20th of February 1974 to the 19th February 1975
As my infant journey approaches the mid-70’s…
…I start to gain some memories which stick with me even to this day.
I remember my favourite Ladybird book Jack and the Beanstalk. My sisters Susan and Katherine had already amassed a small collective library of these books. The had all three volumes of the nursery rhyme books coloured red, blue and yellow, and plenty of the stories as well, such as The Elves and the Shoemaker, The Princess and the Frog, The Gingerbread Man etc; but I think my first one was Jack and the Beanstalk, and I used to love looking at the pictures. The best part of the story for me, was as Jack climbed up the Beanstalk for the first time; and even though I knew, after a few reads, what was up the top, I still remember that feeling of nervous trepidation as he discovered what was hiding above the clouds. Those classic editions of the books had the most beautiful pictures in them back then.
Eventually, I would gain more of them in the next few years; Rumpelstiltskin was another story which comes to mind, I also acquired some of the non-fiction ones, such as the Ladybird book of Summer, and Garden Birds. All of them such wonderful books.
I’m fortunate to only remember…
…the family having one main colour TV at this point; something that, according to other family accounts, had only just arrived in our home.
With a change of career, my Dad became a postman around this time; and it seems that, with this new job opportunity, came the chance to invest in a new television, and for the first time a colour one, replacing the black and white version the rest of my family had lived with up to this point.
It seems I’d turned up just at the time when, not just colour television, but also colour photographs became the norm in the household. Even today, I can proudly set my own girls straight when they try and pin the “Dad, you’re so old” line by pointing out that all family photos which I’ve appeared in since birth are all in colour thank you very much, which pleases my ageist ego no end.
According to family memories around this time, my dad was so fascinated by a chance encounter with a colour TV that he’d seen, at a place the family were staying at on the Isle of Wight for the summer holidays, marvelling at the greens on the televised golf broadcasts (personally, I thought it was the Wimbledon tennis but my mother is sure it was golf; and thinking about it, golf was more his laid back thing), that when we all got back home, he immediately went out and bought one outright; unlike the time before when any big purchases that size had been paid on Hire Purchase.
When he wasn’t goggling at his new box, he was busy with his other new labour of love. Building a new ground floor bathroom extension at the back of the house which had previously been the outside toilet, while converting the old bathroom upstairs into a new third bedroom.
He managed to do this completely on his own, in his spare time, by using a few books for guidance and visits from council reps to make sure everything was built properly and within regulations. A truly remarkable achievement that I wouldn’t even begin to try and start, even with YouTube videos in this day and age.
As for me,..
…I don’t remember the building work going on at all, but I do remember a part on a summer holiday where I was placed at the edge of the sea and began freaking out because the water was freezing. The family have a lovely snapshot of that moment with me in tears to prove it.
What I much preferred was digging a big hole on the beach, which kept the water in and that I could sit in quite happily; my own make-shift paddling pool.
I remember the colour TV…
…and watching the same programmes Susan and Katherine watched in the evenings.
I just about remember watching Jon Pertwee as the 3rd Doctor in Doctor Who, which would have been his last season. The first conscious fear I vaguely recall from it was thanks to the Sontarons I think.
The other show which I remember would have been Top of the Pops.
I do remember some TV in the daytime. I remember the musical patterns fascinationg me in the early afternoons on the screen, when there were no actual programmes on, and then watching childrens programmes like Camberwick Green or Trumpton in the early afternoon. I remember other favourites of mine being Barnaby Bear, Andy Pandy, Mary, Mungo and Midge, Rupert the Bear, but probably my personal favourite at that time was Chigley and knowing all the words to the song they sang on the train “Time flies by when I’m the driver of a train, and I ride on the footplate there and back again…”.
Being the age of 2 for the majority of 1974, and the first 7 weeks of 1975, I was probably still being carted around in the pushchair by my Mum; that is unless it was being wheeled off by my two sisters to the local Co-Op on the corner at the end of our road.
Playing would have been out in the rec, or mainly in the garden with my sisters…
…(if they were home from school) or on my own with a few toys or a toy watering can, watering the rockery and flower beds, even the apple tree.
The other pastime would have been playing with an old kitchen kettle, and other utensils unusable for the actual kitchen, in a sand pit which was next to the shed. The kettle was a light pink colour, maybe previously red but now bleached due to being out in the sun for years. It also had a dent in it.
Years later I would find out that the dent got there when my mother threw the kettle at my father in a heated moment of an argument. Fortunately (or maybe unfortunately for my mother), my Dad’s lightning reactions got him out of the way before it struck him, with the kettle hitting whatever was behind him.
I’m assuming the kettle was empty, and had not just come off the boil, otherwise that would have been some incendiary device hurtling towards him. It may seem unrealistic to some who may think it too heavy to hurl, but who knows what strength my Mum could muster when provoked.
As she used to quote years later from the opening titles of the TV show ‘The Incredible Hulk‘, “Don’t make me angry; you won’t like me when I’m angry”, which by the time my little sister Jayne had come along, had us in fits of laughter and attempting to wind her up enough to see if she’d turn green.
Back to when I was 2, and that sandpit area would give me hours of play, but would eventually become the scene of an innocent but damaging crime which I’ll call “The Washing Machine Incident”.
