A Wincanton Childhood - A Talk by Gill D'Arcy

Gill gave us a great evening with a vivid, well planned and excellently illustrated talk which attracted a very good turnout of some 40 people. All of us of the grey-haired variety who remembered the fifties and early sixties when Gill was growing up living in Mill Street were vividly reminded of our own childhoods as we heard her describe the care-free days when she and her friends would wander off to play games and have fun in ways parents knew little or nothing about. In homes where central heating was unknown, let alone fridges, and where TV had yet to arrive, children made up their own games and little things like spending pocket money was a big deal.
Gill described for us a very happy childhood in what was then a small town where everyone knew each other, where gardens were bigger and homes more spacious than many now being built and where children felt safe and were relatively unsupervised. Chickens, ducks, dogs and pigs were everywhere, there was a cattle market and a train station. All adding up to a very different post-war world - yet it was not so long ago.