Author: mickyrichards1957

Contents of a Tupperware box have changed over the years.

During summer holidays in the 60s and 70s I’d purchase my Red Rover ticket at Balham Underground Station and travel as far as possible, believing Ongar was not only (then) the end of the Central Line, but also that beyond that, you’d drop off the end of the Earth.

With me would be my Tupperware box full of 60s/70s foodstuffs: Spangles; Blue Riband biscuit; a meat-paste sandwich consisting more paste than meat and another Tupperware receptacle holding water with just a hint of squash (as the combination of e-numbers, the depths of the Northern Line and 80% of all Spangles eaten by Clapham North may have had a detrimental effect on mummy’s little Mickey Mouse’s tummy).

These days the Blue Riband would be replaced by something which is now 90% cashew (even though it is called “chocolate something” on the wrapper); water will be the only drink – preferably flown in from a mountain stream feeding Lake Geneva; Spangles replaced by the most exotic fruit from an island which hadn’t even been discovered in the 60s and all forms of bread would have been replaced by sushi.

In the 60s Sushi was likely to be the name of someone who worked alongside Steve Zodiac, Troy Tempest or Captain Scarlet.

These days no one is more than six-feet away from a bottle of water; the summer signs at Tube stations actively encourage you to carry one. So how come none of us living in London in the 60s and 70s died of dehydration?

Growing up I’d play outside for hours, either trying to become the next Alan Knott or Gerd Müller; but I’d never have any form of liquid near me. I’d return to my Balham flat and be given orange squash diluted by tepid (at best) water from the tap, not some chilled bottle of Perrier or Evian.

I always judged people as being posh if I was ever invited anywhere for tea and offered lemon squash. We never had fruit juice either (how I never contracted scurvy I’ll never know!) and the Du Cane Fruiters opposite my Balham flat never sold anything from outside the UK (they were advocating leaving the EU before we even joined in 1973), so the only fruit intake I had was at half-time during school football matches.  Accessible water, unless you were having it flown in from the Perrier factory in the Gard departement in France, was restricted round my way to the school water fountain or the horse trough on Mitcham High Street.

These days water bottles proliferate and the substances inside manifold. But, if you’d have asked me in the mid-60s, after running around Wandsworth Common like a banshee, if I’d have liked an Elderberry Press, I’d have assumed it was the name of a local newspaper!

There are many smells from my youth growing up in the 60s & 70s, which have stuck with me and ones I fear may never smell again.

Last week I talked of applying calamine lotion on anything burning during a childhood ailment and, if you’d suffered, one smell you’d never remove from your olfactory sense.

Virol too, is a smell I’ll never encounter again, as people now know obesity is not the name of an Afrobeat band from the 70s. Virol was a malt extract (made of 200% sugar) which you were given as a kid if you were skinny; I was like a character in an LS Lowry painting and got given it by the vat load!

Excessive use of chlorine is another long-forgotten smell. Due to an altercation with a swimming instructor aged eight (I was eight, the swimming instructor wasn’t, as that would have been dangerous, unless they were half-haddock) I didn’t swim much, but, am aware chlorine in swimming baths has subsequently been watered down – although the faintest of smells bring on my hydrophobia (I don’t foam at the mouth as much these days).

Burnt milk is another (courtesy of Costa, Starbucks etc.) waft you don’t get.  Before any Seattle-based coffee shop entered the UK, my nan would boil up milk for a “frothy coffee” is her saucepan.  Invariably she’d forget, having gone off in pursuit of a Player’s Weight, whilst the milk, originally destined to become a frothy coffee, was fast becoming more like the top of a crème brûlée!

I can only think the need for lepidopterology is rapidly declining as, whenever you used to visit an aging relative, you were hit by the overriding smell of mothballs. Perhaps moths are now on coat-free diets?

Diphtheria is not only tricky to spell, but you never wanted to catch it as a kid; I never did, but did contract most of the other children’s diseases during the 60s.

My mum used to have a book which had a table listing all potential ailments: their symptoms, how long they lasted and the incubation period; the latter column being the one most used – you’d be innocently sent to a children’s party where your parents knew some child there had chicken pox –, you came away from the party with a balloon in the shape of a penis, a piece of cake and a highly contagious disease!

In my Balham flat I remember my dad having to get up in the night to put calamine lotion on me in front of our two-bar fire. (I assume it must have been winter, unless he was deliberately getting me to lose weight as I had a ride on the 3.30 at Newmarket the next day!)

I had measles as a baby, chicken pox at six, mumps when I was seven, German measles (it was the only German thing allowed in the flat) at eight. At nine, I contracted a mild form of Scarlet Fever.  The treatment for this was to dab the inflamed parts with milk.  I had an aunt who did this whilst smoking one of her 40-a-day Embassys; I was concurrently cured of Scarlet Fever whilst enduring passive smoking.

