KITE flying and flirting were among the major preoccupations of the young men about town when old-timer Norman Thomas was a lad.

Kitted out in Sunday best, the young bucks and teenaged lasses used to parade up and down a number of stretches in and around the town centre, eyeing one another up and hoping to 'click.'

The main parade was at the end of Church Street and known as the 'chicken run', recalls Norman, an old chum of this page from Frodsham Drive, Blackbrook.

"But at Newtown we called ours the monkey parade. It was good innocent fun with no harm done and as long as you behaved yourself, the local bobby would have a laugh along with you."

Kite flying in the streets (something that would never be tolerated today) was all the rage on Norman's boyhood patch. A lad called Billy Walker was the chief kite maker . . . "and we bought our twine from Mrs Coxhead in Cambridge Road."

The home-made kits would soar aloft before vanishing out of sight over the rood tops. The kids needed some help in winding down any of the kites that survived the chimney stacks and overhead lines . . . "because the pull on the twine was terrific."

Norman also recalls the wartime bombing raids on St Helens and the open-ground scars that these left on the neighbourhood. But there was no shortage of waste ground areas, either, back in Norman's boyhood 1920s.

One stretch was between Grafton Street and Exeter Street. "We kids played soccer there and cricket with the wicket chalked on the side wall of Green's the butchers.

"If a bobby came in the scene, the boy nearest to the football was expected to grab it and run, unless the ball happened to be a blown-up pig bladder cadged from the local abattoir."

Not that the police were too concerned. Norman thinks they enjoyed sending the lads scattering. "Anyway, they never caught any of us, we kids were like greased lightning."

Then there was the waste patch, also in Cambridge Road area, bounded by Rodney Street and Virgil Street. No grass grew on its hostile surface and there were scarred young knees aplenty. It was, however, an ideal bonfire site and on Guy Fawkes night Eddie Smith, the local fruiterer, used to clamber on to his big store-shed and throw down old fish and fruit boxes to the delight of the fuel-gathering Newtown boys.

NICE little peep at the way things used to be. Thanks for the memories, Norman.