SCHOOL days are said to be the happiest days of your lives and they certainly bring back some happy memories for married couple Barbara and Derek Vose.

They went to different schools but have atmospheric photographs of a time gone by that will be remembered by many of our Looking Back readers.

Barbara, who is aged 79, and called Vose before she married, lived in Chorley Street as a child with her parents George and Mary and brother Rodney, who was 10 years younger than she was.

She was a pupil at Whitecroft Road School which was, says Barbara "quite a modern school" when she was a pupil there as it had only opened in 1935.

When she left the school Barbara went to work as a nurse at the Bolton Royal Hospital for 12 months then did shop work, she explains.

"We didn't have a school uniform but some of the girls made their own school dresses. I couldn't sew so I didn't have one," she says, explaining the variety of clothing worn on the photograph of the older girls.

Another photograph Barbara is particularly proud of is the one taken in London in around 1949 when she visited the capital, with her school friends, and met up with Bolton MP Mr John Lewis.

Whitecroft Road School closed some years ago and in its place is now housing.

"It was a good school and was not around for very long really if you think about it.

"It seems a shame that so many schools in Bolton have closed. I can remember many of the girls I went to school with. I wonder how many of the girls on these pictures are still in Bolton and remember the trip or having the photographs taken," says Barbara.

Barbara's husband, Derek, also aged 79, was a pupil at Christ Church School in Harwood — another Bolton school that sadly now no longer exists.

He has two photographs from his days at the school including one in which a young Derek is pictured looking at his cheeky best during a May Day celebration. Derek can be seen second from the right at the front of the picture wearing a cap.

"I can remember my mother was cross with me. I got in trouble when I got home because the other lad you can see standing next to me had gone home to get changed because he told his mother the Bolton Evening News photographer was coming to take our picture and he put his best clothes on. I hadn't told her and I was in my scruffs," he says.

On the other photograph Derek says that the green land behind the children has now been built on and that Yates' farm (to the left) has now gone.

"It is all very different today," he says.

Derek met Barbara at the Palais in Bolton "where everyone met in those days," laughs Barbara, on bonfire night in 1955.

The Palais was a major part of life for many young people in Bolton in the 1950s and 1960s and Barbara and Derek were no different to many couples, spending every Saturday night there enjoying the music and dancing.

They could spend just one and six to go on the balcony at the Palais where, if Barbara had rushed there from the hospital in Chorley Street with her uniform on she would have to cover it up as she was not supposed to be in there wearing her uniform.

They were very gentle times and a time when it was perfectly safe to leave belongings around without the fear they would disappear.

"If you were asked to dance you knew you could leave your coat or your bag on the side and when you got back from the dance it would still be there. It wouldn't happen today would it?" asks Barbara.

Derek, who worked as butcher in Farnworth, said they were very happy times.

"It was a very happy time and we had a lot of fun," he says.

It was not all about drinking alcohol until intoxicated in those days though as many young people would simply go out for a coffee and a night of music and dance, explains Barbara.

Groups of friends would meet to chat and watch the dancers if they could not afford to dance and even buy just one dance pass and then pass it around the group in order to allow each member of the group the opportunity to join in the fun if they did not have the money to do so.

Times were hard for many young people but that did not stop them enjoying themselves and making the most of being young. Still recovering from the hardships World War Two had imposed on the public of Bolton people were determined to get back to some sort of normality and the dance halls were one way of doing so — the Palais was the major and most popular source of entertainment with its regular big bands and crowds flocking from all over Bolton and beyond.