Category: 60s

Half man, half haddock

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I was destined never to follow in the footsteps, or arm movements, of Johnny Weissmuller, Mark Spitz or Orca.  

My complete inability to swim; pathological fear of water and dread of putting on a brightly coloured hat were reasons enough to believe south-west London swimming baths and me were not a perfect match.

My mother befriended a family who were, as far as I was concerned, probably mermaids (the women always wore long dresses); their ability in the water made Flipper look sluggish.

Aged 8, in 1965, and swearing at the instructor my mother forced me to have, had me banned from Balham Baths; sniggering and pointing at the “No Petting” sign at Clapham Manor Baths ensured I was thrown out and given a detention during a school swimming gala.

Latchmere Baths, worryingly next to Battersea’s Coroner’s Court, was where I discovered declaring I had a verruca got me put straight back on the 49 Bus straight to my Tooting secondary school.

While I realise it is a useful skill to have, I cannot swim.  I carry a set of water wings with me if ever I travel into to the City and have to cross one of London’s many bridges.

Night Swimming is my favourite R.E.M song; I can only assume Michael Stipe doesn’t mind wearing goggles.

Le lighter de ma Tante

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Cliftonville in 1968. 

Not skiing in the Alps; not being a Bedouin living in the Sahara for a week; not visiting Washington DC.  Two generations later and it seems the school trip is slightly more exotic than it was when I was eleven!

A boarding house (do these things exist anymore?) just outside Margate was our final primary school year’s school journey.  It was so bleak and the food inedibly awful, it could have been an SAS training school for eleven-year-olds.

If Grand Designs had have been on in 1968, Kevin McCloud would have suggested getting Fred Dibnah in – pronto.

Many of us had rarely ventured outside of SW17, let alone visited Kent.  It might well have been Mars, such was our disbelief of it being so far away.  It didn’t take us long up Balham High Street to see who’d not taken their Kwells.

At secondary school the trips weren’t much better.  The day trip to Boulogne and Dunkirk were arranged ostensibly to hone our French speaking skills.  We did learn ou est les flick knives? and Combien this lighter that was possibly once a flame thrower?

No wonder Elon Musk is so keen to get to Mars – he’s probably had to stay a week in Cliftonville.

“DYB, DYB, Sausage”

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I remember my first night at Cubs; the first time my woggle had left my flat.

The meeting was held in my primary school hall – it seemed odd going to the hall in the dark and not having to sing “All things bright and beautiful”

There were lots of big boys – probably about ten.  In my eyes, that was nearing old age.

Having never read The Jungle Book it puzzled me as to why people were called Akela, Shere Khan and Baloo.  No one was called Martin, Peter or Lorraine – popular names in the early sixties when I first wore my new (incredibly itchy) Cub jumper.

There was lots of running around, especially when Akela called.  It was nearest I’ve ever been to becoming feral.

On my first night we were told about several things we’d have to learn by heart and recite ;  I guess the Masons are the same – only with more use of pigs’ bladders?

We would learn about knots – handy if you were thinking of a career in kidnapping; cook sausages – Cubs wasn’t very Vegan-friendly and get the chance to gain badges to put on your itchy jumper.  Might that make the jumper less itchy?

In time I’d get a badge which showed I could send messages using an Aldis lamp with one hand while cooking sausages with the other – and all the time making sure my woggle never caught fire.

Sausages are off, love.

The last straw donkey

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If you’ve returned from your summer holiday, have you brought back a large sombrero or a bottle of wine in a wicker casket, as if you haven’t got enough flammable objects in your house?

What different experiences we have now than when I was growing up in the ‘60s and ‘70s.

We no longer send postcards; a text will tell people you are having a lovely time and you wished they were there – which is a lie, otherwise you’d have invited them. 

We don’t paddle anymore; we go on courses to learn how to scuba dive for weeks on end.

The places we travel to these days you are unlikely to pick up the local fudge, biscuits, or tin of clotted cream; rock tends to be what the houses are built into rather than something peppermint which can remove fillings.

The desire to bring back a straw donkey soon after regular holidays to Spain started always confused me.   You have your hands full enough with luggage; small people and 200 Senior Service, so why on earth do you decide to carry something on the plane which is almost as big as yourself?

Retsina’s off, love.

Down with (big) skool

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In September 1968, 56-years ago, I started big school.

I wore long trousers for the first time – I worried about chafing until well into the 3rd year; got given homework which was slightly more complex than drawing a cat and then colouring it in; I established the cane wasn’t something sugar grew on.

In the first year I played a sport with an odd-shaped ball in mud which wouldn’t have looked out of place in the Somme.  I would stand, looking out, with horribly blurred vision, as I had bad eyesight, wondering if I’d ever been clean again?

I attended lessons I’d never done before.   I went into a science lab.  Surely, with 90 boys from Balham and Tooting, and with all those Bunsen Burners just waiting to ignite, one of us was a potential pyromaniac?  Since 1968 I don’t think I’ve ever used trigonometry – mainly as I have little interest in trigs.

