AS our family albums suggest, the simple pleasures of the outdoors were reflected nearer home.

A wartime half-day treat was to follow the North Beck up from Goose Eye to Newsholme Dean, where a cottage sold pots of tea with which you could wash down your own sandwiches sitting at these homely outside tables, some of which I recall as old school desks with holes for ink-wells.

At the bottom of the hillside a wide bend in the beck provided a grassy open space for games.

An esoteric link between local and national events, this snapshot was taken on the day the Italians surrendered in 1943.