Category: 60s

A chocolate is not just for Christmas

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I was given a box of chocolates the other day.  The chocolates were made by Lindt, something I thought you found in a First Aid box.

Inside was the list of contents.  Some of the descriptions were so long, Tolstoy could have written them.  By the time you’d read what was in the box, you’d have lost your chocolate craving and not worried about ordering a higher potency of Statins.

At Christmas, inside my Balham flat, there would always be the obligatory tin of Quality Street. 

Inside the lid, there’d be a chart showing which chocolates were inside: “Fudge”; “Coconut Éclair”; “Toffee Finger”; what it didn’t say was: “Flown, First Class, from the cacao fields of Mexico; fermented, dried, roasted and grinded for your delectation and mixed with hazelnuts (because, hazelnuts seem to feature in every chocolate these days) and lovingly shipped from Turkey”.

All I need to know is, IS it a COFFEE CRÈME?

But what if you’re colour blind?  You really don’t want to be mistaking a Strawberry Cream with a Toffee Penny.  It’d be like eating a giant handful of Revels – your palette wouldn’t know what day of the week it was; would it be hard or soft and would you be needing an emergency dentist’s appointment later that week?.

But one thing, which has remained the same is: at what stage do you start tucking into the second layer?  Probably when there are only Praline Surprises left on the top.

Deep, fat Friar

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As if going to big school, and having to wear long trousers in September 1968, wasn’t alien enough, what I didn’t anticipate were the new words I’d have to learn.

We were told about prefects.  At my first playtime I expected to see a fleet of Ford Perfects lined up on the rugby pitch.  How surprised I was to see several bigger boys, adorned with their badges of authority, checking no one ventured onto the rugby field.  The rugby field confused me too.  Why had they built two longer poles above the football goalposts? Clearly they’d had a job-lot delivered?  And where was the penalty spot?

During the lunchbreak we learned about a thing called “the tuck shop”.  I was a massive fan of the ITV series Robin Hood, which ran in the early ‘60s; I thought we’d meet one of Robin’s merry men.  I was, however, praying it wasn’t a travelling barber’s.

We were also informed, should we ever need to temporarily leave our Tooting school, we’d require an exeat.  At primary school we’d not studied Latin.  We’d learned how to a throw a beanbag, pretend to be a tree during Music and Movement and drawn lots of dinosaurs; we’d never had to conjugate Latin verbs.

But the most confusing word for me was: homework.  My inability to get my head round this word was duly reflected in my 1973 O-level results.

Gloria sic transit (Gloria was ill on the journey).

Eyes wrong

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I went to the opticians last week.

I’ve been going since I was five, a consequence of failing to pick my dad’s googlies playing cricket against the garages by our Balham flats. 

“Can you read that car registration number?” asked my father. 

“What car?”  Off to the opticians in Tooting High Street we went.

They now have many more tests than they did in the early ‘60s; but the one constant is the 1930s sci-fi apparatus they put on your head.  This certainly hasn’t been designed by Prada; Ray-Ban or Hugo Boss – some of the options for later should you need new glasses.

By the time I was eleven, I couldn’t see the large letter at the top of the table in my left eye.  Back then they couldn’t make the lenses thinner, so my left eye looked like the lens had been made by Unigate rather than Carl Zeiss.

The use of glass from this famous east German glass manufacturer worried me as a kid – clearly watched too much Emil and the Detectives at Saturday Morning Pictures.  I often assumed that, because these were where the glasses were coming from, all opticians were spies.  Although at our local optician, Burgess & MacLaine, they all seemed terribly nice people.

“Shut up, Eccles”

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As a kid, I managed to get most of the childhood illnesses: measles; mumps; scarlet fever; chicken pox (I can still smell the calamine lotion) and German measles (which, oddly, the Germans don’t call English Measles).  I’d have had diphtheria, except my mum couldn’t spell it.

