Category: 60s

I never read as a kid (The Beano and  don’t really count) but one book which I would absorb, lying on the shag-pile carpet in the lounge of my Balham flat, would be the Guinness Book of Records.
I wondered if I’d ever be in it.
I was quite tall as a kid and pondered whether I’d ever reach 8’ 11” – diet being key in height development. However, I can attest that egg ‘n’ chips consumed daily only gets you to six-foot, slightly smaller than marginally under nine-foot.
I deliberated if I could balance fifty spoons on my body? The fact that we didn’t have five, let alone fifty, spoons in our flat meant I’d have to attempt this world record in the ABC café on Balham High Road. Assuming you’d have to be partially naked, this would have only been practical in the warm weather. Either way, it’d have got me banned and I did so like the iced buns and cups of tea with more head than tea you got at the café.
What we did have in our flat were cream crackers. Could I eat three of these in under 49.15 seconds? Did you know it only takes ten seconds to become totally dehydrated? I found this out aged ten.
At 62 some records are now beyond reach. Sitting in baked beans for over 100-hours would never work – at my age I’d be needing a wee after half an hour.

Ernie Binks, the caretaker at my school, could multi-task: not only had he got a very useful left foot, he was also very adept at scattering sawdust.
There was no such thing as after-school club in the ‘60s in Balham, but at my primary school, if you stayed in the playground after the 3.30 bell had rung, the caretaker would give impromptu football lessons. He played in goal for Balham United, as far as we were concerned, it was like having Sir Alf Ramsey coaching us.
Mr Binks did have a very cultured left boot (probably the only thing cultured in Balham in the ‘60s) and this was demonstrated in the playground on many an early evening as he tried to encourage us ten-year-olds to “let them know you’re there”. Even though I played for the school football team my interpretation of this was to involve your opponent in some of philosophical debate (while also being concerned whether I’d ever get dubbin off my hands).
Unless you played football, Mr Binks was largely absent, unless, as they say on announcements on London Transport, there was a Code 3 incident. In which case he would enter our classroom with his bucket of sawdust, scatter it liberally, but accurately, after which we would return to advanced calculus or hitting a Glockenspiel very hard, depending on whether it was a Tuesday afternoon or not.
Mr Binks lived on site, probably with a forest of pine trees (native only to Balham) in his back garden, all ready for sawdust preparation. Thankfully he never mistakenly came into our classroom with a chain-saw rather than a bucket.
They won’t forget Ernie.

I changed secondary schools in 1972.
As well as studying different syllabuses, I was introduced to different hobbies.
At my new school my new friends had two hobbies: discussing what girls were really like? And plane- spotting. (If the latter hobby continued into your thirties, you’d never find the answer to the former!)
Plane-spotting involved journeying to Heathrow Airport (pre-Piccadilly line extension and Heathrow Express). We took a train from Balham to Clapham Junction, another train to Feltham, a bus to the airport (where was Sherpa Tensing when you wanted him?) and finally onto the observation tower within the main terminal, where we stayed for what seemed like the length of time it’d take for a return journey to Brisbane.
My interest in planes had been soured in the summer of 1968 by having to drag my nervous (and very drunk – too much Campari) mother across the tarmac at Luton Airport to board a plane to fly to Majorca (she wasn’t content having gastro-enteritis at home!).
My previous experiences of transport-spotting were ticking off 88, 155 and 181 buses (and the occasional Green Line to make my hobby seem exotic to my new school buddies) as they trundled down Balham High Road.
I ticked these buses off on the back of a Basildon Bond envelope stolen from my Nan’s secret stationery store; plane-spotting meant having a pad the size of an Encyclopaedia Britannica.
I lasted two trips, the journey tired me out – I assumed this was jet lag?
However, to ingratiate myself with my new schoolmates, I invited them to the top of my block of flats, so they could spot their planes there.
And from that time on I’ve always been able to tell my Qantas from my El Al.

Until the mid-Seventies I thought Dr Crippen was the fifth Beatle.
In 1964 my dad took me to Madame Tussaud’s to see the newly-installed Beatles waxworks.
I was seven and looking forward to seeing the Fab Four.
The train and bus journey from Balham to north-west London was a familiar one as my paternal grandmother lived nearby, so a visit to Madame Tussaud’s killed two birds with one stone – not dissimilar to Dr and the late Mrs Crippen!
Having made our way round the exhibition I remember thinking to myself that George Harrison looked a bit like President Kennedy, when I realised it actually was JFK (who wasn’t the fifth Beatle, either) – the clue being he was on his own, not holding a guitar and wasn’t part of a pop-combo involving Eisenhower, Harry Truman or FDR.
Modern culture box ticked, dad suggested a trip downstairs to the Chamber of Horrors.
I’d watched the initial episodes of Dr Who (albeit from behind a sofa) so the thought of being face to face (or face to wax on this occasion) with a selection of poisoners didn’t fazed me.
Except it did later that evening, as I couldn’t sleep thinking the likes of Crippen, Haigh and Christie were in the next flat! I’ve never had nightmares like it – except when I’d drunk Newcastle Brown Ale mistaking it for Virol.
It took several decades before I visited the Chamber again, in comparison, Hitler seemed quite innocuous; probably because he wasn’t wearing glasses like Crippen or Christie?

As an eight-year-old, at Christmas, I believed there were two ways I could get drunk – like my relatives.
The first was Pimm’s:
My auntie, who also lived in our Balham flats, whilst being sponsored by Embassy before they ventured into supporting snooker and darts, would have bottles of virtually everything alcoholic in her flat except potcheen (and she didn’t have that because of her allergic reaction to potatoes).
It was tradition on Christmas evening to go to my auntie’s and, whilst everyone else got Pimm’s, I had a glass full of half the contents of the greengrocers opposite the flats, lots of lemonade, a tiny umbrella, as used by The Borrowers, but not a sniff of Pimm’s.
The second route, I believed, was with the help of the mandatory Christmas box of chocolate liqueurs.
However, after eating a third, I’d already began to feel nauseous. Given that you need to eat 700 grams (that’s fourteen Picnics!) to get one shot of liqueur, I’d have had to have eaten one anti-emetic tablet every time I’d tuck into a Tia Maria Bounty (never did quite learn the names).
A consequence of this lack of alcoholic intake meant I remained stone-cold sober, although often felt sick and burped a lot courtesy of more than enough chocolate and a surfeit of lemonade!
A third route could have been with Advocaat, but I didn’t like the taste of “Snowballs”, having massive doubts about the colour and felt the texture was like that of blancmange which was past its sell-by date.
So, needing to go to meetings saying, “my name is Michael and I think I have a problem”, was never necessary as an eight-year-old!