Sepia Saturday 372 : Thanks For The Can, Dickie and Nelly

It is not that often that you get the opportunity to match a Sepia Saturday theme image with exactly the same image. It is the kind of special opportunity that should be limited to birthdays and high holidays and, to the best of my knowledge, today isn't a high holiday. But it is the birthday of the little lad in the image and therefore I get the opportunity to refresh my imagination with the sweet waters of nostalgia. 

In other words, I get to tell you how this is a picture of me aged five watering a patch of garden that had been allocated to me when we moved into our new house in Northowram, a few miles north of Halifax. The year will have been 1953 and my father was still in the process of turning what had been half a field and half a building site into a garden. That wonderful Yorkshire dry stone wall was an original feature, dividing the field that had been used to build a new group of semi-detached houses from the neighbouring fields which still had the occasional cow in it. The smaller wall in front of the little terraced garden had been built by my father - no doubt with the help of my brother - from stones that had been rescued from the fields and quarries around where we lived.

The watering can was a birthday gift from our new next-door neighbours - Dickie and Nelly Somethingorother - who were keen to instil a love of gardening in my young mind in the belief that it would lead to a long, satisfied and sober life. Looking back from the perspective of sixty-four years later, I can assure them that it has been satisfyingly long and most enjoyably far from sober.

See what memories other sepians have managed to grow this week by visiting the Sepia Saturday Blog and following the links.