Category: 70s

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.

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.

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

Do people still have room-dividers?

I didn’t in my Balham flat, but I would often go to friends’ houses where the kitchen had a series of beads and/or coloured strips hanging down from the doorframe, separating it from the rest of the house. 

What were they there for?  Was it to give an air of mystery to the kitchen holy of holies?  Hide embarrassing old relatives? Stop herds of wildebeest rampaging into the lounge?

Anyone going to the cinema in south-west London in the sixties would remember the ad for a local restaurant which advertised: “it’s so good, even the cook eats here”.  The reveal would be the chef, behind the dangling beads, literally eating his own lunch.

I think, budding cooks believed that the magic ingredient to a good meal wouldn’t be to add a selection of exotic spices, but to erect a series of dangly things.  Who needs Mrs Beeton or Fanny & Johnny if you’ve got the threads of Joseph’s coat hanging from your kitchen doorway?

How were these things created?  My belief is that many a room divider was made out of beads stolen from school abacuses.  This would explain why many people at my school could only count to five by the time they were eleven.

If there was to be privacy, you couldn’t knock, as your hand would go straight through – thus knocking over the embarrassing relative.  At least that would have saved her from the stampeding wildebeest.