I survived by being good at cricket, singing and by making the slightly rougher boys in my class laugh.   

Although, staying in your class until 4.10 was tough- it felt like it was nearly tomorrow!

And where had all the girls gone?

Hair today…

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I had my hair cut earlier this week and experienced a first: the barber shaved the outside of my nose.

I am blond and never been hairy; so, I was rather shocked, as the barber told me what he do if he were the England coach, he ran the razor over my nose.

In my Tooting secondary school the boy (?) who developed hair (not on his nose) first was looked upon as a demi-god and immediately voted unofficial form captain.

When you’re twelve you’re desperate for hair to grow everywhere; when you’re sixty-seven you’re wondering where it’s going to sprout from next.

Up until this week my un-Pinocchio-like nose had been untouched by human barbers’ hands, let alone sharp implements.

Clearly the barbers is a place where you experience firsts in your life:  When you don’t have to sit on the wooden booster plank; when you no longer have your mum telling the barber what you want (usually armed with a photo for a years-old magazine).  These are all rites of passage which means you have become a man.

My not reaching manhood was put into sudden realisation the first time I was asked if I wanted anything for the weekend?

“A new boat” I had replied, as that weekend I was going to the ponds on Clapham Common.   Not the entertainment the barber had in mind.  Next!

Putting the ENT in Enterovioform

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Medicines in the Fifties and Sixties, when I was a child, were deliberately awful; this was to stop you thinking you were ill. 

We never had Calpol.  We had medicines designed by evil professors – with no taste buds.

Getting a sore throat wasn’t at all advantageous back then as we’d be prescribed the foulest of all tablets: Dequadin.   It’d have been preferable having your tonsils ripped out by some vicious goblin who’d only qualified that week in an ENT ward.

Getting a cold and being forced to hide your head under a towel with a chipped bowl containing Friar’s Balsam taking effect didn’t encourage you buy anything else from the monastery.   I always seemed to get a cold on a Sunday – the treatment would coincide with “Sing something simple” being on the radio.  As if having a cold wasn’t punishment enough – vapours from hell and a radio programme from an even worse place.

The one medical thing I did learn (the hard way): Alka Seltzer – not the ideal product to make lemonade.  All that fizzes is not gold, as the nurse with the stomach pump told me.

Gripe Water’s off, love.

Health, efficiency and safety

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My first day of work was 30th September 1974.  I remember it vividly.

Wearing flares on the platform en route to London of Balham station was a mistake,  The wind, generated by the oncoming Tube trains, created a Marilyn Monroe-type effect of nearly lifting me off the platform.   Because of the copious amount of trouser material, if it wasn’t for a particularly attentive guard suggesting I get them away from the doors, I could have been half naked by the time we got to Stockwell.

Safely arriving at Embankment, I had a short walk to my office in Adam Street.  I was to be a clerical assistant with the DHSS.  The boss I had put the SS into DHSS. 

I really wanted, like my dad, to go into advertising but, armed only with a couple of O-levels which enabled me to quote bits of King Lear and name the participants in the Russian Revolution of 1917, a clerical life was to be my world.

I was given a clocking-in card to check I’d done my allotted hours; lengthy school summer holidays were a thing of the past; there was playtime. I couldn’t go home for lunch; everyone was Mr, Mrs or Miss (Ms had yet to be created); they counted the paperclips on your desk.  It was a miserable existence until, six-months later, I started a career in advertising.

The only saving grace, for a 17-year-old boy, was the messengers who worked in the building had a magazine library which made the copies of Health & Efficiency I’d see at the barber’s seem very, very tame.

Pocket billiards

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As I no longer own a fob watch, I’ve stopped buying three-piece suits. 

When I first started work in London I’d always buy a suit with a waistcoat; not for any stylish reason, but because it was colder in the ‘70s – the end of the last Ice Age. 

Occasionally they had “take your hamster to work“ day – so the extra pocket was useful – although it would get quite crowded in there if I was playing snooker.

The tiny pockets of the three-piece suit had manifold functions: hamster and chalk aside, you could hook your thumbs in and do impressions of Mussolini.  This was marginally more acceptable in the ‘70s than the ‘40s.  Although one Mike Yarwood never tried. 

You could store your train ticket in one.  These were the days when contactless meant you’d not heard from someone for a while or was a person not stored on the flip-up phone directory which sat on a table in the hall beside the phone. 

I used to have watch in my waistcoat.  It was second-hand, broken and actually a stop watch.  It was forever stuck on 3.59.  Either the owner had had some terrible accident just before four in the morning (or afternoon) as the watch had stuck at that time, or it belonged to Roger Bannister.  

He never owned a three-piece suit.  He did, however, have a three-piece suite, as he had to put his feet up a lot. 

Thunderbirds are no go

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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.