The mine manager built a large flat area to the west of the houses at the mine. I don't know what he called it in his budget or how he justified it, fire break, equipment park maybe. Anyway it was large and open and flat and had a backstop at one corner and it was our ball diamond. We played ball there all summer long, almost always "scrub", or rotation ball because we never had enough kids for teams, and it was great, though I was never much good at it.
The whole area was natural sand, acres of it, and where the ground had been levelled from the slope of the hill there were sand banks. A gigantic sandbox two hundred feet long and deeper than you could ever dig. There we played with our "Dinky" toys, with our trucks and scrapers and loaders and armies of plastic soldiers and tanks. I had an army truck, which pulled an 88mm field gun, and an armoured scout car and an APC with a swivelling machine gun turret. my cousin had a tank and tank transporter and a lot of planes. We all brought something to contribute to the war effort. We made cities and destroyed them, and we always won.
When we were a little older we would set up a tent down on the ball diamond and leave it set up and sleep there and play marathon games of Monopoly for days on end, going home only to eat and stock up on snacks.

Everybody grew a vegetable garden then, vast plots, half an acre and sometimes more. Potatoes, beets, carrots, onions, turnips, winter staples all. Radishes and lettuce and cabbage for salads. Peas and beans, cauliflower and cucumber and vegetable marrow. Dad would borrow grandpa's tractor and plow all the gardens in the Spring, ours and my uncle's and the cookhouse garden, and the gardens behind the houses of the manager and office manager and the maintenance man's house.
Our garden always grew best because it was on a south facing slope, protected from the west wind by the trees.
We also had all outdoors for a garden in the summer, saskatoons and chokecherries that weighed down the tree branches, wild strawberries and raspberries and blueberries. Hazel nuts if you could save them from the squirrels. Pincherries and gooseberries and rose hips to peel for the skin
Canning peas, pears, peaches raspberries, blueberries. Pickling beets and dill pickles and bean relish and corn relish and green tomato relish. Butter and cream and milk from the farm.
God, we lived like kings and didn't even know it.