Norman Pascoe, 65, of Askam-in-Furness, recalls growing up in Barrow in the 1950s and his career as a skipper of a fishing boat in Morecambe Bay

I have just published a book, ‘A Boy from Glasgow Street’, about growing up in a large family in Barrow-in-Furness in the 1950s.

In those days there were many different sounds to be heard. For example, you could hear the noise of riveting and caulking coming from the busy Vickers shipyard as well as the man trotting his horse and cart around the back streets shouting ‘Rag bones - any old rags!’ Our Co-op milk was delivered by George with his horse and cart; we would beg our mum for a slice of bread for the horse.

Our house was cold and damp and the toilet was at the bottom of the yard with squares of newspaper hanging on a nail behind the door. We read by the light of a candle on our bedside table, which was an upturned orange box.

But what an adventure playground we had on our doorstep. Our favourite place was the bustling docks. There were cargo ships carrying iron ore and pulp for the paper mill at Salthouse.

Outside the dock entrance various vessels would be beached, ready for scrapping by Wards ship breakers.

We would play truant from school and, when the tide was in, we would climb hand over hand up the mooring ropes to get onboard. These ships still had furniture and a coal fire you could light; on the rare occasion we got caught we would receive a clip around our ears.

The long summer holidays were spent camping on Piel Island or Walney. It was totally unsupervised by adults and we invariably got up to mischief.

One day paddling miles out to sea in our dilapidated canoe we spotted a trawler on the distant horizon. When, exhausted, we reached the trawler, we received a royal rousting from the Fleetwood skipper.

He pulled our canoe aboard his boat, gave us a mug of tea and steamed all the way back to the beach at Walney, gave us a safety lecture and a large feed of fish.

This incident with these kind men inspired me to eventually become a skipper of my own boat and fish the beautiful, but deadly, Morecambe Bay, just like them.

In the 1970s my boat was involved in the salvage of a large Fleetwood trawler, the Stephil, which foundered in a storm off Walney Island. The wreck needed to be removed before a nuclear submarine left Barrow.

The next adventure was the dramatic rescue of the crew of a coaster aground in the dangerous shallow Duddon estuary, using a tug owned by myself and two partners.

There are humorous stories in my book of the characters I met along the way, including Peggy, the only female keeper of a lighthouse.

* ‘A Boy from Glasgow Street’ by Norman Pascoe is available through www.ypdbooks.com paperback at £9.95 or Amazon Kindle for £4.99. All money raised from the sale of the book will go to the self-funded Duddon inshore rescue boat.