Saturday 2 July 2011: CHALLENGE # 26 (IN FULL) SWING

This weekend our village has been holding an archive exhibition. This is one of the photographs, taken circa 1960, of the village's band doing a circuit of the village during the Whitsuntide walk (no longer celebrated).

It was a moment of revelation when my sister and I viewed this picture as we had not seen it before and the dapper looking gentleman in the right forefront of the picture was her Godfather. He was an accomplished organist and won a scholarship to either the Royal Academy of Music or the London School of Music (neither I nor my sister could recall, with accuracy, just which one it was). However, he did not take up the scholarship as his father said that they needed him to go out to work in order to support the family. It was such a waste of a great talent but that it how things were in those days.

It brought back happy memories of times when, as a family, we would go and stay with Uncle Donald (the man in the picture) and Aunty Kathleen. Saturday night was always the time when the adults would gather around Uncle Donald's grand piano and have a good old sing song. My dad's party piece (he had a good voice too) was I'll Take You Home Again, Kathleen which always brought a tear to Aunty Kathleen's eye as she was a Belfast girl far from home in Bradford.

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