THE winter of 1947 was so severe that burials became a problem and pneumatic drills were used to dig vegetables out of the ground.

Phyllis Chapples used to push her newborn son Steve the four miles from Nelson to Burnley alongside the railway line; the snowdrifts were so deep all she could see was the funnel of an abandoned locomotive.

Not that Steve can remember; his earliest memory is as a three-year-old, walking down the garden path at the family home in Arncliffe Road, Pike Hill, Burnley, in 1949.

His dad, Leslie caught the moment on camera.

In the early fifties, he and a lad called Bobby Elliott — who would go on to become one of the chart-topping Hollies — would ride their soapbox down Brownside Road and there was also an annual derby on the Kebs Road all the way down into Mereclough.

In winter the lads would sledge down the ‘Big Dipper’, which began at the back of Ullswater Road and often end up in the frozen River Brun.

Steve, Mick Lacy and Michael Comstive would also sledge the half-mile to the bottom of Brunshaw, before the estate was built.

They would cross the river by the waterfall at Brownside and fish with nets on bamboo poles for frogspawn, sticklebacks and tiddlers. They carried them home in jam jars tied with string.

The gang built a covered den on Driver’s field at Pike Hill in a hollow and installed carpets while Steve and his best friend Mike Farr, built an underground den at Hag Wood near Roggerham and camped out in the evening frying sausages.

As a youngster his mum would daily administer pure, concentrated NHS orange juice, cod liver oil and malt extract on a spoon, to help keep him healthy.

Said Steve: “I started at Todmorden Road School when I was five and every morning we had 20 minutes of mental arithmetic. We knew our 12 times table off by heart by the age of six and recited them every morning.

“I always went home for dinner, but a common trick at the bus stop on Lyndhurst Road was for someone to throw your school cap under the bus, so you had to wait till it had driven off to retrieve it.

“Headmaster Sam Smith, who had his desk in the main hall, from where he could observe all the classrooms, ran the school with a rod of birch.

“Detentions were spent stood in silent lines an arm’s length apart in the main hall. More severe crimes were dealt with by six strokes of the cane.

“Half the children attended school in clogs and a lot wore National Health spectacles held together with Elastoplast and hand-me-down short trousers with holes in their backsides.”

He went on: “When rationing ended on sweets I recall long queues forming outside Tommy Mullen’s shop at the top of Brunshaw Road and we gorged ourselves on Spangles, Fry’s Chocolate Creams and sarsaparilla tablets.

“We also drank gallons of Cowburn’s dandelion and burdock, which was delivered to our door in earthenware flagons with corks.

“Milk was also delivered on Mr Driver’s horse-drawn cart from his dairy farm on Brownside Road, now the Thornton Arms pub.”

When he was eight Steve started going to the Mickey Mouse Club at the Odeon Cinema, with Phil Scott, whose father Walter had the greengrocer’s shop at Pike Hill, where a boiler stood in the back yard for steaming beetroot.