WITHIN hours of an appeal from a former Blackburn lass to track down her long lost cousin appearing in Looking Back, the pair were speaking on the telephone.

After the call, Anne Glendenning travelled to her home town, for the first time in more than half a century, to meet Elizabeth, her only relative on her father’s side of the family.

Anne was born in Adelaide Street in 1941 as Anne Fogarty. Her father Edward and Elizabeth’s father, John, were brothers.

Anne’s return to Blackburn rekindled many memories of her childhood including the old Roxy Cinema were she used to go on a Saturday morning to watch Johnny Mack Brown, Roy Rogers and the terrifying, but compulsive, ‘Flash Gordon’s Trip to Mars’.

She said: “I looked in vain for the old Boulevard where the hot potato man and black pea sellers once stood, these eagerly bought on very cold days, wrapped in twists of paper, the contents burning our mouths and warming our hands at the same time!

“The street were I was born was demolished years ago, but as I stood on the corner of Montague Street and what would have been the top of Adelaide Street, memories came flooding back.

“Apart from poignant family memories, in my mind’s eye I could see the town hall clock with the ball on top which moved up and down on the hour.

The chiming of the clock was followed by the muted sounds of the angelus bell at 12pm and 6pm.

“I remembered the blue police call box which stood outside the pub on the corner of Adelaide Street, as kids we often used it to report fires, when asked ‘Where?’ we would shout ‘in the grate’ and run off.

“Just around the corner on Montague Street, was a shop whose window displays were always empty because goods were scarce or non-existent.

“As kids we use to queue for ages with a ha’penny waiting to buy the rationed sweets, that had just come in.

“I remembered the pawn shop round the corner at the bottom end of Adelaide Street where we used to read comics.

“St Anne’s Church, where I was baptised, is as beautiful as ever, despite the horrendous fire years ago.

"The aisle is now carpeted, but as a child it was a solid floor and I did not want to go to church in my clogs because of the noise they made.

“Sadly, the old school I attended had been knocked down, but the laughter and playful screams of the children in the replacement building, echoed my own memories of happy schooldays at St Anne’s.”