READING Looking Back's account a fortnight ago of the antics in Darwen on Pace Egg Monday before the First World War - when mill lads scrambled in the street for the "pace egg" parkin biscuits that town-centre baker George Butterworth showered about that day - 87-year-old Blackburn reader Mrs Hilda Marsden had two reasons to be intrigued.

The tale took her back to her days at St Aidan's CE Primary School, in Norfolk Street, Mill Hill, Blackburn, and when on Pace Egg Monday - the Monday before Good Friday - grocer and confectioner John Walton would appear at the door of his shop at the street's corner with Parkinson Street and throw similar "pace eggs" to the schoolchildren.

But as well the story reminding her of this now-vanished pre-Easter custom, Mrs Marsden found out after all this time what the biscuits were made from.

"Until I read the article, I was unaware of the ingredients used, never having caught one of the 'ginger nuts'," she tells me.

Unlucky. Not that all the youngsters who did manage to grab a prize that day were lucky either. For a report in the Northern Daily Telegraph 45 years ago on "pace egging" in Blackburn in the early part of the century tells how some got their fingers burned - literally.

"The grocers' men used to throw shovelsful of biscuits and pennies out on the streets," it said. "The expectantly waiting urchins had difficulty in picking them up because they did not know that both the shovels and pennies had been on a hot fire for a half-hour."

Yet, though many such old Easter traditions have disappeared, Mrs Marsden still wonders over the meaning of Pace Egg Monday. Can Looking Back enlighten her, she asks. "Pace" is said to have come from "Pasch" which, in turn, derives from the Passover, the Jewish spring festival commemorating the deliverance of the Israelites from Egyptian slavery - an event which the Christian Church correlated with mankind's redemption by Christ's death and ressurrection, celebrated at the same time of year at Easter.

But "pace eggs" and "pace egging" in East Lancashire were not confined to biscuits and hot pennies on just one day. Different kinds of frolics went on all week.

These included the rolling by children of brightly-coloured hard-boiled eggs down steep slopes and even cobbled streets - a custom said to symbolise the rolling of the stone from the mouth of Christ's tomb - with the last remaining unbroken egg becoming the "cock" egg while the broken ones were promptly eaten.

But in another still-remembered tradition, "pace-egging" also meant groups of younsters dressing up in fancy clothes and going about - often with musical instruments - singing and dancing outside people's houses in return for pennies or treats.

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