It was where I scored my first Ashes century against Australia, bagged a hat-trick for Pompey in the FA Cup Final and skittled the West Indies with a seven wicket haul in the space of less than half an hour, an arena of dreams and sunshine, of cricket and football, of hot summer days and squelching winter mud.

It wasn’t Lord’s, Fratton Park, or Wembley, of course - except in our fertile young imaginations - but Alexandra Park, home to a motley bunch of pre-teens, back in the days when indoors, if we were lucky, we had two television channels, on which we gazed outwards on a black and white world, black and white action heroes and black and white, mostly American, or American-influenced pop singers.

My parents bought the house in Gladys Avenue in late spring, 1960 and we moved in, after my ex-builder grandfather masterminded extensive modifications, in the late summer of the same year.

Before that, we had lived in and/or around Manor Road, in what was then regarded by my mother as “Buckland”, because Fratton, for her, was far too common!

Back then, our playgrounds had been Kingston Rec (15 minutes or so walk) and Kingston Cemetery (about the same), the latter a perfect backdrop for war games, wild safaris and all manner of other adventures.

Those days were fun, but now I had Alexandra Park right on the doorstep, literally a stone’s throw away from our front gate, even for a not-quite-eleven-year-old and, on the far side of that was the sea!

Of course, it wasn’t the sea as in Southsea and Eastney; it was fine enough at high tide, but as the waters receded, they exposed an expanse of the most glutinously evil mud, semi-saturated by decades of diesel and oil spillages from the scrapyard that we could see right opposite the swing park area of the main park.

Down at the Harbour Station, kids would lark in the mud to retrieve coins tossed from the rail pier by amused onlookers - our mud wasn’t for larking in, rather for getting totally stuck in, if you were daft enough to venture out onto it.

It wasn’t quite so bad, though, if you followed the promenade northwards from the park towards Hilsea, passing the incredibly flimsy looking scaffolding pole footbridge out to Horsea Island.

A little further on was the slightly raised “wadeway”, over which, at low tide, the naval supply vehicles would pass to take supplies and whatever else out to the sailors that garrisoned Horsea.

Even that became a favourite haunt - in an earlier issue, I told you how we used to fish off the “bridge” section out in the middle of that wadeway, where at low tide the water rushed first out and then, as the tide turned, back in, on a good day sweeping fish into our crudely made net, fish that earned us a few shillings from an older lad, who used to then sell the sea bass on to restaurants, at a price we wouldn’t have believed.

Further up, towards Fox’s Forest and the Lido, between the promenade and the various areas of allotments, naval housing estates and school playing fields, ran a muddy ditch, overgrown for much of its length by tangles of thorn bushes and weeds.

Among these, I discovered what was even then the last traces of a miniature, or narrow-gauge railway, which a search in the the local library revealed had once run from Alexandra Park, all the way up to Hilsea.

The remnant I found was a stretch of rusting rails - no more than twenty feet at most - resting on a series of badly rotted sleepers, at the northern end of which were the remains of what had clearly been a set of buffers.

This had presumably been some sort of siding, perhaps to enable the tiny trains to pass half way along the route, but I couldn’t say for sure.

In fact, even now, I know little about that railway, except that it did exist and that it was probably opened at around the same time as Alexandra Park itself, but how long it lasted and why it was closed down and dismantled, I have no idea. Despite many enquiries and extensive searching, the fate of that little line remains a mystery to me.

If any of you readers out there know anything more, or know where I can lay my hands on any photographs, I’d love to know, as my more recent researches have revealed nothing about any railway, save for the circular one that ran around the Lido itself, during the forties, fifties and early sixties.

We spent many hours in Fox’s Forest and up on the ramparts of Hilsea Lines, where the rose garden was superb in summer, the scent of the blooms almost overpowering, as you walked through the long arbour, the climbing roses thick on the timber frameworks.

But it was back in good old Alex Park itself that we spent most of our time, in days when, although there was the athletics stadium, compared with the modern day Mountbatten Centre it was a modest affair, although the pavilion grandstand did manage to accommodate several hundred rowdy schoolboys on school sports days.

Around part of the circumference of the stadium, outside the wire fence and hedgerows that were supposed to stop us getting in out of hours - they didn’t succeed, I ought to say - were a row of four or five brick air raid shelters, all with thick, reinforced concrete roofs.

These reminders of a war that was then scarcely fifteen years in the past, had mostly been sealed up, except for one that Jock, the “parkie”, used as a store for his mowers and rollers and other implements of cultivation and care.

They were set half into the embankment, upon which the perimeter fence stood, so that on the inner side, they stood only a couple of feet above the grass, which made it easy for us to gain entrance through the “window” vent of one, once we’d managed to prise the corrugated panel loose from it.

That shelter, musty, damp, smelly, full of spiders and whatever else, became our headquarters on rainy days, or during the early autumn evenings, when the sun set early and when Alexandra Park was locked up half an hour after sunset.

Safe inside our bunker, with the corrugated panel pulled back into position, to beat the idle gaze, we would sit and chat quietly, peering out until the daylight was just about gone, when it would be safe to assume that Jock had finished his rounds, unlocked his bike from the railing outside the park lodge and headed off to wherever it was he called home.

Not that we ever did anything wrong during our illicit after-dark stays - we might walk back and around to the swings and the “spider web” roundabout, or perhaps the “umbrella”, or we might crawl out through one of several weak spots in the fence.

