, each morning, a road tanker would deliver milk to a much larger dairy in Liverpool. The roads were much quieter in those days; and, on the return journey, the tanker drivers would look out for people they recognised who might be waiting (in the hope that they could hitch a ride to Wales) at a particular point near the entrance to The Mersey Tunnel.
Between 1947 and 1953, I was quite often one of those 'passengers'.
Initially, these journeys were planned in advance - during a school holiday, for example - when one of my parents would accompany me to the aforementioned 'tanker stop'. In time, however, for a variety of reasons and, often, on the spur of the moment, I would turn up unexpectedly at my grandparent's doorstep on a Saturday afternoon. With the benefit of hindsight, I suppose an aunt or an uncle will have telephoned my mother to let her know where I was. Similarly, someone would have woken me up around 2.00 am to 'catch' the tanker before it began the long drive to Liverpool. Interestingly, I was only once late for school on a Monday morning.
As I approach my ninth decade, I feel quite sure that these journeys in the milk tankers will have contributed significantly towards (1) my love of travel and (2) my subsequent life-long preference for driving heavy vehicles......and here are couple of photos of the tankers in which I travelled (taken, interestingly, an industrial dispute at the dairy). By todays standards, they seem quite small; however, in the forties and fifties, they were considered to be huge; not least because the roads were much narrower.
I often think fondly back to those little adventures; being fascinated, for example, with the changing views from the top deck of a double-decker bus as it travelled from the leafy suburbs towards the more grimy city-centre and enjoying watching escapologists or other street-entertainers on bomb-sites or discretely following the LFC centre-forward as he strolled from one city-centre pub to another.
Those were the days!
However, the point of this particular blog is to chronicle a rather different journey.
As it happened, my grandparent's farm was situated a couple of hundred yards from a farmers' co-operative dairy - from where, each morning, a road tanker would deliver milk to a much larger dairy in Liverpool. The roads were much quieter in those days; and, on the return journey, the tanker drivers would look out for people they recognised who might be waiting (in the hope that they could hitch a ride to Wales) at a particular point near the entrance to The Mersey Tunnel.
Between 1947 and 1953, I was quite often one of those 'passengers'.
Initially, these journeys were planned in advance - during a school holiday, for example - when one of my parents would accompany me to the aforementioned 'tanker stop'. In time, however, for a variety of reasons and, often, on the spur of the moment, I would turn up unexpectedly at my grandparent's doorstep on a Saturday afternoon. With the benefit of hindsight, I suppose an aunt or an uncle will have telephoned my mother to let her know where I was. Similarly, someone would have woken me up around 2.00 am to 'catch' the tanker before it began the long drive to Liverpool. Interestingly, I was only once late for school on a Monday morning.
As I approach my ninth decade, I feel quite sure that these journeys in the milk tankers will have contributed significantly towards (1) my love of travel and (2) my subsequent life-long preference for driving heavy vehicles......and here are couple of photos of the tankers in which I travelled (taken, interestingly, an industrial dispute at the dairy). By todays standards, they seem quite small; however, in the forties and fifties, they were considered to be huge; not least because the roads were much narrower.