I’d had all these by the age of ten, and wished there’d been an I-Spy book for me to have ticked them all off.  I never got West Nile Fever (25-points), even though we did live near the River Wandle.

When I was ill, it was my dad who looked after me; my mum invariably had “one of her heads” – Balham’s answer to Cerberus – so caring for the sick fell to my dad.

Whether it was dabbing calamine lotion on me; pumping me full of penicillin or just sitting on the bath while I occupied another piece of bathroom furniture, he’d chat away.  Usually about sport or comedy.

Dad would ask whether the Tommy Baldwin/George Graham swap was good for Chelsea; how lucky Kent had been with wicketkeepers through the years, as he extolled the virtues of the (then) very young Alan Knott and would suggest getting comedy records out of the library, as he wanted to introduce me to The Goons.

All this lead me to feel better – however unwell I was.

If ever I’m unwell now, I talk to myself in the style of Eccles, Bluebottle and Minnie Bannister.  More effective than kaolin & morphine.

Mum’s gone to the Ottoman Empire

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Many people use social media.  My activity on Myspace (something I thought was for people suffering from claustrophobia) and Friends Reunited (they really weren’t your friends or you’d not need to reunite with them) isn’t as active as it once was. 

Another social media platform I no longer use is Twitter.  It is now called X.  Growing up in the ‘60s and ‘70s in rural Balham (I lied about the rural bit) X meant one thing: the film you weren’t allowed in to see. 

Looking as young as I did, I was more likely to see Charlie George starring in an acting role at the cinema rather than Susan George!

Changing Bejam to Iceland was just as confusing, especially with the tag line “Mum’s gone to Iceland”.  This made many small children believe that one day their mothers would suddenly disappear to some Nordic wasteland.  I was always asking my milkman if he was aware of where Reykjavik was?

No doubt Philippides is turning (he can’t run anymore) in his grave now his sporting event chocolate is called Snickers (which is what American call plimsolls).

MFI is now called the Secret Intelligence Service.  However, their bookshelves are better quality.

Anyway, what do I care?  I’m about to go on holiday to Czechoslovakia via Abyssinia to get some Opal Fruits in Duty Free!

Tempus fudge it

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You rarely see young people wearing watches these days.  If they do, it probably does tell the time, but also it tells them how much water they’ve drunk; how fast their heart is beating and the results from Newmarket that afternoon.

I was encouraged to tell the time from an early age and had my first Timex bought for me from a Balham jewellers in the mid-60s.  The man in the jewellers was disappointed as neither parent were buying any expensive rings or bracelets, but solely a watch where you got change from a ten-bob note.

My mum owned a perfectly good watch.  However, this didn’t stop her asking policemen (or anyone in a uniform for that matter) the time!

I had the Ladybird book on telling the time.  I learned that “at 12 o’clock Mummy cooks dinner” – until my mum re-wrote it to say: “at 12 o’clock Mummy opens her first Guinness”.

The final page was: “at half past seven we are asleep”.  I could never understand this during the summer when there were still about three hours’ of daylight left!  But, as you get older, so that’s horribly near the truth again.  What the book didn’t tell you was “it is two thirty in the morning and you realise you really shouldn’t have had that Bournvita”.

Whenever I’m asked what the time is, I look at my watch and tell people where the big hand is; they soon seek their information elsewhere.

Deskbound

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There were many changes for me going from primary to secondary school.  Aside from getting used to my long trousers chafing, we had actual desks.

At primary school we had tables.  Our new school, deep in darkest Tooting, had wooden desks.

There was much carving on my desk.  The desk was so old, I almost expected to see drawings of buffalo or mammoths carved into the top.

The desk had a lid on it.  I gingerly lifted it up, checking that no one had written “Pandora was here” on it.

Assuming that all the world’s ills were not in the desk, ready to fly out, I continued to open the lid; the contents were disappointing.  There were no Post-It notes on the inside with any instructions for finding secret tunnels; invitations for illicit liaisons (no bad thing given I was only eleven and it was an all-boys’ school) or the answers to that week’s French vocabulary test. 