There were plenty of those, where untwisting just a small piece of supposedly securing wire meant we could lift a section of the chain link enough for fairly small boys to wriggle through, to gain access back onto a promenade that was openly accessible from either end anyway.

Then, if the tide was up, we might walk along to where one of several sets of concrete steps led down, first to a slightly raised walkway that ran beneath the level of the promenade itself, a walkway that was about a foot above the mud and shingle and which itself would be well submerged by the higher tides.

We would paddle a bit, throw a few stones out across the water, then maybe crawl back into the park, walking barefoot across the grass of the sports field area - football pitches in the winter, cricket pitches in the summer - before eventually walking back towards the main gate, climbing over it and heading home, at an hour so respectable that our modern equivalents would find astonishing!

I was almost eighteen, before I discovered that Jock had known, or at least suspected, all along that we were out there, haunting the dark hours, whilst he was home eating his supper.

But then, as he told me, just weeks before his rather belated retirement, he knew that we weren’t doing any harm and he didn’t return next morning to a trail of vandalism.

Jock was strict about just one thing - at the front of the park, where people walked, or sat around in one of many ...wrought iron benches, there was an open oval of grass, ideally shaped to form a cricket ground for our young efforts.

He had no problems with us pitching our wickets in the middle there - he even let us use one of the smaller hand rollers, to keep our “strip” fairly flat - but there was no playing with hard balls and, conscious of the fact there were mums with smaller kids, toddlers and even babies in the vicinity, we never broke that rule.

Instead, our test matches were played with tennis balls, preferably older, more worn ones, so that they didn’t bounce too extravagantly, although that made hitting a four or a six more difficult.

Sometimes, we would have a “crowd”, generally on Sunday afternoons, when the benches around our “boundary” would be populated by mostly older couples and a good shot would invoke a small ripple of applause - well, a few sporadic hand claps, anyway!

During the week and on Saturdays, too, the tea interval would be taken at around five o’clock and extended in order that several of us could jump on our bikes and race off to complete our paper rounds.

Close of play would therefore be much later than that of our professional counterparts, governed only by that after sunset curfew.

We would generally take sandwiches and bottles of squash to the park with us, especially during the summer months, but when the liquid refreshments ran out, there was always the water fountain, which is still there, although it has long since ceased to provide water.

Just as well, probably, as the brackish liquid that used to trickle out from the spout in our day was almost certainly supplied via lead piping and what unhealthy “additives” it contained were anybody’s guess.

Not that it seemed to do any of us any harm - no cholera, yellow fever, bubonic plague, although there might have been the odd loose bowel movement by the time we got home again!

We couldn’t have cared less, though; when a fast bowler is thirsty, he’ll drink anything and the great Fred Trueman wouldn’t have been squeamish about drinking from our fountain, would he?

Those days are now getting terribly close to being half a century in my past, but I can still remember them fondly, especially when I find the time to stroll across Northern Parade and wander around the old place.

Yes, I’ve been back in the old family home for a few years now, though mum and dad are gone, along with at least a couple of acres of the old open area, on which the Mountbatten centre and its assorted satellites stand.

The swing park is now just inside the main gate, the old “Monkey House” gone, the concrete remnants of the bandstand removed from the hump in the middle of the front part of the park and replaced by flower beds.

Now I walk past sturdy, mature trees, their trunks up to a couple of feet across, trees that I can remember as tender saplings, surrounded by protective wire cylinders and supported by three by three stakes, driven deep into the soil alongside them, to offer them support against the brisk and even strong winds that frequently blew in from the water.

Over the back, along the far side of the sports field area, stand the trees I can remember watching being planted, spindly things that also required similar support and protection.

Now they are close to a hundred feet high, with massive trunks that have more than four decades of winters, springs, summers and autumns behind them and which will probably still be standing, higher and bigger, long after my generation has passed on.

Back in the sixties, I probably gave little thought to those people who were the first to enjoy Alexandra Park, already more than fifty years old, even then - I knew this from the inscription on the fountain.

Did those Edwardian kids become young W G Graces, or C B Frys? Did they run around in those long, baggy shorts, turning Alexandra Park into their own Fratton Park, or, a few years later, the then new Wembley Stadium?

I like to think they must have, just as I would like to see more of our present young generation emulating us and them, more football pitches with jackets or jerseys as goal posts, more young trees used as stumps for two a side cricket knockabouts.

But then times change and perhaps the lure of the Gameboy, the pressure of a hundred or more TV channels, thousands of DVDs and an Internet that can supply the mind, but not necessarily stimulate the imagination, is too great a burden on their free time and anyway, there are more organised clubs for those who are so disposed, I guess.

Besides, with the cost of designer trainers, who would consider tramping across muddy fields on a cold and wet January afternoon ...

Don’t mind me, though. The grey from my hair is obviously reaching down into the roots and getting to my brain and, as someone once remarked, the past is viewed in its best light from as far in the future as possible.

So bless you, Alexandra Park and bless the people responsible for your creation.

Bless all the Jocks of this world, who nurtured and still nurture our priceless patches of “rural” escapes amidst the urbane urban-ness of our modern life - thanks for all those years and priceless memories and here’s to your next hundred years, Alexandra Park.

Yes, one hundred not out and still going - may the future people of Portsmouth remember and rejoice when you eventually reach your double century ...