Garage

The Garage

It should have been a listed building but alas, I think it has probably now been demolished!

Remember when you were 15 or 16 and there was nowhere to go except for hanging around the streets getting into trouble? Well my parents had a garage but no car and so it was duly requisitioned to keep us off the streets. We spent half our lives in there (and the other half on Priory school playing fields!) and consequently the garage stood for the last 30 years as a monument to all the girls and boys we'd all fallen in love with, even if it was only for a day or two!

Luckily I managed to capture most of the graffiti from the walls before the house was sold last year, and for those of you who painted your love lives on the walls, here is a reminder of those relationships!

The guest list for the garage is a who's who of everyone we used to hang about with in the early seventies including guests from other schools like Gedling and numerous assorted French exchange students...

.....and of course it was compulsory for everyone to have their name painted on the wall. Regulars of course got much more free use of the space to paint their own pictures and slogans all over the place.

To mark that we were all very well educated and well behaved pupils of Carlton Le Willows we went through a spell of adopting our own mottos which of course had to be in a suitable foreign language, preferably latin unless you just spelt it backwards......eroom nai aviv eh tats!

Can you remember who these two belonged to...and what do they mean?

	Of course if you've gone off the opposite sex then you can always go back to the original love of your life, your football team!
And of course if you can't cope with all this graffiti because you've used up all the paint you can carve the names in to old door propped up on two tea chests which formed the table, and the settee. Or in fact you can lie under the door and carve on the underneath...sorry though everyone - the door was thrown away before I got there with the camera! Or you could write your slogan in the roof using candle smoke, as candles were the only form of light or heat that we had in there.

Tats obviously preferred this method of writing on the roof as he was taller than the rest of us and could reach!

And now the garage has gone..sold with the house a few years ago but for those of you who spent the days painting the walls, I hope these pictures bring back some happy memories!