LOOKING Back heard this week from Thomas Kennedy who, along with the friends in his street, got in a right old pickle nearly 70 years ago.

For he has told us of the time a pickle place opened at the bottom of Palm Street, Blackburn -- around 1936, he reckoned.

He said: "The children started calling it a pickle factory -- although it wasn't so much that as a small brick garage abutted on to the end of a terraced house -- and the budding entrepreneur, the pickle man.

"His finished products, pickled onions, beetroot, piccalilli and red cabbage, were sold in old jam jars and he would pay us a penny for four. Apart from the times when strawberries and other fruits were in season and our mums could make jam more cheaply, jars could also be swapped with the rag and bone man for donkey stones.

"I got many a telling-off from my mum for taking the jars which always used to be kept under the kitchen sink and my friends and I were always knocking on our neighbours' doors asking for empty jars."

As time went on Mr Kennedy, who still lives in Blackburn, remembers being given little jobs to do in the factory, such as cleaning out the glass jars, in a large galvanised tin bath full of cold water, which was only changed about every two weeks!

But he said: "By far a more unpleasant job was peeling small onions. Three or four of us would sit around one of the many tin baths fishing out the onions from the very cold water, our fingers numb and our eyes streaming with tears.

"Turmeric is what gives piccalilli its yellow colour and after we had cut up all the cauliflower, gherkins and onions, the pickle man would put the whole mess into a large pan to boil, before spooning it into the jars.

"This could be a very messy business, so we were each given a none-too-clean rag to wipe the rims of the jars and we always had plenty of 'yellow stuff' on our hands, so my mum always knew when we had been 'piccalillying'.

"The pickle man used to hawk his ware around the local streets on a handcart he had made himself and you could always hear him approaching as the glass jars jangled against each other on the cobbled street.

He continued: "On the outbreak of war the pickle man was called up, and although I don't know to which regiment, I reckon he would have been best employed in the chemical warfare branch, rather than the catering corps!

"In his absence his factory closed down and the premises became the street's fire-watching and ARP post -- but that's another story."