KENT Brooks remembers life as it was 60 years ago:

Winter was a time for sledging.

This we did on Castle Hill and where Kendal College now stands.

We had nice wooden sledges, plastic ones, often in garish colours, not yet having appeared.

Villages could be cut off for weeks at a time in those days and I well recall being snowed in at Old Field Farm, Docker, in the winter of 1947. After standing with my mother at the bus stop for a long time in driving snow, it became clear that the bus was not coming. Neither did it come for some days.

One of the seasonal things I much enjoyed was a trip to Force Falls at Sedgwick at the time when the salmon were jumping. Sometimes the fish misjudged and landed on the rocks and we hoped to grab one of these, but never did.

Another seasonal occupation was to shoot deer on the Middleton Fells. My father was a friend of Eddie Wightman, who farmed at Middleton Hall, and deer were plentiful in the autumn.

My father owned a rifle of unusual calibre (210?), for which he could only get ammunition from ICI at Kynock.

They told him this line was being discontinued and offered their inventory for a very low sum. One day, an ICI truck appeared outside our place on Stramongate and unloaded dozens of wooden boxes: my father had acquired hundreds of thousands of rounds!

He also shot many rabbits, which formed a major part of our wartime diet. He sold his surplus to Bowmans, an open-fronted greengrocer on Stramongate, which also sold game.

He was also a keen fly fisherman and in those days brown trout were plentiful in the becks.

One day, fishing on Waterside in Kendal, he succeeded in catching a lady passer-by who got the hook in her lip. It fell to Dr Edgecombe to remove it.