My sisters had some great games and toys.
Things like a battery powered pair of dollies called ‘Tippy Tumbles’ (one for each sister, to keep the peace I’m guessing). These quite large dolls would perform a head over heals routine at the toggle of a switch on a battery powered controller (one blue, the other one red), tethered by a wire, attached to the battery powered doll. I remember playing with these acrobats indoors, probably given to me to play with by my Mum while my sisters were out at school, as I don’t think I would have been allowed anywhere near them if they were there, especially from Big Sis Susan. Anyway, no harm was done.
Seeing what they look like after the passage of half a century (and these pictures are just for reference and are not the actual dolls my sisters owned), my own teenage daughter remarks that they look like “the stuff of nightmares”. Well, yes they do. I’ve seen the original Poltergeist (note to self; must get teenage daughter to see that at some point…)
The same cannot be said though for Susan’s battery operated toy washing machine.
This was a working miniature marvel and went round and round just like a proper washing machine, which I’m sure my 11 year old Big Sis and her 8 year old sidekick Katherine would put their dolly clothes into and, with a push of a button, would pretend to wash their clothes.
It was one of my Susan’s favourite toys, and I don’t know how it ended up in the sandpit area, as there is no way I would have carried it out there. I’m guessing she’d innocently left it out there a day or two before, when it was time to come in for tea.
I don’t remember filling it with sand and turning it on, but I must have done so; and for years afterwards, when she would bring the contentious subject up (which happened many times, much to the rest of the family’s amusement I may add), I really couldn’t explain why; and through the subsequent years, it was difficult enough trying to navigate whichever age I was at the time of her next interrogation; whether that be in my teens, my twenties, or even into my thirties, let alone have to attempt to travel deeply back through my own distant past to try and psychologically tap into my two year old consciousness to provide any useful semblance of an answer to satisfy her prolonging grief for her long lost and much missed toy.
Eventually, I feel that the pressure subdued enough,..
…once she had produced 3 young sons of her own, Luke, Reece and Sam; and within the next few years of their young lives, the answer was eventually given to, not just my sister, but to myself as well.
You see, with my big sister Susan able to experience parenthood first hand with her own family now, she also had the opportunity to live out some of her long lost childhood again by providing them with some of the same experiences she’d had, and one of those was for darling boys to have their own sandpit and mud kitchen.
A lot of work went into making this kitchen experience (2.0);..
…far superior to the early 1970’s playpit that she’d had. This by now was the early 2000’s, not the early 1970’s, and to be honest, the way she’d meticulously furnished her own matriarchal home, thanks to Laura Ashley and Habitat, before her own children arrived; and with her obedient husband Keith (think of Hyacinth Bucket and her long suffering husband Richard, but just ten years younger, then you’re on the right wavelength), running a comfortably successful self-employed plumbing business (since breaking away from British Gas), I’m surprised even the mud kitchen wasn’t kitted out with granite worktops.
The boys also had their own playhouse, which of course housed their very own washing machine;..
…and with their mother’s perfect vision of playful outdoor reflection of domesticity now complete, it was only a matter of time before the inevitable answer to her age-old and much-asked question was finally revealed.
Expecting her three darling little cherubs were innocently making ‘tea’,..
…just as herself and her little sister Katherine would have done; when she eventually did look outside to check on her boys’ happy play, she discovered to her wakening horror that the older two, Luke and Reece, had dragged their own helpless washing machine out of the playhouse and (in a moment that must of only felt like revisiting her 30 year-old recurring nightmares), she stood there in paralysed apoplexy as she witnessed them, midway through, shoveling copious amounts of mud and sand into its drum.
When she did final yank the patio doors to one side and yell out to them,..
(In my mind, it would probably be with a scream which would give Fay Wray or any other scream queen a run for her money), what the hell (or words to that effect) did they think they were doing to the washing machine?! The response that came back from Luke and Reece in unison, didn’t just finally answer the age old question why, Why, WHY!, but should personally also go down as comedy gold.
Now, their response could have gone one of two ways;..
…either they could have dropped everything and ran for cover (pretty much what 2-year old me would have done if I’d been caught on my own when I did the exact same thing to her original machine years before), but this time round there was a key difference. They had strength in numbers, and were therefore confident of their own abilities.
Luke and Reece stopped dead in their work, turned to her and shouted back in unison, “It’s a Cement Mixer!”, before getting back to their important project, probably with a little help from Sam.
It’s probably not the enlightenment of the answer,..
…finally revealing itself to Susan at that moment, which crashed into her like a full size Thomas the Tank Engine with its eyes spinning on impact, but maybe the realisation that her little brother, all those years before, was just innocently copying his own dad, and was mixing ‘cement’ like he’d seen his dad do when he was building the new bathroom.
I’m sure, after her inward (and most probably outward) sobbing finally subsided, she managed to tell her updated realisation, where she’d actually witnessed the crime being committed for the second time in her life, but this time first hand, to the rest of her son’s grandparents, uncles and aunties.
Since her fateful day of discovery, 20 more years have now passed by, and her eldest son Luke is now married himself, and has become a qualified solicitor.
End of Part 1…to be continued...
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