When I was a kid – maybe six years old – some Sundays in summer when the sky was clear just after dawn, my Dad would come into our room and say, “Wake up, we’re going to St Annes”. St Annes-on-Sea was in those days a four-hour drive from Manchester on the Lancashire coast. Today via the North West’s motorway system, it takes about fifty minutes.

The summer’s day at that hour always smelt of grass mown the day before. The growing morning light built up the drama of expectation, and a special day to come. Dad’s car was a Hillman Minx, and he had access to petrol off the ration because, as a cloth merchant, he needed to travel round to the various mills and factories he supplied in the 1950s.

By the time my brother and I got downstairs, Mum would be wrapping a packed lunch of egg salad, ham, and marmalade sandwiches in a towel and placing it carefully in a wicker basket. My brother Mike (always far more practical than me) would be looking out the cricket bat and ball, bucket, spade, small beach windmill, Clarks sandals and fishing nets always vital for trips to the coast. I would just walk around excitedly, asking questions: will the weather be nice? can we play on the sandhills? how far out will the sea be?

The last of these was a very important question. The Lancashire coastal plain stretches out for miles, flatter than a hedgehog under a steamroller. If the tide was out, actually getting to the water’s edge could be half a day’s hike. But somehow, Dad always knew the answers.

Of course, the motorways aren’t the only reason four hours had shrunk to fifty minutes by the late 1970s. We were the only people in our street with a car, but driving the pre-war Hillman Minx anywhere was rather like setting off round the Grand National course on a Drayhorse. When going up hills, everyone leaned forward in order to get the old banger over the crest of a hill. But before we got to the sandhills of St Annes, there was one vitally important ritual: breakfast at Mrs Chadwick’s.

The nearest I could get to her name as a toddler was Chiddlewack, and so the monniker stuck. When Dad was doing his Air Force training at nearby Kirkham Camp in 1942, Mrs Chadwick had run a full-board guest house nearby for the wives of airmen. She took a shine to the shy working class kid with the amazing blue eyes, and my father never forgot this. So after the war, as his family got out of nappies, Dad made a point of always calling in for the Chiddlewack breakfast.

Mrs Chadwick was like the farmer’s wife in a Dickens novel. Her grey hair was arranged in an elaborate series of buns, and her pinny (I don’t remember ever seeing her without one) was constantly being used by this matriarch as a towel for wiping off everything from gravy to pastry. Chiefly however, I remember her as being always covered in flour. At times it looked like stage makeup against her rosy cheeks, but it was also in her hair, and on her forearms. As she walked along, it sort of puffed out from her being like steam from a railway engine.

Her breakfasts in 1953 were unbelievable. As she had a smallholding at the back of her guest house, Mrs Chadwick could supply eggs, fresh bacon, home-made sausages, and astonishing toast from home-milled bread. And there was butter. Real butter, crammed with salt – and rich yellow in colour. In most homes, margarine was still the order of the day…and trust me, it didn’t taste like modern margarine. Post-war margarine had the distinctive flavour of axle grease watered down with bleach.

By mid morning we’d be on the beach, and Mum & Dad would sleep off breakfast while Mike and I chased all the Apaches, Germans, robbers, dragons and Treens off the beach. (The Treens were the great enemy of Dan Dare Pilot of the Future from the Eagle Comic. They were led by a wicked leader called the Mekon, who bore a striking resemblance to William Hague).

Mum would then come and get us, order us to rest and eat lunch, and the minute permission was given to leave the sand-cloth table, we’d be off again to catch all the sharks in the rockpools, dig up an entire Tyrannosaurus Rex in the sand, build what looked like a sandcastle but was really a machine-gun pill box against the Nazi invaders, and perform many other superhuman feats. Towards the end of the afternoon, we’d play beach cricket. Mike would thwack the ball miles in every direction, I’d throw a tantrum, and then our parents would know it was time to leave.

As we chugged off back to Prestwich, dusk collected above the trees, cascading down like an opaque, pointilist mist until the dark finally came. I remember above all the feeling of tingling skin, replete imagination, heavy eyelids, and the radiating security of being in a family where my Mum sorted everything – and my Dad knew everything about everything. My upbringing was far from perfect, but on days like this it was magically important to a kid who frequently felt – as a suburban Mancunian – like a fish in a tree.

At age 65, on good days with few if any trolls, I can still think mainly about what could be….and if it could be, then why not shoot for the Moon? It is never too late to wonder at new things, to wish for something better for everyone, to see happy kids and concerned parents, and to notice how – despite the negligently neo-fascist educational practices of the last forty years – so many kids from all backgrounds come through the bollocks, still able to think for themselves. Such people are the questionners, the shibolleth-smashers, the jewels in the crown who know that the King is in the Altogether – and are prepared to say it out loud.

These children are the proof that come Hitler or Ho Chi Minh, Murdoch or Machiavelli, the individual human explorer spirit will always win out. My own life has continually surprised me in its ability to chuck all the balls in the air…..and then hand me a personal Angel when I least expected it. For the eternal child who always wonders, it is never to late to seek out and nurture the Angels.

Earlier at The Slog: The elevated Labourers who have deserted the NHS