The disappearance of a small seven-year-old boy has put the seaside town of Great Yarmouth right in the forefront of the news sadly for all the wrong reasons.

In the years immediately after the war I lived in the town for some ten years when my husband, newly discharged from the Army, was appointed manager of the Regal.

The theatre was a cinema during the winter, but in the 12 weeks of late June to early September it became a variety theatre, playing twice nightly with all the big stars topping the bill.

Great Yarmouth used to rival Blackpool in those days as the town in which to spend your holidays. Few people had the money to go abroad and families used to decamp in their hundreds and descend on the coastal towns.

There were seven live shows in the town at the height of the season and the houses were full for most of the time. There was no television in those far off days and, after the stringency of the war years, families from the industrial North felt they needed some relaxation.

The big factories closed down for the Wakes Weeks, usually the August bank holiday period, and half the towns would head for Blackpool and the other half would come to Great Yarmouth.

It was hard to get a room at the height of the season and some of the boarding house owners spent nights on a sofa in order to accommodate a couple more guests.

There were some excellent hotels on the seafront and I was sad to see from the articles in the newspapers that some of them had been turned into short-term council hostels for some of the drifters who now seem to have joined the asylum-seekers in this once thriving town.

There was a time when the Scottish trawlers filled the harbour and you could walk from one side to the other leaping from boat deck to boat deck. You could take a bowl into the shruff houses (as the filleting sheds were known) and fill it with delicious herring roes or buy some of the finest kippers.

All that seems now to have gone and the fishing fleet has shrunk dramatically. In its heyday Great Yarmouth was on the visiting list for all the stars, Tommy Trinder, Max Miller, Semprini, Tommy Cooper, stars of the Big Band era, it would be hard to name a star who did not play the Regal Theatre in those days.

For many of the readers of this column these names will no doubt bring back many happy memories of holiday evenings laughing at innocent jokes which today would not get a second glance.

Looking back on it now I remember it as a much gentler age. There probably was drunkenness and probably some violence, but it must have been very much in the minority. It certainly did not provide the daily headlines as violence seems to today.

Let us hope nothing dreadful has happened to the missing boy but, sadly these days, one's instincts are that the outcome is more likely than not to be tragic.

From the newspaper reports it sounds as though Great Yarmouth has gone a long way down hill from the busy happy holiday town it once was. The end of season parties we enjoyed would seem very tame to today's generation.

I can remember cooking bacon and eggs at three o'clock in the morning for Jimmy Jewel and Ben Warris as we all wound down after a night of fun and laughter. No cannabis, no heroin, no crack, just a crowd of friends enjoying themselves.

Few of the old crowd are still with us but that is the way of the world. As you get older you go to more funerals than weddings but, as the song says, 'Memories light the corners of my mind'.