the toy cupboard

It was known as the “toy cupboard” but to me, it was the portal to another world.

It was next to the bath I spoke about earlier. Built into an alcove, there was a large copper water cylinder above, which kept it comfortably warm. The toy cupboard measured about three by four feet and a couple of feet high. There were lead water pipes running around the bottom of the walls, where spiders and silverfish sometimes lurked. Two old wooden boxes were kept inside to hold most of our toys. I would often climb into one of them and shut the door. It was a place where I felt safe and private, a haven from a world I was still unsure of. Sometimes I’d fall asleep.

Other times it was a place of excitement – a cinema, a car or a spaceship. It was our stage for make-belief adventures. I had a toy battery operated slide projector. The slides had images from the comic strip Dan Dare. Sometimes the four of us – me, Barry and the two Shirleys – would climb into the toy boxes that became our seats of a 1950s space rocket! I would sit in the front and be the projectionist, illuminating the flaky whitewashed wall, transforming it into a window to outer space. We spent many hours exploring this new universe, fighting aliens and out-running them in our low-tech, toy box rocket. Eventually it would get unbearably hot or the appearance of a spider would ensure a hasty exit from the escape hatch!

freedom at last

I can't let today go by without a post here. I resigned my job after suffering enormous stress after the company was bought out a couple of years ago. I decided to retire early and today was my last at work. Free at last. Kind of a weird feeling after 40+ years of working. Not much else to say about it, just wanted to record it here as part of my story.

great uncle Jack

Here's me with my great auntie Ria and her husband Jack. They had no children of their own. I only saw them a few times in my life. Jack was a simple, uncomplicated man who apparently was pretty useless at anything but keeping bees, which was his passion and forte. He had few social skills and said little, as demonstrated one day when they came to visit us. He offered to take my sister and I for a walk and eventually we came to a corner shop near the childrens playground. It was hot and sunny and we were all wilting.

"Uncle" Jack, as we called him, announced that we should wait outside while he went to get an ice cream. We waited with baited breath for the certain treat we were about to get to revive us. He duly appeared brandishing a single cone topped with a lovely flourish of ice cream. I can imagine my sister having the same thought as me, that we would have to share it, but hey that was better than none. Not so, without a word spoken he carried on walking, slowly devouring his ice cream whilst we trailed on behind, ice cream-less!

1950s winters

Now that summer is over, thoughts turn to the coming winter. In the 1950s we had “proper” winters that brought new phenomena to explore and excite us. I would wake up and all seemed deadly quiet. The room so cold you could see your own breath. Opening the bedroom curtains would reveal a snowy world that had turned white over night. It was incredibly exciting and I couldn’t wait to get out into it and be the first to run around the houses and garden paths to leave my footprints, make a snowman or roll up a huge snowball that quickly became too large and heavy to push any further.

With luck some friends would be out too and snowball fights with them were great fun until eventually you realised your hands were so cold that they were numb. Woollen mittens would have been discarded once they turned wet and soggy and bare hands were the tools to use. When we finally gave up, went home and they warmed up, the blood flowed again and they hurt like hell. In those days we had snow that was deep and sometimes stayed for weeks. It would be piled up along roadsides and turn black with dirt from the traffic. Eventually it turned rock hard after continual hard frosts.

Winters were very cold and sometimes mum would put her washing out on the line during the day and forget it until evening when it would have frozen stiff. You could stand my dad’s heavy overalls up against a wall until they thawed. Hard frosty mornings would turn puddles to ice to be hacked at with the heels of your shoes. The toilet overflow pipes that jutted out of the stone outhouses sometimes dribbled water, which then froze into long icicles. We would snap them off and sometimes treat them as free, iced lollies, sucking them to a sharp point.

When it snowed and we got to school, kids would have made a slide down the playground and be queuing up to take a run and see how far they could slide down it. The best ones were when they had frozen overnight and had become hard, glassy and incredibly slippery. We would get the fun out of them for a day maybe before the caretaker eventually threw sand on them.

There is a small pond or “tarn” on the moors here. After a week or so of hard frost, it would ice over thick enough to stand on. If you went there at the weekend, it would be heaving with adults and children sliding and skating on it. I remember skimming lumps of broken ice across it, which would make a weird echoing, whistling noise as it zoomed across.

sunday night at the london palladium

We had no TV for many years and a real treat for us would be an invite for us all to go to our good friends and neighbours the B…..’s to spend a Sunday evening. Sometimes we would start out with a game of Monopoly but the real treat was watching their TV. It meant we could stay up late with our best friends and it always seemed more fun at their house. The two families together created a great buzz for me, Mrs B. had a natural quick wit and always had us laughing.

“Sunday Night at the Palladium” was a family variety show very popular then, hosted by Bruce Forsythe. There would be a mix of entertainers – a comedian, a singer, magician or someone spinning plates on the end of sticks but always a star performer to finish. This star would usually be the reason for our invite, someone who was a particular favourite of mum or dad – Ella Fitzgerald, Shirley Bassey, Frankie Vaughan, Matt Munro, Sammy Davis Jnr. etc. It was also a novelty to see commercials on tv. The only other tellies we could watch were our grandparents or uncle Frank’s. They only had the one BBC channel (no commercials) but our friends had ITV as well. There was one advert where a small guy in a white overall was telling us how good it was to buy “low suds in Cheer” washing powder. We all thought he looked like dad (he was a painter and decorator who wore white overalls) that seemed to amuse us all no end. Wasn’t entertainment simple then?

Mrs B. would usually have bought a big bag of mixed sweeties, which would be handed around every so often much to my delight. My favourites were “chocolate butter dainties” which were toffee lumps filled with chocolate. Not really dainty at all as they had a tendency to rive your tooth fillings out! The show always ended with the “Tiller Girls”. They were rather like the dancers in the Follies Bergere - scantily clad young women in skimpy costumes with long legs. They would link arms and high kick their legs in synchronicity while rotating around – bizarre or what? It was always a point of amusement to us because as soon as they came on Mr B. would don his spectacles and lean forward to get a clearer view. I was too young to understand what was so interesting about them – pretty boring to me. It didn’t click until I was about 13.