There was, however, a fossilised iced-bun.  At first I thought this had been left by some Neanderthal who’d lived in Tooting when it was all lavender fields and/or marshy swamps?  It wasn’t until the first break, when iced-buns were sold, that I realised I hadn’t uncovered a neolithic food storage site.

I did discover, mainly during supremely dull French lessons, that the desk was very comfortable and easy to sleep on. One of the many reasons I failed French O-level or never became a palaeontologist.

Shouting down

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This week I was travelling to London, changing trains at Clapham Junction. 

This is the Mecca for trainspotters: Clapham Junction is the busiest station in the UK.  It’s not actually in Clapham, which means, if you are a trainspotter, you will need to be good at orienteering too.

In the early ‘70s this station was one end of my daily commute.

I would walk to the station from my school every evening with several friends.  One friend lived in Wimbledon.   His platform was 100-yards away from mine; mine headed heading towards the Gateway to the South.  When you’re fifteen, you couldn’t give a monkey’s about other people around you; my friend and I would continue our conversation across several platforms – like human loud-hailers.

Back then, there were no electronic indicator boards – for any form of transport.  These days, you know exactly when the next bus or train will arrive.  In the ‘70s, you could be at a bus-stop and sometimes feel you were on the set of Waiting for Godot.  

Back on the platform, I’d look hopefully at the station staff as they dipped into their four-foot high box which housed the train destination boards.  Until the one mentioning “Carshalton” was withdrawn and inserted into its rightful place, I continued shouting across many platforms, asking: “how do you draw an ox-bow lake?” and “just how many bloody Pitts were there?”.

Gute Reise, as my friend’s Austrian mum would have said.

Great Scot!

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When I first started work, I couldn’t wait to get into the office.  Not because I liked work, but because I always had a packet of Royal Scot biscuits hidden in my desk.

My Tube journey from Balham to Warren Street would have me drooling at the thought – I had to be very careful I didn’t dribble over anyone’s Daily Mail on the journey.

Other items in my drawer literally had my name on – I’d written “Mike” in Tipp-Ex on anything which could be nicked inside my desk.  I had a calculator, as well as a stapler; a tin of boiled sweets (you never knew when you were going on a long car journey); paperclips; emergency packet of Royal Scots; a selection of foreign currency (MI6 could ring at any time).

These days, with paper being used less and less, the contents of desk drawers are vastly different: phone charger; spare lanyard; small, French dog.  For those who have been working from home, then they will simply have a spare pair of slippers, surgical cushion and a manual showing you how to unmute yourself on a Zoom call.

Sadly, Royal Scot biscuits are no more. They are extinct, like the pterodactyl – a Royal Scot biscuit had a smaller wing-span.

For Royal Scot biscuits, it’s “goodnight, Vienna”.  I hope this doesn’t make Viennese whirls an endangered biscuit.

Not one Cornetto!

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I never had as much as a chocolate sprinkle from the ice-cream van growing up. 

I lived on the fourth-floor of my Balham flats; the moment I heard the strains of Greensleeves or ‘O Sole mio (which means raspberry ripple in Italian), I’d put on my Tufty Club slippers and leg it down four-flights of stairs.  I’d reach the bottom and hear Greensleeves dying in the distance as the van made its way down the High Street towards Clapham, a town where most people would do anything for an Oyster.

To get any form of lolly, tub or 99, you had to be as fast as Roger Bannister; I was more Minnie Bannister.   I would arrive to see hundreds and thousands of hundreds and thousands lying on the street.  Evidence I’d missed out yet again.

Having attained a semaphore badge with the Cubs, I could have sent a message to Mr Whippy. 

When learning semaphore we tended to learn phrases like: “I think the boat is sinking” not “one cornet, please”.  By the time I’d have gone down the many flights of stairs, it would have melted. 

Flake’s off, love