But prevention being better than cure, I was force-fed sprouts as a kid, as my mother told me this would stop me getting consumption; Black Death and Marsh Ague (winds from the River Wandle could have brought them, apparently!)

My Nan introduced me to French Knitting whilst growing up in her Balham flat in the 60s; she did this for two reasons: one, to stop me playing outside the confines of my block of flats and two, in case they ever reintroduced capital punishment via La Guillotine on Balham High Road, she would have a ringside seat.  Because, if you see paintings of any execution during Le Terreur in late 18^th Century France, you’ll see depictions, aside from the poor, cake-offering toffs about to have the severest of all haircuts, old crones with no teeth, smoking clay pipes and knitting!

If public executions were to return to the UK, my Nan wanted to be in the thick of it and I would be her vehicle – who is going to stop a ten-year old kid brandishing an old cotton reel, four nails and two-foot of something which wouldn’t even work as a draft-excluded, even for The Borrowers, moving, with his Nan, to the front?

Being introduced to handicrafts such as French Knitting (I wasn’t allowed a crochet needle as I’d have taken my eye out – apparently) in retrospect was possibly a mistake as, strangely enough, we didn’t have use for things like this at an all-boys school – the ability to create some very long piece of intertwined wool didn’t stand me in good stead on the rugby field! I was expected to conjugate Latin verbs as an eleven-year-old, not provide the entire class with matching hat and scarf!  Plus I needed to know the exact dates of Gladstone’s periods as PM – crocheted coasters were never ever needed for that!

Occasionally, as a kid, I’d be given an extra sixpence pocket money to buy sweets; I believe the local dentist was in league with my nan and her sugar-loving sisters, who would supply the bonus money.

In the mid-60s there were more sweet shops along Balham High Road than there were traffic lights – this resulted in the whole of SW17 having high cholesterol, few teeth and an abnormally high ratio of road traffic accidents.

My sweet shop of choice was Nugent’s, run but a woman, seemingly 200-years-old (you think that as a kid and she was probably only 150).

Sixpence was almost too much to possess as this produced the dilemma of choice.

There were many items – Fruit Salads, Black Jacks, Shrimps (made from 200% sugar) – where you could get four for a penny.   With my order only 16.7% complete, there was the executive decision to make as to whether you continued to build a glucose mountain in your hand – twenty-four pretend bananas would have had me climbing the walls – or did you plump for a 3d Jubbly?

I would spend an eternity in the shop doing mental arithmetic and wishing I’d bought a copy of Calculus for Idiots with me, an abacus or a slide-rule.

I think, looking back, I probably went the 24-shrimp route as I consequently needed several fillings before I was a teenager. Sadly, you don’t get four of anything for a 1d these days – which is why you never see a rich dentist!

I rarely ate school dinners as I lived next door to my Balham primary school; plus I had an intolerance to caterpillars – which the school salads had in abundance (the dinner ladies thought it a substitute for ham) (although you rarely get that with an Ocado delivery “We’ve no ham, but we’ve substituted it with a punnet of caterpillars”).

As an only child – and subsequently a fussy eater – my weekday lunch at home was a decade of egg ‘n’ chips – I look back and wonder why I have such high cholesterol!

However, growing up in the 60s there was a regularity about what I had for my tea:

Diets have changed over the years (mine hasn’t, although I rarely have spam twice in a week these days) and more foodstuffs have been introduced.

However, for me, avocado is still the colour of your bathroom, not something you eat on toast!

Living on the fourth floor of a block of flats meant Easter egg hunts were precarious to say the least.   My mother was good at hiding them, but I never felt confident with her scaffolding-erecting skills outside the lounge window.

In the 60s I’d get Easter eggs from benevolent relatives. They’d be from Cadbury’s and would contain (inside) a small packet of chocolate buttons – as if you’d not had enough chocolate with the actual egg!

Nowadays you can spend hundreds of pounds in Hotel Chocolat (who can’t even spell chocolate) or from Lindt (which, when I was growing up, was something you’d put on a wound).

Creme (what is it with the inability to spell correctly in the confectionary industry?) Eggs were introduced in the UK in 1963, the same year there was a rise in anti-emetic drugs.

I believe there is something in Easter eggs which make them even more addictive than normal chocolate. It clearly isn’t just the sugar.  Perhaps there is crack cocaine inside?  I’d be very unhappy if I were to get an Easter egg where a Curly Wurly had been replaced by some Class A drugs.

Although it might explain the ads with Terry Scott in in the 70s.

Happy Easter!