By Dick Scarlett, regular contributor to The Pioneer Magazine
Whilst throwing together ideas for my latest music video I thought it might be nice to have a few background images of some local landmarks from in and around Walsall & Birmingham. So I jumped on to the internet right away there were a few easy wins – some lovely photos of the War Memorial at the top of Barr Beacon, a few black & white shots of Walsall back in the day, including some highly nostalgic shots of the old ABC cinema and one in particular of the foyer there that brought back memories I thought had long since been consigned to the neural scrapheap. That feeling of trudging back out through the foyer, past the long closed snack bar, talking ten to the dozen with your mates about the film you had just seen and then all of you blinking and staggering almost drunkenly for a few moments as you step outside and your brain fights manically to adjust to the full on daylight after you’ve been sitting in near total darkness for two hours. Ah yes, electric shock therapy to your circadian rhythms – funny what you remember.
And that single shot of the foyer unlocking a whole flood of recollections did get me to thinking – what other memories of my early years in Walsall had I, if not completely forgotten about, certainly not recalled in years? In no particular order the following slowly percolated to the surface of my admittedly jam-packed little mind. I remember daring to venture into the deepest darkest corners of Grice’s bookshop to pull out huge books on astronomy or science. Admiring with envious delight the latest advances in pen and propelling pencil design at Millington York, doubly silly as not only couldn’t I afford them, but I have always been truly atrocious at art!
I have fond memories of the pick & mix in Woolworths and the small but always interesting toy section upstairs. The old Co-Op superstore in Bridge St. was seemingly endless – it seemed to have a dozen floors and all of them went on forever. Side note; was the layout of the Co-Op based on human anatomy? I seem to remember the shoes were in the basement and the hats were on the top floor? And there was flipping through the posters in Gadsby’s until we were thrown out and trying on school uniforms in Buxton & Bonnett. And then trudging all the way back up the market hill, going underneath an old building that was held up by huge diagonal timber joists that were sunken into the pavement, to retrieve the car from a weird split level car park that was the definition of a wasteland; modern four wheel SUV’s would struggle with it but my Dad’s old Cortina shooting brake made light work of it! And sitting in the backseat of the same car as it made its way up that stupidly steep road that used to be there going over the top of the town. They weren’t perfect but they were happy days.
Now of course every moment of everyone’s lives is recorded, photographed & posted online. We won’t need memories as we’ll have the Facebook Archives – they can be housed in disused libraries. And even the cinemas now have a fifty-yard walk-in gradually increasing light from the screen to the foyer. How times change!
The video for Still, containing the background images mentioned, can be found on YouTube!