Blog

I never ever did collect all the Thunderbirds cards as a kid.  Of the set of fifty, I was missing one card: Thunderbird 3 going through the Roundhouse on Tracy Island.

I would walk the length and breadth of Balham and Tooting High Streets hoping that at least one newsagent would have the packet containing my elusive card.

I had countless multiples of cards depicting the Hood looking evil in a disguise; Tin-Tin looking longingly at Alan Tracy and Parker contemplating, if he ever got sacked by Lady Penelope, where the next bank job might be?   But no action shot of Thunderbird 3.

Some days, I’d consume so much bubble gum, after buying these cards, I felt like I’d caught tetanus.  The newsagent was glad as I was unable to complain.

The alternative was getting a massive sugar rush: buying packets of sweet cigarettes, to get the card inside the packets.  One day, I didn’t get an expected Thunderbirds character, I got Don Bradman (these were the days before sell-by dates).

Had they deliberately rationed them like a 1933 penny; a Queen Victoria Twopenny Blue or a hen’s tooth?  Yes, M’ Lady.

TV remote controls are more likely to be found down the backs of sofas these days than farthings; dead hamsters or a half-eaten sausage roll.

Back in the ‘60s (and ‘70s with the advent of colour) the TV control wasn’t remote; it was the youngest member of the family. 

If you’d had enough of Coronation Street and fancied Compact, a small person was commanded to get up and physically change the channel.  (There were more small people available as fewer people had functioning chimneys).   If I couldn’t be bothered to get up, we’d watch whatever channel was on until the Epilogue came on.

When BBC2 started, channel changing almost became an aerobic activity as you were on your feet more.

TV repairmen were more in evidence back then too.  

They would arrive, like doctors, with huge bags.  These bags didn’t contain penicillin, leeches or enema kits, they contained valves and wire. 

You learned words like contrast and brightness (the latter not being a word I heard much as a kid). 

In my Balham flats there were giant aerials on the roofs, but there was still the need for an indoor aerial – unless you wanted to see four sets of Dangerman or see the animals from Tales of the riverbank strangely shivering or doing acrobats.  They were talented, but NOT that talented.

The TV repairman made everything correct again and you were free to watch your programmes.  What he didn’t do was thump the top of the set several times.  And in return, you never said the words Radio Rentals – the TV repairman’s Macbeth or Voldemort.

Can you please hold that aerial still!

I blame my tremendous lack of knowledge of flora and fauna on my primary school not having pets you could take home for the weekend.

I would hear of people taking the class hamster home on a Friday night.  Not me, or any members of my class; we had to make do with imaginary pets.  One class member had an imaginary dodo for the weekend – turned up on Monday saying human hunters had killed it.  Life was tough on some Balham streets where no human had been before.

I so wanted a guinea pig to look after for a few days – to see if they made that odd noise when you held them up.  I had no siblings, so couldn’t experiment on them to see if they emitted the same sound.

No one in our class would come in after the weekend with tales of what the class gerbil had done; the “show and tell” table was pitiful.  The nearest we got to having a class pet was a pine cone which resembled a hedgehog.

As a child growing up in sixties London I never heard the sound of a tiny wheel being run on; no coming in Monday smelling of hay (or worse) and no revelations that the class chinchilla had escaped from my flat, ran eight floors to the top of the building shouting “Top of the world, ma”.

In an effort to improve me, my dad would take me, on wet Sunday afternoons, to places of interest.

We’d take the coach from Balham High Road and visit south-east England stately homes, castles (usually in ruins) and majestic gardens.

My thoughts, while walking round these places, would be: I’d love to slide down THAT staircase; where would you put the boiling oil to dissuade uninvited guests and what magnificent begonias (I  was a teenage boy)!

And why did most statues only have one arm?  Had they all been in some ancestral scything accident?

For me, the places which housed the Earls of this and the Dukes of that held no appeal.

I wanted to go to the Gift Shop: the treasure at the end of the National Trust-owned rainbow.

I wanted to get a tea towel with Churchill on; a mug decorated with Sir Philip Sidney poems and Kendal Mint Cake sponsored by Rudyard Kipling. 

Oddly, I would also buy coloured slides.  Strange, as I didn’t own a projector.  Perhaps I secretly hoped I’d be invited to someone’s for tea, where the parents had a slide projector and would ask, “does anyone have any slides of Ann Boleyn, some eleventh-century turrets or flowering clematis?”.    Remember, I was entering adolescence 😊

Everyone back on the bus, please.

During the Sixties, as I’d walk from my Balham flat towards Wandsworth Common to reenact famous Gerd Müller goals, I’d wonder at some of the imaginative creativity in the gardens along the way.

Many people clearly took great pride in sculpting various shapes and sizes on the bushes in their front lawns.  

One day, on the way to the common with my football tucked underneath my arm like Anne Boleyn’s head, I noticed that there was some vigorous pruning activity going on.  However, the tools being used were tiny.  I wasn’t allowed scissors as a kid, but I think I could have got away with playing these, such was their incredibly small size.

At this time we were being read The Borrowers during school.  The town where they lived was never mentioned; now I had living proof.  As I passed this house, they were, like the gardener in Bill and Ben, temporarily absent; but, to me, The Borrowers clearly lived in Balham. 

In addition to the tiny scissors there were tiny pliers; tiny wire-cutters and a tiny penknife.  Obviously, Swiss Army knives didn’t come in XXS.

There were never any competitions held down the street but, for me, the giant cockerel at number sixty-nine always won it.